Today, MEAB features a special guest who will respond to each news item: Your annoying Uncle Kyle that always seems to have a take that’s tangential to reality but not grounded in reality. Why? Practice my friends, practice – because you probably only see Kyle at Thanksgiving and Christmas and it’s time to gear up.

  1. Southwest flights are now bookable through the Chase travel portal, but only Wanna Get Away and Wanna Get Away Plus fares.

    Kyle’s response: WGA+ fares as a 1.5 cent per point booking with low friction means that brokering of Southwest flights is going to skyrocket. Watch out!
  2. Office Depot/OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300 in Mastercard gift cards through Saturday, limit eight per transaction. As usual, link your cards to Dosh, liquidate your American Express Business Gold $20 monthly credits, try for multiple transactions back-to-back, and experiment with different purchase amounts.

    Kyle’s response: You’re waiting in line behind someone arguing about a $0.45 coupon at a store with staffing levels lower than the half-sized aisles of InkJet toner to buy a Mastercard with a Visa? Are you even listening to yourself talk?
  3. Chase Offers has 13% back on at least $50 and up to $307.69 in airfare booked by tomorrow. (No, I didn’t make that number up, why do you ask?) This is gamable in multiple ways.

    Kyle’s response: I haven’t known anything about gaming since Tetris, but you know that booking airfare means flying Southwest right? Their boarding process is a mass psychological experiment and you’re the subject!
  4. UPDATE: Dead! There have now been at least a half dozen reports of successfully transferring the pseudo Ultimate Rewards with a fixed 1.0 cent per point from the Ink Business Premier to real Ultimate Rewards accounts from other premium cards, but only by phone.

    It’s unclear if this is a bug or intentional, but either way the 150,000 pseudo Ultimate Reward sign up bonus for $10,000 spend in three months available in branch or perhaps via Green Star offers looks extremely attractive right about now, especially if you can earn it quickly.

    Kyle’s response: You know that those pseudo Ultimate Rewards points are how the government tracks your spend, right? Converting them to a variable value point throws them off because they can’t know exactly what you spent.

Have a nice Monday!

Kyle’s response: You do know Mondays suck, right? Everyone knows that because Garfield taught us. Stop being so chipper.

Even the Thanksgiving pie will be fed up with Kyle.

  1. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards card has mid-month offers for online spend by December 14. Reported offers, and this stacks with other offers sent at the beginning of the month for spend at utilities:

    – $40 off of $600 in spend
    – $50 off of $750 in spend
    – $80 off of $800 in spend
    – 200,000 Shop Your Way Points for $600 in spend
    – 7,500 ThankYou Points for $750 in spend
    – 12,000 ThankYou Points ofr $800 in spend

    (Thanks to irieriley, David 99, Greyo, Dave 37, Fish, Bryan G, and Charlie)
  2. Chase Ultimate Rewards has a 25% transfer bonus to JetBlue through January 20, 2024, which for the right redemptions beats booking with a Sapphire Reserve through the Chase travel portal at a fixed 1.5 cents per point, but make sure to run the numbers first.

    Side note: if you’re paying close attention to the arbitrage opportunity for the JetBlue/Spirit anti-trust case and want to collaborate, please reach out to me.
  3. The American Express Business Platinum card has a targeted 190,000 Membership Rewards bonus link that’s been floating around for a few weeks and various ways to pull up that version of the offerhave come and gone and have had limited success. There seems to be a new repeatable way to pull it up: Open the application page from Dallas, TX. Geographic targeting has been more prominent over the last year, and it may be worth getting a VPN with multiple city endpoints as part of your churning toolkit.
  4. American Express offers has a targeted promotion for 17,500 Membership Rewards after $700 or more in spend at Princess Cruise Lines through February 15, 2024. Lately it seems like we might need to say ‘gamers gonna cruise’ instead of ‘gamers gonna game’? (Thanks to Rich)
  5. The Capital One Spark Cash Plus Select business card, which probably is missing at least three words in its title because clearly the marketing team is slacking, has a $750 sign-up bonus with $6,000 spend in three months. The card has no annual fee, but earns only 1.5% cash back on spend, which I guess means those three missing words should be “sock drawer bound”.

The NordVPN Dallas, TX datacenter.

News

Before we dive back into the time value of points, there are a few relevant and leading news items to discuss:

Not only does maximizing the value of your points require burning early and often, but it also necessitates hitting smaller products with outsized value harder than products with average value.

Revisiting the Time Value of Points

With those notes in mind, we can derive an equation for the time value of points. If it doesn’t render correctly in your email client, see the website here. (And yes, I’m sorry to put you all through this, but sometimes I can’t won’t help myself):

FV = PV \times (1 + r - (q \times d) + i)^n \times (1 - p)

Where:

FV = future value
PV = present value
r = any promotional increase of value in a given period
q = the probability of a devaluation in a given period
d = the rate of devaluation in a program in a period
i = interest on points earned in a period (there is a program that does this)
n = the period (time)
p = the probability a program shutting down and wiping out all value

(Thanks to Jon for noting that the original version of this post lacked a definition for i)

The Point?

Is this formula useful? Sort of. It’d be more useful if someone would write a quick calculator web site. Do I actually expect anyone to use this formula? No, not really for anything other than mental gymnastics.

Points and miles still devalue, and sometimes they devalue a lot. Don’t forget that the second part of this site is titled “And Burn”.

Pictured, left to right: MEAB with glasses; The entire churning community after this post.

  1. Clear has a $75 Uber credit for new accounts with promo code WBTGUBER23. Incidentally Clear only requires a new email address to be considered a new account. Assuming you have a few AmEx Platinum or Business Platinums under your belt, this is a backdoor cash out. You may need multiple Uber accounts to take advantage of the promotion multiple times though, the jury is still out.

    The expiration date isn’t specified, but I assume it won’t stick around past black Friday. (Thanks to caseyrobinson2)
  2. Target will have its annual promotion 10% off of up to $500 in Target gift cards on December 2-3, limit one per Target Circle account. Normally I’d wait until near that date to write about the offer, except having seasoned Target Circle accounts is the way to scale and if you want to scale it, you should start seasoning approximately [checks notes] now. (Thanks to DoC)
  3. Kroger has a new promotion for 4x fuel points on third party gift cards and fixed value Visa and Mastercard gift cards starting today and running through December 5. Secondary market fuel points rates have recently been sky-high because:

    – Gas is expensive
    – There are fewer suppliers
    – There hasn’t been a long-running 4x promotion for a while

    I expect though that a week or two into this promotion we’ll see rates come back down to recent norms. As usual, make sure you’re working with a fuel points broker or end-user that assumes liability for frozen accounts within a day or so.
  4. Hy-Vee stores have $10 off of $150 or more in Visa gift cards through November 23, limit one per transaction. If you live in Hy-Vee territory this one is almost certainly worth your time. (Thanks to GCG)
  5. American Express offers has a targeted $50 back on $200 or more in JetBlue airfare through December 31 (or travel wallet funds if you book a non-Blue Basic fare and cancel it after 24 hours).
  6. For some reason the second tier airlines are colluding to run fare sales for travel booked by tomorrow night:

    – Southwest for travel from December 5 through May 22 with surprisingly few blackouts
    – Alaska for travel to and from Mexico
    – JetBlue for travel from December 3 to January 31

    The Alaska sale in particular has some great rates, assuming of course that Alaska serves your airport.

Ok, which one of you is responsible for this ending up in my inbox yesterday? 😭

It’s common for card issuers to offer bonus points for keeping a card open (retention offers) and for converting your card to a more expensive version (upgrade offers), but a new type of bonus just dropped in exactly the way that Taylor Swift’s Reputation (Taylor’s Version) didn’t last Friday: Downgrade offers.

We’ve now seen multiple reports of instances where an AmEx cardholder had no retention offers available and wanted to close a card, but were instead offered a bonus to convert the card to a lower annual fee product. The linked datapoint downgrade offer was 25,000 Membership Rewards after $1,000 spend in three months for converting a personal Platinum card to a personal Gold card (which I’d generally rather have anyway).

Unlike nearly all other banks, American Express’s primary business is credit cards so outstanding card count matters to their bottom line disproportionately, at least compared to most other card issuers. Now we just need to wait for the “offer final frontier”, or a statement credit or bonus points for closing a card.

Discover’s poorly thought out upcoming product conversion bonus, foil included.

  1. Staples has fee free $200 Visa gift cards in store through Saturday, limit eight per transaction. This stacks nicely with the American Express Business Gold $20 monthly office supply credit.

    These are Pathward gift cards, so have a liquidation plan in place. If your liquidation plan includes major nationwide retailers, there’s a $480 per six minute per store velocity limit.
  2. There’s a, umm let’s say “targeted”, Bank of America promotion for 5% off of ebay purchases of up to $1,000 with promo code TAKE5BOFA through December 31. The coupon has a limit of 10 uses, and presumably the limit is per ebay account. Notably you don’t need to use a Bank of America credit card to be eligible.

    The promo code isn’t working with the most obvious plays like gold bars, but you’re enterprising people right? Sometimes it makes sense to be on both sides of a transaction, just calculate the spread first. This may stack with portal cash back too. (Thanks to DAMU)
  3. It’s been just three days since we discussed the time value of points and how devaluations are one of several factors that erode the future value of loyalty currencies. Southwest decided that Veterans Day was the perfect time to illustrate the principle, announcing that points would be worth 4% less starting on January 1, 2024.

    As usual, head-on bookings with the Chase Sapphire Reserve continue to be more valuable for redemption than transferring points to Southwest and booking that way (1.5 cents plus mileage earning vs about 1.35 cents and no mileage earning), that is unless the risk premium for free cancelations and redeposits on points bookings and not dealing with flight credits is worth more than 0.15 cents per point to you.
  4. Meijer MPerks has 15,000 in points back on Choice, Happy, and One4All gift cards of $100 or more, limit one per MPerks account. Fortunately for Meijer, it’s not possible for a single person to have multiple email accounts, and therefore multiple MPerks accounts. (Thanks to GCG)
  5. There’s a targeted American Express offer for $175 back on $1,000 or more in cumulative spend with Cathay Pacific by December 31. It’s an interesting choice on AmEx’s part to make this one cumulative, almost inviting gamers to game. (Thanks to TeddyH)

Happy Monday!

An NFT sold on ebay showing the relative value Ultimate Rewards Southwest bookings compared to Rapid Rewards bookings. Limit one NFT per MPerks account.

Financial goons will be quick to tell you about the time value of money, which is a basic concept in economic theory that says money is worth more now than it is in the future, in part because:

  • You can earn interest immediately on money you have now
  • Thanks to modern monetary policy, inflation will always eat away at money’s value
  • Opportunity cost (which is sometimes added directly into either or both of the above)

The same concept applies to points and miles, but the factors aren’t quite the same. In the case of points and miles, they’re worth more now than the future because:

  • Devaluations happen
  • The redemption value of points is often tied to the cost of tickets (inflation bites here too)
  • Currencies get washed away
  • Miles and points don’t earn interest

What’s the takeaway? Burn those points as soon as practicable. Can you come up with a formula to describe this, asked no one? Yes we can, but no, I’m not going to do that today.

Have a nice weekend friends!

Yes, it’s time for the quarterly MEAB math nerd joke. Sorry, not sorry.

Apparently today I chose chaos by barking out orders at you like a 70s business man in a plaid suit with his feet on the desk and a cigar hanging out of his mouth. Sorry I guess?

  1. Do this now: Register for your targeted Q4 United MilePlay promotion. I got “book and take a premium seat one time by December 15 to get 5,000 bonus miles”, and the fine print says minimum $450 in base fare.
  2. Do this now: Manufacture Spend on all of your Bank of America cards today, up to $2,500 per card. You’ll earn your regular rewards +2% on cash back cards, and +2x on points earning cards.

    Note: There’s some debate about whether multiple cards for the same company are each eligible for $2,500 in spend. My opinion is that you’re eligible for $2,500 per main card account, regardless of the associated business.
  3. Do this never: Bilt points can now be transferred to Marriott at a 1:1 ratio, or for masochists that hate value, a 20,000:25,000 ratio in exactly 20,000 point increments. Frankly this is almost worse than redeeming Bilt points directly for a statement credit. If you’d like 100 bonus Bilt Points as a consolation prize for having to read this news, you can link your Marriott Bonvoy account to Bilt and you’ll get ’em.

Happy Thursday!

MEAB’s Thursday demeanor.