The deluge of promotions between Black Friday and Cyber Monday is waning like the Joyland Amusement Park in Lubbock, TX, but that doesn’t mean that your favorite promotions will die when they’re supposed to. Famously in November 2021 for example, VanillaGift.com had fee free Visa gift cards using code SHOPEARLY2021. That code was scheduled to last for a couple of weeks (which should also be obvious from the name), but it didn’t actually stop working until Summer of 2022.
This isn’t an isolated occurrence either, it’s happened to multiple promotions over the weekend and some of them will no-doubt continue throughout the end of the year, or if you’re lucky into next. What’s the lesson? Companies don’t always bother with expiration dates. Always be probing.
Clearly Lubbock’s amusement park outlived its expiration date.
It may be worth a quick trip if you’re not already in H-E-B land if you’re confident in your ability to scale. It is possible to mint thousands of dollars quickly. (Thanks to GCG)
Alaska has a paid and award ticket sale through Wednesday night. I’m seeing transcontinental flights, Hawaiian flights, and some international flights pricing at 7,500 miles each way in economy, short haul flights are showing at 4,000 miles each way in economy.
The sale is for travel booked 21 days in advance for travel through March 9, and there are a few blackout dates in late February.
Of course you should combine these with buyers groups or gift card reselling activity when possible. If you’re not targeted for one of them, remove those cards from your profile, add them back, then wait a day and check again.
Citi ThankYou Points are redeemable toward Apple e-gift cards today only with a 25% bonus (or 20% discount per Citi because they’re bad at marketing). The resale rate for Apple gift cards is well above a 20% discount making this a nice way to cash out ThankYou Points at above regular rates.
These may be worth your time for American Express cards in particular, but only if you have a low cost liquidation channel, since portals are no longer tracking when a promo code is used. (Thanks to TeddyH)
The internet standard measurement of a banana for scale really isn’t big enough on cyber Monday. Instead, use comically oversized carrot for scale to filter through the madness.
There’s plenty to overwhelm you out there, this weekend more-so than normal. My quick advice is set a profit threshold for yourself and skip anything that doesn’t look like it’ll pass that amount as fast as you can. I promise there are other things around the corner that will. In the mean time:
Fortunately for us, we have the technology to combine Rakuten’s card linked program, American Express Business Gold or Chase Ink cards, and Staples fee-free gift card promotions to help make this a good use of time. (Thanks to Douglas)
As is custom at MEAB, a new promo code for Breeze means another drawing for “Breeze dartboard route map bingo”. Ladies and gentlemen, today’s dartboard route is: Cincinnati, OH to Providence, RI! If this completes your Bingo board, please collect your prize (spoiler alert, the prize involves the word CYBER).
A sage reader once told me that with hoarders, you really need to think in terms of three dimensions, not just floor space. Ditto for deals this weekend.
You can earn: 15,000 30,000 Membership Rewards® points for each eligible referral – up to 100,000 Membership Rewards® points per calendar year. Plus earn +3 more Membership Rewards points dollar spent per on eligible purchases for three months, on up to $25,000. Terms Apply.
What’s an eligible purchase? Anything that would normally earn Membership Rewards qualifies. Note that so far we’ve only seen the +3x bonus on roughly 20% of accounts, and only on personal Gold cards, though it’s probably sporadically available on other personal cards too. If you have $25,000 in restaurant or grocery spend, err “restaurant” and “grocery” spend, then you’ll net 7x with the referral bonus on the Gold with this promotion.
Because this is only available on some cards for some account holders, I’m going to riff off the Milenomics naming of “3 for all” in 2020 and “4 for us” in 2021 and call this one “3 for thee (but none for me)”. Hopefully you’re one of the chosen some, and happy Thanksgiving!
American Express has a targeted Thanksgiving surprise for another 10% of accounts too: Remotely detonated yams. Check in later to see if you’ve been targeted for that promotion instead.
Warning: There’s a lot of math in today’s post, but don’t worry, it’s the easy kind that doesn’t cause my P2 to break out in hives.
PenFed has a $750 new savings account bonus for depositing $50,000 by the end of the year and holding it through April 30, 2024. The account earns 3% APR, and the bonus is effectively another 6% 4.5 APR. Last I checked, 3%+6% 4.5 = a good savings rate for cash. (Thanks to DoC, and Anthony)
The American Express Business Platinum card has heightened bonuses via referral, now up to 25,000 Membership Rewards for the referrer and 150,000 Membership Rewards for the referred.
Citi has a new targeted offer by email for a $30 statement credit with $350 or more in hotel spend through December 20. Check your inbox for the subject: “[NAME], Activate your offer today and start earning now!”
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.
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!
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?
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!
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.
– $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)
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.
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.
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”.
Before we dive back into the time value of points, there are a few relevant and leading news items to discuss:
Ness, a favorite credit card for churners who love Chipotle gift cards, Aesop bath products, and On sneakers abruptly shut down at 5:00 PM Eastern yesterday. They’re allowing you to redeem your points through Wednesday of next week, and in theory they’ve lowered the redemption cost of several options. There are two interesting observations for the time value of points:
The value of points can increase over time, though it’s very rare
Interest can be considered a form of points, and if it doesn’t pay due to a bank shutdown then its unpaid value can also drop to zero
Your opportunity cost for short lived products can be vanish overnight, so the more outsized the value of a product, the more likely it is to revert to the mean or to fail
A program has multiple aspects, and occasionally different parts of the program have a different devaluation rates
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 = 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.
