What started out as a slow weekend turned into a landslide:

1. In September there was a backdoor way to turn an American Express Clear credit into $100 in United TravelBank credit through a promotion for a new Clear account. The offer is now back, and it’s still a way to turn a Clear statement credit into a quick TravelBank hundo. The caveats:

  • The $100 TravelBank credit expires after six months
  • You have to fly United or United Express to pay for airfare with TravelBank funds
  • TravelBank funds can’t be used to pay for therapy or liquor, even on a United flight

Last time you didn’t actually need to complete enrollment at an airport for the $100 credit to show up in your account, likely it’ll be no different this time.

2. Check your Chase Offers for 10% or 15% back up to $37 for charges at a Hyatt property from now through Valentine’s day.

3. The demise of the Citi Premier 80,000 points bonus has been greatly overstated. You can still find it at this link, and don’t forget that you can get this bonus multiple times as long as you space your applications out by more than 8 days and you hit the bonus spending threshold after all of your applications are in.

4. Since around Christmas time reports have surfaced that the American Express Blue Business Plus card has been eligible for the 1.9 Million Membership Rewards offer for adding employee cards (20,000 points per employee card that meets the minimum threshold spend, up to 99 employees). To see if you’re eligible, you’ll have to call American Express and ask if there are any offers for adding employees to your card.

The Blue Business Plus variant of this offer is better than the Business Platinum variant though, because the threshold for earning 20,000 bonus Membership Rewards is $2,000 in spend versus the $4,000 spend requirement on the Business Platinum. If you maximize this deal it becomes a 12x everywhere offer for up to $50,000 in spend and 11x everywhere for the remaining $49,000 in spend, wowza.

5. The Free-quent Flyer has an excellent post on how to match your Hyatt status to MGM Resorts MLife gold status, and the instructions clock in at seven words. I admire the brevity.

Pictured: The weekend news dump.

I heard from quite a few of you this week and I appreciated your insightful questions and discussion. Thanks to all of you.

Now let’s sail into the weekend with a few items:

1. We’re far enough into 2021 to have good data-points on what’s working with American Express airline incidental credits and you can expect a writeup on that next week, but after a few positive reports we’ve gotten new reports yesterday that United TravelBank errors when you manually enter your credit card information.

It might seem like that avenue stopped working, but it didn’t. You can still purchase those United “incidentals” as long as you pay with a credit card that was saved to your MileagePlus profile.

2. You can get Star Alliance Gold status through February of 2024 by combining a promotion that started in April of last year with Singapore’s newly announced “loyalty measures”, and no, I didn’t make that term up. To do so, you’ll need to transfer 250,000 Chase, Capital One, Citi, or American Express points to Singapore (watch out for expiration of those miles after three years though).

This is very useful if you fly United domestically regularly because it gives you access to United Clubs while you have a same-day United flight, so you can drink yourself numb on cheap whiskey to reduce the pain of travel on your upcoming ERJ-145 or CRJ-200 United flight.

3. We had a nice three weeks without thinking about those pesky $200 MetaBank gift cards, right? Well, party’s over man. Staples is having a fee-free sale starting on Sunday running through the following Saturday for $200 Visa gift cards, limit five per transaction. To maximize:

  • Use a card that bonuses at office supply stores (duh)
  • Try for multiple transactions back-to-back, five per transaction

Unfortunately the Rakuten in-store card linked program for cash back at Staples is no longer around.

4. Related to the above? Maybe a little. The final payment date for Q4 2021 estimated taxes is Tuesday, and there are three major payment processors that accept debit cards. The IRS limit is technically two payments per quarter, but in practice they accept two payments per processor for each quarter at a cost somewhere around $2.50 each for using a Metabank debit card (EDIT: Thanks to Gary at VFTW for the correction on IRS limits):

Overpaying the IRS and getting it back as a refund was a nice manufactured spend technique in the before times, but now due to staffing shortages and tax code changes realize that refunds are now taking six months or more (though you do earn a 3.2% interest rate from the IRS while waiting for your refund).

Happy weekend!

The United ERJ-145 makes this cabin feel spacious and luxurious, but you won’t be focused on comfort after drinking the United Club’s “premium” Dewar’s Scotch.

1. Check your Chase personal credit cards at this link for a Q1 spending bonus. Offers have been seen on both co-branded cards and Ultimate Rewards earning personal cards, but none have been reported on the business side. Some examples:

  • 5x at Amazon, Grocery, and Restaurants up to $1,500 in spend
  • 5% cash back on at grocery stores up to $200 in spend
  • $50 back after 15 purchases each month, up to three months
  • 5% cash back at gyms up to $50 cash back

If you get an error message or a blank page, going incognito in your browser will usually fix it.

2. The best way to cash out Dell credits on American Express Business Platinum cards for most of us has been to buy Xbox gift cards for resale, and for essentially all of last year you could get 10% off of one gift card (per purchase) using the promotion code XBOX10 which made your effective cash-out rate even better. That code finally died, but a new one surfaced: GAME10

Note that when Dell starts cancelling your orders (they will eventually no matter what you buy), there are workarounds. Perhaps the simplest and also most annoying is to call the sales office at (877) 717-3355 and place an order over the phone.

3. Delta Air Lines has:

  • Extended existing travel credits and upgrade certificates through Dec 31, 2023
  • Made current tickets and newly booked tickets in 2022 valid through the end of 2024

Delta travel credits are particularly useful for cashing out American Express Platinum airline incidentals, so this is a nice change. (Book a ticket that costs a little less than your travel credit dollar amount + $200 and AmEx will see it as an incidental)

Dell’s order verification team for Xbox gift cards.

1. The American Express Business Platinum card’s annual fee is increasing from $595 to $695 starting tomorrow, so if you might want one of these cards in the next month, apply now even if you’re not currently eligible. If you’re denied you can always reconsider within 30 days with the original annual fee attached.

Note that reconsideration can bypass certain things and that American Express rarely pulls your credit, so don’t be afraid to probe.

2. A new version of the American Express Pay-Over-Time bonus has surfaced, this time for 30,000 Membership Rewards. You can check your charge cards for eligibility at this link. (Thanks to stillwaters23 on reddit)

3. There’s a $5,000 opportunity for from-home manufactured spend on Visa and Mastercards (Patreon subscribers have known about this play since August 1 of last year, but it’s now become more-or-less public with multiple threads on multiple forums including /r/churning):

Public.com is a stock trading platform that allows funding up to $5,000 total with a debit card. It also happens to treat PayPal Key as a debit card, so this is a one time $5,000 MS opportunity on Visa, Mastercard, and Discover credit cards (American Express credit cards don’t work with PayPal Key). EDIT: Rob let me know that you can fund $5,000 in a single transaction. The $1,000 per day limit no longer applies.

As usual, find a friend for a referral link to Public.com and make their day, but if you can’t find one, reach out to me and I’ll share mine. Be forewarned: the referral bonus is lame.

Wednesday thought: Is it ironic that the Public deal became public?

Over the weekend there was a 4x fuel points promotion for Kroger stores which usually causes BestBuy volume to crank up to an 11, but that didn’t happen this time. Sure, there was some BestBuy buying capacity to go around in select circles, but only at roughly 15% capacity of what would normally be available. What happened? Two things:

First, January is always really slow for gift card reselling and this year it’s even slower than normal, likely due to supply chain issues that mean retailers aren’t holding major sales.

Second, BestBuy stopped giving refunds on lost and destroyed packages to accounts of suspected resellers starting sometime around Christmas. With approximately three percent of packages lost, this means that less-crafty BestBuy resellers need to factor another loss into their cost of goods sold.

With somewhere around a third to a half of those resellers not yet figuring out how to work around the reseller flag, BestBuy rates were reduced by about 1.5%. Yay efficient market, but boo for gift card resellers.

Of course I have no idea how the BestBuy gift card market will actually look in the future, but based on watching BestBuy’s growing disdain toward resellers, I think the outlook for 2022 BestBuy gift card resale rates isn’t as rosy as it looked in 2021. Go ahead BestBuy, prove me wrong. I dare you.

BestBuy’s Kitty Sanchez to resellers: “Say goodbye to these, Michael”

Because American Express is still on its New Year’s bender, it’s given us a couple of tidbits related to the crazy offer for up to 1.9 million Membership Rewards points that surfaced in fall 2021 for Business Platinum cards. (Refresher: $4,000 spend on an employee card gives 20,000 bonus points, and you can have up to 99 employee cards per Business Platinum card):

1. According to multiple AmEx call center representatives, the offer on Business Platinum cards is scheduled to be available through late April. Of course that could change at any time so don’t treat it that as your reason to procrastinate.

2. An anonymous friend let me know that there’s a similarly structured offer on his Delta Gold Business card offer for 5,000 SkyMiles for $1,000 in spend, per employee card. Chris let me know that an identical offer was present on his Delta Reserve Business card too, effectively making both of these deals 6x SkyMiles up to $99,000 in spend.

As we learned in the 2021 recap, this offer doesn’t show up online and you have to call and ask about it to enroll, because reasons. So, if you have Delta business cards or any other American Express business cards, when you’ve got a moment give the number on the back of your card a call and say “Are there any offers for adding employees to this card?”

I’m still not sure who’s actually running the show over at AmEx, but wow guys, keep it coming.

American Express’s CEO barking clucking out orders for new card member promotions.

Introduction

Literally no-one: What’s the bane of every manufactured spender’s existence?

MEAB: Great question! It could be: Karen cashiers, broken money order terminals, gift cards that have been tampered with, other customers in line, made up rules, or a dozen other things.

I want talk about a workaround for one of those banes in particular today, credit card fraud alerts.

Going on a Manufactured Spend Trip

The best manufactured spend techniques let you spend large amounts in a single transaction, but these are also the most likely to be flagged as potentially fraudulent by credit card issuers, more so if they are round numbers. In fact, if you have a $2,500 purchase at a grocery store and the bank rhymes with pretty-skank, I’d give you 9 out of 10 odds that you’re going to get a decline on the first swipe and a subsequent fraud alert that takes at least a couple of minutes to sort out.

There’s an easy way around those algorithms though; when banks think you’re on a trip they expect abnormal purchases. So before buying $2,500 worth of “kombucha”, open the bank’s mobile application on your phone and set a travel alert for the state you’re in, even if it’s the same state you’re always in. Afterword, that purchase is likely to sail right through.

Happy weekend friends!

There are at least of four banes of my existence in this image. How many can you spot?

This is absolutely the slowest time of the year for gift card reselling, and 2022 has started out even slower than normal. Kroger is doing its best to change that with a Friday through Sunday 4x fuel points sale, but even that isn’t going to revive the market with meaningful volume given the backlog that aggregators currently have. Here’s what I’m seeing out there, and it’s a bleak January:

Tier 1 Cards

Resale rates (without fuel points) are weak and capacity to buy is currently small:

  • BestBuy: 95.5%
  • Home Depot: 93.5%
  • Apple: 93.5%
  • Nike: 93%
  • Lowe’s: 91%

If you’re really good at fuel points and can use them for yourself, they’re worth $35 per 1,000 which will easily make up for any loss you have when reselling Tier 1 cards. If you’re less good at them, their value is closer to the $15-18 range which can still make these deals worthwhile, provided you find a gift card buyer with capacity of course.

Tier 2 Cards

Tier 2 cards cards like Adidas, Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Gap just aren’t moving right now but I expect that to change by the end of the month. That said, even when these cards start moving it typically only make sense to buy when there a good deal on them, and those deals are likely to be non-existent other than perhaps for MLK weekend, so don’t get your hopes up for any volume.

Tier 3 Cards

Lower tier cards like Domino’s and Bath and Body Works are also at a stand-still, but unlike the tier above, I don’t really expect them to start moving until February and I’m not expecting any major deals on them until then either. So if you got some of these over the holidays, it may be best to order what Domino’s calls a “pizza”, but the rest of the world calls “cheap cheese, red paste, and grease bread”.

How MEAB is Playing It

I’ll be using Kroger’s 4x fuel points sale to offset the loss in selling Tier 1 cards this weekend, but it’s not going to be any sizable volume. Instead I’m focusing on non-gift card reselling techniques to keep the my spend up, and I suggest you do the same.

Good luck out there!

Special thanks to Travel With a Point for noting a grammar error in the original version of this post.

Pizza purchased with your holiday gift card: a bargain rip-off at twice half the price!