Frequent Miler on the Air - Black Friday, Free Bank Money, Easy Credit Card Spend, and Marriott

Episode Date: November 30, 2019

This week Greg and Nick discuss: -Black Friday / Cyber Monday Deals -How to increase credit card spend without going broke -Bank account bonuses (easy money!) -Marriott meetings: an easy way to get 10 elite nights

Welcome to Frequent Miler on the Air with Greg and Nick. Today we're going to talk about Black Friday and five ways to increase credit card spend. Then we're going to move into easy money from bank account bonuses. Not including Black Friday. And are we taking advantage of all the free money that's out there? And if we have time, we're also going to talk about Marriott meetings, how to easily get 10 elite nights from Marriott. First, we have, as always, our feature is to read a reader feedback.

The reader feedback. This week's, yes, the reader feedback segment. And as always, Nick has no idea what feedback i'm gonna read i don't yeah this one is directed at you though uh-oh joe uh-oh this is a reader who thinks your name is joe oh okay the reader says got an eye for detail i see the fm podcast hyped the PFS coin deal. I think Joe, I think it was Joe. This was in parentheses. I think it was Joe.

Said he was able to buy five or six of the coins. The coin right now is going for $1,000 on eBay. I sold mine for $650 a day after the mint release, and it has since gone up in value very quick. One could say Joe really wasted a mega opportunity to at least get the going rate of $6.50, $4.50 profit after eBay, PayPal, shipping, and purchase costs per coin. So the going rate of $6.50 per coin the day after release. Those who listened to FM and went ahead with the PFS coin deal lost out on a huge potential profit. I think FM should address this. So let's do that. Let's address this. What do you think? Is he right? Did we lead our readers and listeners astray with

this PFS coin deal? That's a great question. It's a great piece of feedback. Or Nick, what should we call him? That's right. Whichever. I'll respond to either way, either name. But no, it was a good question, a good piece of feedback, actually. But here's where I think it's very easy to play Monday morning quarterback, right? And say, wow, the coins have gone up. They've gone up since that 650. If you look at recent eBay sales, I was looking at them just last night, and they were around $1,200, $1,300. And that's completed Zold listings. So it's gone way up. And this is for a coin that costs $70 to $85 to buy new, depending on whether you paid for overnight shipping or not.

So I mean, we're talking huge profits possible. And we had written about it. And just to remind readers, we were able to buy them just one per household. And you had written about ways to sort of have more than one household. Well, right. I mean, you probably know a few other people who have households and maybe they aren't interested in doing the legwork, but you could do the legwork for them and that can work out. And certainly, with the cost and the way that these blew up, certainly it could have worked out really well. But when we wrote about it, we wrote about it because a buying group, PFS Buyers Club, was offering originally, I think, $187 for the coins and then $200 for the coins. And eventually, they agreed that if you emailed them and just asked them to bump it up to $300, that they would honor that

for $300. I think that was in a comment he left on Doctor of Credit. So now it's really easy to look back and say that that was a horrible decision. But let me run you through the previous coin deal. We wrote about one just a couple of months ago, maybe it was five or six months ago. And in that case, it was APMAX that was buying the coins, a large coin dealer. And it was a similar kind of a thing where I think in this case, maybe you spent $700 or $800 and got $100 profit. And so I bought the $700 or $800 worth of coins and I got them and shipped them out to AP Max. And I wasn't here when AP Max sent me an email and said that the boxes were damaged. And so they had to send them back to me. They couldn't buy them and I could return them to the mint, but I wasn't home

when that came through. So I wasn't home in time to reship them back to the mint. So I couldn't return them. So I was stuck then having to sell them myself. Now, in that case, everybody expected that the coins would go way up. So no big loss, right? Except they didn't go way up. The mint ended up issuing more of them. And now I will eventually have to sell them for a loss. I'm still holding them, but they're going for the same price that they were the day they got released because the Mint released more. You could buy them from the Mint again the next day. So, these are coins. So, do they have face value? Are they something that you could go into a drugstore and buy a pack of gum?

You couldn't buy a pack of gum. But so we're talking like one ounce worth of silver, which I haven't checked the spot price of silver lately, but the last thing I knew was like $17 or $18. So you're talking about in the PFS deal, the one that now has shot up and become really valuable, it's like about $17 or $18 worth of silver that just happens to be worth a lot to collectors. And what's the face value though? What's I'm just,

yeah, I don't know. I think it's a dollar, a dollar. I think that's what it says. I think, yeah. And maybe it was more than that.

I'm to be honest with you. I didn't even look at the face of it. I didn't open the boxes. Um, but, but I think it's something like that. I mean, it's,

it's not that much of, uh, you know, it's just an American Eagle. So anyway, at any rate, my point here is that it's easy to play Monday morning quarterback and say, wow, the prices really went up. But on the previous coin deal, I ended up not being able to sell them to the buyer I intended to. And I got stuck with coins that aren't worth a penny more than I paid for them. So I'm going to lose on them when I eventually ship them, or I'm gonna have to hold them and hope that the value of the metal goes up over time. Either

way, I didn't do well on that one by holding them. Now, this time around, if you held them, sure, you could make a fortune. But if you knew that two weeks ago, you would have opted out of the PFS deal, or you wouldn't have done the PFS deal. If you knew that none of us knew that I'm not a coin collector. I knew that I was looking looking at it as hey this is an opportunity to make some easy easy money like click refresh refresh refresh click ship it okay great print out the label out to pfs money in the bank i got paid within the seven days as they said so uh so i i totally understand the perspective that yes they won't weigh up in value but that's impossible to predict and if you're good at predicting that then you should get into doing coins more and not probably stock market too right right and lottery tickets if you're able to predict i imagine that anyone who who does

i brought a stock market because i imagine that anyone who does stock market predictions in any kind of public way gets feedback all the time from people who are upset that they led them astray either by telling them to buy or telling them to sell either either way it's going to be a wrong choice in many cases let me add to that that i had a family member who got a couple also and so i was helping them sell them so i called the local coin shop actually a few days after this sale was over when ebay prices were like 650 or so like like the reader is saying so the guy at the coin shop told me he'd give me 450 for it. And I said, okay, well, then the family member was happy with that. Go ahead. Family member got there and the shop was closed. The guy wasn't there.

And so later on that night, prices were up to like 800. And so I said, well, let's try and put that on eBay. 840, done. Four minutes. So it was lucky. But even the coin shop owner didn't know that. And I called a second coin shop. And that guy said, you know what, I don't even want to do this because I've seen these things happen before. The prices are high now. And then they go down. He said, I'm not even interested in buying it. He didn't even give me an offer. And I told him somebody else had offered me $450. He said, that sounds like a great offer. I would take it. He didn't even want to buy it for $450. And now it's $1,300. I mean, that guy made an $800 mistake. And he's a coin collector. He owns a coin shop. All right.

So anyway, that's that. So I think that's enough of rubbing in my face how well you did on last week's deal. Let's talk about today's deals that I didn't participate in. I've been doing Thanksgiving and just spending time with family. And meanwhile, you've written a few dozen quick deals, it seems like, covering Black Friday deals. So, what's going on with Black Friday? Are there good deals out there? There are. There are. We've written more than 20 quick deals in the last couple of days here since the Black Friday deals kind of broke. And so, there have been some deals big,

some deals small, but a couple of deals that I think people shouldn't ignore. And the first of those is that Cole's Small Appliance deal that I wrote about the other night. A reader shared it with us. I'm sharing it with readers now, again, on the podcast because it's a great opportunity to pick up some easy spend. So if you just go to FrequentMiler and type in Cole's Small Appliance, the basic idea is you can buy a bunch of small appliances and get most of the money back via rebate and then Kohl's Cash, which is kind of one of those weird things, the strange economics of Kohl's Cash, as Greg has written, is something to consider a little bit.

But at the end of the day, you can more or less come pretty close to breaking even if you're a regular Kohl's shopper anyway, and then take those appliances and either resell them or donate them to a charity. That was what the reader reached out with the idea of donating them, which I think was a really great idea. It was a way to kick off Black Friday shopping with something that you were doing a little bit of good with, or certainly you could resell them and maybe make a couple of bucks. But you could pick up like $1,000 in easy credit card spend. So if you're someone who's kind of struggling to find ways to meet minimum spend, and you don't want to do manufactured spending, that's a really easy way to do it. So that's one to take a look at. Go ahead.

Oh, well, I was just gonna say, how long does that last? So a lot of our listeners probably are gonna hear this at best over the weekend. What is this something that goes through Monday? That's a good question. I don't know. I'd have to look. My bet would be that the rebate goes through Monday, but it's possible that you have to buy that by Friday. So that's a good question. I'm not sure. Are there any that off the top of your head you know are going to last several days or through Monday that we should be highlighting here? Here's one that I, well, yes, I'll give you two. One that I want to highlight that the specific one may change, but at least it'll plant the

idea of what you might be able to find by Monday. I wrote a post earlier today about Top Cash Back, and they're offering 20% back at Macy's and also a reader brought up right now. They're offering 20% back at Carter's, which is a baby clothing store. The reason that that is a significant payout, A, is obviously it's a large payout for those stores, but B, Top Cash Back is offering a new customer bonus for new customers who sign up through our link. They've only offered this to a few blogs. We'll get $35 in bonus cash back after you earn $10 in cash back. All right, so let's put this

together. If you spend $50 right now, Friday, as I speak at the moment, at Macy's or Carter's, and you earn 20% cash back, that's $10 in cash back, which will therefore trigger the $35 bonus if you're new to Top Cash Back. So you're talking getting $45 back on a $50 purchase at Macy's or Carter's. Now, you might say, okay, that sounds great, but I've been using TopCash back for years. That's the case in my situation. However, my in-laws haven't been using it for years. My parents haven't been using it for years. I've got friends and cousins and brothers and sisters and lots of different people in my life who haven't been using it for years, who I was able to recommend this to and are able to then buy stuff with it. So that's a great return. And if you can

find any store that's offering a return like that, like 20% from Top Cashback, it's worth taking a look at the numbers with Top Cashback. Even if you find a store that's only paying 10% cashback, you got to spend 100 bucks to get 45 of it back. I mean, there's so many sales that will be on between today and Monday that I think it's pretty easy to take advantage of that. So that's a new bonus that I think is worth a look because you can get a nice cheap gift or something decent for yourself anyway. I think a lot of people might have ignored that. The 20% back that lasts through Monday, what about the top cash back deal? Is that longer? So the 20% back is through top cash back. Those payouts could change. So that's why I say you might have to look for a different store.

It might not be Macy's or Carter's tomorrow. The $35 bonus, yeah, the new account bonus, that lasts until Sunday the 1st. So you'll need to sign up by Sunday the 1st, and then you can earn your $10 cash back. I believe anytime after that, the past promotions like this, they've run, they've always told us that you have an infinite amount of time. Once you've earned your 10, the promotion is attached to your account and you would earn your $35 bonus. So you do need to sign up for it though. So you want to go to frequent miler and type top cash back and the search box there and find the post about $35 new account bonus at top cash back. Easy deal. And with stuff being on sale on Cyber Monday, it should be pretty easy to earn that $10 in cash back in order to trigger

the $35 bonus. Okay, nice. So I think the key takeaway is even if you don't have anything that you want to buy, at least sign up and you haven't signed up for TopCashBack before, go ahead and sign up for that. And then if you do have something you want to buy, that's especially if it's in the $50 range, it's kind of a no brainer. You're getting a dirt, dirt cheap. It is. Well, at least at Macy's or Carter's or anywhere 20%.

But otherwise, because the point is you need to get $10 back from TopCash back. $10 back from TopCash back, yes10 back from TopCashBack, yes. In order to trigger the $35. Yeah. Right. And so the larger bonus that you're earning on your purchase right now means the lower amount of money you need to spend in order to trigger that $35 bonus. And therefore, the bigger chunk of your money you're going to get back.

But that's one that I definitely think that people are like, or no, not likely to, some people are likely to ignore it and shouldn't because it's just a very easy one to do. My wife didn't have a TopCash back account. She signed up, got some clothes for my son from Carter's. So, I mean, it's great. Got some new clothes to wear. Didn't cost us a bunch of money. Okay, cool. So, that's great. I mean, and especially great timing because people can get a head start on holiday shopping and do it from home really easy and get it for almost nothing. What else? You mentioned you had a couple of them. Yeah, I mean, so I should also mention at this point that we have a running list going of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals.

So that's also worth mentioning here that if you go to the site, this will be pinned near the top throughout the weekend where you'll be able to find a list of what's on, what's still available, cross things out as we discover things have expired. So definitely you should take a look at that if you're looking in general to see what's still available now that may or may not have been available sooner. But another one that I think is worth a look from a travel perspective is Expedia is running 25% off of activities. Now, that's valid for Black Friday, but I'm sure that they will run a new coupon code

for Cyber Monday. And I don't know what the coupon code will be, but we'll have it on Frequent Miler. And that's a good one to look at because Expedia sells a lot of activities that you might not think of as activities, transport, airport transfers from the airport to your hotel and that sort of thing. And right now, as I speak on Friday, you can get 25% off up to $50 back. And again, I'm very confident they'll run probably the same coupon for Cyber Monday. They've been copying that for the last couple of years. So

that's one to watch out for on Monday because you could save money easily on different tours, but also on different types of, like I said, transportation, tickets to attractions and museums and things like that. So that's an easy way to save some money on upcoming travel. Yeah, no, that sounds great. Now, how about, what are the, are there any great ones that we missed? What should I have been sitting at home in front of the computer watching Frequent Miler, you know, to jump on a deal right away? And it's like, I didn't do it, so I missed it. That's already good. Is there anything like that that jumps out at you? There's one, and actually, you would have needed to have been a member of frequent miler insiders or to have been following me on Twitter. Um, there is a insider says

is our Facebook group, by the way. That's right. That's right. Our Facebook group, the frequent miler insiders, Facebook group. So it was, let's see, it was Wednesday night. I was up very late posting quick deals and I got done posting one. Uh, I posted one anyway about a Sonos beam soundbar. And I'm not very familiar with Sonos except to know that it's like the inexpensive type of home theater wireless speakers. And so the soundbar was on sale at Amazon for 300 bucks. And I had written a post about how you could get it for a couple of dollars less than that by stacking an Amex off or elsewhere. Seemed like a very good deal.

It was really popular at $300. And at 4 a.m., I kid you not, at 4 a.m., I went to close my computer and get a couple hours of sleep for Thanksgiving. And I saw that Costco had a mistake taking more of a discount off of it than it was supposed to be discounted. And so you could get the same item that was already a great deal at $300 for $180. Would have been a really easy resell for anybody who's reselling. And yeah, mistakenly taking the discount off of the wrong product. And so at that point, like I said, I had closed the computer,

it was four o'clock in the morning, I was tired, I wasn't going to open it all back up and update the post again. So instead, what I did really quickly was I shared it to frequent miler insiders with a link to it at Costco. I did the same thing on Twitter out of my Twitter account, which is Nick at FM, just so that anybody reading could at least see it and click through and get it. And I think a few readers did because there were a few comments on that. So that was a great one that you would have had to have been paying attention for. But if that was something, if a nice new soundbar was on your radar, that one's normally like, I think, over $400. So getting it for $180 would have been a good deal because they don't go on sale often. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, thanks for keeping us up to date with all these great deals. Sorry that I missed especially that one. That sounds really sweet. It was, but you had to be awake at like four in the morning, I think, to have gotten it anyway. Right. Which some were. Or been somewhere else in the country other than Eastern Times. Right, that too.

That too. Yeah. So let's take a step back now from the deals and say what we do every day of the year is we talk about ways to earn miles without flying. And by miles we mean points, miles, cash back, all that kind of stuff. So there's a couple of topics that we have that are related to that. So the first one is about credit card spend and how to increase it. Now that sounds like the opposite of making money, increasing your spend. But what we're talking about is a lot like shopping for Black Friday. It's ways to increase spend in ways that you either get the money back or on spend you're

doing anyway, but usually not with credit cards. And so by using your credit cards, you get the rewards. And, of course, where the big rewards are are with sign-up bonuses or with big spend bonuses where the credit card company says when you spend, let's say, $25,000 in the year, you get this. And some of those are pretty compelling. This is pretty compelling bonuses at those levels. So I put out on Thanksgiving morning a set of five easy ones. The five easy ones I listed, easy ways to increase credit card spend, are to pay taxes.

So pay federal taxes. There are several services that will take any credit card, Amex, Visa, Discover, MasterCard, and you can pay your federal taxes. And even if you don't have taxes to pay, you can pay your estimated quarterly taxes, even if you don't owe any, and the IRS will pay you back the difference when you file your end-of-year taxes next year. So obviously you need to have the money available in your bank account to pay off your credit card bill and to

float that until your money comes back, but you do get it back minus the fee, but the fees are quite low on paying your taxes. Now, a little higher in fees is paying bills with plastic or plastique, depending on how you like to say it. It's with a Q at the end instead of a C, is a service that lets you pay bills with a credit card, bills that you couldn't normally pay that way. And so you can pay your rent, you can pay contractors, there's a lot of different things you can pay. There are rules about who you can pay with Amex cards and who you can pay with Visa cards. MasterCard and Discover are pretty wide open. You can pay almost anything you can't pay your credit card bill you can't pay a bank account but beyond those kind of smaller limits you can with discover mass card you can pay your mortgage with visa and amex as well you can pay your rent and there's just a lot of things

you can pay that way and that's a great way to use your credit card in ways that the credit card companies are not don't get upset about it it's legitimate spend as far as they're concerned they've already instructed plastic as to what they're not allowing so as long as you're obviously they've set their limits yes that means they've've set their limit, so it's a good way. Now, there is that high 2.5% fee, which most credit cards don't earn that much for spend, or sometimes they earn a little bit more, but it's still like, it's not like you're going to profit a lot. But if what you're doing it for is to hit a big spend bonus

or a minimum spend for getting a new credit card, I think it can be well worth that fee right sure the other one that i thought was not had lost interest in most of the country until just recently is gift of college there's these gift of college gift cards that are available regionally in stores where you can buy them with a credit card. Not every store will let you buy with a credit card, but a lot do. And if you can find these cards that are loadable up to $500, then the fee on top of the $500 is about 1.2%, which is a very small fee. And most credit cards luckily do earn rewards that are worth more than that 1.2%. Most good rewards credit cards, we should

specify. Yeah. I mean, even a 1.5% credit card is doing better than that, right? So, it doesn't take much to do better than that. And then, of course, if it's helping you earn bonuses that much better another nice thing about this unlike paying taxes or paying bills is is category bonuses so if you buy these in stores that are grocery stores or gas stations you know if you have cards that give you extra points in those areas then you'll collect on those points by buying those cards there. And so, what recently happened was the, what's the name of the chain again? Cumberland Farms.

Cumberland Farms. Yeah, station chain. Yeah, they just added Gift of College gift cards. So, what can you do with Gift of College gift cards? There's two things. You can use them to fund your child's 529 accounts or a grandchild's or a niece's or nephew's, you know, anybody's 529 account. So it's great for saving up for college. Or if you've been to college and you have student loans, you can use these cards to pay the loans. So what you do is you load the cards up into your gift of College account and tell it where you want those funds to go to.

It takes about two weeks, I think, for the funds to move to wherever you intended them to go. So that's a really nice way to increase credit card spend. But it is a regional thing. So if you look on our website, you'll find a list of what stores carry them. We don't list the stores that carry, there's a number of stores that carry up to $100, very low amounts are up to $50. Target, for example, carries them, but not up to a useful

amount because the fees then on those way outweigh the value of doing this. So I don't recommend buying them at any store that limits you to $100, even to $200. You really want those $500 cards. And to add in there, you really want to load them with $500 so that the fees take up a low percentage of the cost that you're paying. You don't want to load one of those with 100 bucks because then you're paying just too much in order to earn the rewards. It's not worth it. So you want to find the $500 cards and load them with a full $500. Exactly, exactly. Then the next thing on the list is funding Kiva microloans.

So you want to help out people around the world who are struggling to get by, who just need money to maybe buy the materials they need for making clothes or whatever their business is. They get their loans from micro-lending organizations that are local to them, but the way those micro-lending organizations get the funds that they pass on to these people is through organizations like Kiva. Kiva is probably, I'm sure sure they're the biggest in the world, but even if they're not, what makes them unique is that you can fund these loans as an individual.

You can fund these loans with a credit card and you are not going to get profit from loaning the money. That's a question I always get about this. Am I going to get profit from loaning the money that's a question i always get about this you know am i going to get profit no at best you're going to get 100 of your money back and it's going to take at least six months probably longer but the point is if you can float the money you you can get all of it back, but it depends on the loan. So there are going to be some people that default. I've had success in filtering the, Kiva exposes a lot of information about the micro lending organizations.

And that's important because those are the ones who do due diligence to see, are the loans worthwhile, is this person going to pay back, all that kind of stuff. So if the microlending organization has a high grade from Kiva, chances are good that those loans that you fund through them are going to payback. And so it's worked out very well for me over the years, less than 1% default rate, which is pretty good. But again, you have to be able to float the money. And so that means your cost is less than 1%. Less than 1%, unless you add in the cost of money. The time cost of money. And this is true of the paying taxes as well, because you're without that money for a while and so you're not gaining interest on the money so if you add that in then then it just depends how how much interest

you might have been earning as to how much it cost you but but yeah out of pocket uh less than one The last thing on the list was coordinating events with friends. The idea is you have a bunch of friends that are into sports and you offer, you say, I'm going to go buy a block of seats at a bunch of the big games this year. So who's in? And my bet is that in most social circles, friends will be happy that someone is stepping forward and being willing to do the leg work to find and buy the tickets and just charge you your equal share. Of course, this person who does the coordinating can use their credit card can even stack deals in some cases like if it's through stubhub you might be buying the the

games through uh using gift stubhub gift cards that you bought a discount we sometimes write about those deals so there's a lot you could do to increase spend or reduce costs and and also maybe even improve your social situation by spending more time with your friends and yeah you'll be popular so or if it's not sports maybe it's plays maybe it's concerts or you know whatever it is. Possibilities around the area. Maybe you're a golfer and go set up the tee time and whatever, do all that. Yeah, so there's lots of opportunities there. I personally haven't done a lot of that, but it seems to me like something I ought to be doing. Anybody who's into this stuff ought to be doing.

For sure. What do you think? For sure. Yeah. I do this all the time for family. Most of my family is not really interested in credit card rewards, which might be surprising since it's basically all I spend my time doing. But they're just not particularly interested in learning how to do it and how to earn them on their own. They figure Nick's got this. Exactly. Why should we learn? Exactly. And that's fine with me.

So, A, I definitely have become the travel coordinator for my family. And I'm often coordinating those types of things that Greg's talking about. In fact, it's funny you brought up the event tickets because my son's birthday is coming up and we found an event that we thought, oh, that'd be great. And so, we kind of sent a few friends messages. And before we knew it, we got like 30 people interested in going and we said, well, let's call and see about group tickets, if we can get a discount. And then of course, obviously, we pick up the spend for all of the tickets. So, everybody will just pay us back. So, that kind of thing can certainly be

a good way to earn rewards. Also, we tend to be the designated Santa for our families. Basically, everyone in the family that's looking for a deal on something knows to come to us and ask, hey, listen, this is what I'm looking for. Can you help me find a deal? And so, we become the shoppers for the family. So, okay. So, let me get this right. So, they tell you what they want to buy for someone else. Exactly. And you do the deal shopping. You buy it for them using your credit card. And then they pay you back earning our portal rewards or MX offers or whatever it is. Yeah,

they just pay us back with a check or bank transfer or Venmo or whatever the case may be. And so we do this all the time. Actually, before we got on the air, we had said that Greg, Greg had said he'd asked me about the things I bought for Black Friday. And I said, Well, actually, I haven't bought that much because I've spent most of my time either writing about it, or helping family members find their deals. So I mean, I have bought some things, but almost everything I bought has been for somebody else so far. So which is great, because I'm picking up a bunch of spend and earning a bunch of rewards that are even less of a cost than gift of college

or the different methods that Greg has mentioned, because in all these cases, they'll just pay me back for the items they were going to buy anyway. And I probably found them a better deal than they were going to find on their own. And yet, you know, I ended up getting the rewards, which is a good deal for me too. So that's a another way to kind of run the same kind of idea as being the travel coordinator, be the person that's the dedicated shopper for the family. Yeah, that's a great idea. Do you also help your family with spend on credit cards, or is that something totally on their side? With spend on credit cards, is that something totally on their side? With spending on credit cards, how do you mean?

So, if you recommend to someone in your family to sign up for a new card, I'm sure you do this with your wife, but someone less closely related, do you somehow help them meet that minimum spend through the things you know how to do? I have helped friends discover ways to do it. So, I've helped friends in terms of like Simon Malls. I've given that tip out to a couple of close friends that are interested in opening a card, but then they say, oh, but I don't know if I can meet the minimum spending requirements. I've taught them how to do that through Simon Malls or through other places that sell gift cards in larger denominations, $500 denominations. So I've helped other family members do that. But no, I haven't actually done the spend for them. But again, maybe surprisingly, most of my family is not particularly interested

in it, even though I've tried to kind of extol the virtues of how you could travel and enjoy it and get a bunch of rewards and not even just travel rewards. Even if you're just interested in cash back, at least get the cash back. It's your money. You might as well keep as much of it as you can, or the banks are willing to give it out as bonuses, then you might as well take advantage of that and pick it up. So I do try to talk friends and family members into that, but a surprisingly small number of close family and friends ask about it. So that always reminds me that there are a lot of people out there that aren't doing the stuff that we do. And it's a good opportunity to be able to tell them about that. But that also creates the opportunities that we have, because not everybody

is looking at the same things that we're looking at. And that's why we're able to pull together these resources and do a reasonably good job of it. Because we're, we are those people that are focusing on it and looking for those opportunities. Not everybody is. Right, right. Now, you mentioned cash from banks. That's something you wrote about this week is the bank account bonuses. Usually, we write about credit card sign-up bonuses, but you wrote about bank account

sign-up bonuses and how it's how it's a easy it's an easy win easy way to get cash yeah yeah now why aren't we all doing so i i i haven't been doing doing that much i mean i've done a couple maybe three times over the past 10 years, something like that. Wow. How about you? You know, if we go 10 years, then it's been quite a bit. But over the last three years or so, since I've been working for Frequent Miler, I just haven't been into doing the bank bonuses.

Really more than that, I guess. I'd say it's more like five or six years. I haven't done them very much because I got really enamored with credit card rewards and the chance to earn big sign-up bonuses and spending bonuses and category bonuses, etc. But recently, the SoFi money deal came around and I realized, you know, that was super easy. And in that case, it was a relatively small amount of money deposited 100. And at the time, you could get a $50 bonus that since decreased and then pick up bonuses for referring friends.

And it was a reminder that banks do offer these bonuses for other types of accounts, not only credit cards. And so then I got looking at a few others, and I wrote a post about it this week because some of them are really, really easy. I opened one just over a week ago now, I don't know, maybe two weeks ago now, and I had to deposit $50 to start the account. And then I needed to receive a direct deposit of $500 or more by December 31st. And the thing that I wrote about

this week, or included in the post, is that banks usually require some sort of a direct deposit in order to trigger a checking account bonus. So if you're going to open a new checking account at a bank, they usually have some requirements. And a popular one is that you have some sort of direct deposit post to the account, which normally would be your paycheck coming from your employer or social security benefits or retirement benefits, et cetera. However, not everybody wants to, understandably, not everybody wants to switch their direct deposit month to month to a bunch of different banks. And the good news is that a lot of banks just don't have their systems set up to know the difference between what is a direct deposit

from an employer and what is a transfer from one of your other accounts. So in this case, I opened a brand new account, deposited $50. I needed to get a $500 direct deposit within the first month and a half here or whatever before December 31st. So I moved money from my SoFi investing account, which I opened the account So I moved money from my SoFi investing account, which I opened the account recently just for the bonuses from SoFi. And so I had $500 in that account. And so I just withdrew that $500 from my SoFi money account to the new bank account. And the new bank recognized that as my $500 direct deposit. And the very next day, I got my bonus for signing up, which in that case was 250 bucks. So like 250 bucks, just kind of out of thin air. Now I have to keep the account, I think for six months before I can cancel it if I decide I want

to close it. So there are some details and the bonuses really do vary in terms of how much and how much headache they are in order to trigger them. But I found a couple like that, that were like a $500 direct deposit and you get a bonus of 250 bucks or so, more or less, it changes, varies from bank to bank, but that's just easy money, right? Especially if you're doing it in two-player mode, you know, with a husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, cousin, brother, sister, whoever it is, if you're playing in two-player mode, then you're looking at a $500 bonus with like 10 minutes of work, maybe, maybe, you know, if you're playing in two-player mode then you're looking at a 500 bonus with like 10 minutes of work maybe right maybe right right you know if you're slow um yeah yeah that's just money easy money i think the reason i think there's two reasons why i haven't been doing it uh one is

that i haven't liked the complexity of having so many bank accounts open and having to track them. Now, obviously, I do that with credit cards, but I just didn't want yet another thing like that to deal with. Whether or not that's a good decision, that's debatable. Probably not. The other thing is I think that cash back i just it's hard to get as excited about and this is this is why rewards programs are so successful for businesses but

it's hard to get as excited about a you know 200 cash bonus compared to a you know 50 000 point bonus which i mean 50 000 is usually worth a lot more than 200 to begin with but but the the point is more when you have the miles you you start thinking about oh this could be a business class flight to wherever sure right whereas with the cash it's just the cash i mean not that not that it's insignificant but but the point is it's it's not something that makes you like dream about how much bigger it could be you know or how it could lead to amazing experiences, even though if you do enough of it, obviously it could. And I'm sure that that's why Greg hasn't done it. But this is why Greg is wrong about that. Because you look at a bonus like the one I wrote about this week,

and it was 250 bucks. And literally, I just moved around my own money that was sitting there. So it didn't cost me anything but a few minutes of my time. So it was $250 in my pocket. I'll get around to doing it for my wife here. And that's 250 bucks for her. So, that's $500. Now, I can use that $500 to buy 100,000 Hilton points. The Hilton points go on sale all the time for half a cent each. Take that 100,000 Hilton points, and that would buy us at least a night in an overwater bungalow at the Conrad in the Maldives if we want it, because that property for the overwater bungalows, those are 95K standard award nights. So, that bank account bonus right there, just one of them done between the two of us would get a night at a place like that. And so, obviously, it could get you a night at a lot of different places. That's just one example, but that's like a pretty decent little bonus. Another way of saying it is you can think of it if you want to. You could think of a $250 bonus as being like a 50K Hilton or 50K up 50,000 points with no new credit card, no minimum spend requirement, no 524 impact. Most new bank accounts don't require a hard pull, though. I did link to a doctor of credit resource where

you can always check that information with doctor of credit. If it does require a hard pull, very few do. There are some that do, then it would change things for me. If it was going to require a hard pull, then maybe it's not worthwhile. But many of them don't require a hard credit card or a hard credit pull. So you've got like literally no negative impact from opening one of these. And it's just easy money or points. And of course, we're all going to spend money on travel on top of the miles, right? You're going to pay the taxes on your award ticket, you're going to pay for food, etc. And I look at that and I say, you know, that's just, it's easy stuff to forget about. But at the same time, if you're going to spend the time figuring out, okay, how can I earn an extra,

you know, two x points on my $50 purchase here, then you might as well take that same amount of time and get yourself $250 that could probably pay for the purchase. Yeah, seriously, you've totally convinced me. In fact, I'm thinking it would be kind of fun to do an experiment where what if I set out to start doing these bank account bonuses, and I set aside all of that cash back explicitly for buying points when they're on sale. And then we can look back in a year or so and say, look, Greg has earned a million, whatever it is, points by doing this. That could be pretty interesting. Yeah, that could be interesting.

You know, it's funny you mention that because one of the readers that commented mentioned that he started doing these just at some point in the summer last year or something like that. And in the last year worth of time or so, he said he had earned about $3,000 in new checking account bonus money. And so I look at that. And often we write about miles being on sale, like life miles sometimes or other programs like that, Alaska. To get the best rate, you sometimes need to buy like $3,000 worth of miles. And some readers will comment and say, you know, I'm never going to earn the cash back and have it there to buy $3,000 worth of miles. But you look at something like this, and that'd be a great way to do it. Like you said, put the money aside in one spot,

spend a year doing it, and then boom, buy yourself 150, 200,000 miles or whatever the case may be for, you know, not a lot of money. Yeah. Yeah. All right. You sold me on that. I think it's something people should be paying attention to anyway. Um, and so, so speaking of things that people should be paying attention to, what else should we be paying attention to from this week? There is, well, there's Marriott. Marriott marriott yeah right yeah definitely that's something that if you haven't read about yet if you don't know what greg's talking about when he says there's marriott you should be paying attention here tell us so this actually came i i had pinned a post from loyalty lobby that it was about the meetings, Marriott meetings,

and how you could get 10 elite nights from Marriott meetings. And the headline didn't make me think there was anything new there. I had only pinned it because I wanted to go check if my understanding, I've never actually booked a meeting yet with Marriott. And so the purpose, again, for listeners to book meetings is if you're looking for elite status with Marriott, one way to get 10 elite nights each year is to book a meeting. And that'll give you 10 elite nights if you do it the right way. So I just wanted to check my understanding with how that whole process worked with what Loyalty Lobby had written. I wasn't expecting to find anything new there,

but actually the whole post was about, here's a link to book a meeting online. And I was shocked. I had no idea you could book Marriott meetings online and get the 10 elite nights that way. So that was really cool. He also wrote about how to, by putting in less than a day, so putting in about half a day, or some people said they had to put in about two hours or less for the meeting time, it drops the

posted price for the meeting in half. So if you can find a meeting listed as low as $200, then futz with the amount of time that you're going to book the meeting and it'll drop to 100. And then you can book it and book a meeting for 100. So that in itself is not mind boggling in that I know a lot of people who have negotiated rates, have called up local hotels, and they pay anywhere from $70 to $100, the people I've talked to, for doing meetings. But I thought it was noteworthy that it's even easier than having to call around because you can actually do it online. It is. And I'll add to that. I knew you could request a proposal online. I didn't know

you could book the room online because in my area, the area that I've looked before at the website, it didn't list any prices. It just had a button to send in a request for a proposal. And so I did that with a couple of places that never got back to me. Then when Greg posted that this week, I was like, let me check a couple of other larger cities a little farther away from me. And then sure enough, I found some properties that had a price listed. Now, I wouldn't have noticed that because I hadn't checked beyond my area. So it's worth noting that not all properties will let you book the meeting online. So you'll have to look through the search results and see the ones that have a price and then go into it and modify the times. And the benefit here is it's all in writing. It's done it. You know, you're going to get the 10 elite nights, I would imagine, right? Versus if you negotiate

it over the phone, you have to hope that that person makes sure that they get that information in there, right? And gives you the credit. You do it online, you don't have to worry about that. Right, right. Now, it sounds like, though, from at least one reader that there is a benefit to doing the request for proposals because someone was able to find one willing to do a $50 meeting for them. So I'm thinking next year when I'm looking for elite nights, I'll put out a bunch of proposals saying, hey, I only need a room for an hour. Oh, I'll one-up you on that. If you know you're going to need the time, you could book it now, right? I mean, you could even negotiate now.

Now, there's a little bit of, do you really want to do it in advance? Because maybe you don't really need those 10 elite nights. But I was already thinking, I don't think I'm going to have 15 nights next year. And I don't know if Marriott might change the program at some point. So I wouldn't mind getting it locked in right now. And you know i'll have my 15 credit card nights for next year and then if i'm able to pick up 10 this way that's 25 then i only need 25 to requalify for platinum so that's that's a great point i'd be inclined to just do that because if i could i mean especially if i could find one for 50 bucks yeah kind of a no-brainer to spend it, even if I end up not needing the Elite Knights.

Although it seems pretty unlikely that I won't need them next year. I think I will. I think I will, too. And I definitely won't make titanium next year. So if I end up anywhere near a stone's throw of titanium, then I'll definitely have needed that. So actually, I didn't do it yet, but it came to my mind. I thought, maybe I'll just book one for January and have next year's done, especially because I figured January living in the Northeast is probably low demand time for meeting room

space. So I thought I might be able to get one of those $50 places. Once I saw that, I said 50 bucks for 10 nights. I felt silly because this week I checked into a place that I wasn't going to stay at the entire stay just because I needed the extra nights. And I thought it worked out to be a good deal because it wasn't going to cost me very many points. But if I knew I could have gotten 10 nights for 50 bucks, I probably would have done that instead. Right.

But, I mean, you knew about the possibility of booking meetings inexpensively. I did. I did. And I knew that I might be able to negotiate a $70 meeting. But I thought there was probably more of a chance I'd end up paying about 100 bucks unless I really wanted to call around forever. And I was like, 100 bucks. I don't know. I don't know if it's worth all that at 50. Though, I think that might have changed the math. When I was looking at it, for me, I was spending an extra 15,000 points. Or I'd have to call around and negotiate my way to about

100 bucks. I figured I said, I'll just spend the 15,000 points. It's kind of a close wash with the $100 cash amount that I'd be outlaying this way. I don't have to spend the 100 bucks, and I didn't mind losing the points, but I would have paid $50 to keep the 15,000 points, I think. Okay. So let me bring up something. You're going to have titanium this year right right you're gonna qualify for titanium i am me too i've actually already qualified for titanium um if next year well i'll talk about me so if i'm not gonna if i'm not gonna hit platinum let's say let's say

so i have the so for listeners to get to titanium you need 75 nights within a calendar year platinum is 50 nights you get 15 automatically from having a credit card having a Marriott credit card. So I have that. So you need 35 nights to get platinum. Even with 10 from a meeting, I'm still 25 nights away. I don't know that I'll get there. And so I'm not sure it's worth doing anything extra to get just to platinum because i'm likely to get a soft landing marriott usually will just decrease your elite status by one level when you don't requalify for the level you reach so so go doing anything even 50 bucks for a meeting, it occurs to me now that it could be wasteful and that I certainly shouldn't be changing my plans to make sure to stay at a Marriott

instead of other things that I might prefer just to get to platinum because I'm gonna have platinum anyway. Now, what I won't get by a soft landing, I won't get by by a soft landing i won't get there's two things i won't get i won't get the 50 night choice benefits so i won't i won't get sweet night awards which is what i would pick at 50 i also won't get closer to lifetime platinum status, which that's the one thing where it'd probably be worth the meeting anyway, the 10 nights, just to get a little inch closer. Because I'm actually, within a few years, if I qualify for platinum each year, so if I get about 50 nights each year,

I'm just about three years away from getting lifetime platinum and then I never worry about it. So doing a meeting every year gets me, inches me that much closer. So it might be worth it. But what do you think? Does that matter to you? That's the hesitation why I haven't gone ahead and booked it yet, because that was part of the reason behind going after titanium this year was that I didn't know that I would definitely hit 50 nights next year. And I enjoy having the platinum benefits. The 4pm checkout has come in handy a bunch of times for me already. And obviously breakfast and lounge access, that kind of thing is nice to have when you can have it. So part of the reason I was going after titanium in the first place was in the hopes that I'd be able to get a soft landing for 2021. On the flip side, I obviously wouldn't mind having those choice benefits and being able to get the

five suite night upgrades if I can. And I know that I will travel a certain extent next year, because we'll have some FM on the go meetings, and we'll have some different things that we speak at and whatnot. So I'm likely to get it, I would say, I would guess I'm likely to pick up at least eight or nine nights throughout the course of the year just from trips related to Frequent Miler. And then I will probably at some point take a vacation. I'm picking up these easy Marriott gift card points from Capital One Venture card, which if you're not familiar with what I'm talking about there, I do a little bit of Googling about Frequent Miler, the best hotel credit card, and you'll find out that.

So, I'm somewhat likely to choose Marriott when I have the choice anyway, even though I don't love Marriott. So, I know there's a decent chance that I could pick up enough nights to get to Platinum. I'm just not positive I will. So that's why it's like an insurance policy having the titanium. You're right. It might be wasteful to book the $50 meeting. Now, here's my question.

And you might not know the answer since you haven't booked the meeting yet either. Do you have to pay for it when you book it? Or do you pay for it when you actually consume it? No, I don't know the answer to that. Although I would get, I think it's when you consume it because at least everything I've seen so far, I don't think they show you, even during the checkout, what the full price is going to be with the service charge and everything. Right. And in the one case where I requested more information about a $100 meeting, it came back with that there's a total of 30% in that case of fees on top of it. So they're adding in service charges and things. So that's why I think it's after.

My thought on that then is that I would look to book one as far out in the schedule as possible, so I'll have a decent picture. Oh, there you go, so you could cancel. Yeah, so I could cancel it, exactly, if it's not useful to me. But I'm partially interested in locking that in now, A, to be able to lock in a good price if I can find a place that's willing to do it for $50. I don't think I'm going to get much better than that. And, B, to have that opportunity locked down and in writing as far as what I'm going to get much better than that and B, to have that opportunity locked down and in writing as far as what I'm going to get, just in case. And I don't have any indication that Marriott is going to change anything, but just in case they decide that they don't want to continue this

program next year, perhaps I can lock that in now. So, I'm at least partially interested in doing that. I don't know. Like you said, it might not be worthwhile, but. I keep talking myself in and out of it now i'm back in and and i'm in for doing it earlier in the year and the reason is for our readers so that i can answer questions like when do they charge you how soon do the nights is the elite night thing automatic yeah all that stuff so i need some experience with it you do it at the beginning and i'll book it at the end yeah and that way no that's actually perfect perfect because then when people at the end of the year, when they really need it,

when they realize they're 10 short, when they say, does this still work the way Greg wrote about 11 months ago? Nick will be like, yeah, I just did it yesterday. And there we go. Hopefully.

Done. So Marriott meetings next year. If somebody wants to meet, then I'll have a meeting. And so will Greg, for anybody who'd like to meet. We should do, you know what? We should do these talks in meeting rooms.

Hopefully the Wi-Fi will be good. Hopefully, hopefully. I've thought that one of these days I'll end up doing that, but not yet because I haven't needed the meeting. I thought I would need the meeting this year, but it just turned out that I had enough nights that we're going to be there anyway. And you hit 75 also, which to me is kind of surprising because I actually don't love Marriott. I don't mind Marriott. I obviously put a lot of nights in Marriott hotels this year,

but it's not my favorite chain yet. I'm going to this year have spent more nights in Marriott than I've ever spent in a single chain before. Yeah. Interesting. Most of mine though, were not actually from spending nights in Marriott. I had some weird stuff happen. I mean, one of the weird stuff was, a lot of people had this happen where they were offered 15 Elite Nights for upgrading from the old Chase Marriott card to the got merged, and the other one had 15 Elite Knights on it already. So 30 of the Knights, no, 45 Knights were not spent in hotels because 15 from my primary account's credit card, 15 from merging an account, and 15 from the upgrade. Pretty crazy. Yeah.

It's almost platinum status. Almost platinum without spending a single night. That's a post in and of itself, but not replicable probably for most people. No, not even myself. I don't know how I would do it again next year. Right. But a good point, though, that came out of that while you were talking was that some readers have been given misinformation in terms of, like, do those elite nights from a meeting or from your credit card count towards the 50 you need for a choice benefit at platinum status? Or do they count towards lifetime status and those kind of things? And the answer in those questions is, yeah, they count just like nights that you spent in a hotel when you're getting it from the credit card or from the meetings, right? Yeah, that's true. The reason that comes up a lot about meetings is that it didn't,

I'm sorry, the reason it comes up with around the choice benefits, if you pick five elite nights as your choice benefit, until this year, those five elite nights as your choice benefit until this year, those five elite nights did not count towards lifetime, but they've changed the terms. Now they do. So now it's just like every other elite night meetings and credit card, all the, all those things now do are consistent. As far as I know,

I can't think of any exceptions that are still out there where they don't count for, for a lifetime. So that's great. Yeah. Yeah. Simple. Yeah. Very good. Very good. So we've got lots of different deals to look at this week. You've got the Marriott meetings to keep in mind and those bank account bonuses that you should not be forgetting. If we hit just about all the topics this week. That's about it. So if people want to read more, where do they go? They go to thefrequentmiler.com.

So that's T-H-E, thefrequentmiler.com. That's where you'll find all of our posts and information. We're posting lots of stuff in the coming days here with the big sales coming up with Cyber Monday. But then you can look out each day for a nice analytical post in the morning and then quick deals throughout the day. That's thefrequentmiler.com. You can also find us on Facebook. You'll find our Frequent Miler Facebook page,

or you can search Frequent Miler Insiders and join our Facebook group where you can connect with other people who are interested in rewards and ask and answer questions and share information with other like-minded folks. And then of course, you can find us on Twitter at Frequent Miler or find me on Twitter at Nick at FM. And then you'll find our YouTube channel, FrequentMiler, where you can watch these videos. If you're watching us right now, great. Good to have you here. If you'd rather listen, though, perhaps you're a commuter or you want to listen during work, you can find us in all your podcast formats. You'll find us in Spotify, Apple, iTunes. You'll find us in all the different various places online. You'll find links to where

you can download these in order to listen to them or watch them on the internet. In our week in review post that posts every Saturday morning. So this particular one is going to post Saturday, November 30th, 2019. But you'll find all of those links each Saturday. So if you forget and looking for it again, check us out each Saturday and you'll find links to all of these different formats, podcast, video, etc. Thank you guys very much for being here. Thank you, Greg, for sharing a little bit of time with us this weekend, too. I know it's a busy weekend for everyone, so we're glad we're able to get a chance to be here and share some of the deals with you guys.

Absolutely. Thank you and happy holidays, everybody. Happy holidays.