1. American Express’s promotion for 10x on dining for up to $25,000 in three months for the referrer after referring someone else to AmEx ends on Wednesday. To make this last a little longer, remember AmEx referral hacks:

    – One 10x bonus per account number
    – Referral links saved before Wednesday will have the 10x bonus attached even if the referred applies for the card after Wednesday
    – If the referred is denied on first application but later approved after reconsideration, the 10x bonus will activate for the referrer, even after the expiration

    Combine several of the above to extend 10x even further, and remember you can always chat with American Express to confirm that a referral bonus is attached after three days.
  2. Giftcards.com has new codes for 10% off of $100 Visa egift cards. Codes to try:

    – VISASUMMER10
    – SUMMERVISA10
    – SUMMER10

    These codes don’t appear on major shopping portals so probably won’t payout, but you miss all the shots you don’t take. If you’re having tracking issues with this site, see this post and also note that all Safari desktop transactions may also currently not track with giftcards.com.

    These are Pathward cards. Several online liquidation channels for these dried up in the last couple of weeks, but there’s always a play and there’s always Kiva as a last resort if you don’t have other options.
  3. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard sent out mid-month offers late last week, we’ve seen:

    – 200,000 Shop Your Way Rewards points for $750+ in online shopping
    – 250,000 Shop Your Way Rewards points for $1,000+ in online shopping
    – $70 statement credit for $1,000+ in online shopping
    – $50 statement credit for $750+ in online shopping
    – 10,000 ThankYou Points with $1,000+ in online shopping

    (Thanks to MVC, Brandon F, irieriley, and Brooke)
  4. Giant, Stop & Shop, and Martins stores have 10x points on Uber and airbnb gift cards through Thursday, limit $2,000 per account. Of course with Pepper Rewards you can get effectively the same deal from home, but probably only for a couple more weeks.
  5. American Express offers has $300 back on $750 or more at Holland America through August 31. (Thanks to FM)
  6. In case you’re wondering how bad the Ultra Low Cost Carrier (ULCC) airlines are doing at matching up with the current traveling public’s needs, two pieces of news will tell you: (1) On Friday Frontier eliminated change fees on non-basic economy tickets and added Euro-Business style blocked middle seats on some tickets. Then this weekend, (2) Spirit eliminated both change fees and cancellation fees on all tickets.

    Of course, you could look at Frontier’s earnings or Spirit’s earnings for Q1 2024 earnings and see it in number form. [Spoiler alert]: They’re both great at losing money, and they’re both good at using accounting tricks to make the losses look less grave.

ULCC post-COVID economic models in a nutshell.

  1. American Express offers has a new card linked offer for $75 back or 7,500 SkyMiles on $200+ in cumulative Delta airfare purchased by August 15. So far these have only been seen on Delta co-branded cards.

    Delta makes this offer easier to game than most airlines.
  2. Do this now: Register for 3x United miles at IHG properties through August 31 for stays booked by June 30 for up to 15,000 earned miles.

    IHG points convert to United miles at 2 miles per dollar normally, which means 6x under this promotion.
  3. Kroger.com has 5% off of most third party e-gift cards with promo code MAYMADNESS through Saturday, including travel favorites like Delta, Uber, and airbnb. You’ll also earn 4x fuel points on these purchases.

    1,000 fuel points is worth between $15 and $25 on average, though you can get up to $35 in value. The Daily Churn has a great episode on maximizing Kroger fuel points. So, you can think of those as an additional ~7% off on average.
  4. Kroger has a 4x fuel points promotion today only on third party gift cards excluding Amazon. Pepper Rewards continues to depress the market, but there’s a growing sentiment with several data-points suggesting that Pepper’s insanity will end before June does.
  5. Staples purportedly has fee free $200 Mastercard gift cards starting Sunday and running through the following Saturday, limit five per transaction. I can’t actually find this offer in the weekly ad so double check before buying, but they did run the promotion last year for the same week so it’s likely real. (Thanks to GCG)
  6. The American Express Morgan Stanley Platinum card has a 125,000 Membership Rewards sign-up bonus after $8,000 spend in six months, which matches the previous high offer for this card. There are a few reasons to care about this card, principally:

    – It’s historically been more churnable than other Platinums
    – It offers an authorized user Platinum card with no additional fee, including lounge access

    You need a Morgan Stanley account to be eligible. Current accounts that should qualify include Platinum Cash+, AAA, Access Investing, or a company retirement account.

Have a nice weekend friends!

Good news on two fronts for Lubbock Holiday Inn guests: (1) It’s not the worst Holiday Inn, and (2) you’ll earn 3x United miles.

Background

Behind most FinTechs is one of a handful of partner banks, common ones include: Evolve, Stearns, Sutton, Cross River, and Celtic, but there are others. Somewhere between an average FinTech and a partner bank you’ll sometimes also find a Banking-as-a-Service player, and there are even fewer of those. Common BaaS names that you may have heard of are Solaris Bank, Green Dot, and Solid.

NOTE: In case you’re wondering, Banking-as-a-Service is nicknamed BaaS because the finance industry often lacks creativity and tries to hide it with focus group generated names designed by committee to appeal to millennials on paper, but the names they arrive at don’t actually appeal to millennials in practice.

April Showers

Synapse, a somewhat popular BaaS platform, filed for bankruptcy in April and for the most part no-one noticed because everything seemed ok for FinTech platforms built using Synapse, because TabaPay (yet another BaaS) struck a deal immediately to buy Synapse’s assets and assume its business operations.

May Gray

A few days ago though, TabaPay announced that it was terminating its purchase agreement of Synapse because of issues with TabaPay’s partner bank, Evolve, funding accounts related to the transaction. Of course, just like a reality TV show, Evolve says that it’s not true because of course they did. Then, Evolve froze the assets of multiple FinTechs built on the Synapse platform because of course they also did that.

After the agreement was called off on Tuesday, a bankruptcy judge went on record to say that up to 20 million FinTech depositors are at risk due to Synapse’s bankruptcy and the failed deal. What does at risk here mean? It’s not fully clear, because typically a BaaS’s partner bank holds custodial accounts for customers and those are FDIC insured, but if they’re frozen and you can’t withdraw them, then FDIC insurance doesn’t mean anything for access to your cash. Additionally, depending on the financial structure of the custodial account, FDIC insurance may be insufficient too.

The Effect on FinTechs

Since Evolve froze FinTech accounts worth $114,000,000 related to Synapse this week, we’ve seen ripples through multiple FinTechs including Juno and Yotta, each of which have had their customers’ accounts frozen by Evolve. My personal, uninformed opinion after watching the Silicon Valley Bank drama is that the federal government won’t let FinTech users lose this money, but of course my opinion tends to have no bearing on reality.

The Advice you didn’t Ask For

Juno had been an interesting tool for manufactured spend at multiple points in the past, but that’s changed recently even without the Synapse drama. Some manufactured spenders still have significant funds on deposit that’s no longer accessible though, and there are indications of issues at other FinTechs too, including but not limited to Yotta. So, while the Miles Earn and Burn way is “always be probing”, I’d sit back on probing any FinTechs that might be involved with Synapse for the time being.

Good luck out there friends!

The finance community’s premier product and industry name committee.

  1. Wyndham points can now be redeemed for all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean, Central-America, and Mexico. Resort prices are either 15,000 or 30,000 points per night for two guests.

    Don’t forget that the Wyndham Business Earner Barclays card earns 8x and gives a 10% rebate on points bookings, which makes this a very solid deal. (Thanks to DoC)
  2. TheGiftCardShop.com has fee-free Visa gift cards with promo code GRAD2024, though you’ll still pay for shipping, and it seems to work for up to $10,000 in purchases per order too.

    These are Incomm gift cards. Incomm cards have sporadic liquidation issues in recent history which can largely be summed as: (1) sometimes full value transactions are blocked, and (2) usually you can’t do more than three back-to-back transactions with the same type of card.

Have a nice Wednesday!

This week’s blog posts.

  1. Office Depot / OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300 or more in Visa gift cards through Saturday. For best results:

    – Try for multiple transactions back-to-back
    – Try and get even multiples of $300 for better discount stacking
    – Link your cards to Dosh

    In theory these are limit 10 per transaction. These are Pathward gift cards.
  2. Giftcards.com has 10% off of $100 virtual Visa gift cards using promo code SUMMER10. The code only applies to three per order, but multiple orders work fine because rules only matter sometimes.

    These are Pathward gift cards too. (Thanks to SPX)
  3. Bank of America has a small business checking account bonus of $1,000 for bringing $30,000 in new funds within 30 days of opening the account and keeping an average balance of $30,000 or more between days 31 and 90. Depending on how well you play timing, it’s an effective APR of between 13.5% and 20.3%. The account must by open by July 31.

    You can also register for a fast track to Preferred Rewards through the same funds and promotion, which frankly is a better deal than it probably sounds. (Thanks to DoC)
  4. The Citi Strata Premier card has a meaningful update: It now includes travel insurance for luggage, delays, and common carrier cancellations and interruptions. Just like everything Strata related, Citi botched the rollout though. This time, they posted the terms and conditions and a FAQ, but then pulled them a bit later. I did read through them while they were up, and the summary for trip delay insurance is (was?): UPDATE: Benefits guide here

    – Trips must be paid in full with the card for revenue tickets for coverage
    – Taxes and fees must be paid in full with the card for award tickets for coverage
    – Round-trips required, one-way bookings may not count [needs to be re-verified]
    – Trip delay insurance requires a 6 hour delay
    – Maximum $500 per incident

    The Sapphire Reserve and US bank Altitude Reserve have better travel insurance than the Strata Premier, especially because you only need a partial payment with those cards for eligible coverage, and one-way trips are covered too as long as you’re away from your home city.
  5. Finally, personal American Express Platinum cards have changed the criteria for at least some authorized user bonuses, requiring that the authorized user card be a Platinum version which has an additional annual fee. That is, the free version of the authorized user cards don’t count for a bonus.

    We haven’t seen this on other cards or business cards yet. (Thanks to Xero Clarity)

Happy Tuesday!

Another rule that only matters sometimes.

Introduction

It’s been a couple of weeks since we talked about thinking about the velocity of money as an APR. As a quick reminder, when you make a spread for moving money around, you can think of the profit in terms of simple APR as:

APR = spread * banking_days / settlement_time

In the example from last time, a spread of 0.65% gave an effective simple APR of 54.6%.

Making it More Complex and Accurate

But, when you’re earning a spread, you’ve got that spread to invest after it’s paid out too which makes simple APR tell an under-optimistic story: Basically, if you earn $650 for moving $100,000, next time you’ll have $100,650 to move, so you’ll earn a bigger payout if you reinvest your earnings. Assuming you’re paid on some frequency we’ll call payout_frequency, we’ve got effectively a compounding APR (APRc) formula that tells a more complete story (editor’s note: if the formula isn’t rendering properly, check the web site here):

{APR}_C = \left(1 + \frac{{spread} \times {banking\_days}}{payout\_frequency \times {settlement\_time}}\right)^{payout\_frequency} - 1

As my super annoying physics and math professors used to say in college, the derivation of that formula is left as an exercise to the reader. Of course it’s not super annoying when I do it, it’s cute right? Right?

Putting that all together with the numbers from last time, spread = 0.65%, banking days = 252, settlement time = 3 (avoid kiting), and payout_frequency = 12 (monthly), we get a compound APR of 70.6%. If you find a spread that pays out every time you move money, payout_frequency becomes 252 and, you’ll net even more with an effective APRc of 72.5%.

Conclusion

A small spread can look unappealing and make your brain flash a 🤏 emoji, but a small number compounded together a bunch of times can still turn into a big number. Obviously if you can do better than 0.65% on your spread of profit – fees (which you often can), then things look even better.

Happy Monday friends!

MEAB in a few decades; just like present MEAB, except older.

Buying gift cards through giftcards.com is a favorite past time for manufactured spenders, especially because it’s an easy way to hit portal spending bonuses. Things have been going swimmingly for me with the site since portal terms and conditions were updated in November 2022 to allow for cash-back on up to $2,000 per order, rather than the prior $2,000 in aggregate per month; or at least they had been going swimmingly until April 11.

On April 12, orders stopped tracking across all portals for a majority of manufactured spenders that used the site regularly. For others though, everything continued to track and the difference wasn’t clear. As far as I can tell, two things happened on that day:

  • Giftcards.com implemented new anti-bot measures, usually manifesting as a puzzle slider
  • They built an internal “cash-back ban list” and put big users on it

Since I pretend to be a scientist, I spent a few weeks trying to decide what exactly had been banned by placing dozens of orders through different portals, each changing some combination of personal information, technology, and credit cards. The result was they seem to have banned users by:

  • device (cookies and browser fingerprint)
  • ip

Changing one of these things wasn’t sufficient to fix tracking, but changing both of them was. So, if you’re having issues with order tracking on giftcards.com, find your way to a new IP and device profile. Your email accounts, name, addresses, and other personal information doesn’t seem to matter.

Happy weekend friends!

Next up: How to ensure that 21 pounds of onions for $7 will post correctly at Meijer.

  1. Do this now: Link your Hilton account to Bilt Rewards to earn 1,000 Bilt Hilton points. Bilt points can can transfer 1:1 to Hyatt or AA (or to Hilton if you like terrible redemption values).
  2. We’ll see at least three dozen articles in the next couple of weeks about the Citi Strata Premier, and they’ll all boil down to a few salient points:

    – The old Premier goes away today for new applications
    – Strata Premier applications start on May 16 with a 75,000 ThankYou Point bonus
    – The bonus won’t be available if you had a Premier bonus in the last four years, and yes, you can still double dip
    – The new card is almost exactly the same as the old card, except for the addition of 3x at EV charging and 10x earning on hotels, cars, and entertainment booked through the slightly inflated price CitiTravel.com portal

    If anything else important comes up, you’ll see it here. Otherwise, skip all the upcoming articles and go probing instead.
  3. American Express has new spend offers for Platinum cards:

    – Delta: $40 back on $180+ booked through AmEx travel through July 5
    – JetBlue: $50 back on $200+ through August 6
    – Hilton: $40 back on $180+ through July 31
    – Hertz: $40 back on $150+ through June 30
    – Dell: $50 back on $250+ through September 30
    – Oceana Cruises: 10x on up to $4,000 spend through July 8

    The Delta one is gameable using the same methods for airline incidental credits and that’s only somewhat interesting, but JetBlue and Hilton are more easily played. I have no direct experience with Oceania Crusies, but there’s an angle with most.
  4. The Citi AAdvantage Platinum Select personal Mastercard has a new 75,000 AAdvantage Miles sign-up bonus after $3,500 in spend within four months. This one is better than normal because the $99 annual fee is waived for the first year.

    Warning: This may be someone’s affiliate link. I’ve found it in multiple places that have affiliate relationships, I can’t get it to appear without leaving all of the URL parameters in place, and I can’t find it via Google search, Citi’s page, or AA’s page, so there may be a hidden commission paid to someone with this link. I can say for certain that I’ll earn exactly as much with this link as with every other link on the blog: $0.

Preparing for the upcoming deluge of Citi Strata blog posts.