Frequent Miler on the Air - Amex +4: Deal of the year? (600K from one card!) | Ep125 | 11-20-21

Episode Date: November 20, 2021

The Amex +4 referral offer stacks on top of existing bonus categories to make for some great deals. How can you trigger this deal easily and what are some good ways to maximize it? We discuss everything you need to know. 00:39 Giant Mailbag https://frequentmiler.com/10-years-of-frequent-miler/ https://frequentmiler.com/40kfaraway-stretching-the-boundaries-of-possibility/ 7:51 What crazy thing did Greg the Frequent Miler do this week? 13:27 Mattress running the numbers: Is it worth indirectly buying Membership Rewards points for 0.9c per point? https://frequentmiler.com/rakuten-earn-90-90x-on-lifelock-stack-with-20-from-lifelock-chase-offer/ 19:12 Main Event: Is the Amex +4 referral deal the deal of the year? https://frequentmiler.com/new-amex-referral-offer-get-4x-on-up-to-25k-spend-when-you-refer-a-friend/ https://frequentmiler.com/amxplat/ https://frequentmiler.com/maximizing-value-from-amex-multi-referrals/ 43:17 Question of the Week: Is the Rewards+ a good downgrade option from Citi Premier? Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City 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 is the Amex Plus 4 deal. The deal of the year.

Hmm. Hmm. Is it the plus 4? What is that? Is it a good deal? There's a lot to talk about. How do you leverage it? Right. And what are we even talking about? Of course, we'll get into that. I am on the road, but I brought my giant mailbag with me, of course. Oh, very good. So it's gone halfway around the world. I mean, if it's gone to the Maldives, it's got to go to places like Denver, right? One of my favorite moments from our trip to the Maldives was the woman at the La Meridian Maldives asking if she could carry my giant mailbag. It was so funny. I had the tone

too. When she looked at it, she's like, can I carry your giant mailbag? Right. And for those who don't know that, my bag literally says giant mailbag on the side of it. So that's where that came from. All right. So this one, so I posted this week about the 10 year anniversary of Frequent Miler, which I had totally forgotten about. It came and went in September. We were clinking glasses in the Maldives and we didn't even know what we were raising a glass to. But congratulations. I mean, that's exciting.

That's big. 10 years. I mean, a lot of people would like to be able to blog and a lot of people try it and a lot of people don't do it for 10 years. So congratulations. Right. And only an elderly man like me can forget. Right. Exactly. A, elderly enough to have had a blog for 10 years and then B, to have forgotten the anniversary altogether. Just punching the retirement ticket here, Craig. Oh, it's ridiculous. But it's funny because the moment that we just described where she asked if she could carry my giant mailbag, that was literally the 10-year anniversary day. We arrived at La Meridian in about, you know, congratulations, but more like sort of heartwarming talking about how much they have enjoyed Frequent Miler all these years and everything.

So it was tough. I picked one comment to use for the giant mailbag, but I do encourage people. There's a lot of great comments in there. So if you get a chance, find that post and, and, uh, scroll down to the comments and just check them out. It's, it's, it's really nice. Um, so I picked one from Steve S but it was very long. Um, so I, I kind of chopped it up a little bit to make it shorter. It's still fairly long. So this is giant mail, but, um, yeah, you know, I took out the sort of nuggets that I enjoyed from his, from his comment. Um, he wrote I'm in Zanzibar right now. Thanks to you, your post on awesome suites, bookable with Hyatt park Hyatt Zanzibar boom. So that's where

he is now, presumably in the presidential suite, which I'd written about, or there was another one. I can't remember the name of that was also ginormous and amazing looking. So he's, he's in one of those two. Not a bad place to be Steve. I'm jealous. I mean, I've definitely thought about trying to make Zanzibar happen also for the, the guck trip, by the way. Yeah. I was kind of, I was kind of hoping that we might, but you know, the Maldives was not a bad constellation. No, not bad. I think I would choose it over Zandervarten. And he says, I started reading your blog one time a week, right around the Redbird days.

And if you don't know what Redbird is, go read that post I just referred to, because I went through the 10 years at the sort of highlights. And he says, and now I read it multiple times a day. Multiple times a day, I'm looking for what crazy thing did Frequent Myler post? So he's going back and back and that's kind of fun. Steve, I hope you know you could just subscribe to our instant emails and keep checking. No, stop it. Stop it, Greg. Keep checking. Keep checking. We get like a half a penny every time you check. So I mean, those are worth it. Those shiny pennies are exciting things. Right, right, right. And then he goes on to say, you have no idea and I can't even convey what amazing adventures I've been on

with my wife. Thanks to you all. An example of your influence. Nick's post about 40K to far away regarding exploring boundaries and appreciating what's possible is now a monthly read with a calendar invite to remind me to push boundaries, never settle, but instead go for what's possible. That's fantastic. I saw that comment and I was like, oh, that's amazing. I hadn't read that post myself in a long time, but it felt really good to hear that. So thank you very much. And I copied out, like you had a quote from Ed Pizzarello, who was on a, I guess a podcast or something where he said, it's amazing to me what seems reasonable when we don't understand what's possible. on all that and the excitement of stretching the boundaries of what you previously thought was unreasonable, really. And it all becomes possible thanks to points, miles, elite status, status matching, all kinds of things that we can do thanks to this amazing, amazing hobby. Totally true. And I mean, Steve at the Park Hyatt Zanzibar there, I mean, that's what

an example of that, right? Of who would ever think that the presidential suite at some swanky place in Zanzibar that I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that the majority of people I know have never heard of Zanzibar. And then if they knew where it was, if they saw it on a map, they'd be like, oh, wow. Yeah. There's just no way to do that. Right. But incredible. And this world, you can, you can hear about that and be like, oh, you know what? I'm going to go there. Right. Right. And then if you saw the suite, it's like something like 3000 square feet with a huge posh dining room with artwork on the walls and everything. You know, if you saw that and said, you know, you could stay here for like really cheap. Right. I mean, really cheap on points. It's no cost at all cash wise.

It's just hard to believe, but it's all true. Absolutely. Fun stuff. Thank you very much. Thanks for picking that one. I like that one quite a bit. And I totally agree with Greg.

It's worth reading the comments. I think, you know, obviously for us, it was fun because there were a lot of very complimentary things. But, you know, what stood out to me was that, you know, the internet is a place where everybody hides behind their anonymity. And so people are honest and sometimes critical.

And in this case, it was just amazing to see the outpouring of positive feedback and the lack of criticism there, which I think says a lot about what you've built and the way that people respect it, that people find the value in it. So congratulations to you and us. Well, thank you. And yeah. And every, and every bit also what you've, you've helped build, you're coming up on your five-year anniversary. Oh my goodness. Yes. No, no, I'm getting old. Hopefully we won't forget that in January. We'll see. We'll have to dig into the archives and figure out the day that is your five year anniversary, but it is in January. So look forward to that. All right. All right. So then what crazy thing did Greg, the frequent miler do this week? Yeah. So we finally got a referral to the X1 card that actually works.

And Nick saw it first and actually tried to do it. But currently they only allow those with iPhones to sign up. Crazy. Come on, X1. We don't all use iPhones. That's a crazy thing that X1 did. The crazy thing I did is I signed up for the thing. There's a lot of bad reasons for signing up for it.

Or a lot of reasons that are, yeah, not to, exactly. The reasons why it's a bad idea. So let's start listing them off. Why was this such a crazy bad thing? Well, I mean, two big ones, I think. One is that I think we talked about in a previous episode that people are getting shut down for nothing. We talked about a guy who had one purchase and got shut down. A legit purchase, like a laptop. He wasn't buying anything crazy. He wasn't buying drugs or gift cards or whatever else. He was buying a laptop. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Part of the process of getting approved is you link a bank account to prove your your salary, basically. And I don't know that they really dig through it for salary or whatever.

But anyway, there's a rumor going around that they're using that connection to your bank to figure out whether you do things like manufacture spend and whatnot, and then have been shutting people down for that. I have no idea if that's true or not, but that's the rumor swirling around you know, not that I necessarily did any manufactured spend or much with this particular bank, but you know, the rumors even go so far to say they're, they're somehow looking at other banks. I don't, I'm very skeptical about that. I don't, I don't see how that's possible. I mean, I had to approve with a, you know, approve through this bank with a text message

from the bank with a code and all that. So I don't know how they'd get into other ones, but who knows? Who knows how this all works behind the scenes? Some people do, I'm sure. Not me. The other reason it's crazy is if this appears on my credit report, then that's going to add one to my 524 count, which is, you know, 524 is Chase's rule saying you are not going to get approved for a new card if you've opened five new accounts in the past two years, past 24 months. Well, it's no big deal because you've surely opened more accounts than that, right, Greg? You would think so. But most of the new ones are business cards, which do not appear on my credit report. So we're not counted in 524. And I am before, before the X1 card shows up on my credit report. Anyway, I'm at 424.

And, and, and there's two chase cards. I want one is the Hyatt business card. Again, it's not actually one that I am dying to get, but I've written about how if you like to kind of manufacture Hyatt globalist status, and if you have the Hyatt personal card, which I do, that it makes sense to have both. There's sort of a minor win there. It's not a huge win. So it wouldn't be the end of the world if I don't get this, but it'd be a win. And of course the welcome bonus would be a win. But the other one is these rumors of this new ink business, platinum, premium, whatever pickle card that that may be coming out would they stop with the peas come on chase like come up with something new right why is everything

a premier a preferred a well i don't even know what they all are why why wouldn't they just go with reserve make it match the the sapphire side i'm hoping they already i'm hoping they have the ink business preferred and you know that matches sapphire preferred so why not and the ink business unlimited reserve yeah exactly yeah exactly exactly no totally i hope that that's what they're doing i hope that the rumors are totally wrong about the name because i hate the name i hate that okay but anyway although if it's a great if it's a great, we don't know anything about it yet, but, but if it's a great card, then obviously I'm going to really want it. And so it would be, it'd be sad if, if the X one pushes me over. But maybe I don't have to worry about it. Cause maybe I'll get shut down before it ever appears on my credit report and maybe it'll never go there. So, I mean, let's just run the numbers here real quick. So, so far on that, on that 424 account, two of the accounts that I can think of were questionable decisions because your Capital One count got shut down right away, right? So that's

one of those four. And then now you're going to have X1. If you end up with two cards on your 524 account that totally shut you out of this ink business. Oh, boy. Premier preferred, whatever it is. That's going to be a horrible story right there. Yeah. Well, at least we've got a story. Yes.

Thanks for being the data point we all want to see. Right, right, right, right. All right. And hopefully my wife will be able to sign up for the ink, platinum, whatever. Right. All right. We can all hope. Okay. So then we've talked about that.

Let's talk about mattress running the numbers. So this week for mattress running the numbers, we've got something that has nothing to do with a mattress, but it does have to do with numbers. So we had a deal that we've published twice in the last couple of weeks. It's one of these deals that comes and goes now and then, usually only around this time of year. And I am betting it's going to come back

in the next week or two. So if you're listening to this shortly after publication, you can watch out for this. So the deal is LifeLock through Rakuten. So the Rakuten shopping portal, if you don't know, you can earn cash back through it. Or if you have a card that earns MX membership rewards points, you can choose to instead earn membership rewards points. And the way that works for those unfamiliar is just whatever the percentage is, it's that many points. So if it's 10% back, you get 10 membership rewards points back, which if you value membership rewards points at more than a cent each is a better deal. So anyway, they've offered a couple of times recently, 90% cash back on LifeLock. So that turns into 90 Amex membership rewards points per dollar spent. And if you value that at anything more than a cent, then that's basically getting your money

back, right? Sort of in a sense, anyway, on the deal. So even if you don't value the LifeLock membership, you might be tempted to buy one of the more expensive ones in order to generate easy membership rewards points. There also happens to be an Amex offer for a percentage back on LifeLock. And there have been Chase offers now. And then actually, I think the Amex offer right now is for a percentage back on Norton, but Norton owns LifeLock these days. So people have said that that has triggered the offer so far. So in the end, without getting into all the gory details and all the numbers, it's an opportunity to buy membership rewards points for less than a penny a point, about nine tenths of a cent per point is what the cost comes out to be. So my question for you here is,

if this happens again, and by the way, I should mention that around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, it usually increases usually to 100% back. So it'll be 100 points per dollar spent. I am betting sometime between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And you'll want to be subscribed to instant email alerts if you want to find out because it'll only be valid that day usually. So by the next morning, if you're only on the daily emails, it'll probably be done by the time you get the email the next morning. So you want to get on instant if you want to know about this deal. So when it goes up to a hundred, it's even a little bit better, but at nine tenths of a cent per point, is it worth buying a LifeLock membership, even if you don't value it all just to buy the MX membership rewards points? What do you think?

Well, let's first get out of the way that if you do value LifeLock at all, if you want it, then that's obviously a fantastic deal. I mean, you're getting close to a hundred percent back and so might as well do it. And so if you want to lock up your life, then that's great. I was going to say that if you had an immediate need for the points, then, you know, then it really makes sense. But these racketing things don't pay out immediately. They pay out like something like once every three months. The next payout is February 15th. So, so it's not really a play if you need something immediately. And so what would the experience be? So it's not just a matter of buying the points cheaply. You're also signing up for this thing that is going to lock up your credit reports and I don't know what else. Right. And, and, um, if you don't want that to happen, um, there's, there, there's some, there's some work involved

in making, in making sure that doesn't happen. And also in, um, canceling the subscription, right. I'm assuming you're, you're signing up for an annual subscription. You are. Yeah. So you don't want it to auto renew. And so you have to cancel it at some point. Yep. Yep. So there's definitely some headache there. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, buying membership rewards points that cheaply, I'd say in general is a good deal. You know, if you are pretty sure you're going to use them for high value. There are so many good opportunities, though, to get membership rewards these days. I mean, we've talked endlessly about it and we're going to talk more about it today that I wouldn't do it. Yeah. Me either.

Me either. It doesn't excite me right now with the plus four opportunity we're going to talk about. I'm just not interested in buying membership rewards points, even at nine tenths of a cent per point, because I can pick up so many of them so easily. Now I will say if you have the Schwab platinumab Platinum, I guess the nice thing is that you know you can cash those points out for 1.1 cent a point. So you know it'll become a profitable deal for you. However, it's such a small margin that I, like I said, I probably wouldn't do it unless you're really desperate for the points three months from now, which is kind of...

Right, right. It's hard to imagine that scenario. But not impossible. I mean, you can get a good deal because you can, I think at the highest level, I worked it out. You can end up with like, I don't know, 45,000, 47,000 points at a cost of about nine-tenths of a cent per point. And that's a decent number of points. I mean, you could potentially get a business class ticket somewhere, an international business class ticket with that number of points, depending on your situation, a lot of ins and outs there. Well, especially with transfer bonuses that they frequently run as well. Right. So you could do very well with that. It's not necessarily that it's a bad deal. It's just that, man, MX is handing out points like candy right now.

Right. Right. So let's talk about that candy then, right? So my verdict here was don't do the lifelike thing, probably, because instead you want to do the plus four offer. Let's get into the main event. Yeah, the main event. Yeah. So Amex, I mean, this has, it's November while we're recording this. At the end of the month, this deal is no longer going to be available to trigger it. So once you trigger it, you have it in place for three months. So you need to trigger it before then.

So the deal is this. Most Amex cards that earn membership rewards points have this referral offer, refer a friend offer, where if you refer a friend successfully, you get an additional four points per dollar for all spend for up to $25,000 spend for three months. And so for example, if you have a card that just for most spend earns one point per dollar, then you're earning five points per dollar everywhere, everywhere on $25,000 spend. If you have the Blue Business Plus card, which earns two points per dollar everywhere on up to 50K spend per year, and you still have 25K of that spend available, then you could get six points per dollar everywhere.

And in fact, even if you're close to hitting your 50 K threshold, um, to the extent that this rolls into January, your, your three months, you can, you know, start then the spend and get six points per dollar and so on. So like Amex gold card, you can, that has the four point per dollar categories. You can get eight points per dollar in those categories. And that's, that's worth highlighting because I think that's something that a lot of people aren't clear on that this stacks on top of existing bonus categories. So yeah, you're talking about eight points per dollar at restaurants and eight points per dollar at supermarkets on the gold card for three months on up to $25,000 spend, which like you said,

it runs into January. So even if you've hit the cap on that, on the grocery on that card for this year, and I mean, if you could do it quickly in the beginning of next year, then you're talking about eight points per dollar on up to $25,000 of the grocery store. It's nuts, it's nuts. It is, it is totally nuts.

Now, I think you should give a summary of how you're taking that deal of the year and combining it with probably the real deal of the year to make an outrageous fortune in membership rewards. Can you give us an overview of that? platinum offer. And so we always refer to it as the Rezzy platinum offer because it's through this website, Rezzy, which is a restaurant reservation website. Why do they have the best platinum card offer out there? I don't know, but it's just the vanilla platinum, the regular vanilla platinum. We refer to the vanilla as the general generic Amex platinum card. The one that's not co-branded with another company. So it's not like branded the Rezzy Platinum Card. It's like the offer that's available through Rezzy. So if you go to our Amex Platinum Card page, you'll see the link to Rezzy and the offer, which we've talked about a number of times already. And if you

haven't been listening, you should listen up now. It is 125,000 points after 6K spend in the first six months. But then on top of that, it's 15 points per dollar at US small businesses and at restaurants worldwide. And so the deal here is I opened up that card just the other day and I generated a referral link and I referred somebody or actually I haven't yet referred somebody, but I will refer somebody to a new Amex card. And when I do, I'll get four extra points per dollar. That's on top of the 15. So we're talking, I can earn 19X on up to $25,000 spent in the next three months

at restaurants and US small businesses. So, I mean, hello, 19X, 19X. I mean, and a lot of people might be like, well, how are you going to spend that much on those categories? And I've often said there's so many, it's going to be eating out at McDonald's an awful lot to use up the $25,000 budget. That is a lot of supersized value meals. Yeah.

So reminds me of a time when we were, we were abroad somewhere at a restaurant in Hong Kong and Kong and a gentleman next to me must have been going through a divorce and his wife is moving to the U.S. with their kid. And he was talking about his kid was going to grow up drinking these 48 ounce colas. Yeah, a lot of supersized colas. So anyway, no, no, that's not what I'm going to do. I'm going to do it all in one shot, I hope anyway. So my plan is to buy a minivan because I you know, we're parents, we got two kids. Greg told me like four years ago that I should buy a minivan. And I was like, No, no, we don't want a minivan. We want like a, you know, svelte looking SUV. We want something that looks cooler than that. And now

we've realized no, Greg's advice is usually on. So we really needed that minivan after all. And now we've realized, no, Greg's advice is usually on. So we really needed that minivan after all. And, you know, I was going to hold out because now is not a great time to buy a car. Prices are high. They're hard to find, blah, blah, blah. But the thing is, most dealerships are small businesses. And it might not look that way because you see Toyota or Chevy, but they're not owned by Toyota or Chevy. They're owned by a local company. So it's usually going to code as a small business, I think. I mean, certainly if you look at the Amex small business map, which by the way, is not the be all and end all. There's lots of places that are small businesses

that are not on that map. So don't be offended by that. But if you look at it, you'll see lots of dealerships have the shop small designation right there on the Amex map. So my plan is to find a dealership that will let me put the entire purchase price of the car on my platinum card, because we'll probably buy a minivan that's in the $25,000 range. And so 25,000 at 19X, we're talking six between the signup bonus and that 19X, we're talking 600,000 membership rewards points I

could earn. Now I know a lot of people are saying that's going to be hard and it might be. And a lot of people are saying, oh, but the dealer is going to charge you more if you put the whole thing on their credit card. I don't care. It's 600,000 points, right? I mean, like charge me two or 3% more. That's totally fine for the 600,000 points, right? Exactly. Yes. Yes. i have faith that you're you're gonna find a dealer who will let you do that the the the sort of less uh faith is is finding a car you want that's actually available uh in the in the time frame that you have that you have in order to uh spend the the 25 000 you're on a three month clock clock. Right. And I haven't yet done the referral.

Well, it's three months for the plus four. Exactly. Which, I mean, even if it didn't end up fitting in the plus four, even at the 15X, I mean, that would still be nutso and more than cover whatever cost I pay in terms of the dealer letting me use the card. And there are some dealers that I wrote about in a post this week that there are some dealers that at least through the Amex auto purchasing program, historically, they used to send an email that would say how much the dealer would take on a card. And there were some dealers that I came across that said you could put the entire purchase price of the car on a card. So it's not unheard of. Other people have done it. It's not easy. It's not necessarily every dealership is going to do that, but I'm willing to hunt. And if I have to fly somewhere and use a couple thousand miles to fly somewhere to pick up 600,000

points and a new car, totally fine. Right. Right. Now, so that's awesome. But let's talk about, I guess, two aspects of the plus four thing. One is what's a good way to trigger it. So let's say you have a card and you want to get in on this plus four deal. Let's say you've got the gold card we talked about before, and you don't know anyone who wants a gold card. So how do you trigger the plus four? Well, of course, you have to remember, first of all, that you can refer to almost any Amex card. So if you got the Amex Gold, for instance, you can send me your referral link and I can sign up for almost any Amex card through your referral link and you will get your plus four. You'll get your bonus on the gold card and I get my new Amex card.

And I say almost there are a couple of limits there. But for instance, we wanted to do exactly that in my household. I wanted to make sure that my wife's gold card got plus four at restaurants and at US supermarkets. So I said, you know what, let me look through the cards and see what I can open. And I opened a business green rewards card, not because the card is any good. It stinks. It's probably the worst membership rewards earning card there is, but it's got a waived annual fee the first year, $95 in years after that. I'd never had the signup bonus before. So it was going to cost me absolutely zero to open that card.

And it doesn't, isn't going to add to 524 because it's a business card. So I opened up the green business rewards card through my wife. Was there any kind of signup bonus on that? Yeah, 25,000 after 3000 spent. So that's fine. And then as I wrote about in the post this week, after I opened it a couple of days later, I got an offer to add up to five authorized users and get 20,000 points for each one after they spend $4,000 on the card. And if I stack that with a plus four, if I refer my wife to, I don't know, business green or something else

that she hasn't had. And she opens it. Then actually, as I wrote about in the post, the spend on that card will end up being 10 X everywhere for the first three months, which is nice. But anyway, that's another thing. You want to read more about that. You can read more about it in the post. I'm going to turn that business green card into a 240,000 point offer. But backing up, that was an easy way without any fee to do that. And that's not necessarily the best one. So I mean, what would you do if you wanted to trigger the plus four like that? Yeah, no, I mean, I think the business green is a fantastic suggestion. It also has the advantage of being a charge card instead of a credit card. And that's an advantage

with Amex because Amex has a five credit card limit. So if you have five or more credit cards, it's possible to have more, but it's just not possible to get another one if you have five or more. But you can get as many of these charge or pay over time cards as they're calling them now as they'll approve. So I think that's a great suggestion. Something else that occurred to me though, is that people like my son has been in Amex pop-up prison. And what that is, is where you go to apply for an Amex card and there's two types of pop-ups. One is where you've had the card before, and it tells you you're not going to get a bonus because you've had the card before. That's not

what I'm talking about. That's a helpful pop-up that tells you, hey, you shouldn't be applying for this card. Great. The other pop-up though is the one where Amex is basically telling you, hey, we know you're not a profitable customer because you keep opening credit cards for the bonus and canceling them, which is totally true, legitimate for my son's case. You're right. They're right. I don't blame them for that.

It's a smart business decision to say, if you proceed with this application, you're not going to get a bonus, right? That doesn't mean you're not going to get the card at all. So it occurred to me in my son's case that if he wants to, in the future, get in on, for example, an upgrade offer from the Hilton no fee card to a Hilton surpass or aspire, I could refer him to the Hilton no-fee card. He could sign up. Yes, he loses out on getting a bonus because he gets the pop-up, but it puts him in place for these other things, including things like people getting that offer, spend $8,000 and get a free Hilton night. It would make him theoretically eligible for those type of offers. And so, um, so that's like another, another idea I had is, is, is, you know, if you've been avoiding cards because you, you are a friend of family members in pop-up

prison, um, maybe you think of it as like, well, the welcome bonus is, is the refers welcome bonus, the plus four thing, rather than the person getting the card. And then it puts the person in who's getting the card in position to have a card that they want, hopefully. Right. And, and, you know, so even if you look at this, if like, for example, if I had gotten the pop-up on the business screen rewards cards, I mean, it was a card I haven't had before, but even if I had had it before, and it told me you're not going to get the bonus because you had it before again, like you said, it doesn't mean I can't open it.

So I could have still opened it. I wouldn't have gotten a signup bonus, but my wife, upon my approval, would have still gotten her plus four. So, I mean, it's a great way to leverage it. And I mean, there's other fee free cards to other fee free business cards. If you're willing to open business cards, the blue business plus or the blue business cash. Those are potentially good options. Like Greg said, part of the advantage of the green, the business green is that it's a charge card. But if you don't yet have the Blue Business Plus, I mean, this just enhances the welcome offer on that or the Blue Business Cash either way.

Yeah. And the Blue Business Plus, especially just great, great card to have no annual fee. And as long as you have it open, it earns membership rewards points. As long as you have it open, if you cancel other cards that you earn membership rewards points on, you won't lose those points because with Amex, you only have to have one membership rewards card open. So it's a great way to sort of free yourself. So when the annual fee comes due for your platinum card, $695. And you're like, Oh, I don't know. I don't know if I really want to spend that much. Totally legitimate. Um, you, you could just cancel without worrying that you're going to lose those points because, um, you have, you have the fee free, um, membership rewards card open. Right. Right. Absolutely. So, I mean, that's a good reason too. And part of the reason

why this is such a good potential deal for people who are making the referrals is you can earn a lot of points. And if you have enough spend to do, you can earn a lot of points from this. And typically, Amex referrals are limited to earning 55,000 points per year. Now, most people probably don't have to worry about that because they probably aren't referring enough people to hit the 55,000 cap. But in this case, you can refer one person and earn far more than 55,000 points, depending on what you have to do. Yeah, exactly. You can end up with 100,000. You can earn up to 100,000. And whereas with the 55,000 cap, when you're getting points for each referral, you'll receive a tax form in the mail for that. You'll receive a 1099. I'm assuming that you probably won't get a 1099 for this because it's a rebate on spend, right? Jim Collison, MD, PhD

Exactly. I'm confident you won't get a 1099 and that's great. So I actually really prefer this style for a number of reasons, like you said, and the fact that people can do so well with just one referral as long as they have high spend that they can do. Speaking of high spend, that's the other thing I want to talk about. So yeah, I mean, is that really helpful though? Because I mean, you do have to spend, if I did the math right, you have to spend, so the usual cap is 55,000 points on referrals. So you'd have to spend 13,750 to exceed that. You wouldn't have to spend very much though. I mean, normally most cards, I don't know, they offer what 15,000 point bonuses for referrals on average. I mean, it varies a little bit, but I mean, that's only like 3750 spend. If you spend more than $3,750, you'd get probably a

better bonus than whenever you'd normally get for referring people. It depends a little bit because there are some bonuses that are better, but I mean, it's still not a small amount of money. So it makes sense here. Yeah. So let's talk about some ways you could spend money on Amex cards that are not just your everyday spend. So one example is the plastic bill pay service. So unfortunately, it doesn't let you pay all kinds of bills. You can't pay your mortgage with an Amex card, but there are a number of types of things you can pay. If you have education expenses, you have daycare expenses, I don't know. There's a lot you can pay using an Amex card, but it costs 2.85% to do that. So the question is, if you're earning an additional four points per dollar above what

the card normally earns, is it worth paying 2.85% to generate extra spend that you wouldn't have spent otherwise on that card? I mean, yeah. Right. And you know, at that point, then you're paying essentially. So assuming you're using a card that has a one X base rate, so you're earning five X total, you're paying well, I mean, less than six tenths of a cent per MX point, basically. I mean, then we're getting into territory where I'm like, okay, this is why the life lock thing doesn't excite me. Cause I'm like,

eh, nine tenths of a cent, six tenths of a cent. Okay. You know, 0.57 is what that comes out to. And if you had the blue business plus you're using that, you know, where you're actually earning six, is it right? So two, eight, five, two, eight by six was it that's less than half a cent per point. So, I mean, that's potentially pretty good. I mean, I think that's great. And there's plenty of situations. If you have a contractor come to your house to do some work, you repair a person, often, at least often this has happened to me, where if I ask about paying with a credit card, they'll say,

yeah, but I'm going to have to charge you a 3% fee. Great. 3% in this situation, you're doing so much better. So even if you think of it, one easy way sort of mathematically to just think about it is that imagine the plus four is like an extra 4%. So paying 3%, you're still getting an extra one percent over what the card normally earns. Right. So, you know, you're still ahead. You're earning. Right. Right. Right. Right. So, yeah, I would, you know, I'd absolutely do that. Paying your taxes. Taxes cost about two percent to pay with a credit card. No brainer, I think. No brainer. And great timing. Right. I mean,

what fantastic timing that this is a great year. Fourth quarter estimated taxes are due soon. You'll probably, I mean, if you did the referral towards the end of this month, what, December, January, February, I mean, you'd be right about the time where you could be doing your taxes and figure out if you owe taxes, if you're the type of person who owes taxes. I mean, it's almost a no brainer because you make that big payment and earn tons of points. I mean, at least five points per dollar spent for 2% fee. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And another thing to think about is if there are local businesses that you frequent, especially if you're like Nick doing both this small business deal and the plus four, look for them to have gift card deals around this time of year. A lot of my local businesses, in my area, I mean, not ones I own, do these kind of deals where they give you an extra,

if you buy a $200 gift card, they'll give you an extra $20 bonus gift card or whatever. And that's going to, in most cases, trigger both a small business thing. And, and of course, it's just more spend. It's sort of, it's sort of like prepaying for things that you're going to spend anyway in the future is, is the way I think about that. Which is worth it when you're looking at, I mean, especially if you're looking at that platinum card, which I mean, the resi offer, that's just insanity. 19X, it doesn't, I mean, we're talking about maxing it out for 600,000 points, but forget about that for a second. You don't have to max that out for that to come out to be worth well more than the $695 annual fee on the card. I mean,

yes, the platinum card has a high annual fee, but as I wrote about in the post, if you're opening it up now, you can do pretty well in terms of the number of benefits that you'll be able to take advantage of because you can take advantage of 2021 calendar year benefits and 2022 calendar year benefits, at least maybe even January 2023 before you have to decide whether or not to pay the annual fee again. So between the welcome bonus and this potential to 19X, if you refer somebody else, I mean, far, value far exceeds the cost of the annual fee on that card. Absolutely. Absolutely. So are we missing any good ways of spending with your Amex card? You know, taxes were one of the first things that came to my mind because of the time. I mean, there's lots of other things I'm sure you could prepay. I'm sure you could prepay different utilities and things like that. And by the way, if you heard Greg's comment about check out if your local businesses have a gift card deal and you're like, oh, but Amex doesn't like gift cards. I think that'll be a lot different.

I think that Amex is known to kind of crack down on people spending towards a welcome bonus that are very obviously buying like Visa gift cards. I think if you're buying a gift card at a local merchant, A, it's unlikely they're going to know it's a gift card. And B, if they do, that's not probably the type of activity they're looking for unless you're buying 25,000 worth of those. That's a really good point. Okay. So actually getting back to a previous topic about finding people to refer, why can't I just refer myself to a new card? That's a bad idea, Greg, because Amex might claw those points back. So yeah, that used to be a thing. People used to do that. And then Amex decided on a whim one day that they didn't like that anymore. And they started clawing back all the points, right?

Right, right. Which makes a lot of sense that they don't like it. I mean, it'd be nice if they had a pop-up or something basically saying, hey, you referred yourself. That's dumb. Why would we give you a bonus for referring yourself? But they allow you to go through with the application, unfortunately. But, but so, so don't refer yourself. You can't do that. MX is not gonna, not gonna let you, or they're going to take the points away if you do that. But what about my wife? I mean, I explained how my wife referred me to the business green. Is that okay to refer a spouse? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, at least, you know, to date, they haven't raised an eyebrow at people doing that. People do that all the time. That's not to say that we might hit a situation where Amex decides they don't like that. Who knows? But that seems unlikely to me. That's a very common thing for people to do with any referral offers, right? I mean, when you have Chase referral offers with, you know, whatever, people do these all the you know, you refer somebody to one new card, and that's a great deal for you. And if you refer each other, and you end up with plus four each, that's amazing. Now, if you're not clear on how to generate a referral link, we talked about this a week or two ago, I'll put the YouTube link again

in the description. So you can quickly see how to create the link because you can make it really easy for the other person. If you're referring a family member who's not particularly good at this stuff and you're worried they're not going to click in the right place, you can create a direct link to the exact card that they want and just send them that link. So it's idiot proof, so to speak. They can just apply, just make sure they apply through your link. Make sure they don't click around other places and apply somewhere else. Right. There you go. Okay. So as long as you're listening to this in November of 2021, make sure to get your referral in. The person you refer actually has to sign up before the end of this month, I think. They have to be approved before the 1st of December. And I know that because if they apply,

but it doesn't go through right away, that could end up being a problem for you. So didn't realize that. And I don't, I say that I don't remember from the last ones, if approvals that carried over the date had a problem or not, but it says they should be approved by the first. So I would make sure that you get somebody on that, especially if there's any question as to whether it's going to be instant. Good safety tip. Okay.

So I guess that kind of wraps that one up, right? So are we moving on to the post-roast? Do you have a post-roast this week, Greg? Man, once again, I did not do my homework. I'm roastless. I'm going to go to the question of the week then, because it's kind of a roast at the same time. So it's the roast question of the week wrapped into one. Sounds great. Here we go. Sounds delicious. So this one was a comment that came in on your post. You reposted this week how to use your city thank you point fortune. So because there's been a number of changes in that realm in just the last couple of weeks here, cities really heated up and changed things a lot by adding two new hotel partners, Wyndham and Choice Privileges at one to two. So a lot of good stuff there. But somebody asked a question that I think also raises a roast. So they asked, should I downgrade my Premier card

and move my points to my custom cash? My annual fee is up soon. Is the Premier card easy to get for someone with excellent credit like City A cards? What are people's thoughts on this? $95 isn't too bad, but the annual fees add up. The key part of the question for me, though, is about that custom cash card. And I think you know why I'm ready to prod you a little bit, because we got some comments from people who told us that, no, you can't combine the points from the custom cash with the City Premier. So A, what do you have to say about

that and b does that make it a good idea bad idea or what to downgrade a premiere to a custom cache okay um so so first of all yeah we had we had at least one person if not more um right in about problems um uh combining the custom their custom cache points with their Premiere cards to make it transferable. It turns out that... So I asked readers through our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group, because I don't have a custom cache where I could test this right now. And it turns out a lot of people have successfully combined them um a lot of people have trouble doing the combining like online they've had to call that's not unusual with city if if if there's anything different in your account like your phone number is different

your email is different your address like it won't let you combine online you have to call to get that all worked out um and and. So it can be done. It definitely can be done. The points become transferable, which is great. I suspect, so Steven Pepper has the custom cache. He doesn't have a premier, so he couldn't test combining. But what he found is that he does not seem to have the option to move points to another person. So that's different from combining accounts. And I think that's what the reader who wrote in was doing was, was, um, cause the reader who wrote in said, said he, he, he does that something like monthly with his, with his, uh, city double cash. And I was a little confused by that because once you combine,

you don't have to combine again. And so it occurred to me later, I sort of pieced it all together. I think what's happening with that reader is when he was ready to transfer points to a, let's say an airline or hotel program, he had been actually moving points from his double cash card to his premier card and then transferring to the hotel program. And so he wanted to do the same thing with his custom cash card, but there's just no menu item to allow that. And apparently he called and couldn't do it. I think he didn't know to ask, how do I just combine these accounts yeah pull them together i see and that's and that's the weirdness with city right their points are not automatically put into a common pool like

they are with mx membership rewards points and it's not super intuitive how to put them together i don't know what we call ultimate rewards super intuitive and that and that wrong it's not as intuitive as chase ultimate rewards which is not to say that's intuitive either, but, uh, but also if, if, if you, if you move your point, if instead of combining your points, you move them from one card to another, that triggers an expiration. What is it? 60 days or something to use them before they go away. So, so it's better in most cases to combine your points rather than move them from one card to another, if you can.

Now, a common thing to do though, is have like, if you and a partner, just one of you has the premier card, then, and you want to transfer, let's say, you know, Nick, let's say your spouse, your wife has the premier card and you don't, but you've earned points on your custom cash. You're going to want to transfer those, those points to her to, to then transfer to a airline partner. And that's an example where if we're right about this, you won't be able to do that,

unfortunately. So what, what about if you pull your points though, once you have them pulled, would you be able to then transfer them? Probably because, because if you have another thank you card that as far as i know all the others allow moving your points to another person so i i think if you you pulled your custom cash with your double cash let's say then i think then you could um move your points to to your

wife's account city vying for a spot. And what crazy thing once again, aren't you saying? We see you there. We see you, City. All right. Yeah, I know, right? I mean, try and wrap your mind around. If you're new to this game,

I apologize for this week's question of the week because it's hard to wrap your mind around that. We really need to avoid these like crazy complicated things. So let's go back to the easy part of the question then. Is the custom cache a good downgrade option from the Premier? Yeah, I mean, I think so. If they will, yeah. It's complicated because if you-

Even the easy question is complicated. It is, it is. Because, oh oh boy if you downgrade to another thank you card you might keep your own keep the same card number which is a good thing it doesn't

count as a card cancellation I can't remember Citi used to have a rule about like once you cancel that triggers the 24 month rule. Is that still in place? Yeah. Yeah.

It's open or closed. Yeah. No, I think it's bonus or closed now. Oh, right. Bonus or closed. Yeah, you're right. So from the time you got a welcome bonus or from the time you closed a premier card, let's say if you want to sign up for another premier or a related card um and you you can't get it again and and so if you if you downgrade to a custom cache it's

likely that you're going to get a new card number and that's likely to mean inside cities internal systems it's going to count as if you close the premier card, no, I don't, I don't think so. Um, it, what they'll do is they're going to scare you. Um, and this is what, this is their, this is their regular modus operandi when you're, when you're product changing in the city ecosystem is, is your, your points, um, expire temporarily and then, and then, uh, reappear as, or they show an expiration date temporarily and then reappear as not expiring.

And it's the scary thing that they don't warn you about, but then you call and they tell you, oh, don't worry. Yeah. So the only thing I'm going to add to that or maybe provide as a slightly contrary opinion is if you are like that reader that usually transfers the points to somebody else, if you've got a spouse with the premier card and you're thinking, oh, well, I can transfer the points to them or maybe they'll open the premier in the future well remember that the custom cash you got a pan in the butt so it could be a good option as long as you're willing to deal with a little bit of the city headache that we've been talking about if what we've been talking about is making your head spin and you're like well i don't get it then maybe it's not a good downgrade option then maybe you're

better off just with a rewards plus or thank you preferred right right? Right. So. Agree. So there you go. And then is it easy to get the Premier, by the way? Probably. I mean, it depends on who you are. Well, I mean, Citi's gotten much harder on approvals with the Premier cards. So, you know, we wrote about that.

Oh, that's right. We did. Yeah, you're right. It's hard to say, you know, so if you're someone who doesn't apply for cards very often, it'll probably be easy, but really hard to say. And people with very high credit scores have been getting denied. But not in huge, it's not like the old Capital One days

where they denied pretty much everybody. It's somewhere in between. The city used to be super easy with approvals. They're not that anymore, at least not with the, um, $95 premier card. There you have it. All right. Well, my friends that brings us to the end this week. So thank you guys very much for being out there listening. If you've enjoyed this conversation and you'd like to get on our email list, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe again, that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our email list follow us all

over social media we're on instagram and twitter join our frequent miler insiders facebook group where you can talk about this stuff with other folks who are into it and get your questions answered thanks again and oh and wherever you're listening to this of course always subscribe enable the notifications hit the like or the thumbs up leave us a comment we appreciate all of that and we will see you guys again next week. Bye everybody.