One of the best pieces of business advice I ever got was at my first startup: “It takes just as long to do a small deal as it does to do a big deal.” That’s often a slight exaggeration because in business, bigger deals usually mean more people are involved, but the sentiment is still roughly correct. Focusing on the big deals is a better use of time when you’ve got a good pipeline.
We can apply that wisdom to all of this weekend’s opportunities in gift card reselling, buyers groups, online arbitrage, point alchemy, and to an extent with travel bookings too. My companion advice to the above for this weekend, specifically, is:
Set a minimum deal size and minimum effective hourly wage for all of your shenanigans. If something flashes by and it’s below that threshold, wait for the next thing. It’ll come.
The American Express Delta Gold personal card has a heightened bonus of 50,000 SkyMiles and a $500 statement credit after $3,000 in purchases and making a single purchase at Delta.com within six months. You can find the offer by going through a flight booking on the checkout page, whether or not you actually buy a ticket.
The annual fee is waived the first year, making this probably worth burning a 5/24 slot. (Thanks to DDG)
– 3x earning on non-bonuses spend up to $500 spend through the end of November – Earning 0.5x on new mortgages (although they’re not truthful about being first, see Mesa) – Points are worth 1.4 cents each on December 1 at Amazon for Platinum members
In churning, there’s always a pariah in a group (cf. gift card buying group A, buyers club B, and bank C), and Bilt is probably that for credit cards.
– 12x points on Zillions gift cards – 10x points on Home Depot and Uber gift cards
There’s likely a limit of $2,000 per account, but the fine print in preview ads is too low resolution to read. UPDATE: There is a $2,000 limit, and Giant Foods doesn’t currently show the promo. It will probably still work but may earn less than other affiliates based on historical patterns.
About two weeks ago, several popular travel bloggers dropped hints about visiting a corporate sponsored affiliate meeting from a company named Mesa. Since then I’ve been expecting a deluge of articles about their newly launched card, but for the most part nothing has appeared. Why? I assume news is embargoed until Mesa says it’s ok to write about it, preferring to soft-launch in relative quiet with a waitlist and then go big at just the right time™. On the other hand though, you know what they say about assuming.
Whether or not you get the card, you’ll earn a point for each dollar when you originate a new primary loan or a refinance an existing primary loan, as long as you use a “The Mesa Mortgage Marketplace Lender”, which I guess we’ll abbreviate as TMMML because reasons. You can do that up to five times per account too.
But, how good are those TMMMLs? Well, when I put in my address, I got a single option: Swift Home Loans Inc which is apparently a mortgage broker based out of Birmingham; but not that Birmingham, it’s the Michigan one. So I guess there’s exactly one TMMML (at least for my state) and they’re rated 2.8 out of 5 on Facebook. I dialed their main contact number to ask about which banks they work with and what sorts of mortgages they can handle, but it just rang for a good minute so I hung up. Looking pretty great guys!
How about the credit card? It’s a Visa issued by Celtic bank and carries no-annual fee. The earning structure:
3x on HOA fees, contractors, homeowners insurance, property taxes, home decor, and other “home-related” charges
2x on gas, groceries, EV charging, and utilities
1x on a linked mortgage, but only on up to $100,000 in mortgage payments annually
0x on other spend, as far as I can tell
Free Sam’s Club membership
Like with Bilt and rent, you don’t need to put your mortgage payment on a card to earn points on mortgage payments.
Burning
There are two options for redeeming Mesa points: booking travel through their portal, and gift cards. The cash value of each, based on my sampled searching:
Travel: 1.0 cents per point, but also a fixed 400 point extra surcharge per flight
Gift cards: 0.7 cents per point
Everything Else
Here’s how I’d look at this card, considering that if you’re booking travel through a portal you’re not going to use Mesa because Chase and AmEx have much better value propositions:
Gift card options include popular bulk brands like BestBuy and Apple, and assuming a resale rate of 93%, that means you can cash-out your points through gift cards at 0.65 cents per point 🤏. So:
You earn 0.65-0.70% back on mortgage payments just by holding the card
You get a 0.65-0.70% rebate on new mortgages, but those are probably baked into the fees of the one member of the TMMML
You’ll do better for other spend, manufactured or real, with other credit cards.
Finally, I extracted the full terms and conditions of the rewards program from the mobile app in case you’re curious, and it’s just this webpage.
tl;dr: It’s ok I guess, but you can probably skip the dozenshundreds thousands of affiliate articles when they come out in (probably) the next couple of weeks.
Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, Citi, and plenty of your favorite credit unions offer premium (or sometimes even fee-free) cards that offer annual credits tied to the calendar year. Most issuers also let you refund an annual fee up to 30 days after it posts too. Combined, that means December is often the best time of the year to get a card because:
Your first statement is usually issued 30 days after getting a card
Your annual fee posts on the 12th statement around 360+30 days after opening
Most issuers give you an annual fee refund if requested within 30 days of posting pushing that to 360+30+30 days
12 statements will straddle three calendar years: 2024, 2025, and 2026
Let’s take the American Express Business Platinum. Annually, you’ll earn (amongst other things, like I dunno, prolly a $1.50 monthly credit to Dollar Tree):
$200 airline incidental credit
$400 Dell credit ($200 in the first half and again in the second)
$199 Clear credit
So if you apply for a card in late November or December, your 12th statement won’t generate until between mid-December 2025 and mid-January 2026. Once that happens, you’ve still got another 30 days for games and an annual fee refund. You’ll get:
$600 in airline incidental credits (2024, 2025, and 2026)
$800 in Dell credits (2H2024, 1H2025, 2H2025, 1H2026)
$450 in Adobe credits (2024, 2025, and 2026)
$597 in Clear credits (2024, 2025, and 2026) (though you should discount those Adobe and Clear credits significantly)
There are a few gotchas to watch for: Bank of America’s annual fee refund after it posts isn’t guaranteed; Capital One’s is guaranteed, but the guarantee is that they definitely don’t offer fee refunds; or how the stupid Dell credits may be going away from the American Express Business Platinum in July, 2025.
– 80,000 LifeMiles after $4,500 spend in 90 days – 40,000 LifeMiles after $25,000 spend in 365 days
Cardless has a one card per person lifetime limit, so consider whether cards like the Qatar Privilege Club may better fit your style. The Avianca card’s best features are that: it’s a third party American Express, and that it includes a Lifemiles+ lite membership which gives award redemption rebates and a cheap upgrade to Lifemiles+ basic membership for free award cancellations.
Do this now: Check your email inbox for a targeted $50 Marriott Bonvoy bonus gift card, but also note that it expires on December 21. A good search query is probably: “in:anywhere subject:Enjoy a gift from Marriott Bonvoy to celebrate your upcoming stay”.
Happy Monday!
Once per lifetime Cardless credit card unboxing photo, presumably.
Sometimes travel hackers get stuck with a ticket that’s got a cancellation fee (I’m looking at you and your stupid $75 award ticket redeposit fee FlyingBlue) or a ticket that simply isn’t cancellable for any fee even if you’re Steve Buscemi (actually, especially if you’re Steve Buscemi). You’ve got two choices if your plans change and you’re not going to take one of those flights:
Pay the fee to cancel if you can, or just eat the ticket cost if you can’t
Play the odds and hope that you don’t need to do either of the above
Playing the odds means waiting for the airline to offer free changes or refunds due to one of:
When one of those things happens you won’t be taking off for Lubbock, but instead you’re headed to refund-town (but you’ve probably got to request the refund from the airline, and in some cases before departure). The odds aren’t great though; at best the chances of this working are somewhere between 1/6 and 1/10, unless you own a pregnant turtle.
The Gotchas
There are a few ways this can malfunction:
You forget to cancel before the cancellation window expires after the game didn’t work, which matters especially with programs like Virgin Atlantic that require you to cancel before the check-in window opens
You don’t request a refund in a timely manner from the airline
The airline disagrees about what a significant delay is (but 2+ hours is usually sufficient)
Personally I put a reminder in my phone for an hour before the flight or cancellation window, whichever comes first, to figure out whether the stunt is going to work and to pay the cancellation fee if I can and it didn’t.
Good luck!
AA’s new Flagship First catering meal concept: “playing chicken with an airline”. They’ll end up cutting the ketchup at launch for cost savings though.
You have to book by tonight, but for travel at least 21 days out so that you’ve got plenty of time to anticipate your upcoming crappy flight, unless your airport is SNA; they continue to exclude it from sales because reasons.
The three Chase co-branded Avios credit cards have an increased sign-up bonus of 100,000 Avios after $7,500 spend in six months, and each has a $95 annual fee.
