Frequent Miler on the Air - Extreme stacking for extreme savings | Ep177 | 11-19-22

Episode Date: November 19, 2022

Whether you're doing some holiday shopping or making day-to-day purchases, you want to stack to get as much back as you possible can. Getting the best deals means peeling back a lot of layers. 00:51 Giant Mailbag 5:46 What crazy thing double header First up: What crazy thing did Hyatt do this week? 11:43 What crazy thing did Marriott do this week? 17:05 Mattress running the numbers: Should we GoWild with Frontier? https://frequentmiler.com/frontier-gowild-all-you-can-fly-pass-599/ 22:39 Awards we booked this week 26:18 Main Event: Extreme stacking for extreme savings https://frequentmiler.com/holiday-shopping-savings-tips-tools/ 27:01 How we find good deals 1st: Slickdeals & Slickdeals Live view 29:24 CamelCamelCamel.com 30:58 Shopping Basket Trick 38:19 Shopping Portals 38:45 How portals work 43:48 How do you find a good portal? 49:15 Best Practices for portaling & favorite portals 59:34 Portal referral bonuses 1:01:43 Capital One Shopping (no Capital One credit card required) https://frequentmiler.com/digging-the-capital-one-shopping-browser-extension/ 1:12:45 Capital One Offers (card required) 1:14:05 Credit Card rewards (welcome bonuses, category bonuses) 1:20:40 Card-linked offers https://frequentmiler.com/card-linked-programs-the-networks-they-run-on-aka-which-programs-stack/ 1:38:18 Question of the Week: In 2 player mode, is it possible to to gift hotel free night certificates so that Player 2's certs can be given to Player 1 to enjoy their elite benefits? https://frequentmiler.com/gift-hotel-points-free-night-certificates-and-award-nights-booked-with-points-rules-by-program/ 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 Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, extreme stacking for extreme savings. It's that time of year.

We're all spending lots of money because we realized we hadn't planned ahead and bought presents for our loved ones. Not me, Greg. I'm not spending a lot of money because I extreme stack. Well, actually, there you go. Or we spend a lot of money and get a lot back. There you go. Spending a lot less money. Yes, we'll spend less money but get more back.

How about that? Oh, I like it. I like where we're going with that. And we might even divulge some of those secrets later in the show when we get to the main event. But for right now, we have the giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes in response to my post this past week called End of Year Checklist for 2022. This is where I posted like all the things you need to make sure you do kind of in the rewards world. Things like make sure you use up your Amex credits

for airline fee incidentals and hotel stays. Make sure you, if you're seeking elite status, make sure you complete the requirements because usually they're due by the end of December, depending on which program you're going with and so on. So it's a checklist of things like that. And one of the things I mentioned is how the Hyatt credit card, which can be used to earn Hyatt elite status, the personal card with every $5,000 spend, you get two elite night credits towards elite status.

And I mentioned in there that the spend will count for this year, even if it posts as like end of December. And even if your statement doesn't close until January, the nights you get should still post for this year, not for next year. And Lynn responded to that. If this is true, my plan is foiled. I already reached Globalist and I was planning to use my Hyatt card for my son's tuition payment due in December so that I would get the Knights in 2023. So Lynn was assuming that because her statement wouldn't close until January, that the Knights wouldn't post till January. But that's not true.

And she says, by the way, the college charges no fee for credit card payments. So that's a very nice feature if you can get it. I'm not sure. Would you pick a college just for that reason? I mean, it could be a contributing factor. That's fine. Very, very nice addition there. But anyway, Yolanda replied to Lynn and confirmed what I had written in the post. Yes, it works as Greg described it. Last year, I spent 5K after my statement closed on December 25th, but before December 31st. So I could get the two extra nights to reach Globalist. It took a while for the two extra nights to post, but it was backdated to 2021 and my status was

updated. So there you go. Some useful end of year info for those seeking high elite status. It is. And for Lynn, if the college will take a credit card with no fee, I wonder if they would extend you an extra couple of weeks to make the payment for no fee if you asked nicely. I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure whether that's possible, but it might be worth asking anyway, if you're counting on using that for global status for next year or for re-qualifying. I mean, I would call and ask if it's going to be a big pay. If you're talking $15,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 or whatever it might be for a college tuition payment these days, I mean, I'd probably just see if they can wait two weeks. Yeah, this is also one case where the curve card, if it actually worked well and if it worked with Visa cards, which it doesn't do either of those things I just said.

Right. of those things I just said. What you'd be able to do with the Curve card is pay it in December, and then in January, go back in time and switch the payment to go against your Hyatt card, again, if it accepted Visa cards, and then you would get charged in January, I believe. So anyway, it doesn't work. So don't don't don't bother. Don't try that. It was a nice little anecdote. But moral of the story is there's no other way to make a call if you want to ask. But otherwise, don't go out and get the curve card at all, really, and specifically not for that. Anyway, so all right. So that was a nice little piece of mail to get anyway. and i'm glad that we

confirmed that yolanda confirmed that because i was still a little skeptical and the one thing that you want to keep in mind is you know know how many elite nights you should have because if for some reason it doesn't end up posting i'm not sure is it easy to go back and see how many elite nights you had the previous year i guess you could go back and count them if they were actual stays but if you earned any from spend on the credit card, I feel like it'd be quite a nightmare trying to show Hyatt what you should have. Yeah. Right. Yeah. The other thing that's kind of impossible is to show anyone how much you had spent up till a certain point with that card, because it's not like a calendar year spend. So you'd have to look across forever spend

and divide it into 5K increments and prove that one of those 5K increments ended in December instead of January. And yeah, it's not a fight I'd want to have. So the moral of the story is get the spend done sooner rather than later. If you're going to spend for any pre-nights. Resolve any issues there, right. Okay. All right. So that's good.. Resolve any issues there. Right. Okay.

All right. So that's good. So let's talk about what crazy thing. And this week I'm excited because we've got a what crazy thing double header. It's our favorite. Yes. We'll start off with a crazy thing that Tim encountered. What happened with Tim?

Well, Hyatt. Hyatt happened to Tim. And, you know, we often talk about the fantastic customer service that Hyatt has and how they're well's no IT in Hyatt. He went to use a free night certificate. He had a presumably category four hotel to book. And in his account, he had both a category one to four free night certificate and a category one to seven free night certificate. And unfortunately, I think we've talked about this before. Hyatt has no way to choose which certificate you apply to your stay. And the moral of the story is they applied his category one to seven to a category four stay.

And once he checked in and realized what they had done, they said, well, it's too late now. It's already been used. So we can't help you. Yeah. Yeah. And to make things worse, he mentioned that the one to seven cert was a recently issued one. So it's not like Hyatt automatically picked one that was about to expire, which might make sense. But in this case, they took the most valuable certificate in his account, applied it and then said, sorry, you're out of luck. That's what you get. And that makes no sense, right? Because I mean, like it's not the customer's fault at all in that case. And, you know, and what customer would have ever chosen to use the one to seven in that case, it's crazy to me that the system is not automatically, if it's going to

be automatically set up to take one without you being able to choose, it's crazy to me that it doesn't automatically use the, you know, like the one that is the smallest one that fits, so to speak. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And at least show you during the checkout process what they're using. So, you know, a week or two ago, I complained about Marriott, how when you go to use a free night certificate, it automatically picks the one expiring soonest, which at least that makes some sense. But often it's one that is, for example, might be a 50K or an 85K cert when you want to use a 35K. But at least there, it shows you what it's trying to use. And there is a workaround. It's a very kludgy workaround, but you can go in separately, book another stay with that 85K certificate, go back to the one you really want to book, book it, and then go back and cancel your 85K stay.

With Wyatt, there is no option like that. because what Tim could have done playing Monday morning quarterback here, which this is ridiculous, but what he could have done was booked a category seven free night because you can't apply the category one to four certificate to that. Right. So he could have booked a dummy reservation sometime in the future just to tie up his category one to seven free night certificate to make sure it doesn't automatically get attached to anything else. And so I guess in the future, that's what I would do with my one to seven.

I'd make a reservation as close to the end of the schedule because those are only good for a year anyway, as close to the end of the schedule as possible. Set myself a reminder on my phone in time for the cancellation policy for that place to make sure that it can't accidentally get taken. That's like what I've gathered out of this. But it's unfortunate that Tim had to sacrifice his category one to seven certificate for me to come to that conclusion. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I know what would happen to me if I did that is, is then I would go to book a category one to seven that I really wanted, see that there's no cert available, just use points. And like, I'd forget about that. This

one is hanging out there. Yeah. So yeah, it's just an imperfect solution yeah i know it's definitely an emperor i mean i guess you could make a category now that you know i guess you could make a category one to seven then make your reservation for the four and then go back and cancel the seven and just remember to make a category one reservation every single time but like it's ridiculous that that's what you would have to do in order to absolutely insane right so yeah and and initially you know hyatt of course told Tim Pounce and, you know, that's,

it's not our problem that we took the wrong certificate. Like you're just, you're done with it. You don't know. You got it for free. Be happy, buddy. Yeah.

Like essentially, you know, they're, but they did eventually after he complained a few times, I gave him 15,000 points as a, I don't know, consolation prize i guess which which isn't bad but um it's still because you can't add points to a category one to four

cert he can't he can't then go use his category one to four cert to stay at a category seven hotel so right and the category one to seven is good during peak pricing. So really, that's, you know, good for up to thirty five thousand points. Right. And so I definitely I'd say still got cheated on that one by Hyatt's poor I.T. So make sure you don't run into that situation. And I I had run into one like that. I think we talked about it on the show last year because I, in advance, I realized that it must've happened to somebody else in our frequent miler insiders group, because I reached out to the Twitter concierge before I made the reservation. So I want to make sure I use the one to four. And they said, there's no way they can do it. I had to just go ahead and make the reservation. And then they would be able to check which certificate got pulled, but they didn't know in advance, which one would get pulled. So I made the reservation. Of course, it was the one to seven that got pulled and they were able to manually switch it for the one to four.

But geez, Luis, stop it, Hyatt. Come on, fix that. Fix that. Okay. It's just the worst feature. We love Hyatt. We love Hyatt's rewards program. We do.

That feature, though, is a disaster. Got to fix that. All right. But this was a double header. It was a double header. Yeah, we're not done with crazy things. But what crazy thing did Marriott do this week? Yeah, let's turn from Hyatt to Marriott.

So Marriott, you know, they have this level of elite status called Ambassador Elite, which we never talk about because it requires $20,000 in Marriott spend each year on top of earning 100 qualifying nights to achieve that level of status. And it doesn't really give you any very material perks above what you get at lower levels of status. Not even any partially material perks, really. I mean, theoretically, you'd be first in line for an upgrade and that sort of status. Not even any partially material perks, really. I mean, hey, you know, theoretically, you'd be first in line for an upgrade and that sort of thing. But I haven't heard amazing stories of the incredible upgrades that ambassadors get on

a regular basis. Obviously, of course, it'll happen now and then. It does happen, sure. But nothing published that's like, this is what you get. Right, right. And during the pandemic, the one published perk that you used to get was an assigned ambassador, like a concierge who is assigned to you that would supposedly reach out to the hotels before your stay and make sure you got treated right. And during the pandemic, they stopped

doing that. They stopped having real people assigned to you. So now the new thing is they've announced, woohoo, we've got a great new feature. We're assigning these concierge people. What a great idea. That's so new and fresh. Thanks, Mariette. And because we're providing this great new service, starting next year, we're going to require $23,000 worth of spend instead of 20,000. How ridiculous is that? I saw that and I said, they really need that tiny little bit of extra revenue

that the extra $3,000 spend is going to provide in order to pay somebody to answer your email. I mean, right? Is it that expensive a program that the, what, how much could they possibly get out of that $3,000 in revenue that you put into it? I mean, I don't even know how they get paid. It's just a straight licensing fee to begin with

or a piece of room sales or what Marriott gets. But whatever out of that 3,000, obviously it's not the lion's share of the $3,000, right? Preston Pyshko, But keep in mind, if you achieve 100 nights this year, you're still under the old rules, only requiring $20,000 of merit spent. So I jumped onto my account to see how close am I. And- Preston Pyshko, Oh, you're inching there, right? Inching closer. Preston Pyshko, You know. I'm kind of close to 75-night titanium status. So what's another 25 nights to get to ambassador?

You got 45 or so to go. But the key is how close am I with Marriott Spence? So according to my dashboard on my Marriott account, I currently have $404 of Marriott Spence. Of the 20,000 required. of the 20,000 required. So you're going to have to book a nice stay, Greg. That's all. You just have to book a nice day. Just one really, really nice day. You're all set. That's it. That's it. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's exciting. I wish you the best with your journey there. My pursuit to ambassador. Yeah.

Right. The hilarious thing is that 23, like what kind of a weird number is 23,000, right? That had to have been a negotiation. Like that number tells me that somebody probably went for 25 or 30, right? And they discussed this and it came down to the 23 number, right? I don't know. It's gotta be.

I'm guessing that when they decided how many of these ambassador concierge people to hire, they figured, well, we can only afford 10 and each one can handle 10 people, whatever the number is. Whatever, yeah. So they come up with some number of how many elites they can actually provide this service to. And then hopefully someone looked at data and said, oh, look, only that many people spent 23,000 or more. So if we cut it off at 23,000, that's how we'll get there. I don't know if they really did that, but that at least would provide some logical-

It would make some sense. Yes. And you would think that they would aim that number a little bit higher because the whole idea of having a bar is to make people jump over it. Right. So, I mean, the whole idea of having 23 is people will spend 23 plus something. So, you know, but, but, you know, conversely, another reason for doing it is, is to, you know, delight your, your best customers so that they'll want to keep coming back. And so why they think someone who spends 20,000 isn't worth, you know, doing this for, uh, in order to encourage them to keep spending 20,000 each year. That's kind of beyond me. I mean, that's yeah. Absolutely. And at that level of spend, if you're somebody who's spending 20,000 a year, it seems like it probably could vary, right? Like maybe next year you will spend 23. Why would you like disincentivize that person from spending that? Who knows? We can go all day long Marriott. You're crazy. I don't understand, but I guess I don't have to, because I'm not

going to spend $20,000 anytime in this lifetime and Marriott in a year. So I guess they didn't design the program for me intentionally. So let's move on then to mattress running the numbers. This week's mattress running the numbers is even more exciting than everything we've talked about here because Frontier is encouraging us to go wild. They really are. So we mentioned this on a previous show that Frontier has this new thing where you can fly all that you want for free, in quotes, for a year. But we didn't know the price tag, but now we do. The first year of this go wild pass will only be $599. $599 to fly as much as I want?

As much as you want for a whole year with a little asterisk and terms and conditions supply. Do you think we need to talk about those terms and conditions before we talk about whether it's worth paying $599 for this thing? I mean, it's always a good idea to take a look at the fine print, isn't it? If you're going to spend $600 on something, you should probably know what it is you're getting or more importantly, what you're not getting for the $599. Right, right, right. So let's start with, how far in advance can you book one of these free flights if you want to go somewhere? A full and complete 24 hours ahead of time. Wow. Okay. So you've got a lot of planning ahead. And I looked in the FAQs and if you want to do a round trip flight,

you still have 24 hours from your return flight to book that return. I see. So who knows when you're getting home? Don't go thinking you're going to book both ways the day before your outbound flight. No. No. One way at a time, folks. Don't get ahead of us here. One way at a time. But that's the only meaningful restriction. Is that right? Sure. Yeah.

I mean, well, unless you count the fact that you don't get any seats or bags or anything else, you're going to pay for all that stuff, right? Oh, yeah. But taxes and fees would be included, right? Oh, slow down there. No, let's not talk about inclusions. This is frontier. So no, you're going to pay the taxes and the fees separately. Oh, slow down there. Let's not talk about inclusions. This is Frontier. So no, you're going to pay the taxes and the fees separately.

Oh, okay. So when Frontier regularly has a price of about, let's say, $100 for a one-way flight, how much of that tends to be fees that I'm still going to have to pay? I mean, a portion of it. A significant portion of it. Significant. Yeah. Some readers posted some typical flights.

It tends to be around $40 in taxes and fees on these one-ways. And so it's still a discount. Yeah, you might save $60 for the downside of not being able to book until the day before. There's also a slew of blackout dates. So not only do you have to wait till the day before, but there's a bunch of days at which, uh, don't even bother trying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not even 24 hours at a time. So, I mean, some people might look at that as an upside. People that have certain types of schedules might look at it as a, you know, being able to plan the day before might be helpful. I mean, I could imagine someone who's like a, I don't know,

a traveling nurse or somebody who does those like three on four off type schedules that has some flexibility to be able to take off and go somewhere. I could see where it might appeal to somebody or a couple of somebodies, but not very many somebodies. Yeah. I mean, you have to be adventurous enough to know that you can get back somehow if you're not able to book that frontier flight back, or maybe you book it some other way. And, you know, I think it only makes any sense also to those who are close to airports that serve a lot of frontier flights. So, you know, I think Denver is probably the top one. I looked on flight connections, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Orlando, Tampa.

They all have quite a few flights. But if you're out of an airport with one or two, I can't even imagine that this would make any sense at all. No, it just wouldn't. And really, the flexibility you would need, again, not only to be able to book 24 hours in advance to begin with, but then like we've said here, you don't know if you're going to be able to get the return flight you want. And because Frontier doesn't have the same type of regular service that other airlines have, you may not be able to travel again for a couple of days. If they only have a few flights a week,

then you don't get your preferred flight. You might be stuck for a few more days or like Greg said, have to find another way home. So, I mean, if you're a retiree or you've got a flexible job where you can work from anywhere, maybe this works for you, but it's a, I mean, it seems like quite a small market segment that this is going to appeal to. I agree. I agree. And then the price goes way up too, after this first introductory thing. I forget exactly what it was, but something like $2,000 or something like that. I don't know. It was well over a thousand anyway. So yeah,

not a mattress run or mileage run for me. That's for sure. Do you earn miles on the flights, Craig? I don't think you do. I don't think you earn miles or Elite credits, so it's not even good for earning that coveted Frontier Diamond status or whatever it's called. Front of the Den status or whatever it is. Yeah. All right. Well, wild Frontier, but no thanks.

We pass. All right. So how about awards we booked this week? Did you book anything interesting this week, Greg? I don't have interesting is the right word, but I did book some flights on Delta for kind of late next year. Well, don't tell me about your boring Delta flights, Greg. Well, I'm going to mention, I'm going to, I'm talking about it for the reason why I booked it, which is I have a few Amex Platinum cards in the household that have airline fee incidental credits.

And on each of these cards, Delta was picked as my preferred airline. I have remaining credits that I hadn't yet used up. And so I've learned from past experience that Delta award ticket fees do count and get reimbursed by Amex. So I made sure to book up a bunch of Delta award flights that would use up my credits. And if by late next year, I realize that I'm not going to take those flights, that's fine. I can cancel them, get my miles back and even get the fees I paid back.

And in my experience, Amex hasn't clawed back the credits they gave me originally. It could happen though. People have talked about in the past that if you do something like this and immediately cancel, like let's say the next week, cancel it, get your money back from Delta or whatever the airline is, that Amex might claw that back. So go slow.

But anyway, that's why I went ahead and booked these awards in case I do take them and to use up my credits. Very good. Great. All right. So I didn't actually book an award this week, but I mentioned maybe last week that, or maybe I hadn't mentioned it yet. I can't recall. My wife upgraded her Marriott boundless card to the Ritz card. And the reason for that was we had a low cost carrier flight to book. So rather than just pay the $300 that it would have cost us for check bags and seats and everything else. We figured, well, it makes more sense to upgrade to the Ritz card, pay $450 in the annual fee for

the Ritz card, and then buy the low-cost carrier flight with the Ritz card and get that $300 back because of course we were paying 300 in those fees. So essentially for $150 more than we were going to spend already on the incidentals on that low-cost carrier flight. I figured, well, we'll have the Ritz card with all of its other benefits, including the annual 85K free night certificate. So we did that last week, about a week before my wife's anniversary date. And I figured that was good timing because it meant our 85K certificates would line up in the future because I have one that comes out around this time of year also. So I thought, oh, great, we'll get a good weekend out of the deal. And sure enough, her next certificate posted and it was an 85k free night

certificate. And they also posted her 35k free night certificate that would have come with the boundless card and a nice little surprise and delight. So Marriott's doing something right. They're surprising and delighting their best customers, which is you and your wife. Right. We have spent more than Greg this year at Marriott's. I'll say that much. That's probably not why they did it. So, but I'm about, you know, nine times short still on my ambassador status. But anyway, that worked out pretty nicely. So that was a good surprise. All right.

So I will book those eventually, but have not yet. And I look forward to putting them to good use. So I think that means it's time now for this week's main event. Main event time. Extreme stacking for extreme savings. All right. Let's talk about first deal finding. How do you find the best deals?

You know how to do this, Nick. What do you do? Well, you just click and find them and you go to frequentmiler.com and you subscribe to the email list, so that you'll be on the list for all of the really, really good deals, at least in this space. But in seriousness, there are a lot of different tools that we use in order to get the best deals. So we'll talk about finding deals. We'll talk about shopping portals. We'll talk about credit cards a little bit and card-linked offers, et cetera. But let's start out with talking about how we find good deals. And so I have for years been using Slick Deals. It's not the only deal forum on the internet. There are other good ones.

Dan's Deals Forums has a lot of activity, I know. And there are other deal sites that post deals. What I like about Slick Deals is that it's really easy to see the forums from the front page. And what I want to mention is any of these deal sites, oftentimes, at least some of the deals that you see standing out on the front page are sponsored or ads in some way. So keep in mind when you go to any of these sites, the first stuff you see isn't always the best stuff. But anyway, we use Slick Deals. I use it quite a bit. And so there are different forums. I use the Hot Deals Forum most of the time. So you can find a link to that right from the homepage on slickdeals.com and scroll through and see deals. What I like about Slick Deals is that it's user-generated

content in those Hot Deals forums. So you have people submitting the deals. There are obviously deals also submitted by Slick Deals staff, but the vast majority of them are from people like you and me that are hunting for a deal and find one and post it. And of course, because it's a forum, there's discussion. So I always like to look through and see, do people say, oh, this is a great deal or this is not a great deal, et cetera, in order to get an idea of what people are saying, because the internet keeps people honest in that way sometimes. So that's a tool I use. Now, at this time of year, as we approach the holiday shopping period, when things are going on sale and, you know, different stacking coupons may happen accidentally and give opportunities for even better deals.

I like to use the slick deals live view, which I've written about before. I think it's just slick deals.com slash live view. But if you Google it, I'm sure you'll find a link to it. And the reason I like that is because you can watch all of the comments in the forums as they scroll by. And so if you want to sit at the computer for a few minutes and just hunt for deals, you can sit there and let it refresh and keep an eye on the comments people are putting in. And again, what I like about that is because I'll see something within a thread I may not have even clicked on. There may have been a thread about something at Macy's that didn't interest

me. But then within the discussion, I see somebody said, oh, there's these three coupons that are stacking and they're working on everything. And then I might realize, oh, well, there's something else I want at Macy's and I can apply that knowledge to some other deals. So I like using the Slick Deals live view for that because I don't have to click each individual thread in order to see the discussion happening. So that's one tool that I like to use. And then along with that, I use camel, camel, camel.com. That's three camels, camel, camel, camel.com. The word camel three times. When one camel isn't enough, you need three of them. And camel, camel, camel is useful for Amazon for price checking things and seeing the historical pricing. So what you can do is you can

type an item in the search box or actually just copy and paste the web address, the URL from your browser right into the search box. And it'll give you the price history on that item. So you'll be able to see the last few years of price history, what price it's been offered at, the lowest price ever, the highest price ever, the average price. And so that can help you when you get an email or you see something online that says, whoa, best price ever, or today only, blah, blah, blah. And you want to see, well, is that really a special price today? Or is it always available at or near that price? And so I use that tool quite a bit, not only when I'm searching for an Amazon deal,

but also when I see a sale on something somewhere else, I'll often look up that product on Amazon and pop it into Camel, Camel, Camel. So I can see what the price history has been on Amazon as a comparison point. Yeah. Yeah. I could see why that would be totally useful because just because something is 20% off, it doesn't mean that's the lowest you can expect to get. And so if it's often cheaper than that, then that's good to know. And by the same token, if you see something and you're like, oh, that sounds like a pretty good price. And you see, oh, wow, that's the lowest price it's been in the last three years. You know, maybe now is the time to buy that if you want one or think you can resell it.

Yeah, no, great, great point. Um, what about, do you ever put stuff in your shopping basket just to see like, you know, sometimes stores will, if you put something in your shopping basket at to see like, you know, sometimes stores will, if you put something in your shopping basket at some store and then you leave and, you know, you might like a day or two later, get an email that says, Hey, come back and buy this thing. And here's 15% off or whatever. You know, I don't do that. Do you, does that happen for you? I I've done it. I've done it sometimes. Um, ironically, it's been a while since, since that's been successful for me. And I don't do it often enough to really have a good track record. Um, where it's worked for me mostly lately is with, uh, the capital one shopping

portal, which we'll talk about later, but,. But getting back to just finding the good deals, how do you find... Sometimes there's great coupon codes that will just save you 10%, 20%, whatever, and stack with all the other things going on. Yeah, and that can be a little tough to find sometimes. But a lot of times, for the publicly available ones anyway, a lot of shopping portals will list them. And some shopping portals are better than others in terms of there's some shopping portals out there where you'll Google for coupon codes and there'll be a million coupon codes that don't work.

But I like to stick with mainstream portals like Rakuten and TopCashback that I know are likely to have the current coupon codes. Rakuten is usually particularly good about having most of the current working coupon codes. There are some extensions, browser extensions you can use for that too. And we can talk about that when we get to the browser extensions in a few minutes, because I'm a little hesitant on installing browser extensions, but the Capital One browser extension does search for coupon codes. So that's one of its benefits. So that's something you can do. Also, by the way, you can set a deal alert. I mentioned slick deals before and I didn't mention you can set deal alerts.

So if you're looking for a deal specifically on the new AirPods Pro Duo Max, whatever they are, I don't know my AirPods, but whatever the latest thing is, if you want to set a deal alert, you can set an alert at slick deals for deals with specific keywords so that you can get alerted to that when somebody posts a deal. So that's something to keep in mind too. That can be helpful if you're looking for a specific gift for somebody and you just want to find a good price on it. But anyway, okay. So coupon codes, like I said, I stick with major shopping portals. So I don't have to click through a million different coupon codes that aren't going to work and I'll

try those. Maybe a browser extension. Do you have another trick for coupon codes? A couple other things. One thing, again, I haven't done this in a long time and I've heard that the best of these are gone now, but when you change your address with the post office, they'll send you a sort of welcome packet full of coupons and sometimes they're very valuable coupons. I mean, they have to be pretty valuable to make me move, Greg. Right, right, right. So you might not want to move just for that, but it's something to keep an eye on if you are moving to see what comes in the mail and not just toss it away. The other thing is with some stores, you can go on to sites like eBay and actually buy good coupon codes very cheaply.

So, for example, before the show, I just jumped on to look at Lowe's. And so you could for about two bucks, 250, you can buy a 10% off coupon code. And these generally work for almost anything. So if you're going to buy something from Lowe's anyway, and 10% off would save you more than a couple bucks, it can be very much worth it. And generally these places that sell them, deliver them pretty much instantly. So when you're ready to buy, you wait until then to buy that coupon code and you're good to go. So I've done that before and it's worked very well for me. So have I. I've done it specifically with Lowe's quite a few times.

There are lots of other sites that sell the coupon codes too, though I'd urge some caution with going through random websites that may or may not be legit, might be just searching for your credit card. eBay was probably a good suggestion in the sense that you can feel relatively safe. Or you can ask around with friends and see who's used a different site that sells coupon codes. But But yeah, I mean, I've saved a lot with Lowe's that way my in laws needed a new washer and dryer and you know, 10% off on a new washer and dryer was not a small amount of money. Same thing my father in law needed a new plow for his truck. And again, 10% off certainly made a large, significant difference on a purchase like

that. So it can be worth the $2 or $3 to buy a coupon code when you might need one. Yeah. And the nice thing with eBay, you can see the seller rating. So don't go with someone with poor ratings. But if they have a lot of positive reviews, then you should be pretty safe. Yep. Very good.

All right. So that's, those are some tips as far as the deal finding end of things goes. And, and, and I should actually, one more thing I'm going to add on that is, is finding a medium for instant notifications, whatever that medium might be. I use Twitter for that still, because that's what I'm used to doing because I get alerts there just for like deal-y sort of things. So like, for instance, we record this on Thursdays and last night. So Wednesday night, I got a notification that dance deals had posted a deal for some app for transportation to get a whole bunch of free credit by adding coupon codes. And so I saw that very quickly because the notification popped right up on my phone because I'm subscribed with instant alerts there.

So I, so I was able to take advantage of the deal, although I don't know if I'll actually use that specific one, but it helps to have instant notifications of some sort, whether that's instant emails, if that's the best form of communication for you, or there are some programs I think you can set up, text messages and that sort of thing, and subscribe to a few sites that post good deals like that. Dan's deals can be a good one. Doctor of credit, obviously frequent miler, uh, because the best of the best deals will often get posted somewhere, but they probably won't last very long. So especially if, you know, if we're talking about holiday deals, limited time, black Friday type

stuff, you want to get notified right away. You don't want to be looking at it tomorrow because it's going to be too late. Yeah. Yeah. Great point. And it's a good time to remind people that we have Frequent Miler. We have an instant version of our newsletter. So if you like getting things through email, make sure you're subscribed to the instant email, which isn't really instant, but it's within about 20 minutes of when we post any

post, you'll get an email with the contents of that post. And so you'll know pretty much right away when there's some deal that we're saying is amazing. And so that's a good way to do it. And I'm going to add to that, that we don't tend to use exclamation points in our titles on Frequent Miler. If we do, that means it's something particularly special. So that can be a good hint to you that if you ever see an exclamation point in the title, it's probably something you want to read right away or something we're very excited about anyway. If it's about a deal and you see an exclamation point, it's time to open that one up

and see what it is because we're careful not to overuse those exclamation points. Right. Exclamations or the word, wow. Wow. Crazy. Yeah. There's something going on. Something's happening. Pay attention. Great, great, great point. All right. Let's talk about shopping portals because that's a huge area for stacking deals. So if there's something you want to buy, you found a great deal on it and you could buy it from who knows Best Buy or Lowe's or whatever, and you figured out all the coupon codes and all that stuff, you could still earn more by starting your shopping from an online shopping portal. So let's talk about how shopping portals work

in the sense of, I think it helps to understand their model, their business model in order to understand what it is you're getting. So the whole idea of a shopping portal is that they have a website. So, you know, let's call it right now, Nick's shopping portal. So I have a website and I have links to Macy's and Bloomingdale's and Best Buy and Lowe's. And so what happens is you click through one of my affiliate links. Let's say you want to buy something at Macy's. You click through a link at my site and you go to Macy's, but that purchase gets tracked. So Macy's pays me some small commission because I sent you to their website. I sent you to Macy's essentially. And so then I share some of that

commission with you. That's the way a shopping portal works. So when we're talking about shopping portals, we're talking about going to a site like Rakuten or American Airlines eShopping and clicking through one of their links to go to the site that you ultimately want to buy from in order to earn some sort of a return. And you can earn return in cashback, you can earn it in miles or points in the various programs because there are lots of different shopping portals. And the key is to understand here is that the way that tracking works. So you click through the link, go to the retailer website, and it tracks that click through. And so you want to make sure that you click through the portal before you're ready to

make a purchase and do it relatively soon after. Don't wait, you know, like a day and assume that it's still going to work because you clicked through yesterday. You want to make sure you click through relatively close to when you're ready to make a purchase so that nothing times out because at some point it'll stop tracking that. Right. So there's some best practices to talk about with that, but that's the general idea, right? Does that capture the gist of it for people?

It does. And let me say too, that in 99.5% of the cases, the prices you get after clicking through from a portal will be exactly the same as if you didn't go through a portal. There are a few sites, often like flowers delivery type of sites where they have some kind of special deal with a portal and the prices are different. And so, you know, watch out for that type of thing. But as long as you follow- You tend to find that with like specifically gifty sites. So flowers, steaks that you send through the mail, you mail, those types of things where you're clearly sending. That's the only reason they exist is to give these deal sort of things. That's the one where it tends to be different prices usually.

Right, right. You won't see it on any of the major like normal brands, the Macy's, the Home Depot's, anything like that. You won't see that happen there. Yep. And worth mentioning that shopping portals work 99% of the time too, if you follow shopping best practices, which we'll touch on that in a minute here, but they typically work. Now, every now and then is something going to fail to track maybe, but most of the major shopping portals out there, at least in my experience, and I've spent many thousands of dollars through

shopping portals because I did a lot of reselling before I worked for Frequent Miler. And I've spent many thousands of dollars through shopping portals because I did a lot of reselling before I worked for frequent miler. So I've spent thousands on top of thousands through portals. And the vast majority of it is always tracked perfectly when I did my job, right. When I did my, my end of it, right. So may you run into a problem at some point possibly, and then it's worth following up with the portal if you do, but for the most part, these things work. So don't get turned off if you have one that doesn't. And also know that it's not instantaneous and that if you do have a problem, the whole business model here is that the portal has to earn their commission. So you have to make sure you're clicking through the link properly and checking out properly because if they're not getting paid, you're not getting paid. So we'll talk more about best practices in a

minute. But how do you make sure you're getting paid Yep. Yeah. One more thing about not getting paid immediately. Like most of these sites, especially the cashback ones, don't expect to see your money for about three months. You know, that's a typical timeframe. So it's not unusual for people to complain on our blog and comments saying, Oh, that portal just doesn't pay out forever. But that's typical. What's not typical is when they pay out right away, which you do see on some portals, usually like earning miles or something where they'll pay out right away. You'll get those miles right away. But if something happens where they find out later that that purchase wasn't a valid purchase based on whatever the rules were, they could actually pull those miles back out of your account.

Yeah. And the reason that it takes so long for the cash back to post to your account is because if you, let's say you go and buy something at Macy's, you buy something really expensive that earns a whole bunch of cash back. And then Macy's will take a return for half of forever. So if you return that purchase, then obviously Macy's isn't a return for half of forever. So if you return that purchase, then obviously Macy's isn't going to pay the shopping portal and they don't want to have paid you. And if they did pay you right away, there would be people that would take advantage of that and buy thousands of dollars worth of stuff, get the cash back, return it all and run. So they have these rules. And so Macy's isn't going to pay them for 90 days or whatever it

is probably. And that's why you don't get paid until they get paid. So that's why exactly half of forever. It feels like sometimes anyway. That's right. Very good. All right. So now that we have the basics down, how do you find a good portal to use when, you know, let's say I found something at Home Depot I want to buy.

What portal should I use? Well, you want to go to cashbackmonitor.com. It's the best resource we've found anyway, that updates daily and shows the cashback rates at a wide range of shopping portals, cashback, miles and points, credit card programs, they list just about everything. So cashback monitor is a great tool. Now, even I've said in the past that they've like missed a few portals, that there were some shopping portals that don't show up on cashback monitor. But for the most part, at some point, they've added the ones that I said in the past didn't show up there. So the vast majority of shopping portals do show up through cashback

monitor these days. And the nice thing is that you could also set your own values there. So for instance, if you value American Airlines miles more than Delta miles, you can set values for the different types of rewards so that it'll sort the shopping portals based on the payouts that, you know, and how you value them. So it's a really quick, easy reference tool where you can see what everybody's paying out and you can click right through to get to that shopping portal page where you need to be in order to earn your cashback. Yeah. And it's important to note that those payout rates are not static. They change all the time for all the different portals and cashback monitor actually lets you see the history of, you know, any given store, what were the payout rates over time, which is really useful. And it also lets you set alerts. So if you're, you know, waiting for the dell.com to go back up to 10, you know, 10% back, then set up an

alert and you'll get an email when, when, when that shows up and it will eventually. So very useful tool. Great tool. One thing to keep in mind when you use that is that if you're searching for Dell, Dell's a great example. In the search box at Cashback Monitor, just type in Dell and hit enter because some portals will name it Dell Consumer and others will name it Dell Home

and others might name it Dell Technologies. And so Cashback Monitor has multiple entries because of course they're getting their feed from all of those different portals. So with some stores, not very many, but with some stores, there might be more than one entry. And you want to look at all the rates from the various ones. That's actually a great tip. That's definitely caught me up sometimes.

And a similar thing with hotel brands. So if you're looking for an IHG property, you might want to actually type in multiple different things. You might want to type in IHG, you might want to type in intercontinental, and you might want to type in the specific brand that you're looking for, Kempton or Holiday Inn, because all of those things might show up differently and there might be different rates depending on which one you're going to. Yeah. But that's going to be your easiest tool rather than having to go to six or eight or 10 different shopping portals and see who's got the best payout. That'll be a really good tool for you to use. It simplifies the process significantly. I use it just about every day. So definitely something, a tool that I use all the time. So that's a good tool for making

sure you're going to get a good cashback rate, comparing against others. And like Greg said, comparing against the 15 month history, which is useful at this time of year because we often see increased payouts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So you want to take a look because if you're going to buy something today, when you hear this week before Black Friday or so, you may look and see, oh, well, last year they increased the cash back to 20% on Black Friday. Maybe I had to wait a couple of days before I buy this. So that can be a good tool. Absolutely. Absolutely. And what it won't do

is tell you about special rates that portals offer just for you or in different ways. And what I mean by that is like Rakuten, which is one of my favorite shopping portals. It sometimes, not always, shows better rates through their mobile app than through the desktop window. And I think what Cashback Monitor shows you would be their desktop, um, rates. Um, it'll also sometimes show you different rates depending on who you are, like even on the desktop. So, you know, for example, sometimes they know who I am. Yeah. Sometimes they have these like, um, special, like two X or three X rewards days. And, and depending on your login, you may be targeted for higher rewards. And that's the type of thing that Catchback Monitor is not going to catch. And I don't even know how it would

if it tried. Wouldn't be possible. And also they usually refresh the rates once a day during the Black Friday, Cyber Monday period. I think that they do sometimes refresh more than one time in a day, but it's worth noting that portal rates for most portals change overnight, around midnight or one o'clock in the morning or so. Eastern time varies a little bit from one portal to another. But during the holiday shopping period,

we do sometimes see them respond to each other and change rates during the middle of the day. So it can sometimes be worth checking your two or three favorite portals to see if the rate has changed. Yeah. All right. Before talking about the next special shopping portal, let's talk about best practices for portaling. So I use a separate browser for shopping than for buying. So when I'm price comparing and everything, I go to one browser and I go to another one to actually make my purchases. Do you do something similar?

Yeah, I do. I do. And in fact, what I do is, well, you know, I'm not even gonna explain what I do. Yes, I do the same thing. Let's keep this easy. I do the same thing. And the reason for that is because when you're shopping and you're testing out coupon codes and you're clicking around different portal sites, there's potential for some confusion

in that tracking cookie. So we talked before how you're going to eventually click through the shopping portal and there's something in the way you click through the computer system tracks that purchase and knows that you got sent to the retailer site from the shopping portal. But if you're clicking around too many different sites like that all at once, there's a chance that one is going to steal that click away. So I like to do all the shopping in one. And then when I'm ready to buy, I want to totally clean different browser to actually click through the portal. So it's one click through the portal to the site, add the item to my cart and check out so that there's no chance that that click gets quote unquote stolen by some other program I've clicked through. Let me give a concrete example. You've gone through a portal,

you've put something in your shopping cart and you're getting ready to buy. And then you think, oh, I should check whether there's any good coupon codes that'll make this cheaper. So you go to another, if you go to another tab within that same browser, search for coupon codes for Macy's or whatever it is, you'll find a site that promises, let's say 20% off, click here to reveal that code, it has stolen the shopping portal click. That site now is going to get the commission for your sale if you go back to your cart and check out. Whether or not you use that coupon code, it's stolen the click. So your protection against that is the way we do it. You search for that coupon code on a totally separate browser, so it can't steal the click. But if you did it within the same browser, your only protection would be to go back to the shopping portal, click through again before you make the final purchase. But because there's so many sort of vagaries around how these, these things track with cookies or, you know, within the URL and everything, we don't really know what's going on. And we can't be 100% sure that when it stole the click, it didn't somehow keep it even if you click through again. Right? Because, you know, think about it, if you were somebody like in that position,

where, you know, you were trying to steal clicks, you'd come up with the best way to do it possible, right? I mean, the whole challenge here would be to come up with the ironclad way to steal that click. Once somebody clicks to reveal the coupon code, if that's your business model, you do the best you can to make sure that that tracking cookie doesn't go away to someone else. So who knows what, yeah, exactly. The vagary is there. It's a good way to put it. So, so best practice use one for shopping. Like, I don't know, use Mozilla Firefox for shopping and then use Chrome for actually, you know, when you're ready to put it in your cart, you've already tested the coupon codes and all the rest of that Mozilla. So you're ready to just go to the portal, go to the website, add the item to your cart,

apply the coupon code you have and check right out without clicking anywhere else. And that's the way I buy stuff. So that's what you generally want to do to avoid any potential problem. Now, are there times when I've personally gotten lazy and varied from that a little bit? Sure. But I'm still pretty careful about how I go about it. So I recommend doing it the way I just said. And then also, I would say that when I vary from that, I know I'm taking a risk because, like we just said, that cookie may get stolen or the tracking may get stolen there. So know that it's on you if you didn't do it right. Because I know that.

And on the browser where you're actually checking out and making the actual purchase, do not install any shopping related toolbars, because they can do the same thing of stealing the click. And so, you know, even though you started your shopping portal from your shopping from the portal that you deem best, well, the shopping portal toolbar might think it's a better choice and, and impose itself on your on your shopping. And so you have to be careful about that. And it's better just not to install those toolbars on that browser. That's a good point. And there are so many different browsers, by the way, if you're not like a particularly tech savvy person, you may not realize how many different browsers are out there. So you could just install another

browser. I mentioned Mozilla Firefox. And of course, there's Google Chrome if you're an Apple person. And of course, you got Safari, but there's Opera and Vivaldi and DuckDuckGo and Cake. And like, there's a bunch of different browsers out there. So if you just Google, you know, a new browser, you can install something that can become your default, you know, shop around and click for coupon code browser. Yeah. Yeah. If you know what you're doing, you could also set up multiple sort of identities in Google That's what I do. I just didn't know. Yeah.

And but don't play with that unless you understand what you're doing. But yeah, I have a shopping portal identity. So I go to that browser to actually purchase things. The other thing I do, just out of an abundance of caution, is even after I've put everything in the shopping cart, when I'm really ready to put in the credit card number and press go, I click through the shopping portal again. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Yeah. Just why not? It's not going to hurt me. It's not going to hurt. Yeah. It's totally not necessary, but it doesn't hurt. Nope. I do everything I can to make sure that that purchase is going to track,

especially when it's a significant return. And I really want to get that return. So I do everything I can to make sure that that purchase is going to track, especially when it's a significant return. And I, I really want to get that return and I do everything I can to make sure that there's no way it's not going to attract. Right. So yeah, agreed. Yeah. Agreed. Do the same. All right. So let's talk about some of our favorite portals. So the reason I would say we, we, we normally are looking for what's the best deal, but if like multiple rates are similar, I would always prefer to go with a portal that I use a lot, that I trust. And not only that, some of them require you earn a certain amount, like $25 before they'll pay out anything. And so if you spread out all your purchases across like a hundred different portals and don't reach $25 in rewards for each one, you get nothing by optimizing. Or if you do, but you forget to redeem it until that portal goes out of business. If you have so many of these accounts, it can be very easy to lose track of

cashback that's been sitting there for years. Ask me how I know. So I'd be interested to hear if you have different ones. But my favorite of the pure cashback ones is Top Cashback. They tend to have the best cashback rates or very close to it anyway. And they've proven very reliable for me over the years. My best, my favorite point earning one is Rakuten. Wait a second.

Isn't that a cash back portal, Greg? Which is advertised as a cash back portal, but it gives you the option of earning Amex membership rewards points instead. As long as you have one Amex credit card that earns membership rewards points, you can switch as you have one Amex credit card that earns membership rewards points, you can switch your earning preference to membership rewards. And if you're like us, preferring transferable points over pennies, then I think that's a great choice. So I love it for

that. And while they don't like every day necessarily have the best rates. They have so many special deals where it's like 10 X day or, you know, 15 X day or, you know, triple the best promotions. I feel like in general, the best promotions. So they're, they're definitely a good one. And my new favorite is the Capital One shopping. And we'll, we'll have to have a whole discussion about that. But before we do, did I miss any favorites, Nick? No, those are my top two anyway, I think. I mean, I use the airline ones when they offer a bonus. So I've used American Airlines eShopping a lot this year, particularly because the points you earn through the portal,

not the bonus points, the way I just said that is going to make it confusing. The rate that you see when you click through the portal, not the bonus points. The way I just said that's going to make it confusing. The rate that you see when you click through the portal, the three miles per dollar or six miles per dollar or whatever it might be. Those count as loyalty points. So that's been useful, I think. So that's one I might add is the American Airlines ePortal because it can help you get to elite status without ever flying, depending on how much shopping you do. And then also they occasionally run these deals like the, I think, I don't know when it ends, but there has been one anyway this week that was spend $1,500 and get 4,000 bonus miles. Now the 4,000 bonus miles, that comes after

you spend 1,500 cumulatively over whatever purchases you made during the promo period. And those don't count as loyalty points, but they're still valuable to me. So I like that portal for that specifically. Totally agree. Yep. Yep. All right. And then, I mean, there are other portals.

I've used lots of other portals. I've used tons of them. I've got cashback strewn all over the place in these little portals. So there are other ones that I've had good luck with, but those tend to have the best rates, I find, and the most reliable payouts. And I'm sure there's somebody screaming at their computer right now saying, top cashback didn't pay me for blah, blah, blah. I know

it happens to one person here or there now and then, but in my experience, they've been great. Right. Or they're screaming about their favorite portal. Right. Also. And that's fine. If you have experience with it, you trust it, go for it. Go for it. That's totally cool. So the way I approach it is I use cashback monitors, see what the rates are. And if one of the ones we just mentioned shows the best rate, then it's a no-brainer to use that. If it's close, then I usually will use one of those anyway because it's close to the top. And then if it's very far from the top,

yeah, then I'll go explore using a different portal, but only then. Yep. So another thing to keep in, I guess I should mention one other thing for you, it's Capital One Shopping, is the referral bonuses. I meant to mention this before for these using these portals. So for instance, I think right now, Rakuten is offering again, or if it's not right now, then keep an eye on it because they periodically offer $40 for each side when you refer somebody new and they spend $40 within the first, I don't know, 90 days or whatever it might be. So right now, this time of year is a great time to use this. Let's say you plan to buy something that's $40 and you've got a player two in your household or a player three or a player four, if you got a couple of kids or whatever,

refer one of those people and let them buy the items. So for instance, I could refer my wife and she could create a Rakuten account and go through Rakuten, spend the $40 and she'll get a $40 bonus for signing up for Rakuten. And I'll get 4,000 membership rewards points because I have my account set up to earn membership rewards points. And so if I wanted to cash back instead, I could set that and earn 40. And between the two of us, we would earn $80 on her $40 purchase. So that can be worth it. And it's worth keeping an eye on that for new portals. If you know you're going to make one single purchase and there's a particularly good referral offer, it might be worth opening an account with that portal, despite what we just said about not opening a million different portal accounts. If you know, you're just going to make that one purchase and set a reminder to cash it out. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a really great tip.

And something that when these $40 deals come about, which seems to be pretty unique, I think, to rack it in. But we do see sometimes 25 or 30 or from others. Yeah, that's a great time to hit up your family members and friends and say, tell them what a great deal it is because they're getting a great deal too. But you could be getting that 40 bucks just by encouraging them to sign up for that portal with your link. And then when they buy stuff, they're getting $40 back as well as Nick said, plus whatever the cashback rate is for that, for the shopping portal. Yeah, exactly. So it's a great deal. Great deals. Keep your eye out for those and don't forget to take advantage. All right. So those portals out of the way, we got to talk about the Capital One Shopping portal because Capital One Shopping is its own sort of unique animal that's been interesting and exciting and weird. So tell us about Capital One Shopping. Yeah. So first let's start with what it's not.

When you log into your Capital One card card account if you have a capital one account um there is something called capital one offer um offers and that's not this which is not this but it acts sort of like a shopping portal am i right yes a lot of a lot of the offers you have to click through and buy stuff in it so the experience is similar to a shopping portal. Yes. But before we lose the person who just skipped over the timestamp here, let's say Capital One Shopping does not require a Capital One credit card. Greg was just talking about what does require a Capital One. We should probably start with Capital One Shopping doesn't require a Capital One credit card. This is a totally separate thing. The whole login thing, we'll come back to that in a second. Let's start with just Capital One Shopping. All right. Start with just Capital

One Shopping. You do not have to be a Capital One customer at all to sign up for Capital One Shopping. And on the face of it, it's an awful portal because the rewards you earn are not actually cash back. It's sort of advertised as get 5%, 10%, whatever cash back. But what you actually get back is credit that you can use to redeem for gift cards. And so it's gift cards to things like Walmart or I don't know, Macy's and things like that. I don't remember what the whole list is, but the point is you can't get cash back if that's what you're hoping for. But the opportunities with the Capital One shopping are really extraordinary if you do what we're about to talk about. Yeah.

And so when we just said a minute ago that Rakuten tends to have the best promotional offers, that's true if you've never signed up for Capital One shopping. If we aren't comparing Capital One Shopping, Rakuten does have the best promotions, but Capital One Shopping has had better promotions. And again, Capital One Shopping is a portal like Rakuten or like American Airlines eShopping. You don't need a Capital One card. I wish they would just brand it differently rather than calling it Capital One Shopping because I think it makes it confusing for people. But like Greg said, on the face of it, poor form of a portal

and not always the best rates when you go to the website, but that's not all there is to say about it. Tell us more. No, it's not. So if you install their toolbar extension, what that toolbar extension will do for you is when you're shopping, it'll automatically pop up a thing saying, you know, you could earn, let's say, 5% back from the store, click here to activate. It'll also automatically pop up a thing inviting you to click to search for coupon codes so you can get a discount at that store that you're shopping on. So those are both handy things. And again, both things that you'd keep on the portal where you search for the best prices, not on the portal where you search for the best prices,

not on the portal where you buy things typically, because of all the reasons we talked about before that Capital One, you don't want Capital One to steal your click if you've got a great deal from Rakuten, for example. Not that Capital One steals anything, except for X-Miles. But yeah, exactly. You don't want any confusion there in the click so it's the shopping browser only install that in the shopping browser not the buying right right and the reason but the the main reason i recommend uh installing it is that after you've clicked around to certain stores and i found especially if you put things into your shopping

cart regardless of whether you actually you put things into your shopping cart, regardless of whether you actually buy the stuff in your shopping cart, they will send you an email with special offers for that store. And often it'll be described as like for the thing that you put in your shopping cart, it'll say like, get this many dollars back if you buy this thing. And it won't necessarily tell you what percentage back that means. But if you click through to activate that offer from the email, you then see, oh, this means I get 27% back on anything I buy at Saks, at giftcards.com, at Dell. There have been so many great offers like that, that have ranged from 18% to just under 30%, that it's kind of insanity. And so far, I've done quite a few of these. They've all paid out. And again, they've paid out in the form of these gift card credits. So

what I'm going to get out of it all is something like Walmart gift card credit, but still, those rates are just so far beyond what you'll find in any other portal that it's definitely worth playing with us. It totally is. And so that's the really exciting part that you get these weird and wacky sort of targeted offers that are totally worth it. Now, I haven't been getting these and I don't know why, but maybe I'm just not clicking around enough in the browser that I installed the extension on. Maybe I need to click around a little bit more, Greg said, add things to your cart.

Maybe that'll help me out. But, you know, and make sure you are signed up for the emails from them. And again, Capital One Shopping, totally separate from Capital One. So you need to sign up for a Capital One Shopping account, just like any other shopping portal. And anybody can do it. You need an email and all the rest of that. Download and install this browser extension because those targeted offers are nutty. And they're way beyond, like Greg said, way beyond what you'll see otherwise.

I mean, you mentioned giftcards.com. And I know you saw a good one for them recently. I had one for Saks this week. And so mine was 27% back at Saks. And if I look at the cashback monitor, 15 month history for Saks, the best that there's been through any shopping portal in the last 15 months was 15%.

And so, I mean, that's pretty amazing. But even that was rare. I expect. For three times, three short times in the last 15 months. For like one day at a time or something like that. Yeah, exactly. Normally it's more like, you know, four or 5%. So 27%, what? That's ridiculous. It's crazy. So, and there've been multiple like that. Exactly. Exactly. So it's pretty exciting. You get these offers, especially when it's things you've been planning to buy anyway, which happens a lot because I'm literally using that browser with a toolbar to shop for things that I'm thinking of buying. And so it's common to get an email for something that I'm going to buy anyway. And to get an extra over 20% back is kind of absurd.

One little tip I'll say is if you use Gmail to automatically put promotional emails into a promotions tab, I would train Gmail to put these in your main inbox. At least that's what I did. So these emails were at first showing up in my promotions tab along with hundreds of other spammy type of emails. And so once I first discovered that these existed at all, I dragged it to my regular inbox and Gmail pops up a thing saying, do you want all email from this sender to go into your regular inbox? And I said, yes. And so

that's how I know about them now. Cause otherwise I only check my promotions tab, you know, I don't know, every few days or something. Yeah. Yeah. I tend to check mine quite a bit. Cause I'm always looking for things like this, but, but I'm sure most people probably don't. So that's a fantastic tip to make sure that you get those in the inbox where you're going to see them because you don't want to miss those things. And it's worth adding to this because the conversation about this came up in our Frequent Miler Insiders this week that these shopping portal offers are unlike coupon codes in the sense that usually, usually they're valid on anything sold by that retailer. So it's not like there are brand exclusions. So this can be a great way, for instance, I mean, Saks is on the mind because of the 27%. If you want to buy something that's not usually discounted, like a Tumi bag, you know,

they only get discounted once or twice a year. Otherwise, the only way you're going to get a better price is by clicking through a shopping portal to a department store like Saks. So saving 27% on something like that that's rarely discounted. I'm laughing because I literally went to Tumi's website yesterday and this morning I got an email from Capital One Shopping for Tumi. There you go. I don't remember what the percentage was, but it was a very high percentage. Yeah. Yeah.

So there's a great way to earn a return on things like that that are often excluded from coupon codes and other types of deals. You can usually earn shopping portal cash back on those things. So that's cool. All right. So you can go through the Capital One Shopping website in order to earn those returns or better. Hopefully, you'll get those targeted offers that we talked about after you've installed the extension.

But that's not all because Capital One Shopping also has an app. So similar to the fact that Rakuten has a website and an app and the cashback rates you see might vary between what you see on the website and what you see in the app when you're logged in. Same is true with Capital One Shopping. If you're logged into their shopping app on your phone, and again, this is not the Capital One app, it's the Capital One Shopping Portal shopping app. And so if you're logged into that on your phone, you may also find higher rates there. In fact, that's where I found the 27% for Saks. It wasn't an email, but rather I found it in the app there.

So the regular rate is like 12%, but there's a section of exclusive offers for me that had them at 27. So that's, I think, worth knowing too, because you'll see different rates. Absolutely. That's great to know. Giftcards.com, some people were getting six or 8% back, I think, in the Capital One shopping app. And I wasn't, but some people were. The website was showing, I think, 3% or 4%, but quite a few people reported that in the app, they had like 6% or 8% back. So it's worth looking at. But I got targeted for over 20% back. So Greg's the winner here, right?

A huge windfall, yes. Yes, that was a nice little surprise. And I guess it's worth mentioning that there's also usually not a stated cap on the portal rewards with the emails. Now with giftcards.com, you're probably still gonna be limited to the 2000 per month, probably,

in purchases in order to earn. But with most sites, Saks or Macy's or Toomey or, you know, to me or whatever, there's usually not a cap in terms of what you can earn. So, right. It's very unusual that there's a cap and that's really specific to some gift card sites like giftcards.com. Right. Um, all right. So that's, and now, now that we mentioned that, I guess I was going to save this for later, but we should mention what Greg was saying earlier, that if you do have a Capital One card, there is an additional place for shopping portal stuff. And that's when you log into your Capital One credit card account, there is that special offers section.

So when you're on your card page, there is a Capital One offers section and there's a little view all button you can click and you'll see a bunch of different cash back rates for different stores. And it works the same as a shopping portal, except you obviously have to log into your Capital One account to start with. And if you're using those offers that you find in your Capital One credit card account, you do have to check out with your Capital One credit card

because that shopping portal works totally different. In that case, you'll earn a statement credit on your card statement for that card that you've clicked through and used. So that's a totally different animal. And the rates there can be different too. I mentioned that I only had 4% at giftcards.com in the Capital One shopping app this week. But when I logged into my credit card account, I had 6% in that Capital One offers section. So confusing. Yeah, it really is. So if you do have a Capital One credit card, there's another shopping portal for you when

you log into your Capital One credit card account. That's the moral of the story. Good. Very good. All right. So I think that's enough about shopping portals. Of course, another great way to get rewarded for shopping is with credit cards. And the obvious thing, at least to anyone listening to this show, is credit card welcome bonuses.

So if you know you're going to be spending a lot, then you probably also know that there are great credit card welcome bonuses available out there, but they usually require a big amount of spend to earn those big bonuses. And so why not stack these two things together and say, oh, I'm going to be spending $3,000 over the next two months. So I'll sign up for a card that'll give me, I don't know, seventy five thousand points or one hundred thousand points, whatever it is after that much spend and use that card to to meet the spend requirement. Yeah, I mean, that's I think that's a no brainer for anybody who's doing a lot of shopping at this time of year. It can be a great time to open a new card and earn a huge bonus that's worth a big chunk of that spend. And,

of course, obviously, we're into miles. So I'd be most interested in many of the different transferable currency cards out there or some of the airline cards. But if you're just looking at costs on your holiday shopping, there's a lot of different cards that offer cash back bonuses that might be appealing in terms of reducing your cash output, your cash costs of the things you're buying during the holidays. So lots of different offers out there. You can use your holiday shopping

towards the spending requirements because you may be spending more than during the rest of the year right now. Another thing to mention on that when we talk about the welcome bonuses, but I think that I think is worth mentioning is timing on these new cards. This time of year can be a great time to open,

specifically cards that offer calendar year benefits. So Amex cards in particular are popular in December because if you open a card like the Platinum card in December, then you could, if you want to, earn this year's set of calendar year benefits like the airline incidental fee credits or the fine hotels and resorts credit. If you use those in December of this year, you can earn them for 2022. Then starting in January, you can earn them again for 2023. And before you're hit with a first renewal annual fee, you'll probably be able to use those again in January of 2024. And then if you decide you want to cancel, you can, but essentially you get the chance to triple dip on those calendar year credits. So December can be a great year to open

any card with calendar year benefits. Again, specifically, there are a number of Amex cards that come to mind with that and earn more essentially than the signup bonus, because you're going to also be able to double or triple dip those benefits. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And it's kind of a reminder too that just because you look at a card like a platinum card that has a $695 fee, deciding whether to get that or not shouldn't necessarily mean, oh, do I want to pay $695 every year for the next forever? The question is more, is the welcome bonus worth significantly more than that first year annual fee? And plus what other perks and stuff do I get for a year or 13 months before I can then cancel and not have to pay the second year annual fee. So that's how I think about it. And it's worth mentioning too that if you do this with Amex, if you plan on canceling,

do wait until the second year annual fee comes due before you call and cancel. Because otherwise, they might claw back the welcome bonus that you earned if, if you, uh, cancel before that. But even though the annual fee came due, even if you paid it, uh, as long as you cancel within 30 days, uh, you'll get that, that second year annual feedback. Yep. Yep. And if you make a habit of doing that like over and over and over again, then they may decide they don't want to give you welcome bonuses in the future. So, you know, don't true story. don't open 10 of them and plan to do it all the same, you know, like be judicious with it, but it can be worthwhile anyway, worth considering good

strategy that adds quite a bit of value on top of a welcome bonus that already exceeds the cost in most cases. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Then of course, if you're not interested in opening new cards, it's worth looking at the bonuses that your existing cards offer. So a lot of cards, for example, offer what we call category bonuses, where they give you more rewards for certain categories of spend. There's not many that offer sort of a general shopping type of category, but there's plenty that will give you extra rewards within certain types of things. If you're going to buy things, office supply stores, or if you're going to buy someone travel as a gift or something. There's plenty that will give you extra points for travel, dining. Maybe you're going to take someone out for dinner, that kind of thing.

Lots of opportunities for extra points through those category bonuses. And then of course, there are great cards that just offer great return on your everyday spend. And then of course, there are great cards that just offer great return on your everyday spend. And if you're doing in-person purchases, one of the best is US Bank Altitude Reserve Card because it'll give you three points per dollar for every mobile wallet transaction. So if you use Apple Pay or Samsung Pay or whatever, to buy something, then you get three points per dollar. Each point is worth one and a half cents towards travel. So that's like a four and a half percent rebate on anything you buy in person. It's a pretty good deal right there. That's a great deal. So if you're the type who's going to go to the mall

and shop till you drop, then you should have that card on your phone or in your Apple Watch or whatever it might be. So definitely worth considering that and which card is going to give you the best return on everyday spend. And remember that all of those things we just talked about, earning a welcome bonus, earning category bonuses, best rewards for everyday spend, that stacks with what we've talked about already.

So you go through a shopping portal and make a purchase online and use a card that earns a good category bonus, and you're going to get your category bonus and you're going to get the portal rewards. So that's a nice little stack for additional value. So speaking of stacking for additional value and credit cards, we have to talk, I think, about card-linked offers next. So when we talk about card-linked offers here, we've got a few different kinds. But the first kind that probably comes up for most people is Amex offers. So if you have an Amex card, you log into your Amex card, scroll down to the bottom,

and you'll see a whole bunch of offers for things like, you know, spend $100 at JCPenney, get $20 back, or we haven't seen that one in forever, but that was the first one that came to mind. So you see offers like that, where you spend a certain amount of money and you get a certain amount back or a certain number of extra points back frequently anyway. And what you have to do in that case is add the offer to your card, to your Amex card in this case, since I'm talking about Amex offers first, add it to your Amex card and then use that Amex card to make a purchase at that retailer.

In most cases, that purchase can be online or in-store and it'll trigger either way. Again, in most cases, there are some exceptions, but for instance, let's say you have one for Dell because I know there was a new one out this week for Dell. You can add that Amex offer for Dell to your Amex card. And then when Rakuten offers an increased portal bonus for Dell this week at some point, because they always do at this time of year, you can click through Rakuten, go to Dell,

and use your Amex card where you have that offer loaded to pay when you check out. And you're going to earn that Amex offer and the points from Rakuten, so it can be a great stack. So Amex offers are a perennial favorite. And in fact, let me add another example that's almost identical to yours, but let's say the great offer you got was from Capital One Shopping. You can still click through Capital One Shopping, get that great offer they offered and pay with your Amex card. And the reason I'm saying this

again is because people keep asking or expecting that you have to use a Capital One credit card to pay when you click through Capital One Shopping or use the Capital One Shopping toolbar. You don't. In fact, you don't have to have any Capital One account at all to use Capital One Shopping. So that's why I want to sort of stress that point that if you're totally into Amex and earning Amex rewards and stuff, great. You can still take advantage of Capital One Shopping. And you should. Yeah. So that can make for a really good stack. So I often look for opportunities. I like comb through my Amex offers

often at this time of year because I want to have an idea of what's out there. And if I have offers that will be specifically good when using a particular card, then I want to make sure I sync those to the best card because what you need to know about Amex offers if you're new to this is that even though you might see that offer initially on all of the Amex cards in your account, you're only going to be able to load an Amex offer to one of your Amex

cards. Years ago, it used to be possible to do more, but these days you can only add it to one. So you want to make sure that you add it to the card you're going to ultimately want to use to pay a checkout. So make sure you choose that wisely. But it's great to look for opportunities to stack that with shopping portals. Now, Chase and Bank of America have their own versions of card-linked offers. So does Citi. Citi has their merchant offers. Chase and Bank of America are a little more straightforward. They're pretty easy to find in your online account. If you're using the Chase app, you can also find them in the Chase app on your phone. You do have to activate those,

but the nice thing with Chase, I'm not exactly sure about Bank of America. Hopefully you can speak to this for them. But with Chase, you can sync the same offer to like four or five different Chase cards and use it four or five different times. A key difference between Chase offers and Amex offers that is worth mentioning is most Amex offers that is worth mentioning is most

Amex offers will be triggered by cumulative purchases. And what I mean there is if you have an offer for spend $500 and get $100 back, you could spend $250 two times and get your $100 back. In most cases with Amex offers, that offer is going to be based on your cumulative purchases. With Chase, it's different. Most Chase offers, again, not all, but most are based on your first purchase after syncing the offer. So you want to make sure that first purchase is the big one after you've synced up the offers. Now, like I said, there are exceptions on both sides to what I just said. What I said was the general

gist of it for most of the time. So make sure you're syncing that up. Now with Bank of America, can you sync the same offer to multiple Bank of America cards? So I'm pretty sure, but don't take this to the bank. Get the pun there. I'm pretty sure that actually there, when you sync an offer, it just applies across your account. All your cards, yeah. And so it doesn't matter where you make the purchase or what card you use. I think you could even use your debit card if you had one and it would count across your whole account. That's my understanding. I haven't spent a lot of time on that, so I'm not 100% sure. Most of those offers are relatively small and that's why you don't see as much excitement over

the Chase offers and Bank of America offers because A, they're usually relatively small and B, they're often targeted. So I may see one in my account that you don't see in much excitement over the Chase offers and Bank of America offers because A, they're usually relatively small and B, they're often targeted. So I may see one in my account that you don't see in yours and that's kind of annoying. So they exist. It's worth looking. By relatively small, sometimes you'll see something that sounds exciting on the surface, it's 15% off your Hyatt stay, but then it says maximum15, you know, something along those lines. So it's really 15% off your first $100. Even 15 is big. There's a lot of them that are capped at like $5 or $6 back.

Yeah, exactly. And so it's not even worth like changing your habits or anything to take advantage of these. Yep. Yep. All right. So Citi has their version too, the Citi merchant offers. But those are like weird. Not everybody has them, I don't think still. Yeah. It's really bizarre. You have to kind of dig around to find your Citi merchant offers.

And if you have multiple Citi cards, you may or you will find different offers on different cards. I've found weirdnesses where a card that I was sure had a certain Uber offer, for example, it wasn't there when I went to look for it, but then I will look later and it was there. So they've got some nice IT situations going on there. Another thing is that while it seems to work pretty well, as far as I could tell, tracking the success of using these things is very, very difficult because you don't get an email saying, congratulations, you got $10 back on this thing or whatever. Instead, it just shows up on your statement without telling you which offer it was connected

to. So if you've signed up for a bunch of offers, you know, is that $10 back for the Uber thing is for that other thing. I gave up on trying to track them one-to-one. I just said, all right, I think it's going to track most of the time, so I'll keep using it, but I'm just not going to worry about it if it doesn't work. Right. Because Amex offers, you'll get an email usually right away when your purchase has gone through saying, congratulations, you just used your offer. Be on the lookout for the statement credit. And when the statement credit comes, it'll say exactly what it was for. So Amex offers are the gold standard in terms of how they handle the tracking and the presentation on the customer end

to know that you did something right. The whole idea of having an incentive is to let somebody know that they did well, right? I don't get why Citi doesn't make it easy to see that, oh yeah, you used your Citi card and look, it rewarded you. It's just weird. So anyway, that exists. So those card-linked offers are bank-based, but there's another set of card-linked offers and that's third-party card-linked offers. And so there are various websites and apps where you can enter one of your credit card numbers and that website or app will track your purchases for qualifying purchases to earn rewards. So essentially, I guess you're kind of giving them access to data about your purchase history. And when they find that you spent money

at one of their retailers, you'll earn rewards through that app. And that's in addition to everything else we just talked about. For the most part, these third-party linked offers will stack with your Amex offers and your shopping portals. So this can really be where you have an opportunity to like triple dip here and earn outsized rewards thanks to this final component. So the most popular of these is probably the Dosh app. I say most popular. I guess it's the one that most people use a lot or used a lot anyway over time because they offered good payouts at popular retailers for a while anyway. And I've used it quite a bit and had good success. Again, it just automatically tracks.

So if you spend money at one of the included retailers, you'll just get a pop-up notification on your phone saying, hey, you spent this money. Do you want to deposit the cash back in your cash back account? And so that's a very user-friendly one, but it's not the only one. No, there are lots of other ones. And we have a great post that Stephen wrote that kind of summarizes them and talks about not only the fact

that there's all these different ones, but some of them can be stacked together as well because a bunch of them all use the same backends, but there's maybe three or four different backends. And so as long as they're using different ones, you can potentially stack these rewards. You can always stack with things like DOSH with the credit card ones, the ones that the credit card company provides, but whether you could also stack it with the ones from companies like Simply Miles or Google has their own Google Wallet-y thingy. Racket has in-store purchases, all those things. I have no idea what stacks with what, but Stephen has a nice post that lays out what should theoretically stack. Yeah, he does. And so it's worth looking at that

because there are some great opportunities there sometimes to stack for extra returns. So I think that's totally worthwhile. And I want to mention here that sometimes these things like Rakuten has their in-store offers. And so they bill that as you connect your credit card and then you go to the store and spend money at the physical store and you still earn rewards. But in some cases, many cases, I don't know, a handful of cases, some amount of cases, you can link that up to your card and click through the shopping portal and also earn the in-store rewards. Because, you know, for example, and I don't know if this specific one works, so, you know, I'm just making one up, but let's say there's an in-store reward for Macy's and you connect a credit card number to Rakuten in-store offers.

Probably the way that works is Rakuten in-store offers is looking for a purchase that codes as Macy's. And when it does, you're going to get your reward from the in-store offers is looking for a purchase that codes as Macy's. And when it does, you're going to get your reward from the in-store offers. And in at least some cases, it will code that way, whether you purchase from macys.com or at the store at Macy's. And again, don't think that this is true with Macy's because I have no idea if it's true at Macy's. It's just an example I'm making up. But you may be able to, for example, click through Rakuten's shopping portal and go to Macy's and use the card that you have an Amex offer on and that you synced up with Rakuten in-store offers and earn all of the above.

So these are the best opportunities. Right, right. And we've been doing a lot of this stackery to earn American Airlines elite status. So with American Airlines, we talked about earlier in the show that you can earn loyalty points, which gets you elite status from buying things through the American Airlines shopping portal. But there's also a card linked service called Simply Miles, which works the way we were just talking about. You put in some credit card numbers. And if you make a purchase that meets whatever the terms is of an offer that's in your Simply Miles account that's been activated, you get more American Airlines

miles that also count as loyalty points. And so you could stack those two things. And the great thing is you could also stack other ones. So like Simply Miles only works with MasterCards, but Citibank, most of Citibank cards are MasterCards. You can use Citi merchant offers and potentially get all three plus whatever rewards your credit card offers directly. So you're really stacking like four things on top of any coupon codes and things you also use. So it's really the opportunities are kind of boundless there. Oh, I like how you used the boundless word, Marriott. I'll be happy to. But yeah. So again, just to reiterate what Greg said,

let's say you have a city merchant offer for Holiday Inn and you add that to your city double cash card. Let's do city premier. You add that to your city premier card. All right. And you put your city premier card number into Simply Miles because let's say, for instance, Simply Miles is offering a thousand miles and a thousand American Airlines miles with a hundred dollar purchase at Holiday end. So you sync up your premier card number with simply miles and Rakuten, let's say is offering 10% cash back on IHG stays. So you go to Rakuten, you click through Rakuten to get 10% back. You go to IHG's website,

you book your hotel for a hundred bucks. So you get your thousand miles, you get your 10% back or 10 points per dollar at Rakuten. And you trigger the city merchant offer on your premiere card plus because the city premier card offers three points per dollar on hotels you get that too ba boom bada bing bada boom whatever that is there you do stackery so uh so all of those things talked about craig how much time do you spend shopping for stuff it must take you forever to do all this.

No, I mean, I don't worry about like every little tiny detail and those kinds of things. So yes, if I were trying to find is every card linked offer possible, can I stack them all together? Then yeah, that would take forever. But no, I mean, you know, when I'm going to buy something, usually I'll just look for the sort of bigger, obvious things. Like I'll check whether is there an Amex offer for this thing. I'll usually consult. We have a current Amex offers page that has pretty up to date at any given time list of what offers are out there. So if I know there's an offer out there for the store I'm about to buy from, then

I'll search my Amex cards to see if I actually have it. I'll use, you know, as we talked about before, I'll use Cashback Monitor to find the best portal rate. I'll do the other deal finding things, which I would always do anyway to try to find what's the best price I can get for this thing. And then picking out a card, which credit card to use is usually, usually there's not a big category bonus involved. So usually it's more about which one am I trying to hit

some kind of minimum spend amount for, whether it's because I have a new credit card where I'm trying to earn a welcome bonus or I'm trying to hit a threshold. Like, you know, the Hyatt cards give you a free night with $15,000 spend. So I keep track of that and it's like, oh, I'm close. So I better spend on that card.

Yep, absolutely. I agree. I don't spend forever on this stuff, but I will spend a little bit of time. And the last thing that Greg didn't mention is because he gets emails when frequent miler post things, he'll know if there's a particularly good stacking one, because, you know, we're on the hunt for these things, because we enjoy this kind of stuff. And so we log in, and we look for offers and things now and then. So you can bet that if there's a great stacking offer where you can put four different pieces together and

earn a bunch of rewards, probably we're going to write about it. So if you're subscribed to the deal sites that write about the types of deals that interest you, you're likely to get tipped off and or be able to go to frequentmiler.com and type in the search box Uber and see, is there a recent post about Uber? So I can see if there's a stacking city merchant offer and simply miles offer and whatever else there might be. So link up my Delta account and earn some sky miles and blah, blah, blah. So those major stacking offers will often be discussed. So that can be a shortcut. Now, we didn't discuss the danger in stackery, which I'll have to tell a story.

When Nick first started writing for Frequent Miler, one of his first posts was an extreme stacking deal with Tumi, I believe. And so I followed Nick's advice, saved a ton of money buying some kind of Tumi thingy. And here's where the danger came in. My wife really liked it. And so from then on, when we're talking about buying luggage or backpacks or anything, it was like, let's get Tumi. So I was kind of stuck. It can cost you a lot in the long run. You might save a little bit today, but you'll spend a lot tomorrow. So yeah, be careful.

Yeah, careful out there, folks. All right. So that brings us, I think, to the end of the shopping bit. I wanted to talk very quickly about this week's question of the week because it's timely. So we got a question in the mailbag

that we have a good answer for. I think you'll be able to answer quickly. So the question from Omri, I think it is, is, hi, in two-player mode, is it possible for both players' certificates, now we're talking free night certificates, hotel free night certificates, for booking on player one's name? Well, you know what? This is written kind of in a way that's confusing. What they want to know is with their hotel free night certificates, is it possible to use player two's certificates, but make the booking in player one's name. So player one can accumulate nights towards status, or you can use player one's elite status, et cetera. So which of the hotel free night certificates can be leveraged in this sort of way to get

elite credit and benefits for your partner? So I would answer that by pulling up Nick's post that answers it. So I'm going to point to where the link's going to pop up. I don't know where it's going to pop up, but somewhere. And check the liner notes if you're on the podcast. And he has a great post that lists by chain, whether you can basically gift a free night certificate to others. And off the top of my head, I know you can do that with Hyatt. And I know you can't do that with Marriott. Yep. And that's essentially what you need to know.

So you can gift one with Hyatt and the person who stays will get the elite credit and their elite benefits will apply. So for instance, my wife has a category one to four for a night certificate in her account, but I'm a globalist. So she can gift her Hyatt category one to four free night certificate to me, make the booking in my name. And so I will receive the certificate. Then she doesn't have it anymore. It's mine, right? And that's only when you're ready to make a specific booking that you can do that.

And so she can gift that to me and we'll get my elite benefits when we check in and I'll get the elite credit for this day, or at least that's how it should work. In practice, sometimes things end up funny, but that's the way it's supposed to work. But Hyatt is really the main one that allows that. So if you've got Hilton free night certificates or Marriott free night certificates, you can't officially gift those to anybody else. No, I take that back. We learned with Hilton. I was going to say, I think Hilton you can. You learned with Hilton you can. That's right. That's something I I always thought you couldn't do but we learned this year that you can do that with Hilton so you can gift also with Hilton you need to call in order to do it you cannot with Marriott and uh Radisson if you happen to have free night certificates still with Radisson you

could book those in anybody's name so an IHG I think also allows you to change the guest name or to set a different guest name so yeah you can change the guest name or to set a different guest name. So yeah, you can change the guest name. It's unclear to me whether you can actually change whose rewards numbers on the count. I don't know. I don't know about that, but there's a post with information about that. I bring that up because I know at this time of year, people might be looking at certificates that they know are going to expire or they might not use and might make good gifts for somebody in their life that likes to travel or needs to go somewhere.

So look out for that post. Cause I'll republish an updated version. Okay. All right. Thank you guys very much for being there with us today. That brings us to the end of today's episode though. If you'd like to get this information in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe again. That's frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on all the various social media, join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group, follow us on Instagram, et cetera, and make sure you turn on notifications wherever you're

listening to this or watching this. Leave us some feedback. Again, subscribe and enable notifications. It helps us out and it helps you out so that you don't miss any of our content as it comes out. Thank you very much. And we will see you guys again next week. Bye, everybody.