Category: MS

Topcashback Offers 1.5% Cash Back on Giftcards.com!

April 5, 2016 / / 1 Comment

EDIT: After temporarily disappearing, GiftCards.com is back on TopCashback at 1.5%

For a long time, Giftcards.com was a good way of meeting minimum spending by allowing you to buy PIN-enabled Visa gift cards which were liquidatable in any number of ways. However, since they raised their gift card fees, it became quite expensive to purchase them without some kind of portal cash back.

To add insult to injury, Giftcards.com was pulled from most portals a couple months ago, but now it’s slowly making it’s way back. Continue reading →

Keeping Myself Honest

April 4, 2016 / / 2 Comments

I was doing some bookkeeping on Mint tonight, and I decided it would be both fun and educational to look at my travel expenses from last year and do an accounting.

Let’s start with a graph:

$4,473. That’s a big number.

Granted, I got a ton of trips out of my $4,473 (Phoenix, India, Japan, Chicago, the U.S. Southwest, Bogota, Bali, Vegas, LA, and NY x 3), but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a lot of money. Continue reading →

Amex Gave Us a Red Card and Served a Blue Bird on a Platter

January 10, 2016 / / 1 Comment

One day, when class participation was particularly poor in my eighth grade U.S. history class, my teacher told us that “Opinions are like belly buttons. Everyone has one.”

Nowhere is this more true than in the blogosphere, where my teacher’s claim might better be stated as, “Opinions are like belly buttons. Everyone must have one.” That being the case, here’s mine: Continue reading →

Retail eBay Gift Card Promotions ($15 off at Safeway for buying $125 GC)

December 26, 2015 / / 1 Comment

While reading about eBay’s holiday promotions, I clicked through to their holiday page and found their page listing retail eBay gift card promotions: http://www.ebay.com/rpp/retail-ebay-gift-card-promotions

Of particular interest to me is the Safeway promotion for $15 off your next Safeway shopping trip for buying a $125 eBay gift card. I do a lot of gift card buying/reselling from eBay, and I shop at Safeway, so this is a good promo for me. Continue reading →

A theoretical travel hacker walks into a bar….

September 24, 2015 / / 11 Comments

A theoretical physicist walks into a bar….

Oh wait, that’s not right. In theoretical physics, everything happens inside a perfect vacuum.

No, I don’t expect you to have taken college physics (or even high school physics, for that matter) to get something out of this post. All you need to know is this: in physics, a perfect vacuum is a space that doesn’t have any external forces or influences so that when you do some sort of calculation (say, how far a meteor will travel in a given amount of time), you don’t have to take into account things like friction, gravity, or air resistance. That is to say, you can calculate without making any other considerations. Continue reading →

$2 off $250 Visa Gift Cards (slight moneymaker) at GiftCardMall!

September 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Get $2 off $250 Visa Gift Cards (VGCs) at GiftCardMall with code:

EndOfSummer15

At $5.95 per gift card, this comes out to a cost of $5.95-$2 = $3.95 / $250 = 1.6% excluding credit card rewards. So this is a (slight) money-maker if you use a 2% cash back card but is otherwise a reasonable way to meet minimum spending requirements if you have a way of liquidating the VGCs (e.g. Redbird).

I also checked the terms at Simply Best Coupons (referral link — thanks!), which offers 0.5% cash back on VGC purchases from GiftCardMall, and they don’t seem to explicitly forbid using coupon codes. As with all things, YMMV. If the cash back gets credited, though, this is an even better deal at $2.70/$250 = 1.08% before credit card rewards! You can find GiftCardMall by searching for “visa gift cards”. Continue reading →

Leave the Cannoli, Take the Cash

September 2, 2015 / / 4 Comments

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, I was having this conversation on my phone from the Las Vegas strip, with my family asking just who I was so busy texting ;). Continue reading →

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