Frequent Miler on the Air - $1K Visa Gift Cards for Manufactured Spending & Finding United 5K awards

Episode Date: July 13, 2019

Greg & Nick of Frequent Miler discuss whether or not the upcoming sale of $1,000 Visa Gift Cards at Simon Malls is a big deal, how that compares to manufactured spending at shopping malls, and why you want to find United 5K flights.

Happy Friday! Happy Friday! It looks to me like you're heading somewhere. It's Friday, you know, it's that time of the day. I guess every Friday it seems neither of us are at home for these Facebook Lives, right? So where are you? Absolutely true. I'm sitting in the Detroit Sky Club. My wife and I are about to head off to England. So we're excited. We've got an exciting trip planned. And I think next Friday we'll actually be in England and we can talk all about it then. Good idea.

Good idea. We'll find out how it went and what you did. So cool. All right. So you're taking off on a trip. I also am not at home visiting friends, though, this weekend. So that's been nice to be able to get a chance to catch up a little bit uh we just got here a couple hours ago and had dinner so on the road you tell your friends like i have to sneak off and do a little uh

facebook live thing yes but the funny thing is something we're going to talk about in a few minutes came up over dinner and so like it made more sense i think because uh but friends aren't miles and points people but we talked about this first, which I might as well just let the cat out of the bag and get to it. So we found out this afternoon that starting on July 17th, Simon Malls is going to be selling $1,000 Visa gift cards with a $3.95 activation fee. So you can buy a card with $1,000 loaded on it and your Visa gift card, $4 activation fee. So, I mean, that kind of blew up in different sites when the rumors hit and that kind of thing and then it got confirmed by our simon mall contacts july 17th to august 4th they're going to have these things so i mean it sounds

cool thousand dollars a pop what do you think big deal not a big deal is this something that everybody should get excited about and rush to simon for. So at first I thought it was a really big deal because we haven't been able to buy gift cards in store with that low of a activation fee as a percentage of the total dollars ever, except during specials. And I guess this is a special, but still, um, and then to be able to, uh, you know, make that, that much spend with the, that few was fewer cards is a big, big win. That was my reaction at first, but then I thought about things like the Amex Gold card where you could go into a grocery store and get a $500 gift card and get 4x points for

it, whereas if you go to Simon Mall, there's no way to get a big multiple like that. And then I sort of got a little bit less excited about it. What's your thought about that? Well, and it's worth mentioning here that not only do you not get a multiple, you get zero points with Amex at Simon Mall. So you definitely don't want to bring your Amex to Simon Mall. That's something to keep in mind.

But my thoughts on it are kind of the opposite side i mean certainly i thought it was a big deal and but i still think it's a big deal i guess whereas it sounds like you're kind of more on the end of and not a big deal you can earn the points at the grocery store and that's true you certainly can but a couple things on that first of all your grocery store spend is capped at 25 000 a year simon will let you spend 10 000 a day and if you build up a year. Simon will let you spend $10,000 a day. And if you build up a track record, they'll let you buy $25,000 a day. So you can do a lot more manufactured spend for sure. And actually, if you do the math, I think you actually come out a little bit ahead on the Simon end in terms of the number of points you earn. So the grocery store, you're typically

buying a $500 gift card with a $6 fee, and then you're earning your four points per dollar, right? So let's, to make it even, say you buy two of those, $1,000 in gift cards at the grocery store, your activation fee is 12 bucks. Now, if you're going to spend $12 in activation fees, you could alternatively go to Simon Mall on July 17th and buy just three gift cards, $3,000 worth of gift cards, pay the same $12 fee. And if you're using a card like the Freedom Unlimited that earns one and a half points per dollar, you're earning 4,500 points. So more points for the same amount of activation fee. You're obviously buying more.

Without a limit. Yeah, without a cap and much easier to liquidate. Oh, my goodness. You don't have to split tender. Anybody who's ever been to Walmart and had to split tender over four cards and then maybe hope that they can buy another money order, too. Like being able to buy them $1,000 at a pop. Boom. I think that's a big deal. You know.

Yeah, actually. Yeah. Sold already. You know what? I have a hard time arguing. It's not a big deal. It is big. And we have never seen this before.

I mean, I've heard rumors of $1,000 gift cards before, but I've never held one, so I'm looking forward to buying some if they're still in stock when I get home from my trip. Me too. I mean, I don't know if there's any Simon Balls in England, but... There might be. They do have some overseas. I don't know whether or not they sell Visa gift cards. I ran across a couple in... It was Japan, I guess, when we were in Japan in April, I saw one, I saw the sign and I was like, I recognize that logo. Sure enough, it's owned by Simon. But anyway, I didn't check to see if they had Visa gift cards, but, uh, but there's another reason I think it's a big deal too. Uh, and I'll say this cause I passed one on the way

here. I'm visiting friends that live not far from a Simon Mall. And at dinner tonight, my friends told me that they're interested in going to Disney World next year. And they don't do miles and points. They don't travel by plane very much. But they said that they're hoping to be able to find a way to cover their flights. And they wanted to know if I would be able to suggest a credit card to cover their flights. And after figuring out what airlines fly from their airport, Southwest seemed like the logical option. And so then there's the matter of meeting the spend on a credit card. And I said, oh, well, you're going to open a new Southwest card. Pretty easy. Wait until after October, because maybe they'll want to go after a companion pass. And then, you know,

on January 2nd, head over to the mall here and, you know, buy yourself a couple of gift cards. Now, if they were to run this kind of promo again, three gift cards and you've hit the minimum spend, I mean, hello, talk about easy points, right? That's absolutely true. And, you know, the other thing is things like paying your taxes with gift cards, you're limited to two gift cards per payment processor. So six gift cards per quarter, if you want to pay your federal estimated taxes each quarter. And so normally you'd be limited to $3,000. Now you can do $6,000 that way.

So even for people who want to do it entirely from home, well, once they get home from Simon Wall, they could do that kind of thing. So you're right. And you don, they could do that kind of thing. You're right. You don't have to drop the grocery store thing. By all means, go to the grocery store, too, and pick up your points there. That's great, too. Even if you're using a 2% cash back card

right now, it's going to cost you $4 to buy the gift card. Let's say it costs you another dollar to liquidate that. It's going to cost you $5, and you're going to earn $20 in cash back. So it's a $15 profit on each card. I mean, right.

That's on a 2% card. If you're earning anything more than that, I mean, yay for you. It's just more. So they're telling us this is temporary. Do you, do you think this is,

it could be that this is a promotion in, you know, in intended to be a promotion to get people excited about going to sign mall. And they're hoping that people will keep coming back after it goes back to 500, intended to be a promotion to get people excited about going to St. Paul and they're hoping that people will keep coming back after it goes back to 500. But it feels to me like they might be testing out a more permanent solution. Like they might be saying, we'll call it a promotion so people won't be upset if we stop it.

Am I just being hopeful? I mean, aren't we all hoping for that? You know, it's like you get that kid in a candy store feeling again. And again, it's not gonna replace other forms of MS. If you're doing MS, if you're into MS, this is like just another avenue and it's a super easy one.

I mean, I really hope that they're just dipping their toes in this pool and that they're gonna wanna come back for more. I don't see why not. And the thing is, I thought before they didn't want to sell the $1,000 gift cards for whatever liability reasons they have, whatever heat they might get in terms of attention on their financial transactions. I figured they got their reasons why they don't want to sell $1,000 cards. But now they're clearly showing a willingness to do it. So if they're willing to do it, and if they're able to earn a profit off

of doing it, I mean, why not? Why wouldn't they? It's obviously what the customers are demanding. I hope it'll come back. I have no way of knowing, but I would hope that they're just dipping their toes in the pool and that they're going to like the way it's received. I have to imagine they're going to do a swift business on this. Yeah. Yeah. So just, I think we should remind people that the Simon Ross stores are very friendly to MSers. They even, they have a form that you have to fill out if you're doing over, I think $2,000, something like that. And the form actually has a checkbox where you say, the reason for the purchase is MS. and they don't have it there to catch you it's there so they know that you're doing something that they sanction they they

want to know that you're doing that because then they know you're not doing something illegal with the cards they know you're not money laundering or whatever at least you know you've told them the truth and and uh and they, they're all for that. But the other thing I do want to remind people is that they also like people to call ahead if you're doing a big order. So if you are going to be doing 10,000 or more at a time or anywhere in that range, call ahead and they can have the gift cards ready for you. And it just works easier with their schedule. Cause I have a feeling they're going to get slammed pretty hard with a lot of

people showing up at the mall. It'd be busy for a couple of weeks. Probably already there right now, but maybe tomorrow and go on. Yeah. Well, you know, and it starts in the 17th.

So it starts on, I guess that's probably Wednesday. Oh, right. Right. It doesn't start yet. So, yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, they still may be busy, but, but starting on Wednesday anyway, you'll be able to do this and totally true. And, you know, I recently, I don't live near a Simon mall, so I, I, I don still may be busy, but starting on Wednesday anyway, you'll be able to do this. And totally true. And, you know, I recently, I don't live near a Simon Mall.

So I don't, you know, go to Simon Malls often to do MS because they're far, excuse me, far away from where I live. But I happened to buy one a couple of weeks ago. I was just on a road trip and I pulled up the map to look for Starbucks or something. And I was like, oh, premium outlets. Let's go try that place and see. And so sure enough, it was a Simon mall. And I walked in and, you know, we bought $10,000 in gift cards and they couldn't have been friendlier about it. Place that hadn't seen me before, super friendly. And we asked some questions about their hours and the weekend and that sort of

thing. And, uh, and the, the, the lady there told me, you know, if you want to come back sometime, just give us a call in advance and we'll get everything set up. Just like Greg said, we'll get it all set up. She said we can have it on the computer with a hold on it. So it'd be much faster for you to swipe and go when you come in. So, you know, I know we've been telling people that, but then I experienced it face to face. Yeah, that's exactly what they want. And they were super welcoming about it. So no fear in doing that. It's just going to save you time.

Right, right. That's awesome. me was your find with these United 5k flights. So tell us more about how I can find United 5k flights, these flights that cost 5k miles and, and why I should care why I should be looking for these. Okay, sure. So as many viewers probably already know, we're doing this 40k to far away challenge where our goal is each to use our particular currency to go as far as we can with 40k miles I have chase ultimate rewards points which transfer to United mileage plus among other programs but United is really the only program that I have that you guys don't. You've got City points, Steven has Amex points. I have Chase so I can transfer to United.

And so I've been trying hard to figure out, you know, where can- Most people wouldn't think is a huge advantage necessarily, right? Right, and in many ways it's not, except for this excursionist perk thing, which you wrote a great post about about a year ago or so um detailing how hackable it is for lack of a better word right i mean you can literally

um go further for less miles by using the excursionist perk creatively. And so let's back up a second. So what the excursionist perk is intended to be is you book a round trip award with United and you can add in between your outbound flight and your return flight, you can add another segment For free to your journey as long as that segment is not in your

Starting and ending region So a typical example would you fly outbound to Europe? you use excursionist perk to fly maybe across Europe and you return from wherever you flew to as Your final leg and and it was that middle section flying across Europe that'd be free and that's that's how it was intended to be used but as You found as drew it travels free found a number of other blogs found different twists on this there are a number of other blogs found different twists on this. There are a lot of ways to do this not as intended.

And when I wrote about it last year, it wasn't as good. I mean, I was pretty excited about it at the time, and it wasn't nearly as good as it is now with your find with these 5K flights. Yeah. good as it is now with with your find with these 5k flights yeah uh although i'm gonna after i explain it i'm gonna say why i i don't think it's as exciting for the average person as you're maybe saying but um let me get back so about a week ago i wrote a post about how you can fly around Japan for 5K miles one way with United Miles. And in that post, I wrote up a couple excursionist tricks that you could do with that. one-way let's say in Europe or across the US or across Africa for free as long as you add on a final one-way leg in Japan so for 10k total points you're getting a one-way flight in Japan a and a free one-way flight across a whole big region and then finally another one-way flight across a whole big region.

And then finally another one-way flight in Japan, which you may or may not even ever fly. But the point was for 10K miles, you got a lot of flying. And so the reason the finding this morning that I posted about with 5K flights within the US is exciting is because you don't have to go to Japan to do that trick. Right? If you know, if you know how you can find 5k flights, and that's what I wrote up today how to find them, then you can do that same trick starting here. And then so here's, here's a good example of how it might really play out for an average viewer, right? Let's say you've booked

You saw a super cheap fare to Europe you saw one of those $260 round-trip fares to Europe you bought it you have no idea if you really want to spend you know a week and a half in Portugal or wherever it was to But if you could add one of these 5,000 5k awards within your the US at the beginning before your trip And then add the free excursionist perk in Europe from Let's say Portugal again to wherever you wanted to go.

Athens or as far across Europe as you can imagine, all the way up to the northern part of Norway. You can add that for free as long as you tack on a return flight within the US, another little 5k thing at the end, which you don't ever have to fly you don't have to fly the original one um so the problem with what i just said is you had bought a round trip flight into portugal and you just flew way the heck away from portugal uh when you got there somehow you have to get back to finish your return your round trip if you bought it that way so the other trick you could do is start two of these round trip awards from the US so for example let's say LA let's say you live in the LA area LA to Vegas is a short flight it's and it's almost always available at the 5k level so you could fly to Vegas is a short flight. It's almost always available at the 5K level. You could fly to Vegas

at the beginning of one round trip award, return home at the beginning of your second round trip award. Two separate tickets. Two separate award tickets completely. This isn't going to work if you book one single round

trip. Then book your excursionist perk from Portugal to, you know, across Europe to wherever, and use your second excursionist perk to come back. And then you have to round off your, those two flights later for any time in the future. And you might actually be able to use them, right? You might be able to use them, right? You might be able to nest them again in a similar way to get yourself another round trip in the US. And so the key there is that then you'll have spent 20,000 points on those United flights

within the United States. Each one of them is 10,000 round trip, right? So you'll spend 20,000 on those points within the United States. And if you were to pay for those flights in Europe separately, they would cost you 30,000. So you're going to save yourself 1,000 miles and get yourself potentially two free trips in the United States, basically, right? Right, right, right. Of course, they're going to be on just the routes where these 5k awards are available. But you get yourself two free weekends in Las Vegas, for instance, and save 10,000 miles on the flights in Europe that you wanted anyway.

Exactly, exactly. So, you know, and Nick and I haven't talked about this, but I'm sure he knows that I'm thinking about doing this for the 40K Challenge. In fact, what I'm hoping to do, you know, some of my flights are going to be probably revenue flights where I buy them at one and a half cents. But often the best flights don't start in the location that the three of us are starting at. So my scenario and this is hard to work out, but my ideal scenario is just is to get to the starting point for my revenue flight by taking two 5k flights to get there. And each of those flights are the beginning of a different round trip United Award so that I'll have two excursionist perks to fly around some big region. I'm not going to blow them in Japan, by the way. That's good. That would be a poor choice.

Before you use your excursionist perks. But in some regions, you can get really far. I mean, like in Asia, you can get really far on one of these excursionist perks. Now, I mean, that's got to be fun. Asia's broken up into several different regions. So we've got North, and then you've got Asia, like Southeast Asia is still pretty big, no? Yes. I'm not denying that it's pretty big, but it's not as big as you would think when you say Asia because there are like three regions in there.

But Africa and Europe, well, and Oceania, as far as I can tell, appear to be the biggest. Actually, North America is awfully big. So you can start one of those overseas? That would work for Oceania? Yeah, Oceania doesn't work for the excursionist perk very well, though, because you have to fly through New Zealand to get from the eastern islands to the western islands, and that would break out of the region and it wouldn't count for the free excursionist. So that's unfortunate, but Africa, Europe, and,

and America, you could definitely do. Yeah. And there's some interesting options there. I imagine. I'm sure we'll learn more about them as you book them in. And we, we talk more about that down the road and we find out what Greg actually does and did. But so the finding today was all about how to find those 5K flights.

Because personally, I had just been hunting in the dark for them a little bit and kind of giving up each time because it was like, I just could never find them. Or I'd find them just on like Los Angeles to Las Vegas and that'd be it. I can't find them anywhere else, only on certain days. But to me, like the brilliance in today's post on top of the ability to nest and really might take a little while to wrap your mind around nesting two of those trips. If you do, that can be really awesome. If you're taking a trip overseas somewhere anyway, you could really,

you know, make yourself a cooler trip. But for me, the bigger find was how do I find those 5k flights? They seemed like unicorns or like they were hard to find. But you found a way to find them much more easily. Yeah, it's funny, I started writing the post without knowing that I would find the answer. And I just like you. So for this challenge, I'd been hunting for 5k flights from our starting location. I hadn't found any. Yeah, I looked too, because I was curious what you could find. I looked too, and I was like, yeah, just like spending an hour, two hours, three hours, like not that long. Testing different airports, because that just seemed like all you could do, right?

Just keep testing. Yeah. And so I started doing the research for this post and as you know in the post I chose Chicago almost randomly it just in the middle of country ish as as a starting place to check out is there like a relationship between 5k awards and the prices of the flights. And what I found was that one-way flights that are less than $50 are usually available for 5k. Not always, but it makes it awfully likely. And then as you get under $100, it becomes unlikely to find but not impossible.

There are some. So with that under my belt, and I showed in there how to find those sub $50 flights very easily, it became very easy for me to look for those extremely cheap flights out of our starting location and Then I just tested each one and my hit rate wasn't well there weren't that many Sub-50 they're more like sub like less than $80 and my hit rate wasn't that good, but I did find I think three Candidates and and one one really good candidate candidate that's 6k. We'll see whether I can afford that extra one. The reason I say a really good

candidate is the candidates that aren't good for this challenge are the ones where there is only like one flight to that airport because if there are weather problems and I'm at some outpost airport trying to get back or to another place looking up for Steven and I I'm in trouble right right so I've got I've got one flight for six guys I said

to to a fairly well you know a airport that is a number of routes in and out and so that's what I'm primarily looking for right now, but we'll see. That's a key piece of the challenge that's proving a little bit nerve wracking for me is looking at some of the longer flights that I have in mind. I'm kind of cutting things a little close and I feel like, man, if something goes wrong along the way, that could have a terrible domino effect on the rest of the trip. But the other thing to me that was interesting, going back to the United Awards real quick, is that it's not just on direct flights.

I assumed that it was just going to be on direct flights that you get a 5K, but actually you found quite a few that it was connections, you know, much longer. I was surprised about that too. Yeah, yeah. I couldn't believe that LA to Chicago to Vancouver showed up as an eligible 5K route I mean what that's going

all the way across the country and all the way back right that's yeah that's nuts to me and being able to use google flights to quickly and easily identify and find those flights I mean that's huge That makes this much easier. I think before this was very theoretical and there were probably at least, there was probably a segment of people anyway who said, that's gonna take too much time to hunt those down. But with the tools that you put in the post today,

I think it becomes a lot easier to hunt them down and the payoff is worth the much smaller time investment now. Although, so the reason I said before, I don't think it's as big of a deal as to the regular person is that the savings aren't really huge. The maximum savings are the difference between 10K and the cost with United Miles

to go one way across a particular region. So for example, if you did this, don't do this, but if you did this starting in Japan to get the 5k flights and you then used your excursionist perk to fly across the United States, you just paid 10K. That's assuming you don't need the flights in Japan, by the way, but you just paid 10K for a flight that's 12 and a half K. So you did a lot of work to save two and a half K. Now in other scenarios, it does get more. I think you could get up to 20K one way, maybe something like that so maybe more maybe it'd be as high as 25k

I thought 25 but looking at it so I mean so you could save it when I used the excursionist park in my case it was because I was using United Mileage plus miles to fly a one way to Africa so I was already using the miles to fly one way to Africa and I needed a flight within Africa and I realized

that if I booked another one way in the United States later on to make it a round trip flight to end my travel in the same region that I would save miles on a flight I was going to pay for anyway within Africa. And at the time, the cheapest flights in the United States were 10 or 12,000, 12,500 miles. So I paid 12,500 miles for a flight. Now I could pay 5,000. And I mean, I would have easily saved 10 or 11,000 on a flight I was going to book either way. So- No, no, no. Right. So yeah yeah so 5k makes it even better yeah absolutely absolutely but um what i really want to find is a way to get cheap business class well right

to start these things you don't have to end them with business class right right so right the um you you the i can't think of any region that has cheap business class fares. Now, the old United Awards chart, before they stopped publishing it, claimed that you can book intra-Hawaii flights for, I want to say, 9K business class. And then around Japan, I think was something like 12K. I'm not sure I have the numbers right, but they were very cheap on their award chart. And those would be amazing because then if you started with one of those, ended with a 5K economy, you could fly business class across the region. And business class, I don't know how high it goes, but it goes very high as far as-

Much higher. To do that. So the savings would be extreme. Problem is neither Hawaii nor intra Japan seem to actually release any award flights with business class seats. So even though they had this pricing on the award chart, it's as far as I could tell,

not something that's actually bookable in either case. Yeah, I mean, I'm fairly confident that's true in Japan and in Hawaii, I haven't looked enough, but I believe that you've probably tested it widely enough. I haven't looked that hard. So if people find a way to book a Hawaiian business class with United Miles, let me know.

No, don't let him know. Let him know. He's already got the ultimate rewards. He's got the advantage from the beginning because he can use his points for one and a half cents each. He's got the advantage right from the get-go. Don't help him.