Frequent Miler on the Air - A controversial post & why we published it and managing your credit card portfolio

Episode Date: November 23, 2019

After we prove mathematically that Greg too often says "um," Greg and Nick move onto weightier topics: - Should we have published the controversial Chase links post? Why did we? - Managing your credit card portfolio. How do you know which cards to get and to keep? How do you get cards that are no longer available? How do you keep points alive when you cancel?

Welcome to Frequent Miler on the Air with Greg and Nick. This week, we're going to be talking about a number of really cool topics to start with. The enhanced chase offers apply at your own risk post. Should we have published that? A number of readers were not too happy with us. We're going to debate that. Was it the right thing or the wrong thing to do? We're also going to talk about managing your credit card portfolio. How do you know which cards you should keep? How do you know

which cards you should get? And when you do want to ditch a card, how do you keep your points? And when you want to get a card that is no longer available for new signup, how do you get it? We're going to be talking about all of that. Funny, I should say, um, to lead into the next topic. You'll see why in a second. We're going to start, before getting into those topics, we're going to start with reader feedback. Reader feedback. Reader feedback. Our favorite part of the show.

The component, yeah. It keeps everybody coming back for more, right? That's right. We've gotten rave reviews from absolutely nobody about the feedback segment. But I like it. Nick does not know what feedback I read each time. So there's a little bit of mystery going on. News to me.

A little excitement. And anything, any reaction he has is totally off the cuff. You know, he hasn't practiced. So this week, David says, Hi, Greg. I really enjoy your blog and Facebook posts. You guys have taught me a lot. Thanks.

One thing I would request on your podcast, which I enjoy the most since I listen while driving or exercising. Please try to reduce the number of ums and uhs when you speak. It's very distracting, perhaps not to others, but it is to me. Yada, yada, yada, yada. Thanks for reading, Dave. P.S. Nick never does this, so kudos to him. Thanks, Dave.

Interesting. So, we appreciate that, appreciate the feedback. Thank you. Yeah, let me say, this reminds me of my son when he was a lot younger than he is today. And he thought it was hilarious to say things like, no offense, but you suck. Thanks, Steve. But I think that's a important important topic i do uh just said uh again i don't want to be saying uh all the time so i'm going to try very hard not to but first we're going to see was he right do i suck as bad as dave said i do and we're going to do this scientifically what we're going to do is our audio technician me is standing by by with last week's introduction. Oh, okay. Wow.

The audio technician is going to play last week's introduction, and our quantitative analyst, that's you, is going to count aloud each time he hears a or um. From either of us. From from you okay all right because introduction i i gave the introduction you gave the introduction that makes sense so there were there were there were no uhs or ums from you okay and i actually as i'm trying not as i'm trying not to say uh or um it's very satisfying to say those words on purpose. It's like getting them out. Shaking it out.

They're stuck in there, and so they're really happy to get out. So, um, um, um, um, um. Good. Now, here goes our intro from last week. Ready to count. Welcome to Frequent Miler On the Air with Greg and Nick. I'm Greg, and today we're going to be talking about several topics. We have the Marriott North Island Seychelles, which is an $8,000 a night island that is now a Marriott property.

So we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the American Express war on gaming where they've been shutting people down. And we'll transition from that to another American Express topic, which is the business platinum card devaluation. And finally – Or revaluation. Maybe. And then finally, the mint coins. They're back.

Let's talk about the mint coins and what's going on there. First. All right. That was the introduction. How much do I suck? Not that bad. What's the official tally? I think it was 12. there might have been a 13th that i might have missed a dozen or so it baker's doesn't or so baker's doesn't perhaps in in a in a single introduction yeah you know i think i think i think

we proved day's point i think it we proved that no offense Greg, but you suck, was mathematically correct. Right. It may have been mathematically correct based on that small snippet, of course. But we know with a small sample size, it's not always accurate. Yeah. See, I just did it right there. I'm going to admit that I listened past that introduction to our podcast, and the uhs and ums did not let up at all what's interesting is i've never noticed it i've listened to our podcast before

and i never even noticed that i was doing it but now i'm gonna notice it every single time and it's gonna be really frustrating so again So again, thanks for that, Dave. Well, you know what? I'll say, Dave, in, I don't know, in Greg's defense, or I don't know if that's the right way to phrase it, but I've spent a lot of years doing video conferences for what I did before I worked for FrequentMiler. So I've been talking on camera to people for years and years at this point. So it took me a long time to get to the point where I didn't say I'm as much and I still say it. I think if you listen to the whole thing, you'd probably find a bunch of places where I said it too. So, it's one of those things. It

just takes a while to get used to not doing that, especially because day to day, you don't even notice when you're saying that kind of thing. So, when you're on camera, even less probably, especially when it's not prepared remarks. So So it's easy enough to make that mistake, but good feedback to have to pay attention to. It is. I'm going to try really hard. And I did say several ums or uhs during the introduction, despite trying really hard not to do it. But I installed a device that will zap me every time I say um or uh, as long as Nick presses his U and M key at the same time after hearing me do it. And he has to do it within half a second of me doing that or else it won't

work. So I liked that we had the U of M reference though, because Thanksgiving is coming up. Right. And so of course I'm sporting my Detroit lions Christmas sweater here. That's a, you know, in honor of the,

the half of frequent miler that comes from the greater Detroit area. So I had to support that. That was an interesting stretch. So U of M, in my context, means University of Michigan, which I think you're referring to. Right. So you're neck of the woods. That brings you to the southeast Michigan area, which then you drift over to Detroit, which is in the southeast Michigan area as well. And you get the Detroit Lions. how well are they doing this year?

You know, who knows? Who knows? I always say I'm a Detroit Lions fan, which means I don't really like football very much. There you go. No, I do like it, but I haven't watched. I haven't been paying attention, but I do hear negative things fairly regularly. So I don't think they're doing too well. But U of M has been doing pretty well this season, so there's that.

Makes up for that. Yeah. Okay. So, Chase offers. Why don't you remind us what was going on? What was the big picture that brought us up to that post? Right. So for quite a while now, Chase has had offers that are targeted directly to you, perhaps that you might find in your online account. So when you log in, whether on desktop

or in the app, there's a section with these just for you offers that you can look for and see. And sometimes you'll find offers that are targeted directly to you. Now, what people had found over time was that the ones with a green star were preselected in some way so that they may be targeted directly to you. And then, therefore, those green star offers had often bypassed 524, meaning that it was possible to get approved even if you've opened more than five credit cards in the last 24 months, not that you would definitely get approved, but that it was possible for that to happen. Of course, not everybody's going to get approved. But that was what we had found anyway, that it was possible. So then they with those Blackstar offers, well, it was Green Star, it was Green Star. And then the Blackstar ones came along, and people found that those

worked too. And then the key finding was that when there was a fixed apr the the interest rate was a fixed number rather than a range so like okay 22.54 instead of 18.24 to 25.24 so you're talking about when you click through to the application and they have the rates and fees section if you see that fixed number 24 whatever whatever it is that is a hint that it might bypass the 524 rule. Exactly. Exactly. So, that had been something that had been happening for quite a few months at this point. And so, that's where things kind of started. And then suddenly over the weekend, people started finding a lot of us had those Blackstar offers in our online logins. It was much more widely available than it had been anyway up until that point.

So that's kind of where things started anyway for the- Okay. So that, I mean, that was newsworthy in itself. Sure was. That, hey, go check if you have a Blackstar offer. Again, doesn't mean you get approved, but it does seem to mean that if you're over 524, meaning you've signed up for five or more credit cards in the past 24 months, that you have a chance of getting

approved, whereas normally you wouldn't have a chance of getting approved because of Chase's rules. Right, right. And let's be clear, again, in these kinds of situations, a positive data point proves more than a negative data point. If you apply and get denied, then for whatever reason you're given, whether they tell you it's because of 524, because of A or B or C, the fact of the matter is some people that were over 524 got approved. The denials mean less than the approvals. The approvals show us that it's possible. The denials just show us that somebody got denied. So, so yes, that was something that had been kind of known and working and happening. Got it.

Then things got a little crazier. So, right. But then, so, so what got crazy? There were some links to not links that you could use to get to offers, even if you didn't have a black star.

Exactly. Exactly. There were some links to offers on various cards that would give you that sort of Blackstar type of an offer. You'd have to log into your account and click the link and it would prompt you to log in and then you would get one of those offers that had a fixed APR, which again had long been the hint that it would bypass 524. That particular offer would bypass it. So there was one for the Sapphire Preferred for 70,000 points after spending 4,000 in the first three months. There was one for the Inc. Business Preferred for the regular 80,000 bonus offer. Then there was one for the 160,000 bonus offer. So it seemed pretty exciting that suddenly there

were these links to be able to potentially get one of those cards, even if you were over 524. Because obviously, there are many people that are interested in being able to sign up for those cards and open them, but are locked out because of the 524 rule. So, some of those links started floating around. And that seemed initially newsworthy. You know, wow, great. There's an offer to let people know about it. Without question, that's newsworthy. Right. But then you emailed me about a comment you read on Doctor of Credit. Right. I hear my dog barking, but something's going on behind me. But ignore our fans in the background. So at this point, we had republished the post telling people,

check your online chase login for the Blackstar offers because more people are reporting these. But then in the meantime, I found this post with a link to the Sapphire Preferred 70K and the Ink Business Preferred 160K. But I saw a comment, a doctor of credit, from somebody saying that you can easily generate these links by just changing a few digits in the URL. And he listed all the various cards with the digits that you need to replace in order to generate one of those offers with a set APR that would theoretically bypass 524. So he showed that it was very easy to just modify the link and kind of create your own sort of, you know, keep talking i'm gonna address my dog's issues here sorry we're doing this we don't we don't have editors we can't just pause

and our sound engineer doesn't have time to deal with this we don't have time for this all right he's he seems to have stopped all right so i know greg because i said listen, I see this 70k Sapphire preferred offer and this 160k business preferred offer, but I found this comment that leads me to believe that this might be getting out of hand and getting a little fishy. Right, right. So, when you sent me that, I thought it was very important. I hadn't been paying a lot of attention to all this going on with the links going on, but I thought it was very important. I hadn't been paying a lot of attention to all this going on with the links going on, but I thought it was very important that we alert our readers that

there's these links that are out there that might be there there might be a problem with using those links and i wanted people to be able to make their own decision about how risky it would be and so i thought it was important to show that comment that to show at least the fact that it was possible to generate those links as sort of evidence that these were not these were probably not official chase links that someone had just found a you know website somewhere that that had posted them but rather that someone may have figured out how ch's URLs work and generated those links. And Chase certainly, if they were aware of that, would not like it. And so, there are risks to it. And so, I wanted us to publish that. And then you did.

Right, right. And so, we had talked about it a little bit ahead of time as to whether or not we ought to publish it, because of the concerns over the links. But then on the flip side, we also always try and present the best publicly available offers to our readers. And so if there's a possibility to get that, then, you know, again, it's kind of each person's responsibility, I suppose, to determine their risk tolerance. Some people do much riskier things than I do, and other people probably think that I do crazy things. So, everybody has to kind of make up their own minds on that, but we do make an effort to publish the best publicly available offers also, and this is something that had gotten published on another blog. So, it was something

that was out there and people were knowing about, So we thought it was important to add our voice to that, so to speak, though there was, of course, the debate as to whether or not that was a good decision. And one of the things that we did before we published it was we sent an email. Doctor of Credit had published these on their blog already. So we sent them an email to ask them why they had taken these posts down, because they had in the interim taken them down. And so we tried to gather some feedback and see what they had thought about it and and the information and then talking about it amongst ourselves to decide whether or not this is something we ought to publish so a lot of times i can't remember what doctor of credit replied i think it was chuck um i think he said that he was thinking of putting them back up. He did. Was it Charles? Yeah, William Charles there.

Yeah, he did. He said that he kind of odd and odd on it and wasn't sure and had taken them down. He said he wasn't sure about whether to publish, had published it, and then changed his mind and said, I might change my mind again, though, and republish. And so at that point, I figured, well... So there wasn't much guidance from Doctor of Credit for us. And it didn't seem very black and white to Doctor of Credit either as to what the right decision was in that regard.

And I can understand why. It wasn't really a black and white. And so now we're looking at it from the perspective of, okay, this information is out there, and we think it's a little risky. So there's the chance that readers are going to see this somewhere else and go and apply through it without having considered the risks. So in part, we wanted to publish to be able to warn people so that they could make a better decision. And then, of course, there's also the fact that another blog had published better offers than what we

had available. And there's the third piece that they might republish it. And so then we're left with the decision of, okay, well, do we wait until they republish it again before we publish and let people know or not? And so there was a little bit of thought that went into whether or not we ought to publish it. Does that seem fair? Right. Yes, yes.

And then we published. We did. And there were several, not dozens, but maybe six or seven vocally angry readers. Right. Is that fair? Yes, that's definitely fair. I had trouble understanding why they were so upset.

I don't know. I felt like someone who had walked in in the middle of a conversation and didn't really know what the background was because it seemed pretty cut and dry to me, at least at first, that there's offers out there on the internet publishing a post saying, hey, here's what's out there, but it's risky, and here's why it's risky, was, I thought, the right thing to do. And I was actually surprised that it was controversial. But what about you? Were you surprised? Or did you kind of expect some of that reaction? I was surprised that it became controversial. When we talked about this ahead of time from the get-go, I wasn't sure whether or not we should publish it. And there was definitely part of me that was hesitant to publish it, not for the reasons that I think people got angry, so much as I thought, putting the link out there, it's a risky link, obviously, because it didn't seem like it was intended to have been, you have been put together the way that it was.

And the fact that it was able to be modified for so many different cards, that is what made it particularly questionable to me. So there was definitely a big part of me that hesitated in the sense that I don't want to make it easy for readers to get themselves into trouble. But on the flip side, like you said, I thought it was kind of important to let people know. So, I was surprised at the, should we say, the tone, I guess, of people who are upset about it, because it definitely seemed like the people who thought we shouldn't publish, let me say this, I didn't get the sense that the people who were angry that we published it were angry because someone might sign up for

an offer that wasn't intended to be meant for them, but more so wanting to kind of sweep it under the carpet so that not everybody would find out about it. And so, that's kind of the tone that I got from it. And that was surprising to me, especially because we weren't the first to publish it. It had been published in a couple of places already right you know we were reporting on news that was out there right right so there was uh somebody who who said okay i get your point when we wrote in the comments why we publish it said i get your point but was there really any point in publishing the codes from that comment we mentioned and you and i talked about it and decided no there's really no reason to show the codes that people can then use and get in trouble with so we mask those or you mask those so that any new people reading it wouldn't see it so we

did we did back down a little bit. We didn't take down the whole post or anything. It's still there. Why do you think people were so vehement about it? I think it took me a while to get to this thought but but i think it probably had come up in private groups and people may have known about it for days or weeks or even months and were very upset when it became public because they knew that this gravy train of chase offers was going to die because when things get publicized like this, the banks or whoever's involved generally shut down that avenue. That's my guess of why people were really upset.

Nobody was willing to come out and say that. No, yeah. Now I definitely think that was it. But ahead of time, I had no idea that was the case because, A, I had no idea that this worked until Saturday night when we saw it on Doctor of Credit. And B, nobody reached out at any point to say, hey, listen, this is what's going on with that. It's been private information. It's fragile. And it shouldn't be published. So we certainly didn't hear from anybody like that. And I think it's worth noting here that there are times when people reach out with information that

is something that is a fragile deal that they say, hey, listen, I'd like to share this with you, but it's, you know, a fragile opportunity, so I don't want it to be publicized. And we generally respect that kind of thing. So, it's not like it was that kind of a situation. So, neither one of us were aware. I'm guessing now, and I'm just guessing because I haven't asked anybody, because I'm sure that nobody who was unhappy wants to tell me anyway. But I would assume at this point that, yes, those links must have been working for quite a while, is my bet. And the people that had been able to use them were upset that the gravy train was coming to an end. And I can understand their

unhappiness with that. But at the same time, it was coming to an end. And I can understand their unhappiness with that. But at the same time, it was information that had gotten published already. So I didn't necessarily feel that it needed to be taken down at that point. I think it was important to let people know so that they didn't make a mistake. But again, we were viewing it from the perspective of this could be a link that perhaps the bank won't like and might shut down your account for using. So be aware if you're going to give this a shot that that's the case. Now, I think probably that wasn't necessarily true.

We just, that's what we thought that with the information that we had now, it might be true now. Yes. Especially because obviously more people were aware of it, but you know, but that's, we didn't know that going in. We didn't see that going in. That's not the way we were aware of it, but, uh, you know, but that's, we didn't know that going in, we didn't see that going in and it's not the way we were looking at it.

Right, right, right. All right. Anything else to say on that topic or should we move on? I think that's pretty good. Yeah. I think so. Managing your credit card portfolio. So I have created and now updated a number of times a spreadsheet for looking at ultra premium credit cards. The idea is that when you're looking at should I keep or cancel or get in the first place these cards that at the time, the first time I created the spreadsheet, most ultra premium cards were $400 or $450 per year. Now, most of them are about $550 per year. Many of them have gone up in price.

Cost of admission is going up. It's going up. So the idea behind the spreadsheet, it was actually driven by a post you had done before I'd created the spreadsheet where you listed the expensive cards you had and which ones you were thinking of getting rid of. And I wanted a way for people to look at feature by feature, how much is that worth to you? And so you can decide in a logical way, am I getting more out of this card than it's costing me? If you're're not then you shouldn't be

paying the second year annual fee you might still sign up for it in the first place in order to get a welcome bonus but you're probably not gonna want to keep it past the first year so that spreadsheet is is really useful for that. An interesting thing came up. So I wrote a post about why I'm giving up my prestige card. And I had used the spreadsheet showing how now the gold card is my go-to for dining without the prestige card. And an interesting thing came up, which is I've told everybody the way to fill out this spreadsheet is to first decide which cards are definite keepers. So for example, for me, I know not for you, the Sapphire Reserve is a definite keeper. So if you start with that, just as an example, you start with that, then any features that other cards have that are redundant, like priority, if I assign the full value of priority pass, how much I value priority pass to the Sapphire Reserve, then any other card

that has priority pass, I shouldn't give it any value for priority pass because having another priority pass doesn't do me any good at all. And that's the idea behind how to fill out the spreadsheet. Where it gets confusing is when there are two cards with similar benefits that you don't know which one you're going to keep if either. And that happened between the Prestige and the Gold for me. The Gold has 4x dining. The Prestige has 5x dining. If I could compare them both to the Sapphire Reserve,

and I could say, okay, so the Prestige gets 2x more than the Sapphire Reserve, so the prestige gets 2x more than the Sapphire reserve and the gold gets 1x more. And so the prestige is giving me more value for my dining spend. And I sign at that. But what if that then means I'm going to keep my prestige card? Then if I go over to my gold card sheet, am i saying the extra 1x over the sapphire reserve is immaterial because i'm getting 5x from dining so i shouldn't give it any value there and i i was whichever one you think you're going to keep it it reduces the value of the other one and i don't know what the right you know answer to all that is except to say i guess you should i or i should in this example compare them both to the sapphire reserve

to begin with if i'm if i'm thinking of canceling either one i'm agnostic to either one canceling either one and and then um whichever one has more value above its annual fee, keep that one. And then I can change the other one to be even less value. Something like that, I guess. But anyway, so just wanted to bring that up as there's no, even though the spreadsheet makes it look like a strong sort of objective way of figuring this out it's really not it's a little murky there's an art to it yeah and it's a it's a tough call sometimes and then it gets interesting too when you look at things like you mentioned the sapphire reserve is a keeper for you and so if you assign value to the priority pass, then you can't assign value to priority pass from other cards. But let's say that you had a large group that you're traveling with

frequently. Well, then you might prefer to have the priority pass from the Ritz-Carlton card since that one has unlimited guests to it still. So, then you would probably more highly value the priority pass from the Ritz card. So then do you only value that on the Ritz card and not value it on the Sapphire Reserve? Even though now you're kind of making a redundant benefit that, like you said, having two of them doesn't do you any good, but one of them is a little bit more valuable than the other one. It starts to get a little bit murky in terms of how to value it. It does. And that's, in fact, what I did is I put the full value of priority pass on my ritz card because the ritz priority pass is better than the sapphires priority pass but

that that's that's a little murky to me too yeah that overvalues the ritz card right right because it's not like you wouldn't have it yeah maybe what i should be doing is only adding the value to the extent to which that priority pass is better than the Sapphire Reserves priority pass and then say, okay, well, maybe that's 25 bucks better or something to be able to guest in more than two people. I don't know. Right, and thinking about how many times a year you're going to be guesting in more people and how much you would right for each guest i guess right can't remember if i've ever have but it's kind of nice knowing that i could so good yeah so that's a good point i should rethink how i do that as well i mean it's a it's definitely a tough a tough game to play figuring out which ones to keep and which ones to cancel and how to benefit or excuse me how to value those different benefits. And then you have situations like with the Prestige and the Amex Gold. In my case, I'm going to keep the Amex Gold

for sure because I want the Forex at the US supermarket. So I'm happy with that. And I'm happy with the airline credit and I'll use the Grubhub a few times a year. And so I'm happy with what I feel like I'm paying as a net cost in order to earn 4x at the supermarket. So I'm definitely going to keep that just for that. But it's also good to have as a backup if the Prestige at some point, if I decide to cancel it, or they change benefits, and I'm not getting 5x dining anymore, or maybe my wife is just out without me, and I don't have her as an authorized user on my prestige card. So she's got the Amex Gold in order to get 4X dining. Now, I'm not going to value that enough to probably put a dollar figure on it in the spreadsheet.

Yeah. But it is something that makes it beneficial to keep and have. So it does get a little bit murky. There are some tough calls in there and like a reader brought up this week or Greg did in response, sometimes it becomes a very chicken or the egg thing in determining which one you're going to value more than the other, which card you're going to value this from or that from. So, there are some ins and outs and what have you makes it a little tough to decide what to keep. Right. But if you want to play with that spreadsheet, Google Frequent

Miler Ultra Premium Credit Card Worksheet, something like that, anything, those kind of words will probably pull it up. Yeah. And I think from a reader perspective, I want to say that we need a good sheet like that for your entire portfolio too. I don't know how you would go about doing that, but we need a sheet like that for deciding what to keep and cancel in terms of your other cards too. Right. And that would be a lot of work, but it is something that would be good to have. We don't have enough time in the day to put in all possible cards into that spreadsheet, but it's a good idea. Good thing to think about for the future. Yeah. We'll think about it.

Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. So, speaking of keeping and canceling, you might be thinking also about the cards that you want that certainly probably also put in your mind anyway, the idea of, well, this is a card I would like to have. We mentioned the Ritz card, for instance, and the fact that you get a priority pass, good for unlimited gas privileges, but that card isn't available for new applicants anymore. So does it matter? Can you get it? And of course the answer is yes, you can. How do you get it? Right. So the trick to getting it is to start with a Chase Marriott Bonvoy card, a consumer one, not the business one. Chase has two or three versions of their consumer card depending on when you got it and whether or not you ever upgraded. And you start with that and then you call Chase and ask, can I upgrade to the Ritz card? If you've

only had your Marriott Bonvoy card for less than a year, the answer is going to be no. At least that's what we've heard from people who've tried. After a year, likely chances are yes. You may have to have a credit limit of $10,000 or more on that account to be approved for it. I'm not 100% sure about that, but that's what i've heard and uh so if you're if you don't have the chase card today you could sign up now for the chase card as long as you're not over 524 the chase marriott card the chase marriott card wait a year upgrade to the ritz hopefully that will still be available at that time we can't promise it is but the reason that came up, the Ritz card in particular,

is because it's the last one standing of commonly available cards that has priority pass with unlimited guests. Even better, it has free authorized users, and each authorized user can get their own priority pass with free unlimited guests. And that's really valuable. That's something that that combination I value much higher than the Sapphire reserves priority pass, because with the Sapphire reserve, you have to pay for each authorized user. So I've been able to give a really great version of priority pass to all my family members. And that, that, and that is super valuable. It's definitely something that makes that card more valuable. It's also got the Visa Infinite Air Discount, $100 when you book a round-trip economy class flight for two passengers in the US.

And that also works for the authorized users, I believe. So it's got some really good benefits, great card to have, and there is a path to getting it. If you have an old Marriott card, then you should probably be able to call Chase and upgrade it. And of course, we can't guarantee that kind of thing. But if you call and ask, that's how you'll know whether or not you can product change to it. But it has been available. People have done it very recently. And in fact, somebody commented that they had applied for one of those Blackstar offers for the Marriott card, specifically in the hopes that they would be able to upgrade a Turret's card in the future.

Yeah, let's hope that works. Yeah, I hope so. I hope it does for them. So that's one example of a way to get a card that you want. You'd have to apply for a card that you don't necessarily want now if you didn't want the Marriott card anyway in order to get the card that you do want later on. Are there other similar opportunities? And of course, Greg wrote a whole post about these similar opportunities.

I did. I did. I started writing the post with just two or three examples in mind. The other example besides the Ritz card that was top of mind was the United No-Fee Mileage Plus card. The idea is you start with the United Mileage Plus Explorer card. After a year, call to downgrade to the no fee card, and you keep the ability to get more saver level awards on United Metal in economy. And you also get last seat availability of standard level economy, or yeah, standard level economy United flown flown i think it's only domestic flights but i'm not sure about that both of those can be super handy i especially like well actually i like both of them but the enhanced the enhanced um award availability is great for when you're booking international award where you have to connect to another city

to catch like an ANA flight or Lufthansa flight or whatever it is. If you are booking, it's not only saving you money of not having to position, but it's keeping it all on one PNR so that your bags can be checked all the way through if anything happens where a flight is delayed. United ought to accommodate you one way or another because it's all tied together. So there's big advantages to booking a award all in one rather than piecemeal. And this makes it so much easier to do that. Yeah, definitely. And I'll say that now also that United has gotten rid of the close-in ticketing fee, then I'm even more apt to look at these also for domestic awards for last-minute flights. In the past, I would often find a lot of availability for those exclusively available

for cardholder flights close in. But with the $75 fee, I wasn't too excited about redeeming miles for them. Now, this certainly makes it a lot better now that you don't pay the close in fee, of course, on partner awards. It seemed like they were just switching that fee to more miles, right? So they're adding a 3000 mile or something like that premium on onto the award tickets. But at any rate, for United flights or flights on United Metal alone, I think it really comes in handy. It does work when you have like Greg said, the no fee card, it gives you that expanded availability. One thing I want to mention, I frequently get asked by readers, if you're booking with a partner's miles, if you're booking with life miles or Turkish miles, do you have access to those those things? If you got the

credit card? No, no, no, no, no, no. You know, the Turkish Airlines agent doesn't have the United credit card. They can't see the expanded availability that's just for credit card holders. So that's just if you're using United miles. You gotta be using United mileage plus miles to get that. Also the no fee card does not give you free check bags. It does not give you priority boarding, I don't think.

Any of that kind of stuff. No, it doesn't. But it does give you additional miles though through united mileage plus the mileage plus x app if you're buying gift cards to that mileage plus x app you get 25 bonus so 25 more miles when you're buying gift cards through that and it also gives you sometimes increased offers on mileage plus shopping in the shopping portal right sometimes sometimes the portal gives portal gives cardholders more bigger bonus. And you still get that even with a no-fee card. That's right.

That's right. So lots of reasons to get and keep that card if you can. So my post had, I think, three examples of these kind of things where a card is no longer available, and you get it by getting a similar card and product changing to it. The other one being the old SPG card, which is now Bonvoy something or other. You can get that by getting the Bonvoy, I don't even know what it's called, but the expensive Amex Bonvoy card. I don't know.

Bonvoy Brilliant, I think. Maybe. Maybe. And then downgrading to the Bonvoy dumb okay so that's a way to get a annual 35k a night certificate for only a 95 a year fee which is pretty good but then there were a lot of examples of where you might want to sign up for a card in order to get a better welcome bonus. I'm joking about this because some of the banks, for some reason, do not like us writing the word sign-up bonus. So we use other words like welcome bonus or new member bonus or something like that.

Early spend bonus. All sorts of different things yeah anyway so you if you want a better early spin bonus the the path sometimes is to get a the path is similar you get it you get a you get a different but related card you get the welcome bonus on that related card which might be bigger or exist at all compared to the one that you really want. And then later product change the one you really want. There's a couple I want to talk about

because I got a lot of questions about them. So one is, I told people if you want the Inc Cash or the Inc Business Unlimited, both of them have 50K offers. I said you could start with the Inc. Business Preferred with that 80k offer, then downgrade to the Cash or the Unlimited. And a question I got multiple times through different channels was, isn't that limiting the bonus points available to you because you could have applied separately for the business preferred 80K and the in cash 50K?

You should have had 130K then, right? You could have had 130K instead of 80K. And my answer is no, because you can have 160K instead of 130K. Because what you could do is after you downgrade from the ink business preferred you could sign up for the ink business preferred again it does not have the 24 month or 48 month rule that the sapphire cards have about having to wait 48 months before you can get a bonus when you've gotten a bonus before. So since it doesn't have that rule, you can keep getting. So you can sign up.

This is contingent on Chase continuing to approve you, of course. But other than that and 524 rules and whatnot, there's no reason you couldn't sign up for the ink business, prefer, get the 80K, downgrade to ink cash later on. like 524 rules and whatnot, there's no reason you couldn't sign up for the ink business preferred, get the 80 K downgrade to ink cash later on, sign up for the bank business preferred again, 80 K downgrade to the business unlimited, and then sign up for the business preferred again and get another 80 K. So you can do much, much better through that path. And that's a great path to keep in mind, because that, to me, has made those 50k offers, which are great offers for cards with no annual fee. If you were to look at them in a vacuum, the offers on the Ink Cash and the Ink Unlimited

are great offers for card with no annual fee. There are very few cards with no annual fee. They really are. Quite a high bonus. However, those bonuses aren't particularly interesting if you think outside the box a little bit and you realize, well, but you could get the 80 and then downgrade later on. Now, of course, the wrinkle in the strategy here is that then you don't have the Inc. Cash or the Inc. Un unlimited right away. So you're stuck with a lesser earning ratio by some, by some, some perspective anyway, on the ink business preferred, because it's not going to get 5x at the office supply store, or it's not going to get 1.5x everywhere, like the ink cash and ink business unlimited, those two cards have really interesting bonus structures. So you'll be giving that up for the interim for whatever the

year or a period of time it's going to be. So if you really need those bonus categories now, maybe it would make sense to still apply for one of those. But generally speaking, you're leaving quite a large chunk of miles on the table if you're not starting at the top and downgrading. Right. Now, if you do want to get started right away, I guess you could sign up for both the ink business preferred and let's say the ink cash and still do what I just said, later downgrade and have a second ink cash, which could be useful if you want to do more than 25k a year at 5x and then get another ink business preferred. So you can do even better than what I said, but i was

talking more and if you're doing one card here's the path to do it right right right i do want to i do want to say there is a case where it makes more sense to sign up for the ink cash or unlimited even if you don't care about those bonus categories and that's if you don't think chase is going to approve you for a 5K credit line. The Business Unlimited and Inc. Cash can be approved at 3K. So that's why when I suggested my son sign up for the Inc. Business Unlimited, we went that path to sign up for the Business Unlimited. He got approved for exactly that 3k credit limit. He probably would not have been approved for the business preferred as my guess.

Right, right. And that's a good thing to keep in mind. Also, in terms of your strategy, is it are those types of limits? Also, actually, that reminds me of a point I wanted to make a little earlier when Greg said that if you're going to product change to the Ritz card, you might need a $10,000 credit limit. There are different minimum limits for different accounts that Chase has. However, the good thing to keep in mind with all of that is that Chase will allow you to move credit limit from one card to another in most cases. So for instance, I have that no fee Chase United card that Greg was talking about a few minutes ago. And so I can move some credit limit from that card, I can call Chase and ask them to do it anyway. And typically,

they're good about this, and move that to a different card in order to bump it up or bump it down if need be. So, you know, if you're looking to product change, and one of those, the problem that you're running into is the credit limit, keep in mind that Chase will usually let you shift credit limit from one personal card to another personal card or from one business card to another business card. They won't go business to personal or the other way around. Right. You can't go across that line. Right.

But you can't shift it around a little bit. But you can't go below that minimum limit. Like my son can't now allocate any of his 3k business unlimited limit to another card because they won't let him drop below that minimum are you sure about that i'm sure there's a limit i'm sure there's a minimum for each card i know that much i don't know for sure that 3k is that minimum for the business unlimited but yes i i've i've tried doing that with various cards and some of them will say we can drop you down to two thousand dollars other ones we can drop you down to 500 let's say for like the freedom cards i think can go that low

yeah yeah no definitely the the freedom cards can go down to 500 um that's interesting because i've heard of people being able to do that with quite a few different cards. Yeah, there used to be a trade. I think they've stopped. I think they've stopped it. And one of the ways they've stopped it is by putting in minimums, I think. Yeah. I know for their Visa signature cards in general, they require a $5,000 credit limit on the personal side. And the infinite cards that they require usually a $10,000.

That's to get started and open the account. But at least in the past, anyway, it was possible to drop those down after being approved if you wanted to move limits around. But that'll all just depend. You'll have to call Chase and see what you can do and what you can't do. They can tell you better than I can as to what you can do and what you can't do. Very good point. Maybe it's just me that didn't like it. Probably not. Probably things might have changed at some point. But yeah, so that's a great technique to keep in mind, being able to upgrade and downgrade in order to get a card that you want.

You may start with a different card, either A, because that's what you have to do because there's no other path to the new card, or B, because you can get a better bonus. Same thing is true with the Sapphire Reserve. Right now, the bonus is better on the preferred. So if you're eligible for one of those Sapphire cards, then you might consider applying for the preferred to start and then down the road upgrading to the reserve. Now, of course, these things we talk about upgrading, downgrading, product changing are things that are generally available. We don't know that they'll be available to every person in every situation. There's always

the chance that you won't be able to. But historically, up to this point, it's been fairly easy to product change with most issuers. The rules vary a little bit from one issuer to another, though. For instance, Citi will often allow you to convert from one co-branded card to another, perhaps. Yeah, they seem to let you change anywhere within the payment network so from a master card to any other master card that they cover as far as i can tell generally speaking i have heard of some people who've been unable to change to one particular card or another every now and then somebody will tell me i they told me i couldn't change this particular one but but generally

speaking yes like i product changed an american airlines card to the AT&T Access More card. So nothing to do with each other, which you can't do anymore. Yeah. But at the time, anyway, the point is that you could change from one co-branded card, an American Airlines card to a totally different co-brand with AT&T, whereas most issuers won't let you do that. If you have a Chase Southwest card, they're not going to let you change it to a Chase Hyatt card.

They don't allow you to change from one co-branded to another. So those types of rules vary a little bit from issuer to issuer. And did I hear that right that Capital One doesn't allow like any product change or no, they do. We've heard some examples, but what do you know about that? I thought they wouldn't. We tried years ago to product change a Venture One to a Venture and called several times and everybody was pretty firm that no, you couldn't product change. You could only open a new one. And everything that I had read up to that point also backed that up, at least everything that Dr. Credit had out there and that I read on other similar sites said that you couldn't product change with Capital One. But we did have someone recently who said that he's had offers to change from a Quicksilver card to a Venture card or something like that, something along those lines that have showed up in his email or in his online account. So it might be possible to do in the past agents have said no, but you might be able to with Capital

One now. I think it's more of a question mark because there aren't so many people that are involved in the hobby of collecting points that probably have a lot of Capital One cards. Yeah, because it's only been in the past year or so that they have had transferable points that make them much more interesting. So speaking of Capital One, I noticed that our Capital One guide, we have guides of each of the transferable points programs. And our Capital One guide in the section titled How to Keep Your Points Alive basically said, the idea is how do you keep your points alive when you're canceling the card? So we have a section like that for each of our transferable points programs. With Capital One, it was like,

you can't just spend the points before you cancel it. As opposed to others that might say, just downgrade to a no-fee card, or can't you with Capital One? I thought the right answer would be, sign up for a no-fee card, move your points to that no-fee fee card and then cancel the one with the fee assuming they don't let you downgrade yeah that that makes sense i i hadn't thought about it

okay and you could also do that like a spouse right because you transfer anybody send your points to anybody so if you have a trusted friend or spouse or whatever that has a Capital One card and isn't about to cancel it, you can move all your points to them to keep them alive with the idea that maybe you'll get a Capital One card again in the future and they can send them back to you or they can book stuff for you from their accounts, right? Yeah, absolutely. And to be clear, it's miles to miles. I don't know about cash back, but the Capital One Venture, Venture One, Spark Miles, Spark Miles Select, the miles can be transferred from one account to another. I don't know about cash back or other things. But yeah, so if you're earning Capital One miles, then yes, you can transfer those to anybody else.

And I asked the agents a couple of times when I called when this started. They told me that there are no annual caps to that, and I haven't found an annual cap or anything like that. It's amazing. Yeah, it is. It's a really generous feature to have. So each of the main banks that do transferable points handle those points differently in a number of ways. With Capital One, the points – actually, Capital One and Chase do it almost the same way, if I understand right. The points stay with the card.

It's not with the person. It's with the card. So if you have two cards that earn Capital One miles, am I right? Yes, you're correct. Your miles are separate. That's correct. You can move them from one to the other, but they are kept separately. So if you don't move them and you cancel one of the cards, you'll just lose all those points that are on

that card, right? And that's exactly the same with how Chase does it. That before you cancel a card, you should move your points to another Chase card you, or to someone else in your household, which is Chase's limit. Chase will not let you send your points to anyone. They'll let you send them to a single household member or to a business partner if it's a business card, if you have a business card. So that's Chase and Capital One.

Amex does it completely differently with amex the points are with the person not with the card and that's important to know because it totally changes how you handle when you're canceling things and everything and it's it's much easier in a way right because it is with amex if you're gonna your platinum card, let's say, and you've earned points on your platinum card, it doesn't matter. You could just cancel it without worrying about it as long as you have another membership rewards card. So luckily, Amex has two great no-fee membership rewards cards. One is the Blue Business Plus, which is fantastic because it earns 2x rewards everywhere up to $50k per calendar year. but it's not as exciting, but at least it's no fee. So you could have one of those cards in your portfolio and never have to worry about your points, losing your points when you cancel. Right, right. And if you don't have either of those cards, but you have something else,

then that's good enough too. Craig's making the great point that you would want to have one of those. That way you could cancel, open, do what you want with your other cards. As long as you keep that one, then your membership rewards are always there. You just never have to worry about it at all. But there's a big downside to how Amex does it. Do you want to, you know what I'm talking about? Well, I, I, the first thing that comes to my mind anyway, is you can't share them with anybody.

You can't send them to another person. That's, that's the big issue. So you can't combine them with a player two in your household. No. And there's no way to send those points to somebody else, which becomes an issue sometimes when you want to be able to put those points together in one loyalty account. And also when you want to be able to have the points together to be able to use them if you're paying for flights or that sort of thing through Amex Travel, or you want

to be able to take advantage of the benefits, for example, on a business platinum card where you can get a rebate when you're using points to book business or first class flights, you might have points in your account and points on a spouse's account and want to put them together, but you can't. Now, you can for loyalty programs, though. Loyalty programs is workaround. What you can do with loyalty programs is add your spouse or your spouse can add you as an employee to a business card or as an authorized user to a consumer card. And then 60 days later, I think they now have a, I think it's 60 days or might be 90 days waiting period before then you can move the points to the authorized users loyalty program from from your account so you can't that's sort of a partial workaround and if you're doing that just for fun i'd recommend doing it

on the business card side just because then there's no issue of the authorized user card showing up on a credit report and looking like another card that's adding to 524 and all that stuff that just gets messy it's not the end of the world if it happens but it's just messy on the and it only happens on the personal side with amex so so that's that's the the partial work around who are we missing city so city is a hybrid of these two sort of yeah city to look at it city starts off keeping the points with your card sort of what they do what they do is they have when you get when you get your let's say your your Citi Premier card, you have your Citi Premier account, but then you automatically also have a Thank You Rewards account with a Thank You Rewards number that you would never know. Makes it so customer-friendly.

How to find, yeah. User-friendly. It's very convoluted. But you have those, and most of the time, it doesn't matter. The fact that there's a separate account with a separate number doesn't really matter. You log into your Citi account, you click on rewards and you're in the thank you portal thingy and you can redeem your points from there. So it's fairly seamless as far as that all goes. But what happens is when you get another card, then you sign up for a rewards plus card. Then when, if you, if, if all of your

personal information is the same on those two accounts, the premier and the rewards plus, when you, when you click over to your thank you account, a thing will pop up asking if you want to combine your thank you accounts into, into one pooled together account. And at that point, it becomes a little bit more like Amex where it's per person rather than per account. But what's really, really weird about it, so you see all the points together. When you redeem points, it's as if they're,

it seems seamless. You can't tell which cards' points you're redeeming from. But here's where it gets crazy. If you then cancel your Premier card, you'll lose all the points that were earned on the premier card even though they're all lumped together in that one pool with the rewards plus points it's crazy it is crazy system so you can you can share your points with others the way you can with capital one with Capital One, but there is 100K per year limit to that. But there's also an expiry. Once you share with someone else, the points expire after a few months. So only share them when they're about to be used.

What a crazy, complicated system. It is. It's ridiculous. And then, so, what it comes down to is you can't ever cancel a Citi thank you card. It's the truth. It sounds crazy saying that, but it's true. You can't because you have no idea which points were earned with that card probably or how many of your pile of points were from that card. So, canceling it could be costly. Yeah, I mean, you could call Citi

and ask to speak to the thank you department and find out. And hope that they're right. I think they should be able to tell you how many points are on that card. And if there's zero, then you could cancel. But most of the time, there's probably some points on there.

And so what I've always recommended is, so downgrade to a no-fee thank you card instead of canceling your card. And so I now have like seven different thank you cards because over the years this keeps happening. And it used to be great because Citi used to be great about retention offers. I would call up to say,

I want to cancel a card, even a no fee card, and they would list all these great retention offers to keep me. And so then I would say, okay, and how about this other card? And then they would read me the offers for that one. I'd pick the best offer. Of course, that sounds great. But on the other hand, it keeps you looped in because then you've earned all these bonus points on that card. So now you've got to get yeah i'm stuck problem you're stuck

it's just a never-ending spiral because you've got all these points now that you earned from this card you can't possibly cancel it so yeah so but so there is a way anyway as greg is saying in order to be able to keep the points alive you just want to be able to downgrade and hang on to one of those downgraded cards forever because that's what you'll have to do in order to know that you've got all your points together. And you have to kind of plan it out and be careful in terms of when you transfer and how much you transfer. Now, the 100,000 limit, is that per calendar year or per rolling 12 months? Do you know? I think it's calendar year. I've heard conflicting things about whether it's really enforced, but I think the last thing

we've heard from readers is that it is enforced, but I don't remember for sure. Yeah, I'm not positive either, but that might be something that would come into play in your strategy then in terms of when you want to transfer them at the end of the year so that you have them to be able to use. And then when you put together a couple hundred thousand, if you've got a big pile of points, like Greg recently wrote about having, and you need to be able to move move them over to someone else and you might strategically think about when you're going to move them because they do expire so quickly. So, you know, if he if he transfers over some now and then some six months from now and he forgets to use the first pile that he transferred over, then it just gets really messy. So I just I would never move them without a very immediate plan for what to do with them,

you know? So if the plan was to transfer them to a loyalty program, I would just do that right away. There's, I don't see any reason that you wouldn't transfer them sitting around. Right. Right. So after the three totally different systems,

so I shouldn't say totally different, three quite different systems anyway. So, you know, it pays to educate yourself and learn a little bit about how those points work because they don't work the same way with each bank. Exactly. Exactly. All right. So anything else? I think that just about wraps us up for this week. So, uh, yeah, yeah, we're, we're, we've been on here. So we, uh, you know, we always appreciate having you guys out there and check out the blog, the frequent miler.com. You'll find all the latest great tips and things. We just wrote about a couple of good deals today. You might

want to check out. So again, that's T H E frequent miler.com. You can also find us of course, on Twitter at frequent miler. You'll find me at Nick at FM. You can find find us, of course, on Twitter at FrequentMiler. You'll find me at Nick at FM. You can find our YouTube channel under the name FrequentMiler also. And then, of course, on Facebook, we have the FrequentMiler Facebook page. And if you search FrequentMiler Insiders, you will find our Facebook group where you can connect with other readers, ask and answer questions. It's a great resource to be able to get help from other people who are in the know in terms of rewards and deals.

And then, of course, you can find this podcast. So if you're watching us on Facebook or on YouTube, and you'd prefer to listen to it in podcast form, you'll find links to be able to download this on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, for the web, Google, etc. That'll all be in our week in review post every Saturday morning. So this particular one will publish Saturday, November 23rd, 2019. So you can find us there, download it, listen to us on the commute. Always appreciate your feedback. Maybe if you leave us some feedback, you could end up in the reader feedback segment next week. So there's a little incentive to let us know what you think. We sure do. So Nick, while the credits are rolling, we'll get our credit guy to roll the credits,

but did I do better with the ums? Do you know? You know, I stopped keeping track, but no. You stopped keeping track. You're the numbers guy. Lost count at 13. No, I think we did, but we'll definitely be watching for that.

I'm going to have to give that a listen. I'm going to ask David out there who sent the message. I want you to send another message to us. Let me know, did I suck less this week? Am I improving? Because I'm joking a lot about it, but I really do actually appreciate the feedback. And I love the idea of having something to work on and get better at this. I find doing these really fun. And if I could get better at it,

that's great. I want it to be great for everybody to listen to. And I certainly don't want it to be as distracting and annoying for David. For sure. For sure. And on that note, we do appreciate your feedback. We like to respond to comments. If you have questions, comments, suggestions, we always love to hear from readers. So feel free to reach out and let us know. So thank you very much, Dave. And thank you everybody else who's out there listening, giving us your feedback, participating in discussion. We always love having you guys here. So thank you all very much. Thank you, Greg thank you nick and uh for those listening instead of watching the credits have finished rolling and so we're gonna say goodbye thank you very much guys take care