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Just bought EQP to requalify for IHG Diamond through end of 2025! Since I usually buy miles for 0.5 cents, the $768 to buy 110,000 EQP was only a $218 premium, and I get Diamond again
Ran into the Mexican car insurance scam with Budget in Merida, Mexico š²š½
Base rate was $18 USD a day, but if you didn't get the CDW costing minimum $85 USD a day, I had to put down a deposit of 330,000 MXN / $16,000 USD which obviously got rejected by all my credit cards.
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For those who prefer signature-based transactions for their debit cards, Amazon has a setting to have them run your debit card as credit.
You can do so here.
I’d imagine it’s useful for those who don’t have an alternative to using a PPDMC, etc., or for those who have some checking account bonus tied to having a certain number of signature-based transactions. For me, it’s useful for Provident CU ’round-up’ matching (Doctor of CreditĀ has a particularlyĀ good resource).
Update (9/14 11:30AM EST): Wow, that was fast. Marriott pulled Fandango from its portal. This is still worth a read though, in case you ever see 100x in the future.
Via Frequent Miler, the Marriott shopping portal appears to be offering 100 points/dollar spent at Fandango. Frequent Miler outlines the general value of such a deal (75% ‘off’ your movie tickets), but as the title of this post suggests, I’d like to take a different bent.
Every now and again while traveling you are struck by an experience that reminds you of the incredible and beautiful diversity that we have in the world and how languages and cultures can bridge that diversity in unexpected ways. My first of these such experiences occurred on one of my very first travel adventures, a week-long trip to Brussels, Brugges, and Paris.
On the last night of the final stop in my adventure, at the Notre Dame in Paris, I sat down to eat a picnic dinner that I had bought myself when I serendipitously stumbled upon a Boulangerie (bakery), Charcuterie (meat shop), and Fromagerie (cheese shop) all adjacent to each other. As I was eating, a man sat down a few feet to my right and proceeded to do the same.
Just to get it out of the way:Ā I promise that I’m not in any way compensated by Orbitz. I just think their program offers huge value and is a fairly easy entry into travel hacking. In about 10 months, I’ve managed to rack up about $1,000 in Orbucks (their rewards currency) as well as theirĀ Platinum status, which actually provides tangible benefits in two checked bag reimbursements (well, back in Orbucks) as well as a TSA Precheck voucher code. It only requires 12 nights (not stays!), and Orbucks-paid stays count towards that requirement, so it’s fairly easy to reach.
In case you guys didn’t know, I’m a huge fan of Orbitz and their rewards program. However, I’ve been a bit bummed of late because I have a few trips lined up for next year but am unable to book hotels (i.e. use my supply of Orbucks) because Orbitz hadn’t released any promotional codes valid for 2016 stays.
Thankfully, that changed last weekend with the release of code:
PACKYOURBAGS
Last week, SPG announced their ‘Open the World’ promotion, which offers a grand prize of a week-long vacation at one of their exclusive resorts, as well as free night certificates, Amazon and Amex gift cards, and SPG points. You can play twice a day by entering your SPG number and email address here.
Like all of my friends, I’ve been dutifully playing twice a day, although my efforts thus far have been to no avail. Which begs the question, is this really worth my time?
Esther, Michael, and I realized that we spend a lot of time talking aboutĀ howĀ we are able to travel to so many amazing placesĀ but little time aboutĀ how we actually get around while we’re on the ground. Since I’m fresh off of a last-minute Labor-day weekend trip to Colombia (I don’t speak Spanish, nor had IĀ been to South America before), I figured now would be a good time to share some of the tools I use toĀ plan and manage my experiences on the ground. Here they are:
A few weeks ago, when an opportunity arose to buy Mastercard Gift cards (MGCs) at-cost (i.e. without the activation fee), Esther and I got into a discussion about whether to buy those MGCs with a points-earning (Alaska Airlines Visa) or cashback (Fidelity Amex) card. To add some color,Ā I was having this conversationĀ on my phone from the Las Vegas strip, with my family asking just whoĀ I was so busy texting ;).
[I wroteĀ this post a few months ago in a Saverocity forum in reference to the 6% Savings account attached to the Mango prepaid card as an explanation of how to compute your effective yield/expected interest on the account.]
There is a lot of benefit to signing up for cards that have annual fees. For example, the US Airways Mastercard (RIP) offered 40k miles on first purchase and payment of an $89 annual fee. Plenty of other cards waive the annual fee (Chase Sapphire Preferred, Amex Starwood Preferred Guest, etc) AND provide you a gigantic sign-up bonus. But when it comes time for you to renew the card (and pay the annual fee) what should you do? Should you keep the card?
Where credit card issuers trick us is in getting us to count the sign-up bonus as part of the cardās value proposition beyond the first year. For example, consider the case of the CapitalOne Venture card. It comes with a 40k point sign-up bonus worth $400 with an annual fee of $59. Should we keep the Venture card for a second year, or downgrade to itās little sibling, the VentureOne card? Hereās the math:
$59 annual fee / 0.75% extra cash back per dollar spend = $7,867
What that means is if you plan on putting more than $7867 spend on your card, itās worth it to pay the annual fee to keep the Venture card over the VentureOne.
Wait. What about your $400? Remember that the money is already in your pocket, whether you keep the card another year or not. It therefore should play no role in your decision of whether or not to keep the card.
What if instead you considered replacing it with a 2% cash back card with no annual fee like the Fidelity Amex or Citi Double Cash rather than the VentureOne? Intuitively, your break-even point will be higher, but hereās how the numbers work out:
$59 annual fee / 0% = infinity
So yeah. Youāll never make up the annual fee.
And the Barclaycard Arrival (which bloggers tout as one of the best fixed-value cards out there)? It offers not 2%, but 2.105% cash back when redeeming for travel, and itās sign-up bonus of 40k points is worth $421 to the Venture cardās $400. Comparing it to the Double Cash or Fidelity Amex:
$89 annual fee / 0.105% extra cash back per dollar spent = $84,761 spend to break even.
To put that into perspective, $84,761 is more money than many households make in a year, forgetting even the fact that people split their spend across multiple cards. Add that to the fact that you can only redeem Arrival points for purchases of $100 or more, and you have a clear winner.
In general, when deciding between an no-annual fee card and a card with an annual fee (or any two cards, for that matter), you want to consider the following:
Difference in annual fee : Fee for card A - Fee for card B
Difference in earnings : Earnings rate of card A - Earnings rate of card B
Break-even spending: Difference in annual fee / Difference in earnings * 100
You might value points for the different cards differently. In that case, the earnings rate is just the value per point (more on that later) * points earned per dollar.
For cards with category bonuses, just take the average earnings rate for a given set of spend, e.g. for a card like the Chase Freedom, maybe you have 75% category bonus spend and 25% general spend, so your earnings rate would be 0.75 * 5% + .25 * 1% = Ā 4%. Typically I only ever use cards with category spend for purchases in the category (with all my non-category spend on a 2% cash back card), so I donāt ever have to do this math.
So, should you get the Amex Everyday Preferred card ($95 AF) over itās little sibling? To keep things simple, letās only focus on the highest earning category, groceries, and letās value Membership Rewards points at 1.5 cents / point. Assume also that we hit the transaction bonuses in each case. The Preferred card earns 4.5 points per dollar spent whereas the normal Everyday card earns 2.4 points. Where do we break even?
[$95 annual fee / (1.5 * (4.5 - 2.4))] * 100 = $3015
