Frequent Miler on the Air - 13 ways to increase credit card spend (and get most of it back) | Ep197 | 4-8-23

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

Big credit card intro bonuses are the fastest way to supercharge your miles and points balances, but how can you meet the minimum spending requirements for multiple new cards per year? Here are 13 ways to increase your spending with no cost or low cost. 1:41 Announcements. Tim Goes Full Time https://frequentmiler.com/no-joke-tim-goes-full-time-at-frequent-miler/ 3:10 Monthly Ask Us Anything 5:42 See Nick live at FTU Washington DC https://frequentmiler.com/come-see-nick-at-ftu-signature-washington-dc-on-5-6-23/ 13:02 Card Talk: Amex Bonvoy Brilliant Card https://frequentmiler.com/marriott-bonvoy-brilliant-guide-and-review/ 23:36 Award Talk -Marriott now allows online point transfers 25:38 Helping Maisie book a last-minute business class award to Europe 29:03 Using a soon-expiring IHG Free Night Certificate 32:49 Spirit Status Challenge Update 41:23: Main Event: 13 Ways to increase credit card spend (and get most of it back) 41:41 #1: Don't take "No credit cards" at face value 43:50 #2 Pay your taxes https://frequentmiler.com/pay-taxes-via-credit-card/ 45:42 #3 Pay bills that don't ordinarily accept a credit card with services like Plastiq and Melio https://frequentmiler.com/melio-pay-business-bills-by-credit-card/ 48:05 #4 Fund college savings or pay student loans https://frequentmiler.com/miles-for-college/ 50:14 #5 Make loans through Kiva https://frequentmiler.com/why-i-love-kiva-for-earning-rewards-and-doing-good/ 55:08 #6 Coordinate events with friends 55:54 #7 Pay bills for friends or family 57:06 #8 Fund new bank accounts https://frequentmiler.com/us-bank-up-to-a-600-bonus-when-opening-a-new-checking-account/ 1:00:28 #9 Buy and sell merchandise https://frequentmiler.com/us-bank-up-to-a-600-bonus-when-opening-a-new-checking-account/ 1:03:53 #10 Buy and sell gift cards 1:07:27 #11 Buy Visa and Mastercard Gift Cards https://frequentmiler.com/best-options-for-buying-visa-and-mastercard-gift-cards/ https://frequentmiler.com/manufactured-spending-complete-guide/ 1:13:07 #12 Reload reloadable cards 1:16:32 #13 Gambling on riskier business 1:23:31 Question of the Week: How can I use the Hilton Aspire $250 resort credit without staying at a resort? Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did Citi do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, 13 ways to increase credit card spend and get most of it back. We haven't talked about credit card spend as like a broad topic for a long time

on the show. Right. I looked it up and can you guess when the last show was just roughly that we talked about credit card spend as a general topic? We've talked about it a little bit like specific things, like we had a show about Kiva Loans, for example. But when have we done a general topic on credit card spend and increasing it? I'm going to say never. Have we? Okay. Two years ago. Nope. November 29th, 2019. Wow. So yeah, almost four years ago.

Wow. We had a show titled Easy Credit Card Spend, and we listed five easy ways to increase credit card spend. And there you go. They're actually all still- Still working. They're actually all still ways that you can do. I mean, details have changed. But we're going to talk about those and many more today on today's show. But first, we have, before the giant mailbag, we have a temporary section called announcements because we have a couple things to announce here uh first of all tim who is has been writing part-time on our blog has moved to full-time and uh i thought it was worth letting everybody know for a couple reasons one just so you know hey congratulations tim he's

now full-time at frequent miler and secondly, some listeners might not even know that we have a blog. And I think it's worth mentioning again that frequentmiler.com, that's our blog. And that's where all of this Frequent Milerness started in 2011 as a blog. And it lived as a blog for many, many years and still does, obviously. And it's a big part of what we do, probably the major part of what we do. But then the, uh, podcast came around in, I think 2019. Um, I don't actually remember when we started. Yeah, no, that's right. Yeah. Cause I remember the trip I was, I was May of 2019. I remember I was in Switzerland. I did the first show from, uh, from a hotel. So I remember that. Uh, but so anyway, I think that I want to add

to that. You said it's like, you know, probably the biggest thing we do or the bigger thing. And if you're just a podcast listener and you haven't been to the site, I feel like that was maybe underselling a little bit. We talked about some of the topics that we write about on this show. We write about a lot more than what it is we have time to talk about. So lots more at the site. So frequentmiler.com, like Greg said, if you haven't been there yet, go. After the show. Please do. Please do. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Finish watching or listening. Okay. Next announcement is that in case you don't know, we do a monthly Ask Us Anything live show on YouTube where the whole team, so not just me and Nick, but the whole

Frequent Miler team includes Tim, who's now full-time, Stephen, and Kerry. Both of them are part-time on the blog. The whole team, if we're all available, we get together on live stream and answer questions, whatever the audience wants to ask. We recorded one this past week and go to YouTube and give it a look. Okay, third. I'm gonna jump on it.

Sorry to jump on it. No, just one more thing, because I didn't mention when you said Tim is full time. I wanted to mention and I realized I didn't before he moved on that I'm excited about that because I'm excited for readers to get more of Tim's personality because he's going to write a morning post every week. And he's been such a good addition to the team. And I feel like people probably have caught some of his humor in his posts, but not the

full picture. And so I'm particularly excited about people getting the chance to get to know Tim better through more longer form posts, because I think he's just going to add so much to the site. So I'm excited about that. And I hope, you know, if you're listening, you are too. Me too. And as you know, as a total aside, you mentioned Tim's humor, which is great. Stephen has been unleashing more and more of this humor lately on his posts. So be sure when you see a post come out on our post that said something like, you know, oh, I loved your last paragraph. And then I went and read it and was just laughing out loud at his last paragraph in that post. So he sneaks in things more and more.

He did probably our best ever April Fool's Day joke about the physical Amex coupon book that was coming out. So give that a look too. Tim, you need to do even funnier stuff than that. I'm looking forward to what Tim comes out with there. Very good. Third announcement. Yes, we've got three um if you uh you can not only see the team live on youtube but you can actually see nick live in person coming up uh ftu signature washington

dc ft stands for frequent frequent traveler university on may 6th so anything i need to know about if they want to sign up and you can just type you just type ftu in the box in the search box at frequent miler.com or hit our events tab we've got an event section there somewhere i don't even know exactly where that is off the top of my head but if you go to the event section or you search ftu you'll find the post about it so it's a one-day event time around. Some of the past FDUs have been two days. This is a one day event. So it'll all happen one day in the city club at the City Club of Washington. Tickets are 149 if you're not an FDU member. And if you are an FDU member, then you pay $100. So you can read more all about that and who's speaking. I'm excited

because it looks like a pretty good list of speakers. So I just can't wait because I enjoy going to this stuff face to face. I mentioned in the post that I really, really got into this after I went to an event like that. I thought I knew a lot. And then I went to an event like that. And I was like, wow, there's so much more that I don't know than what I thought I did know. So I enjoy these things. They're not for everyone, I guess, but I always enjoy them. I look forward to seeing some readers there. Awesome. Yep.

Okay. Now, finally, we get into the giant mailbag. And today we really do have giant mail. So there's a lot. There's a lot here to cover. Okay. I'm going to get my cup of coffee. Go ahead.

Yeah, please do. So this all started with Nick posting to our blog a post called something like Shifting Shopping Portal Habits. And Daphne wrote in to that saying, I've really begun to feel like both Nick and Greg have kind of lost interest in the site. I felt that that way, at least for the last couple of months, Tim and the British guy, which is Stephen, by the way, are basically holding it together for the most part these days. I'm hoping that Tim becoming full-time will get the blog a little more back on track. Well, I hope so, Tim. Welcome aboard, buddy. Apparently the ship is sinking and we're glad to have you. Tall order for Tim there. Yeah, my goodness. Yeah, I was surprised. I saw that comment and I was taken aback a little bit because obviously Daphne had that opinion about it. Something's given her that impression. And I thought to myself, my goodness, I spend almost every waking hour thinking about Frequent

Mylar or working on something, responding to something. Sometimes those waking hours are extra long too. So I, so I was surprised to get that piece of feedback, but I guess that's something to consider. I don't know what I, and I did ask what, what gave her that impression. So I'd be curious to hear if she hasn't answered your question yet. Hopefully she will. But the statement, well, my first reaction was, well, this is silly. You know, I haven't lost interest at all. It did make me sort of step back and think a little bit about my own situation with all this. And what I realized is that I've been more excited and interested lately, and this has been for quite a while now,

on the award booking side of things. So I've been writing a lot about new tools for searching for awards or tricks for booking awards, that kind of thing. But you haven't been in the trenches manufacturing spend. That's true. I haven't been doing nearly as much of that kind of thing. And so I think from that point of view, maybe Daphne has a point. And if you think about it, our blog, the tagline is

earn miles without flying. It's not spend miles. Without trying. Without trying. There you go. We just need to add that. Add that line. You're welcome, marketing department. I got you. So anyway, so I was really taken by the reply to Nick's reply to Daphne, which was from Tracy P. And Tracy said, I think Daphne and a lot of casual readers' frustration comes from the fact that we do not have access to liquidation methods that allow you and Greg to churn multiple no-lifetime language offers, or Greg with the 90K ink referral with Player 1, Player 2, and Player 3 a month ago. Basically, she's saying that we can sign up for lots of cards with lots of big welcome bonuses because we know tricks for manufacturing spend, for increasing credit

card spend and getting most of it back. And not all those tricks are things that we are comfortable blogging about, or we've promised people who've told us these secrets that we won't share them, those kind of things. And she goes on to say the vast majority of us are not sitting on million plus points in the flexible transferable currency. So there's definitely a growing disconnect, even though you guys are dedicating the same, if not more time. I've learned quite a bit from the blog and appreciate everything you do, but have resigned myself to only focus on what's attainable for me and my family in the current economy and not be envious of what you guys are able to do. But it gets hard at times. Hope this feedback helps in some way,

and I'm looking forward to your team challenge. Yeah, I thought that was a great piece of feedback to kind of frame what Daphne had said, or at least add something to her interpretation of it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that those were some good points. I think that a here we are now we're going to talk about ways to increase spend. And I'm sure that that was part of the reason we picked this topic this week, because, you know, it's a it's a good point. There are lots of ways to increase spend. So my first reaction when I read that was, well, there's a lot of ways to do it. You got to go out and look for them. And it's not easy if you don't know what you're looking for. It's hard to find something when you don't know what you're looking for. So here, we'll give you some things

to look for, hopefully today. And that hopefully will help some. So I appreciate that feedback. And I also think that part of the reason perhaps that Daphne and I are putting thoughts in her head. So what do I really know? But perhaps part of the reason that she feels like we've lost interest is because we have expanded out to a lot of stuff, right? And I mean, now we've got this podcast, we have the Facebook group. And so those things all take time and focus. And so we've got an Instagram, et cetera. So all of those things do take up some time.

And so perhaps our attention is more divided now than it was when it was just blog posts every day, right? So I could also see some of that perspective where, you know, we're trying to produce different types of content that appeal to different types of people. And so that probably has changed the quantity of content in one area or another, it has to write by the, you know, just the simple math. But But hopefully, we're producing enough to keep you entertained and interested. And like I said, here we go. Let's talk about ways to increase spend today, but I'm sure we've got something else first. I don't know. Go ahead. Do you have something else to. We have a few more segments

before, before we get into how to, how to increase spend so uh next segment card talk let's talk about yeah let's talk about the amex bonvoy brilliant card i'd rather not talk about it i'm gonna let you talk about it because you wrote the post about it this week right so tell us about that i i i finally got around to uh writing a guide and review of of the card basically. We've written quite a bit about the card in the past, but usually... I think the last time I wrote a dedicated post about it, it was saying why Tim's post announcing changes to the card were kind of wrong about it. He shouldn't be as excited about the card as he was. But this time we took a step back and gave it a more, I guess, balanced look at the card. And it's definitely worth considering for a lot of people, I think, but it's not a slam

dunk for everyone by any means. So here's the problem with the card, $650 a year. Yep. That's it. I mean, that's the main problem with the card. It's definitely a year. Yep. That's it. I mean, that's the main problem with the card. It's definitely a problem. And what you get back, you do get back credits, but you get $300 back in dining credits, but up to $25 a month. So you have to use that card for dining purchases every single month in order to get that back. But still, that's not too onerous. So now you're at about $350 altogether per year.

But then starting with your second year, when you pay the annual fee, you get a free night certificate in your Marriott account worth 85,000 points. So I shouldn't say worth 85,000 points. It is, you can use it to book a stay that costs up to 85,000 points, or you can add points to the certificate to book a stay that's worth up to 100,000 points. So for example, you could add 15,000 points to the certificate to book a 100,000 point one night stay. You can't use it to book multiple nights. And so that can be very valuable because we've seen even things like the St. Regis Maldives recently was available for less than 100,000 points for a lot of days. Even less than 85K for some days. So you could cover it entirely with the free night certificate. And that's a place that regularly, if you're not familiar,

it goes for $1,500 a night or so or more. Or more, yeah, yeah. So we were seeing nights that cost like the best price was like $2,000 and it was still bookable with the certificate. So you get some outstanding value in certain circumstances with that. It also gives you platinum elite status. So that's a great level of status if you're at the right hotel. So that's a great way to put it. Marriott's elite program is extremely frustrating because it's so inconsistent, at at many hotels you get uh free full breakfast and or lounge access

with platinum elite status um so you you can get a lot out of that uh it also gives you 25 elite night credit elite night credits yeah uh which um it can be you'll have to read my post why you'd care about that. If you're already getting platinum status automatically, check out the post because that's kind of a lengthy topic. Earning power is not great. So you get two points per dollar for most spend, and that might sound good, but with points being worth less than a penny each, it's not as good as just a basic old 2% cashback card in my mind. And plus, Marriott often sells their points on sale for about 0.9 cents each. So you'd get more than two points per dollar by spending on a 2% cashback card and then

buying Marriott points during sales with that cash back. So, uh, that's why I don't think it's very great. I mean, it also gives you 3X for air fare with airlines, 3X with restaurants. Again, that's not, that's not amazing. 6X with Marriott, that's not even amazing. Um, so, you know, some hotels like IHG will give you 10X at IHG hotels with some of their IHG cards. So anyway, so it's kind of blah with earnings from spend. If you do spend $60,000 on the card in a calendar year, you get a choice award, which can be another 85K certificate. So that can be a valuable perk if you spend sixty thousand dollars uh you get a prior priority pass membership but this is amex's version which doesn't include priority pass restaurants or uh what's the other thing experiences restaurants experiences yeah

uh and you get global entry fee credit every four, four and a half years, something like that. So what do you think? Would you love it? No, I don't love it. I mean, it's fine. If you have the card, I wouldn't tell you to cut it up necessarily, but it doesn't excite me. The $25 a month dining credits really don't excite me. It's not that I don't spend $25 a month at restaurants. I do, but I don't want to have to carry that thing in my wallet just for the $25. I'd rather just use my gold card for four points per dollar. So that's kind of an annoyance. Now there's ways, you know, you've written about using flus and that sort of thing to

trigger that credit. But then I got to do it every month and I got to build up these gift cards that I got to remember to use eventually, too. So I'm not super excited about the $25 a month. It's like, okay, but I don't get excited. And then even if I valued that at full face value, which you should know we don't and you shouldn't, but even if you did, it's still 350 a year for the free night certificate. And I just don't usually spend $350 on a night, even if it's going to be a really fancy night. It's out of the budget that I would normally spend on a free night. So it doesn't particularly excite me.

The Platinum status is potentially interesting because it gets you the free breakfast at a range of places. Some, maybe most Marriott properties-ish. But at the same time, if you have one business and one consumer card that's not the $650 card, that puts you 30 nights towards platinum status. You only need 20 nights a year then in order to keep platinum status. So I don't really feel like that's worth paying too, too much for since I'm going to probably stay at Marriott's at least 10 nights a year, if not more. And so

I'll probably hit that 20 more often than not that I need to. So no, I'm not particularly excited about it. But for somebody who is going to stay at St. Regis now and then and save a bunch on breakfast, yeah, it might make sense to have this for platinum status alone. And then the 85k cert on top will be particularly nice. Am I remembering right that when you stayed at the St. Regis Bora Bora, you and your family got great value from the breakfast benefits? We sure did. They offered us our choice because, of course, it's a welcome benefit. So they offered us a couple of coffee mugs if we'd rather. But we chose to take them up on the $100 a day breakfast because free breakfast is one of those choice benefits. And it would have cost $100 a day breakfast, you know, because free breakfast is one of those choice benefits,

and it would have cost 100 bucks a day. Yeah, I mean, so five days day, it would have been $500 in breakfast right there. So, you know, and in a place like that, you're kind of stuck. It's not like you can, you know, head down the street to McDonald's or the local diner, you're going to have to eat there one way or another. So being able to get that for free is quite a large saving. So that's what I mean. And you know, if you're going places like that, then yeah, get this card and have it and hold it. I'm going to boil it down to, here's my recommendation. If you value the Platinum Elite benefits and you have to look into what those are and whether you think it'd be valuable to you, if you value those benefits and you don't think you're

going to earn Platinum Elite status any other way, this is a nice, easy way to get that status, get the value back for your annual fee with the free night certificate and the dining credits. So it's not, you know, the net cost isn't really too bad. And, you know, don't use it for spend except for $25 worth of dining each month, because it's just not all that valuable in that way. I don't recommend trying to spend $60,000 to get another certificate. Much better option is to look into getting a Chase Marriott card and a year later, upgrade it to a Ritz card, which that Ritz card will also give you an 85K certificate each year. So that would be sort of an ideal combination if you want another annual certificate.

Yep. And I like the Ritz card more because the fee is lower and the credits are more useful to me. So it feels like a net cost that's much lower for that 85K cert. But the problem is the Ritz card doesn't come with automatic platinum status. So if you need that, you need the Brilliant card. Right, right. And it's also not available new directly. So that's why it's that long play where you've got to get a Chase Marriott card and upgrade it later. The other reason I'm not super excited about the Platinum status on the Brilliant card is I'm getting close-ish to lifetime platinum. So I guess that would get me there a little bit sooner, but I'm probably going to make the push each year

to get enough night of the 20 nights because I should be, you know, lifetime platinum pretty soon here. And then I really wouldn't need to pay $650 a year for that card. Yeah, yeah. You know, I have the brilliant card and I have lifetime platinum status.

So you're not even getting that. That whole aspect of the card is meaningless to me but you'll use the 85k start to good value i mean it's i will use i'm sure i'll use 85k start to good value um i'm getting you know i'm definitely going to earn the full 300 dining credit i don't value it at face value but i still get that so those two two things help, you know, offset the annual fee. And for me, I actually value the fact that this card gives you 25 elite Knights instead of 15, which, which the other cards give you, because I sometimes want to earn the next level status titanium and, and the extra 10 nights really help with that.

So so at least for now I'm keeping the card but um it's something that i'll have to reevaluate every now and then i think all right very good so uh that brings us next then too i lost my agenda here to award talk let's talk about awards so for award talk this week what do we got first yeah so first up marriott we we didn't bring up that Marriott card for no reason, but Marriott's in the news because they are finally letting us transfer points to other people online. We don't have to call and hope that a rep, well, first of all, hope that we can navigate that phone tree and get to a rep who knows how to do it and then, and then get it done have to you know all that all that stuff we can now do it online and i'm pretty excited me too because i my wife has a bunch of marriott points and you can only move a hundred thousand per year

from one person to the other so the last couple of years she's had to call and move points over to my account you know i usually make her do it at the end of the year just in case there's a reason we need the points through the through you know the rest of the year, just in case there's a reason we need the points through the rest of the year. But now, great. A couple of clicks, I can get it done. So super duper easy. I'm really, really happy about that. Right, right. And another reason I'm happy is I've been consolidating Marriott Points over the years into my account from other family members who I manage their accounts and makes it easier to book things and everything. But when a family member has a free night certificate and I want to top it off, then there needs to be points in their account.

So, so the ability now to do that on my own without getting a call rep involved is so good. Really nice. Really a big, I mean, hats off Marriott. Nicely done.

Thank you for finally making that possible and hyatt if you're listening marriott made it possible to do this online hello come on hyatt this whole like emailing in a form and waiting a week is ridiculous like it's 2023 hyatt right right at the same time it's like i'm so happy that both hyatt and allow it hyatt allows allows the free movement of their points to other people that like shouldn't complain. You know, of all the things I'm going to want to complain to Hyatt about, that's not top of my list personally. Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. So then another piece of news this week, you'll be booked a little something this week or help somebody book something this week, right? Yeah. So, so, uh, some people might remember Maisie, the culinary concierge who, who, uh, helped me on the, on the

three cards, three continents challenge last year. Uh, and, uh, she, well, she and I went around the world in business class and, and, um, she, uh, she came to me, she was actually in town in Ann Arbor and said it was a Saturday. She said, I want to where she'd have multiple stops on the way, and she'd be paying nearly $1,200 for that one-way cash ticket. Yeah. So I got all geared up to, I popped open several tools, because I've written recently a comparison of award booking tools. And I wanted to see with this real life situation, which one would work best. It turned out not to be really helpful to compare them because they all came up with the same answer very quickly, which was that there were Air France business class flights that, as close to direct as you can get from, she was flying from Detroit. Um, so it was, uh, you know, Detroit to Paris and then Paris to

Lisbon. So, uh, we managed to find one, the times were perfect for her. She, uh, transferred while we recorded the whole thing. So you'll see a video soon on YouTube, I think. She was able to transfer her Amex points instantly to Air France and booked it while we were doing this. And then later she sent me a video of her on the plane enjoying her her uh her little uh lie flat uh cocoon area as you know it's not i guess it's not a suite but it's what is angle or not angle uh reverse herringbone reverse herringbone yeah it looks like a pod on air france you know it's like it kind of looks like a cocoon you're right feels that way it does yeah yeah yeah it's great i mean i mean many business class products now these days are that way but for good reason those are good really good seats and

hopefully she got great service and everything too very good that's exciting that's fun it's fine i'm glad to hear that because i enjoyed maizey's personality so much during the three cards three continents challenge and i'm really excited that she is interested enough to, to come back and ask for help and get that figured out. Cause I, that's just cool. It's cool to see somebody that was kind of new to this whole world, show the interest in coming back and learning how to do it again. Cause I'm sure she realized, well, this is kind of nice. Oh yeah. And, and, and now she, and now that she's done it sort of on her own, you know, she did the actual booking.

She now like she landed in Lisbon and emailed me like immediately. All right. I have another trip in May. I want to do this myself. Which tool should I use for this situation? That's great. So she's hot. Awesome. Welcome. Welcome to the party, Macy. All right. So good. Very good. For me, award talk this week, award I booked this week was I stayed at the Kempton Hotel, Monaco, Philadelphia. I had to think about it because I was a little confused for a second. I'll come back to why. I used an IHG free night certificate. And the reason I wanted to bring this up was a couple of different things. My IHG certificate was scheduled to expire later this month, and I had a perfect use for it three days after it was scheduled to expire. Actually,

I could have used it two or three days after it was scheduled to expire, if only it were possible to do that. Now, somebody named Greg the Frequent Miler told me that he seemed to remember that I said fast. Hopefully nobody on uh they he he remembered that maybe there was a way for them to book a few days beyond expiration now i know the general consensus is that you can't use these past expiration but he had a pretty specific idea in mind anyway as to what he remembered somebody saying a phone agent was able to do so i thought maybe they're definitely they're definitely used to be yeah uh be some a few days i was remembering like something like six or nine i can't remember exactly but past the expiration date that you could still apply it which is so because i remember actually

doing probably like that probably worked for sure at some point right so yeah yeah it did but unfortunately not anymore I got an agent who certainly seemed willing to she didn't tell me no off the bat. She just like repeated what I asked for. And she's like, Okay, I have to check. I'm not sure and put me on hold. And I was on hold for a while. And she came back and she's like, I'm sorry, unfortunately, we just can't do it. And she seemed like she had tried. So I take her word for it, which, you know, anybody who knows me well knows that I don't always take customer service at their word. Maybe I should have called two or three times,

but I felt pretty confident that it just wasn't going to work. So I couldn't use it for the perfect use. So instead, I did it in Philadelphia because I had to go for the last step of the matching that I wrote about recently at Rivers Philadelphia. So some i picked the hotel monaco so there were two kimptons in philadelphia uh kimpton palomar and a kimpton monaco and i've seen that in other cities before and i'm not a kimpton guy myself so i knew that they both existed and i think they're both in i don't know san francisco and washington dc a bunch of other cities los angeles i think miami but what's the difference between a Palomar and a Monaco? And it was like, isn't Kempton its own brand? Like, do we need to have a brand within a brand?

I mean, come on guys. It seems like a Marriott move there, right? I have no idea. What's it? So, so what I learned is that a Kempton Hotel Monaco is whimsical and fun and a Palomar is sophisticated and elegant. So both four-star hotels, but that's the differentiator. So if you're looking for whimsical and fun, you want to go Monaco. If you're looking for sophisticated and serious, then you want to go with Palomar. But I ultimately – So you, of course, did the latter.

No, no, no. You're Mr. Sophisticated. My five-year-old and two-year-old are not. So I went with whimsical and fun, both A, because it looked like it'd be more fun. Actually, I'm staying tonight as we record this. So when you listen to it, I'll have already stayed, but I don't yet know how it's going to work out. It looks fun, and it's right next to Independence Hall. So I figured I could make a little bit of a history lesson out of it for my five-year-old so we'll see how that all went

hopefully you'll read a little bottom line review soon but bottom line is this can't use your ihg free night certificate beyond expiration it seems so you know find a kimpton near you i guess is the moral of the story yeah all right all right. All right. Challenge update. Do we, we jumping over that this week? Cause I don't think we had any updates. Okay. No,

no update. The mattress running the numbers. Then this week's mattress running the numbers is, is not a mattress run at all. This is about spirit airlines. So, uh, spirit is out with a actually very interesting status match opportunity.

What's going on there? Yes, we do. We got Spirit. How about you, huh? All right. So Spirit this week has said that you, well, they've launched a status match. So you can match status from 16 different airline and hotel programs. Basically, almost any airline or hotel program you're likely

to have elite status with, you can match to Spirit. And if you have status that's, I don't know, not totally worthless, then probably it matches to Spirit Gold. I say that. I think United Silver only matches to Silver. But if you've got like Hilton Diamond or Hilton Gold, which you can get for free with the Platinum card or the Hilton Surpass card, or Wyndham gold, which you can get for free with the platinum card or the Hilton surpass card or Wyndham diamond, which you can get with the Wyndham business earner. So a bunch of different statuses you can get for like 95 bucks with the right credit card. They'll match to spirit gold. So you match to silver or gold, but this is a little different than other status matches. With this one, you'll apply for the status match and you have to pay for it. So if you want to match to silver, it's $49. If you want to match to gold, it's $99. So you'll have to

decide which of those makes sense for you. Now, I would say for most people that are going to consider paying for this, probably you would want to pay for gold. There's not enough benefit at the silver level, I don't think, to make it worth paying for silver status. The nice thing here is it's good for a year. So wait until you're ready to book a flight and then go ahead and go through the steps to apply for the status match. Silver benefits, like I said, not great. You don't have to pay a fee on redemptions. One nice thing about silver benefit is you can host a points pool.

That's a cool thing with Spirit because you can pool points with, I think it's like, I don't know, 10 people or something like that, nine people. So you can create a points pool. So for instance, if you fly with a family of four or five people, you could pull all of those points into one, all the points you earn on the flight into just your account. So that makes it a lot easier to redeem for awards. So that's kind of a nice feature, but otherwise it's like priority boarding, priority security, same day standby, nothing particularly exciting. Exit row seats.

You can get an exit row seat assignment with silver status. So that's nice. Gold status. So that would be $49. For $99, you get gold status. And that would give you all those silver benefits. Also, though, one free checked bag, one free carry on bag, free drink and snack on board zone one boarding free flight flex, which means you get one free change, a free pet fee waiver. So hello,

Steven Pepper, you can get yourself the pet fee waiver and fly spirit and then different group seat selection and purchase. But yeah, the one thing you can't get is you're not going to get the big front seat for free. You're still going to have to pay for that. But otherwise, you get all the other stuff. So, I mean, that's pretty nice if you live in a market that's served by Spirit, right? Because Spirit is super cheap. They get you on all the extra fees. But if you got gold status, you're not paying for all that stuff.

You're not paying any of those extra fees. Yeah. No, I think that's awesome. You know, if you're planning a Spirit flight, and if you're planning on bringing bags, look at how much you'd be paying and then compare that to the $99. And it could be that in just one or two trips, you might easily, making out better. Um, I had, I had spirit gold status for a bit because, um, spirit offered it to us as bloggers and podcasters. And, um, uh, you know, a couple of things to know is that like these benefits don't extend to your travel companions. Um, so, so, you know, I was flying with my son and so he wouldn't have gotten free bag. But since I got both a free check bag and a free carry-on bag, my plan was to have one of our two bags as a carry-on and one checked, and that covered us both.

Turned out our flight was so delayed, I ended up flying Delta. But it was close. It almost worked out really well. That scheme would have worked. Almost worked out well. No, you know, I flew once because I also had the free spirit gold status there. And I flew once with it and I changed my flight for free.

So that was nice. I did the one free change. That's huge. I did. I think I did too. I think we both ended up having to change the flight for what we were doing. So, and the free carry-on bag and check bag is really nice. Like you said, the bummer is that it doesn't extend to anybody else in your group.

But if you got at least one other person in your household that's got an elite status through one of these cards that you probably have for both players, then it might be worth paying 99 bucks each. Like you said, I think if you fly two times and you would check a bag and pay for a seat assignment and all the rest of that, this probably pays for itself. So if you'd fly more than two times, I think you'd come out nicely ahead with this data set.

Yeah, yeah. And when we actually flew, the whole experience was very nice. We had both bought up to the big front seat. So it's like having domestic first class in any other airline, with the exception that you can't lean it back. But that's, in a way, a positive. So the person in front of you is not going to be leaning into you. And the flight attendants were super nice.

The whole experience was, was actually great. And so I, uh, I wouldn't hesitate to take advantage of that. If, if flying, I wouldn't either. Now the, uh, the last thing I'm going to mention is that I had written about, and maybe some people could have missed the detail. That's why I'm going to mention it. I had written about the fact that I status matched from spirit gold to Delta gold. Now Delta does not officially take spirit Spirit Gold as a status match.

And I submitted it anyway. And they wrote back and they were like, no, we don't match Spirit. And so I wrote him back and I was like, are you sure? Could you please match Spirit Gold? I would really like it. And they wrote back and they were like, OK, fine. So you may be able to leverage that into something else. I wouldn't count on it, but maybe you could.

So yeah, a lot of people will qualify for this. Again, if you live in a market served by Spirit and you would fly them, then this is totally worth it. They don't serve my airport or they do, but I'm like one route. But I would totally do this if I live somewhere where Spirit was more common, because I'm totally fine with the Spirit experience for domestic flights. That big front seat is like flying domestic first for a heck of a lot less. You don't get a discount on that with your gold status. You're going to pay the full price for that. But even still, when you don't pay anything else, it still works out to be so much cheaper. Yeah. Yeah. It, it often does.

And, uh, they actually have a pretty thorough route network, uh, in the U S and, and nearby. Um, yeah.

And you know, the, the biggest problem though, is they, they, they don't have a, from any given airport to another given airport, they don't have a lot of of multiple options to get you there.

So if something goes wrong, like what happened to me, I either had to wait the seven hours until the flight actually took off or switch airlines, which is what I did. But you know what? They were actually great about handling that part. They refunded my money and everything, and they didn't have to because I believe it was a weather event. I don't remember the details, but anyway, yeah. So there you go. I'm talking all nicely about Spirit, even though I've only flown him once. I mean, I've flown him twice, I think, but both experiences were remarkably good. I mean, like nobody's going to wow you in economy class domestically, right? So it doesn't take much to wow me, I guess. And the

flight attendants were friendly. The planes are pretty new. I mean, it was fine. Obviously, you always, anytime you get on a plane, you run the risk of being next to somebody who's rowdy or obnoxious. So I find that to be a risk you're going to take no matter where you fly or who you fly with. So that doesn't concern me particularly because most of the time flights go off fine. So I'm totally fine. Okay. Okay. Okay. Our audience has listened to us drone on and on long enough while they've been anxiously waiting to hear about 13 ways to increase credit card spend. Congratulations for anyone who made it through what was already, I think, a pretty long show before we get to the main event. But now let's dig in. 13 ways to increase credit card spend

and get most of it back. Do you want to start off with number one? Number one, don't take no credit cards at face value. Sometimes you'll run into a vendor, merchant, whatever that says they don't take a card, but it's always worth pushing back, whether that's a contractor doing work in your home or a car dealership. I wrote about buying a car on a credit card and lots of places said they wouldn't let me put the full cost of a car on a card. The last place, in fact, the salesperson told me they don't take more than 3000. And I said, well, I'm willing to pay like a 3% fee if I can use my card so that I could trigger a huge signup bonus. And he came back and said, okay, we'll do it for a 2% fee. So if I hadn't pushed back and asked and said, are you sure we can't find a way to do that,

then I might have missed out. So don't miss the opportunity to negotiate for that when you're making a large purchase that you supposedly can't use a card for. Okay. And I can't remember any time in recent history that I've done this. Do you do this often? I don't know if I'd say often, but I don't often run into situations where people don't take a card.

So I've heard enough readers that have said that they've dealt with contractors doing work on their home and said, well, if I pay the transaction fee, would that work? And so I think more often than not, if you're willing to cover the cost, whatever it's going to cost them to accept a card, then it removes a lot of the reason not to for them. Maybe not. Right. And for all of these things coming up, when we talk about things where you have to pay a fee, like 2%, 3% in order to use your credit card, it only makes sense to do that when your rewards are much bigger than the fee. So don't do it when you're earning like just regular 1x rewards on your credit card.

Do it when you need that spend in order to hit a minimum spend requirement for a new sign-up bonus. Or in Nick's case, when he was buying a car, it also counted as a small merchant and he was getting something like 15 points per dollar. Those kind of special situations make sense, but don't do it otherwise. Which brings us right to the next one, which is use your credit card to pay federal taxes. So there are three different processors that will let you use a credit card to pay taxes, and you can pay your end of year taxes, you can pay your estimated quarterly taxes. You can even pay your estimated quarterly taxes when you don't owe any. And then when you file your tax return at the end of the year, you'll get that refund back however much you've overpaid. So the government actually, I think

they like getting a loan for free. I mean, you're out that money until it comes back to you. So it's not like it's really free to you. Plus, you paid the credit card fee, which is generally just under 2%. Yeah. So again, it could be totally worth it for earning a big welcome bonus. If you need to spend $5,000 or $10,000 or $15,000 on a card to trigger a welcome bonus that's worth $1,000 or $1,500 or more than that, then it can totally be worthwhile to make an extra tax payment. You just do have to probably wait a while to get that money back. And if there's a delay in processing your return, you might have to wait a really long time. So that's something to

keep in mind. Otherwise, pretty good. Is it something you do? Yes. So for each of these, we want to talk about just real quickly. Do we do it? Yeah. And I'm going to add to it. I also pay property taxes for a number of different family members through different either local entities that accept a credit card or I'll use a bill paying service, which we'll talk about in a second. All right. And I also do the pay taxes quite a bit. I find it really handy for things like paying estimated taxes for my business. And I need to spend, let's say, $15,000 on my Hyatt credit card in order to earn the free night certificate that it offers. And I can, boom, get that done all at once, which is great. Okay. Number three is to... Well, you take number three, Nick.

Well, I mean, so pay bills that don't usually accept a credit card. So you can use services like Plastic, Plastique, I don't know how they pronounce it, but one or the other, where you can use, it ends with a Q, Plastic ending with a Q, where you can use a card to pay certain types of bills that you wouldn't be able to use a card for ordinarily. Like I mentioned property taxes, I'll pay property taxes for a number of different family members. And plastic charges a fee. I think it's 2.85% now. So again, just like we said before, this will only make sense for you if you're earning a big welcome bonus to do it. But I opened a business platinum last year and earned the bonus, mostly paying property taxes for family

members. So that's one service. Melio is the other one. Now you wrote about Melio, so you know more about that. That's for business card payments, right? Right, right. So if you have your own business, even a small sole proprietor business, any payments that can be reasonably attributed as business expenses can be paid with a credit card through Melio. Nice thing, they both have around a 3% fee, but the Plastic has stopped accepting Amex cards altogether. They have other rules about what can and can't be paid. Melio also has rules about what can and can't be paid,

but they're less restrictive and they still accept Amex at this point. So that's a good option there. One of the things, sometimes you'll run into certain bills where the biller will say, we don't take credit cards, but we do accept debit cards. So I've heard people say for their car loans, for example, sometimes. And you might then be able to use a Visa or MasterCard gift card to pay that as a debit card payment. So that's another place where you could pay a bill. So it's very indirect because first you have to use your credit card to buy the Visa or MasterCard gift card and then use the gift card to pay that bill.

Yeah, but that's a great point because like my health insurance, for instance, doesn't take an Amex, but they'll take virtual Visa and MasterCard gift cards that I bought from giftcards.com with my Amex card and I can make multiple payments. So there's a lot of different types of bills like that out there that you might be able to put on a card you didn't realize you could indirectly. Right. Right. Yep. Yep. Very good. All right. Next up, saving for college and paying student loans. You were like, I think basically the original source on this, right? I mean, you wrote the guide on how to pay for college using credit cards. Yeah. So there's a gift card called Gift of College, which in some stores you can buy and load up as much as $500 onto the card and it's around $5

fee. So it's about a 1% fee to load $500 onto the card. And you can then use that card to fund a college savings account, one of those 529 accounts, or you can use it to pay student loan. And so if you're in that situation of either saving for college or saving for someone else's college, or for paying a student loan, then that's step one. Step two is you need to be lucky enough to be somewhere where there are stores nearby that sell these and allow loading up to $500. So there are national brands, like I think Target is one that allow only $100. So that's not useful because the fee becomes too exorbitant there. But Cumberland Farms last I remember is a chain in the Northeast. Yeah, it's a gas station chain in the Northeast. Yeah, no, it's a gas station chain in the Northeast. Yeah, very good. Good memory that you remember the name of it, because I assume you probably

haven't been to a Cumberland Farms before. I don't think I have. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a gas station chain. And yeah, so if you have a card like the Windenburner business card that earns eight points per dollar at gas stations, well, I mean, you could do pretty well by loading up your college savings account. And by the way, if you don't have one of these yet, do your research in terms of which 529 makes the most sense for you. And it's not really related to today's topic, but it's worth mentioning because in some states, for instance, you might get a tax deduction for contributing to your own state's 529, but you can contribute to any state's 529. So if you want to open a state of Washington 529, I have no idea if they're any

good, but you can look into what options there are for investing because it differs quite a bit from state to state. Yeah. All right. Next up is making micro loans through Kiva. So this is a really specific thing, but Kiva is sort of like a clearinghouse for microloans that are around the world. They've vetted all these microlending organizations and they advertise these loans so that people who want to help out someone who's, you know, struggling to get the materials to build, you know, to make the clothes that they sell or whatever it is that is their business. People can do that and through Kiva's website. And a cool thing there, PayPal does not charge Kiva a credit card processing fee. So you can fund these loans with credit cards and you don't pay a fee. Kiva doesn't pay a fee for that. If all goes well, you eventually get your money back. You don't earn interest on these loans that you've given out, but you've done some good and you've done some credit card spend.

There are risks. Sometimes these loans will default, so you won't get all your money back. I've tracked these loans over many years, and it used to be I was able to only lose about less than 1%, but over time, it looks like closer to 2% is what I lose on that. But if you think of it sort of like a fee, kind of like paying taxes as a fee,'s actually not too bad and and i feel you can feel good about yourself too while you're doing it so i do that frequently um have you ever done microloans with kiva you know i signed up and then i i don't think i ever really did i remember like going through the steps going through the motions but i don't actually think i got into it uh and then you know i started to hear more about the defaults potentially costing a little more

than the one percent that you had originally calculated. And I was like, I just didn't get into it. But I think it's a good option to keep in mind. Yeah. What I've been doing a lot lately is, for example, when there's a great Visa gift card deal or MasterCard gift card deal, get free 5X at Staples, for example, and then just use these to fund loans, it's just such an easy way to use up those cards. Now, I do have to wait quite a while before the money comes back, but it's super easy. So I really like that.

You know, I need to back up for a quick second because I realized when we talked about saving for college, we left out two things that I think were important keys to that. Because you may think if you already have a kid in college that this doesn't make any sense for you. But I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Greg, because I think you had more recent experience with this or you had some experience. Even if your kid's in college, you can contribute to a 529 and then immediately take the money out and pay the bill, right? So if you've got a kid in college right now, it's okay. Your investments aren't going to go anywhere with the 529. You could still load up the 529 with gift cards that you bought on your credit card and pay your kids tuition and reimburse yourself. So if you don't have a way to pay your kids college tuition right

now, then that's something. The other thing to keep in mind that we've heard from readers before is some colleges will take a payment with a credit card and in some cases without a fee. So again, if you got something in college, that's even better. I mean, cut out the middleman altogether. Oh, I don't know if it's better. It might be better if you've got a Cumberland Farms for 8X on the Wyndham card, I guess, or some sort of a gas station multiplier, but certainly easier to make it just one payment. So anyway, I thought that was worth mentioning because it's not just a, A, not just the gift of college cards

because you could potentially pay the college directly and B, not just for people who are saving for a someday college expense also. Yeah, yeah. Actually, let me point out a double dip here. If the college does allow you to pay with a credit card, you can still do the 529 you withdraw to your bank account and because as long as you have that receipt showing that that that you paid a valid uh you know that

you paid that much to for valid education expense then uh it's a legitimate withdrawal from your 529 even though it went to your bank account and. And then you could also pay with a credit card. So you're kind of double dipping there. Not kind of, you absolutely are. Absolutely are, yeah. Buying the gift to college gift cards and also paying with your credit card at the time you pay. So I actually did some of that. When my son was in college, his university didn't accept credit cards.

But at the time, I could pay um even with amex cards through plastic and so i would pay his uh tuition through plastic and then um also do the 529 thing so yeah pretty great combination so definitely a great stack there if you got somebody in college or saving for somebody in college. Okay. So jumping back over Kiva coordinate events with friends. Yeah. So, you know, uh, let's say you, um, you're interested in going to a local sports event or a local concert or, uh, just doing a big dinner, you know, get a whole bunch of friends together, offer to coordinate and tell everybody how much it's going to cost. And you put it all on your credit card, get whatever category bonuses are available to you for that and have them all pay you, you know, cash or Venmo or whatever.

And boom, it's a nice, easy way to both enjoy yourself and get some credit card spend going. Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. And similar to that is our next one on the list, and that's paying bills for friends and family. Now, this won't necessarily be an option for everybody, but I definitely have to mention this because everybody in my family locally, everybody that lives nearby locally knows that if they have a major purchase to make, they should call me because I would love to put it on my card and have them pay me back. And so everything from mechanic bills to, you know, large home improvement purchases, taxes, like I said, property taxes, that sort of thing, local school taxes. I pay all that stuff for a bunch of family members that don't really care

about credit card rewards because they don't travel much and they have the money to pay for those things. They're just going to send a check. So rather than them send a check, they'll let me do it with my card. And so whether I'm doing that through plastic or I'm able to pay for it directly, a lot of those things help and have become great ways to be able to pick up extra spend that isn't even mine. So it's worth putting the feelers out there and mentioning it if you have family members around that are going to incur those expenses. Yeah. Yeah. Or if you're listening and you have some big expenses that you don't know how you're going to meet, just contact Nick and ask him to-

Wire me the money and I promise I'll pay it. Okay. What's up next is, oh, fund bank accounts. So this is kind of a lost art in a way, but bank accounts often, if you're setting up a brand new checking or savings account, they'll often let you pay a small amount with a credit card to fund the initial opening of the account. And let's reword that because that made it sound like you're paying a fee. They'll let you fund the account via your credit card, right? So you don't usually know. Correct. There's no fee. Right. Right. Right. Right. There's all kinds of potential gotchas in that because if you're not being careful, some credit cards may charge you a cash advance fee when you do that. Usually Amex is not accepted.

So if you're trying to meet minimum spend on Amex, it's not. It used to be fairly common for some banks to accept up to like $3,000 or even $5,000. That's getting less and less and less common. I used to tell everyone, go to Doctor of Credit. He has a great page on all the banks that let you fund and to how much and whether or not they charge cash advance fees. I checked it this morning, though it doesn't look like he's updated in quite a while. But this topic rose to my memory because there's a recent new thing, which is the US bank has this account called Smartly, which if you're opening that, the reports are that you can fund up to $3,000 now. It was recently limited to 200,

but now they've expanded to 3,000 and Amex cards are accepted. So there's a whole bunch of reports of people using Amex cards, earning points with the Amex cards funding this new account. So that's, that's a sweet little free way to get $3,000 of spend. It sure is. And, you know, I think people have lost interest in this because you can only do, if you can do it at all, usually only a few hundred dollars, but really that can add up. I mean, if you open up three, four or five new accounts a year, which can be worth it for the bonuses for opening new accounts, I certainly have opened more than that in a year before. Then I mean, that could be one signup bonus a year potentially by just opening and funding

new checking accounts. So even though the limits are relatively small and a lot of them, they can be worth it. And that U.S US Bank one is certainly worth keeping an eye on. Unfortunately, the golden days of loading up a Citi account with 75,000 or 100,000 or whatever people were doing back in the day, those days are gone, it seems. But nice to have that as an option anyway, if and when you find an opportunity to do it. And Dr. Credit reports on a lot of that, but there's so many banks out there, who knows what local bank you may come across that has the ability to do this. It's worth looking.

That's a really, really, really great point. And keep your eyes out. I used to have a bank account that let me fund not just new accounts, but my existing account. They've stopped allowing that now. They did charge a 2% fee, but it counted as a purchase on my credit card. So that was such a nice, easy, awesome way to meet minimum spend requirements.

Unfortunately, they stopped allowing that, but check it out. Whatever banks you have access to, see if they allow it because there might be an option there. Who knows? And if you find it, let us know. All right. So that's that. Next up, let's talk about buying and selling merchandise. So buying and selling merchandise is another technique for increasing your spend. There are buyers clubs out there that you can join where they'll tell you about a product that they want to buy. Usually it's something that is a limited quantity per customer.

Maybe you can only buy one per customer or two per customer. And so what you'll do is you'll buy that item and then ship it to the buyer's club and they'll pay you for it. Usually it will cover the cost of it, sometimes a little bit of a profit also. But of course, it comes with some risk because there's the risk of the buyer's club not paying you for the merchandise you've sent. There's a risk of things getting lost or damaged in the mail. So it's not risk-free. But first of all, pre-buyer's Club not paying you for the merchandise you've sent. There's a risk of things getting lost or damaged in the mail. So it's not risk-free. But first of all, pre-Buyer's Club, this is the only way that I generated points before I fell into this whole circle of miles and points. When I first heard about manufactured spending, it made no sense to me at all.

I was like, wait, you're going to pay a 1% fee to earn points? I want to buy something that I can earn a 20% profit on and get the points, and they're just gravy, right? So I used to do a lot of this. But there is definitely some risk in terms of all sorts of the scammy things, and you're putting money into stuff that things can go wrong. So there's some potential downside, but a lot of potential upside in terms of easy spend. And I see that you are now doing some Buyer's club action here, huh? A little bit. Yeah. So, so, uh, you know, first let me just back up and say, you know, years ago I did some buying and selling on my own. I had

this, uh, this month where I, where I challenged myself to earn a million miles in a month. And, and I did, and a lot of, a lot of what I did was, and selling stuff. But I didn't enjoy it. I mean, it's like having another job. There's a lot of work involved in buying and selling on your own. Buyer's Club makes things a lot simpler, but you have to trust them. Anyway, so after asking around friends who have done Buyer's Cl clubs, I've dipped my toes into one called Max Out Deals. And I've just done a few purchases so far just to test it out. I wanted to wait and see not only did they record that they got my shipment and then

did they promise money, but did I actually get the money that was promised back? And so I've done that cycle now with two orders and I've gotten all the money. It worked out fine. But things can go wrong. My very first purchase, I had to contact them, their support, because they never logged in the shipment. And I was like, what's going on? Anyway, eventually what we found out is it was user error. I had messed up. I had put in, you're supposed to upload the tracking number for the shipment. I had uploaded the order number instead, and so they didn't know what to do with that. So yeah, so no matter what, there's chances of things going wrong here. So you have to be careful, but it's a nice way to potentially not just

increase credit card spend, but make some profit too. Yeah. I mean, profit and points is a nice combination and it all depends on the buyer's club and the item. But sometimes we've seen with some of the coin deals we've written about over the years, sometimes you get three, four or $5,000 spend on one thing and turn a small profit and potentially knock out a full welcome bonus in just one transaction. So that's certainly one in terms of buying and selling, but that's not the only thing you can buy and sell. You can buy and sell gift cards. You can. You can.

So usually, so there are websites where they'll buy your merchant gift cards. And the problem is they're not going to give you $80 for an $80 gift card, right? They're going to give you something much less than that. And it'll depend on the type of gift card. Like they'll give you more money for a grocery store gift card than a 1-800-Flowers gift card, for example. But the way this can work out in general, just at a high level, is when there are deals for buying gift cards. And so you can get the gift cards at less than face value and then resell them. When you resell them, you're also going to be getting less than face value. But sometimes those stars align so that you're either losing hardly anything or maybe even earning a tiny bit. And that's how you can increase credit card spend that way.

Yeah. And I've done quite a bit of this over the years. I've done not as much as some, but I've done a fair amount. And so it certainly can be a nice way to ramp up spend. And because you're buying merchant gift cards, it feels a little bit less risky in terms of causing a problem with your card issuer than perhaps Visa or gift cards might feel. Not that they're necessarily more dangerous, but so there's some benefits there. And sometimes you could go through a shopping portal, in some cases, and earn a nice return while you're buying gift cards that you're going to ultimately resell. So it could become very profitable. Sometimes if those stars align, it could work out really well. But of course, we should mention that there's also the same

types of risks we just talked about with merchandise buyers clubs. A few years back, there was the Plastic Merchant, which was a popular gift card resale site. Lots of miles and points people were selling gift cards. And one day the business just folded and the check started bouncing and people lost real dollars and cents on that. So you do have to kind of be careful. And I would just caution anybody who gets into buyers clubs or buying and selling gift cards to go slow and make sure you're sticking with amounts that you're comfortable with losing if something goes wrong. And hopefully you've asked around and found something reputable where, you know, hopefully nothing is going to go wrong. You can go easy with it. But it's a very easy way to increase spend

pretty substantially. Now on that note, reselling gift cards, I want to kind of transition us to the next thing, which is going to be about buying and selling or buying Visa and MasterCard gift cards. And we'll talk about why you might want to do that in a second. But on the gift card resale, and I should mention that just this past week, Lowe's had a deal where if you bought a $200 MasterCard gift card and you had to register online, you'd get a free $15 Lowe's gift card. Now, there are sites that will buy those $15 Lowe's gift cards for more than the cost of the activation fee on the gift cards. So essentially, you could resell just the Lowe's gift card and end up profitable already, not even including the points you've earned on your card. So that's a deal I've liked to have done. You can only do two per email address, but

you could have a lot of email addresses. And so that deal could work out well because you're reselling the gift card and then you're ending up with a Visa or MasterCard gift card. Excuse me. So what would people do with those? Oh, yeah. That was like a long transition. I wasn't even kind of ready to catch that softball, but thank you. So there's a few things you can do. First, let me just say, there's lots of ways you can buy Visa MasterCard gift cards with not much cost. And we talk about those things frequently. But just as an example, we've talked about it many times using your Chase Inc. cash card, which earns 5% 5X at office supply stores to go to Staples when they're offering a free fee free Visa gift cards or MasterCard gift cards and buying them there. You earn five points per dollar. You get the Visa gift cards. Now the question is, what do you do with them? And there's a few things when you buy Visa gift cards, whether it's from office supply stores, grocery stores, drugstores, wherever you get them, you can. Number 11 on our list is buy money orders. let me say that this is a technique that is fraught, fraught in all kinds of ways.

So Nick is, Nick is some reason I don't hear Nick, but he's, he's because my microphone was off fraughtness. No. Well, yes, I,

you're right because I want to make sure that the pronunciation is clear that he is saying fraught, not broad yes i what you're right because i want to make sure that the pronunciation is clear that he is saying fraught not fraud right oh oh thank you yeah fraud boy it's definitely not fraud um although some people might think you're committing fraud but no no see here's here's the issue with the the um the buying money orders is that there are some places the reason it works at all there are some places that will let you buy a money order with a debit card so like the and what they have in mind when they allow that is a bank debit card one attached to your checking account for example and um but the gift cards visa and master gift cards pin numbers, so they can be used like regular debit cards. And so in some places, you can use your Visa or MasterCard gift card like a debit card in order to buy a money order.

Many types of Visa, MasterCard gift cards don't work in many different stores. So you really have to, this is a whole art, I think, of, you know, getting to know what works where many stores don't, um, even if it technically works at the terminal to use Visa or MasterCard gift cards, they may have trained their employees not to allow them and to look for you to actually have your name on the card. There's all kinds of things that make this difficult and not something for the average person to do.

There's no nationwide rules that are applied. We can't say, hey, if you go into this store, this is what's going to work because a lot of the things, what works and what doesn't are local. And there's also a risk at the back end. So once you get your money order, you need to deposit it, for example, to a bank account and then use that to pay your credit card bill. If you deposit a lot of money orders into a bank account, there's a good chance that you'll get eyes on that and the bank may shut you down because they suspect that it's not just fraud, but fraud. I had to slip that in there somehow. Preston Pysh, Nicely done. Nicely done. that it's not just fraught, but fraud. I had to slip that in there somehow.

Nicely done. And so, yeah, so this is, you know, this is not 101 manufacturing spin. No, it's not. And it's very regional. And so that was important that you mentioned that. A couple of notes I want to add on there. First of all, if you're new to this and you heard the word pin,

you might be like, oh, can I go to the ATM and just take the cash off of the debit card? And if that worked, that's what everybody would do. So no, that's not going to work. The pin is just for buying stuff in a store. Now, the default pin on most of these is the last four digits of the card. In some cases, you can go online and change that if you want. But that's your tidbit of info there. But then also, I wanted to mention when you were talking about the money orders, a couple things there. Greg mentioned the risk of getting your account shut down. And if your bank account gets shut down at a bank where you have credit cards, your credit cards will likely also get shut down. So if you're going to do this, do not deposit your money orders at a Chase bank where all of your Chase cards might get shut down and you might get banned from getting

another Chase card ever again. Don't do that. Deposit those money orders somewhere at a bank where you don't care if they shut your account down because you know you'll get your money back. So that's number one. Number two, do not mail these to your credit card issuer to pay your bill. I've heard of people doing that now and then, and maybe you'll get away with it for a little while. But if you keep mailing in money orders to pay your credit card bill, you are going to get your credit card shut down at some point. So don't do that either. So those are the two big things I wanted to mention, because I know that some people will be like, oh, well, wouldn't this be easier? Yeah, the reason people do it in a complicated way is because the easy ways don't work. That's usually the case. If you hear somebody doing something in a complicated way in this game, it's usually because the simpler, easier path is not simple or easy. That's right. That's right. Now to get even more complicated, we're going to get to number 12, which is reload, reloadable prepaid cards. This is something I haven't done in years,

but it used to be like the main topic on the Frequent Miler blog. There are cards called Serve or Bluebird, for example, where you can use a debit card, just as we talked about in the previous item. You use a debit card to add money to this card at certain stores like at Walmart or Family Dollar and things like that. And so if that works for you, there may or may not be a fee in doing that. But once the money's on there, depending on the type of card, you can use that money to, for example, pay your credit card bill or even to withdraw to your bank account. And so it's a nice, potentially easy way to run up spend. Right. But it is worth mentioning that lots of people have been shut down from serve over the years. So if you do this to high volume, it's going to be great until it isn't.

And one day it's going to end. Although that said, I mean, there's not much downside to going until you're shut down, right? Right. No, no, there's not. So you can't do it anymore, but you know, fine. Right, right, right. But I think, you know, I think my point there though, is if you go at a sustainable rate, then, you know, it might be better for you in the sense that you may be able to keep this up

for a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So, so, yeah. Absolutely. So again, this is something that I kind of feel like for various reasons, because a whole bunch of us got all shut down by our servant Bloomberg accounts a number of years ago now. And I've never dipped my toes back into that water since then.

And so it hasn't been a main topic, but it's something that I'm feeling like at least one of us on the blog ought to get into and, and start reporting what the current state of those things are. We've still got a few of these in my household and the family dollar in town. So. So I will look forward to reports from now.

I will. I will certainly dip my toes back in. I had mostly kind of forgotten about it. It's worth mentioning that when I said I have a few in my household, you can have more than one of some of these. There are limits. And so there's a lot of detail that we don't have all of the latest stuff on anymore. So I will see what we can do to become more current on that. So there you go. That's another one that is potentially interesting, I think, and potentially relatively easy. But again, just like with the money orders, might be a little bit cashier dependent in the sense that if you tell them, you know,

whether you're buying a money order or you're loading your serve card, if you're like, hey, I have this gift card, can I please use this for this transaction? They're going to tell you, no, if you just swipe your card, most people probably aren't even paying close enough attention to be like, wait, you just swiped that instead of entering a chip. What's that? Most people aren't even paying that much attention. So like wait you just swiped that instead of entering a chip what's that most people aren't even paying that much attention so you probably will get away with it most of the time but keep in mind that if you run into a cashier that tells you no then just try coming back at a different time of day and see what happens all right and okay if it wasn't already obvious we're getting as we're going down this list, we're getting more and more into the weeds of the higher level manufacturing spend 301, 401 classes. This last one is probably the most fraught with peril in some ways because you can really lose your shirt if you go the wrong way with this.

But casinos and sports books offer ways to increase credit card spend. Can you talk about that? They sure do. So a lot of states now have online sports betting, and there are a variety of different sports books. Some states have lots of them. I think New Jersey has like 16 or something, and lots of different states have sports books. And so that can be attractive for a number of reasons. If you are decent with math or you look up some resources, you can kind of play the welcome bonuses against each other to make some profit. But also in terms of what we're talking about here today, some of them can be loaded with a Visa or MasterCard gift card. So you may be able to load some of those cards to your sportsbook or

online casino account. And in some cases, you might even be able to do it with a credit card. I think that's super risky. But you could do your research, I guess, and figure out whether that's possible and with which cards. I would be cautious about doing that much, except with a card that you don't care about getting shut down, I guess. So that's something to look at or think about, I suppose. Usually, though, once you've deposited, you're going to have to play through the money before you're able to withdraw. So that's a potential downside because it means you're going to have to gamble that money. Now, how much you gamble versus playing the numbers in order to make sure that you don't lose much money. It's going to be up to you in terms of how much research you want to do. But there's a lot of danger because you

might certainly lose money. And if you mess something up, for instance, if you're hedging your bets, then you need to be really careful about how you do it. Because if you mess up, then it could cost you a lot. So we're not talking about pennies here. So you could lose everything that you put into it, potentially. So you got to be careful, go cautious. And also, of course, if you get shut down by one of these sports books, it may be inconvenient if, for instance, you like having your Caesar's Diamond status

to be able to match that around for free cruises. On the flip side, if you like your Caesar's Diamond status, but you need some tier credits for the celebration dinner, it can be relatively easy to generate those this way. So a bunch of different stuff there in terms of what you can do. Now limits, and there's a lot of potential downsides to be said here in terms of losing money, but also your account might get limited at one of these sites. You might suddenly find that you can't bet anymore, can't load with cards anymore, etc. So there are some dangers there, but it can be something to dive into because you certainly may be able to do some.

I've done quite a bit this way, to be frank. So if you're at all thinking of getting into this, I highly recommend do a lot of research on how to make bets as safely as possible. There are ways of hedging your bets so that there's very little risk.

But even then, you have to know what you're doing because even if theoretically there's little or no risk, that's assuming you do it all correctly.

And if you place the bets incorrectly, then all bets are off so to speak uh or they're on and they're on a way that's not going to be good but but but the bigger bigger caution and i feel like much bigger caution is that uh some people uh get addicted to gambling and and if you do, uh, that's, that's a disaster. I don't need to spell that out, but, um, you know, if you, if you think there's any chance that, that you have that type of personality, um, where, where you might get addicted, just please just don't, don't go this route. Right. Right. Absolutely not. These apps are designed to draw you in and get you hooked. So, uh, so that's definitely worth mentioning.

If there's any chance that that's going to happen, stay away. Yeah, it's like going to a timeshare sales presentation unprepared. And then you're going to accidentally buy a timeshare and regret it. And this is worse. Agreed. The downside is worse. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

All right. And on this note, note also the other thing we had on here was cruises and so if you go on one of these cruises we've written all about all these sorts of different cruises in some cases not necessarily all but in some you may be able to when you go into the casino excuse me load your machine and charge it to your room account and you know put in your car your What's your machine? Load your machine. Your slot machine. So if you go into the casino on the ship and you put your card in the slot machine, you don't need to bring cash with you. You can, at least in many cases, charge what you

want to your room. And now the limits in terms of what you can add per day or cruise or whatever are going to vary from one cruise line to another. But you do that and charge it to your room because eventually your room folio gets charged to your credit card. So you could do that. And then if you spend for a little bit and you decide you don't really want to play anymore, you can cash it out. You got to keep in mind how much cash you're going to be carrying around then and how much you can bring with you before you've got to declare it, et cetera. So there are some ins and outs and what have you in terms of your limitations. And like I said, different cruise lines will have different limits on that. But I have put that to the test on my recent cruise experiences and done it successfully on all of the cruises that I've

taken so far that I've written about over the last several months. So it can certainly be a way to increase spend. And if you've got a travel multiplier on your credit card and you're paying the cruise with that, then it can be a nice way to generate some pretty easy points or some decent chunk of spend. Yeah. What's the multiplier on your Holland America credit card, Nick? Not doing it with the Holland America credit card. Yeah. I mean, if I was doing that, I guess I would charge my either Sapphire Reserve to get 3X or my Altitude Reserve to get 3X for all travel. What do you use? Well, so before the Carnival Cruise I took last year, there was a plus four

referral offer then where you get four extra points per dollar on travel spend. So I triggered that with a referral from the blue business plus, so that was six points per dollar. And you know, you can come back into the U S with, you carry more than 10,000 in cash than you need to declare that. So, uh, I'll leave that out there. So leave that to your imagination. Yeah, exactly. So there you go. You can generate some points that way. So those again, risky and there's some ins and outs and you should ask around and find some friends who've done that kind of thing before you get deep into any of that stuff, because there's more reading to be done. We're only hitting it at a high level here. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. 13 ways to increase

credit card spend and get most of it back. there you go. 13 ways to increase credit card spend and get most of it back. There you go. Unless you get addicted to gambling. Right. Don't do it. Don't do that. All right, my friends, that brings us to the tonight's question of the week, today's question of the week. And I had a really good one that I loved from Jacob that came in via email. And I mentioned it because I know Jacob listens and I'm going to hold off on yours because it's a good question. We're going to use that a different week. Not that this other question is a bad question. This other question isn't this other question, the question itself, you're going to be like, oh, the answer is easy. But if you haven't seen one of the responses from a Facebook group member, then we'll have

something interesting to add to it. So Kevin and our Facebook group has a question. This is a faster question. I guess that's what I what I said. So we'll hold off on the longer one until next week. So Kevin says, I have unused Hilton Resort credit, $250 for my Aspire card. Hilton Aspire card has a $250 Hilton Resort credit each year. So he has unused Resort credit from the Aspire card, but unfortunately, I won't be able to use it before I cancel the card since I have a newborn. How can I use the credit without staying at a resort? So what would you say there, Greg?

I would say just book a resort for Greg and his wife and pay for it with your Hilton Aspire and you're all done. Very generous. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's one way. Is that not the right answer? It's one way. is a an answer i don't know about the answer it's an answer uh yeah i mean well so you could all joking aside

book a hotel for a friend or a family member potentially and make a deposit on that stay so some places that are coders resorts will charge a deposit up front right away and so that's super convenient because that'll just get charged to your card. Then you don't necessarily need to worry about them having the same card when they check in. So that's a potential use. I wrote a couple of years ago about making an advanced deposit for a hotel booking you've made. The example I had used was booking a hotel in the Maldives sometime next year and then contacting the hotel to see if they would allow me to put down a partial deposit now for my folio when I stay next year. And so that's something you could potentially do if you've got plans to visit a resort, say,

next year or sometime in the future. And of course, if your plans change and you cancel that stay, well, you're still going to have gotten the credit probably. So that's a potential way to do it. But interestingly, somebody in our Facebook group mentioned something that I did not know was possible. Now, if you live near a Hilton resort or you're going to be visiting one, you're not going to be staying at necessarily, but you're going to eat dinner there. I've often heard people say you can't use the credit because if you just pay at the restaurant, it's not going to trigger the resort credit. You have to pay at the front desk. But a member of our Frequent Miler Insiders group says, if you have a property that Hilton considers a resort nearby, you can get dinner at the property

or a spa day and have the hotel open a house account and bill it with your card on it, bill it with the card, the house account, and that'll trigger the credit. So with a little bit more questioning, apparently what you have to do is go to the front desk before you go to the restaurant or the spa and ask them to open a house account for you, give them your Aspire card, and then you can charge to the house account, just like if you had a room, except you don't need the room.

Nice. That's great. That's an awesome tip. I love that. Yeah. So you could be staying at the Hyatt next door and then walk over to the Hilton Resort. Exactly. Do exactly this and have a lovely dinner or spa treatment, like you said. Boom, boom, never would have known that was possible. So that, uh, that's, I thought that was a great tip that I'll keep in mind because that's a, the example you gave there, Greg is like spot on how many times might that potentially happen? So, yeah, so I like it. I like it. Okay. My friends, that brings us to the end of today's show. So if you've enjoyed today's show and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Join our email list. Follow us on social media. Join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group so you

can learn tips just like that one that I just learned today. So if you're jumping into conversation there, good resource. Follow us on YouTube and Instagram and those types of things. And if you have a question that you would like to be considered for a future question of the week, you can send that to. Send it to mailbag at frequent miler dot com. Bye, everybody.