Frequent Miler on the Air - Free points. Free money. Just ask. | Ep73 | 11-21-20

Episode Date: November 21, 2020

00:17 Reader feedback: Can't leave a Stitcher podcast review? 2:21 What crazy thing did Citi do this week? A triple header! 1) Citi (3:26) 5% cash back for online purchase with a (semi) working registration website - stack with other deals https://frequentmiler.com/citi-cards-5-back-for-online-shopping-november-24-30/ 2) Barclays (8:35) Crazy spending offers for existing cardholders! 60K points/miles with $3K spend - without a new credit card! https://frequentmiler.com/wow-amazing-barclays-spending-offers-via-email/ 3) Choice privileges (14:23 Redeem fewer points for gift cards....except it doesn't work (and it's a bad deal anyway) 16:09 Mattress running the numbers: Is the Choice 70K points promo at all-inclusive resorts worth a mattress run to Mexico (or somewhere else?) https://frequentmiler.com/70k-points-with-500-all-inclusive-booking-via-choice-privileges/ 27:01 Main Event: Free points. Free money. Just ask. https://frequentmiler.com/chase-sapphire-reserve-retention-offer/ https://frequentmiler.com/my-575-phone-call-complete-in-20-minutes/ 52:44 Post Roast: Cash app. Are the wins way too small to care? https://frequentmiler.com/stop-sleeping-on-the-cash-app/ 58:28 Question of the Week: Which card(s) should Kathy use to pay a $10K tuition bill right now? https://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-sign-up-offers/ Don't forget to like, subscribe, and comment! Music credit: Annie Yoder

frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event free points free money just ask all you got to do all you got to do let's first roll out the giant mailbag and see what we've got today all right i'm excited i'm looking forward to hearing what people are thinking this week so what's the what's the reader feedback what's in the mailbag this week all right today we we got mail from i'm gonna call him jay this was this was through email i don't know that he wants his name shared okay that bad huh no it's not it's not bad it's more like what crazy thing did nick and greg do last week So he writes, tried my dangest, but cannot figure out how to leave a podcast review on the Stitcher platform.

Sorry, guys. So I believe we signed off last week's show with a call to, you know, ask people to leave a review or like the show or whatever, right? Right, right. So after I got Jayay's email i got onto

stitcher and i couldn't find any way to do it either i mean maybe there's some way but it's it's not at all obvious um i i got onto stitcher both from a web browser and from a phone app on the web browser, I could find a way to like individual shows of ours, but not the, you know, the podcast overall. And on the phone, I couldn't find either option. I couldn't find even that option. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, probably, I don't know what I'm doing, but. Do other podcasts have reviews on Stitcher? Do other, I don't know. I didn't like it. Maybe they just don't have reviews at all. I don't know what I'm doing, but. Do other podcasts have reviews on Stitcher? Do other, I don't know. I didn't look. I don't know. Maybe they just don't have reviews at all.

I mean, they would seem really weird in today's day and age. Right. Right. Yeah. But there we go. So we should probably, we should probably not ask people to do that. Right. Not if you're listening on Stitcher. Not if you're listening on Stitcher.

There are other platforms. Go ahead. Stitcher now. I mean, shoot. If you could find a way to, to review us on Stitcher, then that'd be great. Especially if no other shows have reviews. Right. Right. Right. For sure. Yeah. So thank you for all of you who've been trying desperately to leave us a review on Stitcher to no avail. We appreciate it. All right. So that brings us to the next segment.

What crazy thing did city do this week? And it has been a crazy week indeed. It has. This is going to be fun. We've got a triple header today. A triple header. Michael, you don't get that every week, right? No, no. I don't think we've ever done a triple header before.

This week's contenders are City, Barclays, and Choice Privileges. Everybody's getting in on it this week. Everybody wants in on what crazy thing this is. So the hot new thing. Everybody's like, maybe we can get featured on the Frequent Miler. What crazy thing did Citi do this week, segment? I'm sure, you know, the whole industry is abuzz trying to get in on our show. I mean, truthfully, just about everybody has at this point, right?

I mean, Chase has been in there. Alex has been in there. Hilton's been in there. Everybody's been in there. So they do seem to be chomping at the bit. So this week, the competition started out or maybe not started out, but we're going to start it out anyway with Citi because Citi did something pretty crazy that in a normal week would probably be the only crazy thing. Right. And it's only crazy because it's

unusual for Citi. Right. Right. So we're talking, of course, about the fact that Citi is offering 5% back and up to $500 of spend on basically all of your Citi cards. They say all of your eligible, but it seems like every Citi card is eligible just about. So 5% back and up to $500 in spend online

from November 24th to November 30th. You do have to register in advance. So you have to click the registration link and register to get your 5% back. But then it's like a free $25 if you're going to spend $500 online between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And I bet quite a few listeners are going to do that, right? Right. I mean, it's an easy win as long as you keep track of which cards you've spent money on and everything if you're going to spend more than 500 then you know rotate through your cards and get the easy money and this is on top of the usual points or other earnings you get from your card and on top of other promotions it should stack with things like city prestige offering 5x for online purchases

and various a lot of cards get targeted offers from city all the time right back with all of them yeah and retention bonuses if you got one of those on your card so i mean you could certainly be earning a great return for your online purchase i mean it could make it something that clearly stands out from all other cards except maybe an amex card that you've loaded with that plus eight points per dollar at Amazon offer that we posted this week. That was a terrific one too. So if you haven't seen that, I don't know if it'll still be available on Amex cards by the time you hear this, but if you have an Amex card, you ought to check for the plus eight points at amazon.com. But

anyway, other than that, this will make for a terrific, terrific return and the craziest thing. So, okay, good at five percent five percent is good period if that was the only rewards you'd earn that would be good it'd be good but it but it wouldn't be it wouldn't be like huge news because you know a lot of cards like with rotating categories offer that you know the freedoms and the discover cards frequently offer five percent at least for amazon not necessarily for all online purchases. Right, right. But that's still notable. People that have those cards make sure that they spend on those because that's the best return you're going to get. So I mean, 5% as a return is terrific. And the fact that it stacks on top of your earnings, I mean, hello, great deal.

The crazier thing is that they created a registration website that actually works. I was able to register all of our Citi cards. You, Greg? I was, but saying it actually works is a little bit extreme. Didn't take it that far. No. So my experience was when I first went to the registration page, it only showed my two bank accounts with Citi and there were no offers. Like you have to pick your card from a dropdown and then it shows you this offer that you could register for. And it didn't show any. So I tried from another browser and this time two of my, I think I have like five or six Citi credit cards. Two of them showed. When I picked one of them and registered, then the others

magically showed up. It's still Citi's usual mayhem. We're getting a lot of comments in the post about I wasn't eligible to register. I tell people, try again. Try another browser. It will work eventually. The other kind of crazy thing is that they sent out emails to people, not yet to everybody, not yet for all cards, but it seems to be coming,

and they still have a few more days from when we're recording this to get it out to everybody before the bonus starts. So that's crazy. But here's sort of a nuance that's the usual Citi crazy, which is that if you click, it gives you like one click to register. You don't have to sign in. So it's very different from the link we posted because the link we posted, you have to sign in, pick your card, and then register.

The email from Citi, you pick it, it just says you're registered. If you click again on the same email, it says, sorry, you're already registered. The only reason that's all weird is that people were worried they had already registered through the link we had posted, and they didn't get the message when they first click on their email. They didn't get a message when they first click on their email they didn't get a message saying you're already registered so then they started questioning were we really registered when we signed up through the link that we posted yes you are really registered you you could go to your online city account and and go through your your offers you should see it there. But yeah, it's usual city. Yeah, exactly. You know, no sense in going more than halfway on something. So they cut things a little short, I guess, but they are

emailing people before the promotion begins. Registration has begun, of course, already, but before the actual 5% begins, which is, that's huge. I mean, for city, that's new for them. That's wonderful. So we won't complain too much about cities. All right. So city got a little crazy. If you got city cards, register those 5%. Hello. Come on. Hey, it's great. Yes. Easy money. So, all right. So then, then not to be outdone by city, Barclays got really crazy this week, right? This is, this has got to be, you know,

if we're going to have a crazy thing of the year awards, which we should do. We should, definitely should. This has to be the, you know, leading favorite going in. So whereas we've been talking for weeks now about credit card companies offering great new sign-up bonuses. And Barclays is like, we've got you beat. We're going to give you a great offer for just having the card.

And no new sign-up required. We're going to give you 60,000 points with only $3,000 spend. And just because. no strings attached. They're like, we're going to give you a signup bonus, but here's the catch. You don't need to sign up for a new credit card. Like, wait, what? I don't understand something here. Don't get it. But yeah, I mean, so tons of different Barclays cards got that offer. Now there are some different versions of the offer. So some people got different things.

Some people got 10x on up to 1,000 spend for each of the next three months. So that'd be a total of 30,000 points, bonus points. And when I say that, it's on a wide range of cards. We've had people reported on Aviator, Wyndham, Choice, Arrival, like you name it, 10 of whatever those points are per dollar for three months. And then a lot of people, not quite everybody, but a lot of people also got a bonus. If they spent the 3000, 1000 each of those months, they would get an additional 30. So for a total of 60,000 points for 3k spend, like Greg is saying, which I mean, 60,000 American Airlines miles, 60,000 arrival points. I mean, that's just amazing.

Right, right. For existing cardholders, what? I know, it's insane. So I'm currently down to just one Barclays card in my portfolio. And when the news came out, I kept searching my email. I couldn't find it, couldn't find it. Finally, I took text, quoted text from the email based on our post about this thing and searched my Gmail. And sure enough, it was a, it was an email that I had archived. Like I go through all the like promos and just archive or delete them,

you know, if, if they're not obviously interesting. And, and so, and so whatever reason I missed one. 60,000 free points was not interesting for you. Not immediately clear. It wasn't, it wasn't clear that that's what was happening, obviously, from the subject heading. So I'm glad I found that I was targeted. Yeah, that's amazing. If you get targeted for that, you definitely want to do that. There's no question about it. You don't have to open a new account and you get the equivalent of a new account bonus. I mean, we just never hear that kind of thing. There are things

called retention bonuses that we'll talk about later on that can be good, but even a typical retention bonus doesn't like hold a candle to the offers coming out from Barclays here. And yeah, well, exactly. Normally they wait for people to ask for it or to threaten to cancel their card before they offer anything like retention bonus. But in this case, they're just randomly sending them out. And so I guess not everybody got these, I think. It seems not everybody did. You didn't get one, right? We got rid of all of our Barclays cards.

I literally closed the last one like two months ago. I keep getting emails saying, you know, your statement is there. And I just ignored them because I knew the card was canceled. But then I was like, oh, maybe they didn't cancel it. Let me log in and check really quick. Yeah. Definitely closed it. Because there was a hot minute where I was like, maybe I'm going to get the email.

But no, it didn't happen. Right. Unfortunately. So I don't. Did they do this on any of their fee-free cards? Do you know? Yeah. Yeah. People got this on the Arrival on the, the Arrival, not the Arrival Plus, the original Arrival 60K. Yeah. Wow. I mean, that's better than the welcome bonus ever was

on that card. I think when it was available. I'm sure it is. Yeah. And that's basically like $600 cash. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. For 3K spend. I mean, that's amazing. So yeah, definitely on that, no fee JetBlue got some offers. Now there were, JetBlue specifically, I remember at least one or two people reporting something a little different. It was like three points per dollar at Amazon or five points per dollar at Amazon or something on up to a thousand dollars a month or something like that. So it was a lesser offer that a couple of people had mentioned,

but no, there were definitely some no fee cards in there that, that got great offers to choice privileges. I don't think that card has an annual fee, does it? And there was somebody that got a smaller offer. I don't think so. And it's not one that I carry, so don't quote me on that. But, but yeah, so there were a few, few different options in there that would certainly be appealing. So definitely check your email. If you've got a, if you're a Barclays cardholder, do what Greg did. Search for those terms that you see in the email screenshots in our post about it. By the way, in case you don't follow along every week with the notes of the show, there are always links to posts with more information in the notes, the show notes. So if you're watching this on

YouTube, it's going to be in the description below. If you're listening in a podcast platform, then when you look at the show description, you'll see links to the relevant posts about all of these things. So if you're like, I don't know what to look for, just look for the description, you'll find a link there. Cool. Yeah. And this also reinforces our thing we've said many times, which is when you're looking to cancel a card, it's often better to see if there's a product change option to a no-fee card. Because if you had a no-fee Barclays card and got one of these offers, you'd be pretty happy right now. So you just never know when those kind of things will happen. Right.

Right. All right. So Barclays got crazy. They got super-duper crazy with us this week. That brings us then to something that's a little more fun crazy, and that's choice privileges. So choice privileges decided to get crazy this week too. They wanted to just sneak in an entry right at the, you know, at the cutoff time, so to speak, with a crazy thing this week. So what happened with choice? Right. So choice, you know, choice lets you redeem points at very poor value for gift cards. And so they sent out an email saying, great news, you now get,

you know, more value. So you can redeem for fewer points for the same value gift cards. And so Stephen clicked through to check it out and found out that it's not actually working, so you'd still pay the old amount. But not only that, the new amount, it's still a bad deal. Right. So, you know, to advertise a bad deal and then not actually have it working is... Pretty crazy. That's pretty crazy. Hey, guys, you can get a terrible deal here.

Click through. And then you click through and you're like, wow, that's not even as good as the deal that they advertised. Right. That's right. You know, I mean, to their credit, maybe the tech people who had to implement it were like, no one's going to click through this. This is a terrible deal.

Right, right. Why should we buy it? It very well be. It could very well be the answer. They said to the marketing people, yeah, yeah, yeah, we got this. We know how many people are clicking through on this. Don't worry. So, yeah.

So if you get the email from choice privileges, inviting you to spend 6,000 points for like a $50 gift card or something, a, you don't want that. And B it's not even working. So, or at least it wasn't when we recorded this, maybe, maybe somebody called the tech team after they heard that they made the, what crazy thing segment on frequent miler. Maybe, maybe somebody called the tech team in the time between that. And when you're listening, but probably not. Probably not. So speaking of choice, that brings us to Mattress Running the Numbers because Choice Privileges

also has a deal out this week, just for a couple of days. In fact, on another day, I think after this podcast publishes. So you have to make a move on it very quickly. But if you register by November 22nd, not register, excuse me, you book by November 22nd, that is pretty soon. That's like what Sunday, right? So if you book by Sunday, November 22nd for a stay at an all inclusive, now they list the all inclusive brands that qualify. It's basically like Mexico, the Caribbean, they have a number of different places that qualify. So if you book one of those all-inclusives through Choice and you spend at least $500 on your booking, then you'll get 70,000 Choice privileges points.

Wow, 70,000 points. $70,000, $500, 70,000 points. Are there properties that cost only $500 for the required time periods and everything? So they have had a similar offer for 50,000 points going for a while. And when I originally wrote about that, I found some properties that were just a little over 500, maybe five, I think 546 is the number that sticks out in my mind. I looked at the same property now for a number of dates and I was looking at like 614. So I didn't search really hard to find something at 500. But I was looking at 614 for three nights all inclusive

and 70,000 points, which at that price would be like, I think 0.87 cents per point you'd be paying and getting an all inclusive stay along with it. If you can find something closer to the $500 mark, then it comes out to a cost of 0.71 cents per point. If you can find something closer to the $500 mark, then it comes out to a cost of 0.71 cents per point if you were looking at it as you were just buying the points and caring about the stay. Of course, you do have to stay if you want to be able to get the points because the points don't get awarded until after the stay. So first question up, is that mattress run worthy? I mean, would you go to Mexico for a Mexico mattress run or something for one of these all-inclusive resorts to pick up 70,000 choice points on the cheap?

Yeah. So, well, I mean, if I didn't, the answer is sort of easy in pure terms. Like, if you didn't actually need or even want to stay three nights, like if you're really talking about a mattress run where you could just go check in to qualify for nights. Like if you're really talking about a mattress run where you just go check in to qualify for the promotion and, but you don't even stay then no, because you can, you can buy choice points indirectly for around that price by, um, booking cash and points days, as long as you have some choice points, book a cash and points day, and then you cancel it and you end up buying points for, I don't remember the exact amount, but somewhere in there. So yeah, so that would be silly to do that for that. But if you're thinking about a, you know, if you'd enjoy the

stay, I mean, that to me sounds like a killer deal that if you can book, you know, I mean, I guess I'd want to compare the prices to other similar properties. And I'd also want to see that there's properties that I'd actually be excited about staying at, but assuming those things are, are true that the, that the prices are reasonable and that I'd actually want to stay there. That's a mighty big carrot, 70,000 points. Yeah, I mean, it really is. And it's possible that there's a number of other pieces that go with it. And here's where this is kind of the, kind of flows very nicely. It's possible.

Possible that the same tech team that worked on that point promotion we talked about a moment ago was also working on this one because it seems like they decided not to waste too much extra time on writing terms and conditions that fit the promotion that they're advertising. So when you click through the link from the email, which we have a link to this in the post, to the promotion, right up at the top, you got that banner that says 70,000 points with a $500 booking, book by November 22nd, stay by December 21st, 2021. So you got to book in the next few days, but you can stay all the way through next December, which is a little misleading in itself because you can't actually book next December right now. But at any rate, that's the headline up at the top. But then when you scroll to the bottom to read the terms, it's all the terms from the 50,000 point offer. So it

talks about getting 50,000 points after you stay, after you make a stay at $500 or more. And when you actually go to book and you look at the rate details, it is all the information from the 50,000 point promotion. So it says you're going to get 50,000 points when you're in the booking process. The landing splash page says 70,000. So if you're going to do this, you have to have some faith that this is going to somehow remember you're supposed to get 20,000 points more than everybody else who booked this deal because you booked it during this very short window in November. Right. And is the 50,000 point deal, is a booking window closed for that deal? No, because they keep extending it. I hadn't realized this. Steven Pepper's been updating it

each week. So that 50,000 point deal right now has been extended for booking through November 30th and they keep extending it. So I'm not even sure that'll end. So, I mean, you've had months already to book that 50,000 point deal. Good chance it'll get extended again. People will still be booking that. So how choice is going to keep track of the fact that you booked the 70,000 point deal when no part of like the actual booking process is 70,000 points is beyond me. So I'm thinking if you're going to book this, you need to keep screenshots. If it works how it's probably intended to work, it's probably intended to be 70,000 points and the same deal as the 50,000 point deal that's been ongoing for a while, which

would mean that you get the third night free, kids stay for free, a $200 credit towards a resort credit towards activities, which from what I hear is a little bit more limited than it sounds. So that's why we haven't talked much about that part of the deal. And then a certificate for a free night returns day, you know, when you come back and your next day to get, Oh yeah. I remember us talking about that, that you probably should just like, you know, forget about the value of that unless you end up like just loving it and loving it. Right. Having an opportunity to go back. Exactly. So, so little questionable as to whether you'll actually get your 70,000 points. And I don't know for sure that the free night and the kids stay free and all the rest of those things are supposed to apply to this 70,000 point offer.

For a moment, I was like, did they just bump it up to 70,000 points and take away everything else? Because, I mean, that seems like something a smart marketing person might try. Sure. But apparently, you know, something didn't get connected with the tech people. So it's a little bit dodgy. So let me ask you this. Yeah. Is there a chance that their errors will work in our favor?

Are we going to earn 120,000 points by booking one of these? I mean, hey, give it a shot. Report back. Is there any risk? Are these non-refundable bookings or can we just book it and decide later? Remember, there's no terms for the 70,000 point offer. The only places on the page you see 70,000 points are in the top bar. Well, no, the terms I want to see are in the booking process.

Is there free cancellation? So, well, you see, but I got to roll you back a step. Because the terms of the 50,000 point promotion say that there's no cancellation penalties, right? That you book it, there's no cancellation penalties, right? That you book, there's no cancel. But when you go through to book on the booking page, it says that you'll be charged $50 if you cancel at least four days in advance, then you'll pay a fee of $50.

If it's fewer than four days in advance, then you pay like the first night. Pay more. Pay more, exactly. So it makes it clear that there is indeed a cancellation fee during the booking. Right now, which one is going to supersede the other? Will the promotion terms that say there's no fee to cancel? I doubt that that's what's going to happen. That hotel is going to keep your money.

I love that choice has inadvertently gamified this promotion. It's like gambling. It is. You don't know what you're going to get. Are you going to lose your $50 ante? If you win, are you going to win 50,000 points, 70,000 points, 120,000 points? Who knows? We're joking about this and I think I'm going to book it because I meant to book it the last time and I forgot about it and then I thought it expired and I just didn't go back to the post and didn't realize that Stephen had updated it when they extended it. Right. But you know, I don't really, I'm very questionable as to whether or not I'm going to end up at an all-inclusive resort in Mexico next year. But since this is good for bookings until December next year, I was thinking about booking something for November for a year from now. I mean, who knows what the situation is going to be then.

It might be worth a gamble, and especially at the 70,000 points. So I might give this a shot, and I feel like it's probably going to cost me 50 bucks. But I might give it a shot and book it and hope for the best. I'd like to anyway. What about you? You're just out of this, aren't you? I can tell.

You don't want to go through the effort of trying to find a place. Well, that's what it is. The window is so short. So if they extend it, I could see it's more likely. Or if I knew, like right now, a nice property that someone had recommended, and if I was sure that there was no cancellation fee, then yeah, I would jump on it. A lot of qualifications are for choice. But I'm not sure that I want to even throw away $50, especially – like I would do it for blog research. But if you're going to do it, then no reason for us both.

Well, the thing is I'm booking it a year from now. So by the time I know – Yeah, I know. It won't really help. Well, but who knows? There might be other crazy choice promos. And we could say, well, we know it won't really help. Well, but who knows? There might be other crazy choice promos and we could say, well, we know from the past that they work this way.

There you go. So I'll take, which could be helpful for the team, hopefully. And, uh, and enjoy that. All right.

So this, at this point of the podcast, this is where you're going to see my face freeze because my battery, if you're watching on YouTube, because my battery is just about dead. So I didn't realize that I wasn't plugged in. I didn't know you ran on battery. I don't usually.

I just forgot to plug in. He's an Android. Right. So this is where I'm going to freeze first. All right. So while he's frozen and kind of disappeared, let's decide where we should send Nick on his choice vacation. Should he go to Mexico or the Caribbean?

Or actually, don't even know what all the choices are. So I think Nick and his family should go to somewhere nice in Mexico. Awesome, we're back. All right, back in business. All right. So just real quick, if you were to do this promotion, which country are you going to pick? Probably Mexico.

I mean, there's a number of different options. Probably Mexico. What did you guys pick? Did you pick something else? Well, that's what I guessed for you when you were offline. All right. So you see? Greg knows.

I won that little game. Well done. Speaking of winning the game, there have been some big wins lately. And if you're looking for free money, for free points, all you have to do is ask, right? but you know, I wrote about, I wrote about, well, you wrote first about how people were, were calling up about their Sapphire reserve card and getting either $150 or $250 just for asking. That was it. Just ask people reporting a call time of like four minutes and 48 seconds, kind of a thing, like like super super easy just right money in the bank so to speak super quick and easy um and and in the same in the same post you wrote some people

mentioned um getting money for uh the ritz card calling about the ritz card and so i called and and um sure enough they they gave me 150 for the ritz card. And then I asked about my Sapphire Reserve and they gave me 250. And then I went on to ask him, can you check all my other Chase cards? Why not? Why not? While you're at it,

you might as well just click around and free money you can dig up. Right. Every single Chase card that has an annual fee that I've had for more than a year, I got something back. That would be the crazy thing that city did this week, except Chase, obviously. That would be crazy normally. But I mean, yeah, that's amazing. So how much did you get back altogether?

Almost $600, something like $575. And how long did that phone call take? Well, it took 21 minutes. But the majority of the time was, there were two chunks of time that weren't really related to, you know, getting that money. The first was, I mentioned that I was considering canceling the Ritz card. And so the agent spent, you know, several minutes trying to convince me why I shouldn't cancel it, or I should product change to a lower fee card or whatever. And finally, I realized, you know, this isn't really, at least people who reported in, didn't really report it as a

retention offer. They reported as it sounded more like a courtesy because of COVID type of thing. And so I just ended up saying, all right, nevermind that. I'm not going to cancel the card, but I've heard that people are getting, I heard someone got $150 back and he was like, oh yeah, no problem. I can do that. And then the conversation mostly went smoothly until he looked at all my cards, including no fee cards, and he saw my United Mileage Plus card and started telling me how I could do better by lesser on the card I have. And anyway, so I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole with him asking him things that he doesn't know the answer to, like, does it give you the same, you know, award availability that the card I have does? And, you know, That was dumb for me to bring it up. I knew he wouldn't know the answer. Yeah, that was dumb. Finally, I was just like, I had to say a couple times,

never mind, I'm not going to do that right now. Let's basically get on with the money machine. Listen, let's just go to the ATM, buddy. All right? Enough of the small talk. Start withdrawing the cash. Still, even with all that, 20 minutes from start to end.

That's amazing. I think the most amazing part of the story with this Chase retention offer bet is that, like you said, people were just calling in and just asking, not even saying they were going to cancel the card, just saying, are there any retention offers available for this card? And that seemed to be enough for a lot of people. Now, it's obviously going to vary a little bit from agent to agent. There were some people said they had to get transferred to a specialist who then was able to give them the courtesy credit. But there were a lot of people who've reported just calling in and saying, hey, is there a retention offer available on my Sapphire Reserve card?

And within a couple of minutes time, getting $150, $250. And when I saw that on the Sapphire Reserve, I had my wife call and see, because the bank is handing out money. I mean, we'll take it too, I guess. So she called to see, and they looked it up and said no. And I thought, well, I wonder what the situation is in the Ritz. So I called on the Ritz next. And I also got a no, unfortunately. But then we had quite a few readers that reported success with that. And amazing that you were able to get it also on all these other fee cards,

like your Marriott card, right? Yeah. So one reader before I called, one reader had said that he was told to call between, I think it was 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. Eastern time, which makes sense. Often we hear things like that, that it's sort of the daytime people

that can give those kinds of offers. So I'm wondering with you and your wife, did you call? Yeah, because I posted it and obviously a bunch of readers did it after I posted it and they were successful. Oh man, so you're just unlucky. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just unlucky, I guess. I mean, I didn't try to call again.

Sometimes these things are a hang up and call again. My wife asked me right away when she hung up, she's like, should I call again? There's a chance I'll get a different answer. And I said, ah, you know, probably not worth it. Uh, probably not. It sounded like they were like, okay, well maybe we need to get back on the horn here and then give it another shot. But yeah, it might be worth it. So generally speaking, how does this work?

So with Chase, it's been super duper easy this week. People just calling and asking. There are any offers basically, right? And as you said, adding too much extra stuff like, oh, I'm hemming and hawing and thinking about canceling or does it have this or does it have that? It doesn't seem necessary at all. Right? So we're not going to mess with that dance for this. But typically, what is it like?

You've done retention bonuses before, right? I mean, what do you usually say when you're hoping to get some sort of a retention bonus? Right. Usually, in order to speak to the people authorized to give you something good, you have to threaten to cancel cancel usually. And it's a little tricky because lately, if you threaten to cancel through the automated phone system, sometimes they'll just cancel you outright and you're done, game over. So make sure you speak to a real representative first and say, you know, I'm thinking of canceling. I've even had like a city rep say,

are you thinking of it or you want to can't like they, they apparently were trained not to transfer you over to the retention department until, you know, you basically say, I do want to cancel. And so it's a little bit of a game there. And so, you know, I kind of in that situation kind of made sure with the rep, I was like, I do want to cancel, but I want to speak with the retention rep to do so something like that to make it clear that I didn't want that rep canceling my card. So yeah. And, and then once you get the rep on the phone who has the power to give you retention offers, usually there's some kind of catch. Not always, but usually, you know, Citi does things like, like I just had this with my prestige card.

They said, we'll give you this many bonus points if you spend $4,000 a month for the next three months. And then, you know, I sit there and type in, like usually have multiple versions of the offer or different offers. And so I type them all into my, like a notepad and then try to figure out which is the best one to accept. And, but, you know But that's a pretty big catch. That's a lot of spend. It sure is. Yeah, right. But I know others are more, I guess, sort of user-friendly.

Like Citi will say, you get two extra points per dollar on up to X amount of spend. Right, right. And that's kind of nicer because then it doesn't you know whatever you spend you get those points yeah so so typically with chase again with chase this week you if you're gonna call in and try it's not even worth going into the song and dance that i think i want to cancel it's more so just are there any credits available i mean you might say in light of the fact that i haven't been able to use the card very much this year

blah blah blah are there any courtesy credits available are I mean, you might say in light of the fact that I haven't been able to use the card very much this year, blah, blah, blah. Are there any courtesy credits available? Are there any retention credits available? Something along those lines. But typically, more typically, when you call, if you're interested in doing this and you haven't done it before, then you'd say, you know, I'm thinking about canceling this card. I want to see if there are any offers to entice me to keep it. I wonder if there are any retention offers available. Something like that will probably get you to the retention rep. And with most banks, you will have to get transferred to a retention representative next. So it's not going to be the first person you talk to that gives you an offer. It'll probably be the second. Now there's some exceptions there, but generally speaking,

that's the way it works. And then the next thing to know about this, if you haven't done it before, is what Greg just explained. Let's say you get an offer that says, okay, well, we'll give you this many bonus points if you spend $4,000 a month for the next three months. The next question you should ask is, are there any other offers available? Because we know with Citi specifically, there are often a couple of different offers. Right, right. And sometimes it's almost embarrassing to keep asking. Like, I've had times where, you know, they've offered something good, and then I've said, is there anything else? And they offer something better. And I don't know, you know, there's sort of a, like a feeling like, oh, they're offering me something good. I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. But, you know, I went ahead and said, can you just check? Is there anything else just in case? And sure enough, there was like more. And so sometimes that happens. And so if, you know, if you're willing to keep pushing it, who knows? Now, I didn't try that with Chase. You know, it seems so great. I didn't want to say, you know, 250.

Do you want to do better than that? Right. But that's essentially what I did with Citi when I've done retention calls. So, you know, it's possible. Now, is that something that the representative has some latitude on generally? Are they going to be able to, like, offer you a little bit more? Usually not. Usually, like, at least with Citi and city and amex and you know i i don't

have as much experience with chase but they they just there's offers loaded into the computer and they typically will just read one of them and it depends on the rep some i've had reps who say i'm going to read you you know these three offers but i know from talking to you you're not interested in the like no interest fee um offers so i'm going to skip those you're not interested in the no interest fee offers, so I'm going to skip those. That's great when you get a rep like that. The other thing to know is just like I did with the Chase cards, you can often, once you're speaking to that agent, you could say,

hey, I have other Citi cards or I have other Amex cards, whichever company you're talking to. And would you mind checking if there's any offers on those cards? And you don't have to, in all these cases, it doesn't have to be that your annual fee is due. I was going to be my next question for people that aren't familiar with this. Do you have to wait until your annual fee posts around annual fee time or whatever else in order to do this?

No, that's, that's, what's kind of weird, but no, you don't have to do it. There's, you know, there's some people who think, and it might be true that you're more likely to get a better offer if your annual fee is due, but it's unclear to me if that's the case. So you may even get them right in the middle of the year by asking. Absolutely. Now here's the next piece. So if you take one of these offers,

this is going to lead into my question that's going to come after this, but if you take one of these offers, are you then locked in to keeping the card through the annual fee for the next year? Yeah, no, it depends. So, you know, some, I think the city offers that I accepted recently when I did a retention call, I believe there were, there was a requirement of keeping the card for a certain amount of time in order to get the offer. But in the case with Chase, there's absolutely no strings attached. It's just, here's some money. Um, and so it just, it just varies.

You know, they usually, Chase didn't, uh, have any terms and conditions. Usually if it's a, if it's an offer as opposed to a courtesy credit, um, there's some terms and conditions that they read to you a long thing. I usually zone out during that, but, uh but it probably makes sense to listen to it and see if there's any, any requirements. I can't remember any though that required keeping it for the whole year till the next annual fee. No, I only ever recall them saying, you know, basically that you are not going to close the card today, kind of a thing. And that, you know, the points, you know, has to be open and in good standing for the bonus points to post kind of a thing.

So typical stuff that would normally be there with any kind of a bonus offer. So no, I don't remember ever being given some sort of a requirement to keep the card for a specific amount of time apart from whatever the spending time period is. If you get an offer that requires $4,000 a month and spend for three months,

obviously you're gonna have to keep it for three months if you wanna get all the bonus points. But I don't obviously you're going to have to keep it for three months if you want to get all the bonus points. But I don't remember even them saying you have to keep it for those three months, though I think probably in the disclosure somewhere there's like the bonus points might take 60 to 90 days to post or whatever, which is never really the case, but it seems to always be there in the terms. So no, I don't remember ever being told that I had to. Now, should you?

And so that's the next piece. That kind of leads me into the, is all of this ethical? So you know what? And I should mention before I ask that question, also, I meant to mention with Amex lately, if you've missed, Amex has been doing this too on chat in some cases. So if you don't want to call somebody, you may be able to get on the chat and just plug into your Amex account, hit the chat button. And from what I was told, the retention type people that offer those offers work from 9am to 5.30pm

Monday through Friday. So you can chat and ask if there's any offers. My wife recently got, I think it was 20 or 25,000 points on the Amex gold card just by asking if there was an offer and her annual fee hadn't posted yet. It was due to post another day or two later, but hadn't actually posted yet and It was due to post another day or two later, but hadn't actually posted yet and just got those points with no spent. So just a lot of other people have gotten

that 2025, I think even 30 or more on gold and platinum cards around renewal time. And with the case of Amex, it seems most people that got that were around renewal time. Whereas these chase credits that you're talking about for a lot of people, it wasn't even around renewal time or people whose accounts renewed months and months ago, and we're still able to get the credits. And with Citi, it could be mid-year oftentimes. But is all of this ethical? Like, if you think you're going to keep the card anyway, should you be asking for a retention offer? Should you be accepting a retention offer?

Should any of us ask for this, or is this just like, is this a bridge too far? Are we just being too greedy. Yeah, that's it. That's a good question. You know, I don't feel like it doesn't feel unethical to me to ask because we're not, you know, we're being upfront about just saying, hey, you know, are you willing to offer me some points or money? And they can say no. I mean, there's nothing, you know, I'm not tricking them in some way, right? Well, I mean, if you say you're thinking about canceling the card, but you're not really thinking about canceling it, isn't that? You that's true that's true um that part is arguably yes arguably so it is unethical um you know we've talked before about how everybody draws the line somewhere and And, and I'm, you know, I totally respect anyone who says

that's unethical to do to lie about your, the reason you're calling and, and I understand that I, for whatever reason, I can't understand why I draw the line where I do, like, I don't like returning things in order to earn points, but it doesn't bother me to call and do this. What about you? I don't find it to be an ethical dilemma either. And in part, maybe it's me fooling myself by saying that, by telling them that I'm considering canceling it. I mean, it's true. I'm probably going to keep it, but I'd be silly not to consider whether or not to cancel it. So I don't, maybe that's just me blurring the line to feel better about it and sleep well at night. But, but I don't feel like it's totally dishonest either.

And on the flip side, the other thing that I think is a key piece of this is it's the same as a welcome bonus to me. I look at it and say, and, and I say this to people that are like, Oh, I don't want to do credit cards. I shouldn't do credit cards, blah, blah, blah. Despite these big bonuses. Now if you don't want to do credit cards. I shouldn't do credit cards, blah, blah, blah. Despite these big bonuses. Now, if you don't want to do credit cards because you can't handle them, that's one thing.

But if you're not going to take the bonuses, you feel guilty about that. I always say, you know, if the bank thinks my business is worth X, who am I to say, no, it's not. You know, if that's what they're willing to pay, because that's what they see, you know, as my value as a customer to them, why would I say no? I mean, it's kind of like if the boss offers you a raise, are you going to be like, no, I'm not worth that much, right? I mean, like nobody does that because that's just not the way life works, right? So if you call the bank and you say, hey, you know, is my continuing business worth something to you? And they say, yes, I don't really find that to be

unethical. Like Greg said, obviously the bank has the option to say, you know, no yes i don't really find that to be unethical like greg said obviously the bank has the option to say you know we don't have any offers right now or no you know it's in not so many words no your business isn't worth anything more to us you've already gotten your bonus and we give you this every year and that's if that's not good enough and you know thank you it was a pleasure doing business with you but you no thanks. Which to be totally clear, we do here sometimes. Of course, of course, we all do sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I agree.

I don't find it an ethical dilemma personally at all. And I don't feel like banks aren't scraping the bottom of the barrel. They aren't like, you know, struggling to survive. Right, right. So we're agreeing it's not an ethical dilemma, but it's probably, um, there's, there's an, it's probably unethical. Yes. And I, like you said, I respect on the, on the zero to 10 scale, it's somewhere. Right. And I'll say, if you don't want to do it, that's, that's fine. That's your business. That's your prerogative. If you don't feel good about it,

don't do it. I mean, like Greg always says, when we talk about that line that isn't always clear, if you don't feel comfortable with something, don't do it. So if you don't feel comfortable asking, don't let me twist your arm into doing it. But at the same time, I don't feel particularly bad about accepting the free stuff that the bank is giving out. So speaking of not feeling comfortable asking, there is one aspect to it. And I think this will highlight something that a lot of people are probably wondering about. Some banks will give you retention offers on fee-free cards. So we've heard that recently from both Amex and I've had that happen many times with Citi cards.

And that's something I've always felt. I've had a hard time saying, you know, Hey, I'm thinking of canceling this, you know, cause like there's, there's not a good reason, you know, other than I'm trying to, I guess, reduce clutter or something. Uh, but that said, you know, once I have, uh, an agent on the phone about other cards, I don't usually have much trouble saying, well, can you check this other card? And that could include fee-free cards. Right. And when they give those offers, so I don't know how the economics of all this works out for the bank. I'm not an economist. I'm not an accountant. So I don't know how it all works

out. I have to imagine in some cases when they're giving you these bonus points, that that's not a win for the bank, but it's also not a win for the bank that we pay off our bills every month and earn all these rewards, right? So and we don't feel bad about the fact that we accept the rewards for our regular spend, right? So I don't necessarily feel bad about this either. Because again, this is part of the cost of doing business to the bank, they say, well, you know, we want to keep X number of cardholders, we want to increase the odds that we'll be able to make more money from more people. So we're going to offer this carrot for people who ask for it. And with the retention offers specifically, that's a carrot they're only offering to the people who ask for it versus the public ones that they're offering to everybody.

So it's definitely they have a box of carrots and they're like, OK, we're going to open this up when somebody asks us to open it up. And if they don't ask us to open it up, it's going to stay closed and we'll leave the carrot for somebody else that asks for it so it's what gets the grease right yeah you're making metaphors there but yeah um i'm not sure we want to talk about greasy carrots but um yeah so so you we know you can call city you can call the number in the back of your card right so that's that's how you can do that same Same thing with Chase MX. You can chat. Are there any other like Barclays? Barclays often give retention offers? Yeah. I, you know, I haven't done those for a while, but, but yeah, they're, they're known to do that as well. You know, I know a lot of people who at least get the annual fees waived. Yeah. And that was the, my next question. So you said every year, I don't personally do more

than once a year. And I often forget to do at all. So I do less than once a year. Yeah, I often do less than once a year to getting a ton of value from the card. So I don't always feel the need to call in at the same time. You know, when there's a great offer available, then I'm going to call and get it just like I would go after a great offer when it comes out publicly. So I kind of vary on that. And my wife, on the other hand, anytime she has to call the bank about something, when they say, is there anything else we can do for you? She almost invariably says, not unless you want to give me some free points. Oh, nice.

It has worked a few times, believe it or not. Not many, not many. Don't get me wrong. But there's been a few times where they've been like, well, actually I can give you 5,000 points. You know, I go, I've got this allotment of extra points I can give away. And so I'm going to give you some of them. So I, this happened a few times. Yeah. So you should, when,

when you're about to get off the call with a bank, you should be like, my wife wants to speak to you. Hold on a second. That's what I should do. That's what I should do. So yeah, so good tips in here. A, call and check in. B, ask them to check in your different cards if you're going to call in. You might as well get it all done in one shot, especially if you have a rep who seems pretty good.

And C, ask if there are any other offers available. D, it's probably not up to the reps, so you're not going to negotiate a better deal. So if you hear that other people are getting this deal and you're not getting it, you're not going to negotiate it. It's just either you have it or you don't, right? Right, right. So I've got another tip. You should think about when is a good time to get a retention offer. And I'm going to give you two personal examples where right now is a bad time. The first is I called Citi because there truly was an annual fee.

And I realized while I was on the call, having already accepted two offers, that this is a terrible time for me to get these offers that include extra points for spend because I, because I, well, yeah, I have, I have, I have that plus three offer from Amex where my Amex card gets an additional three membership rewards points for all spend. And that's where I want my spend to go. And so it was dumb of me to trigger like a plus two offer now when, you know, they overlap. So i should have waited on city till i was done with the next thing that's the other one the other one is with amex itself which is you know some of the things that i'm i'm buying with the plus three offer um you know you never know when amex is not going to like what you're spending or think it might be gift cards or something like gift cards.

And so I don't want them to see me right now as gaming, which is a term banks use, especially Amex, that they don't like. They don't like customers who are gaming the system. I don't want them to think I'm gaming the system. And so I think asking for a retention offer right now might just be poking the bear at a bad time. So wait till the plus three points I'll post and a little bit later than maybe. Well, there you go.

So that might be a good tip for them. So, but on your other non-Amex cards, as good a time as any perhaps to call in unless you if you have that plus three like greg said then you probably don't want to divert any spend away from it so in that case you would wait until the three months of that is up right so that would be a good strategy smart strategy all right good stuff there so that i think brings us to the question of the week or no post post-roast rather post-roast. Post-roast. Post-roast this week. I think you probably do.

So you, you wrote, you wrote a post, stop sleeping on the cash app. Right. And then you went on to write about how this, this cash app can save you five bucks here, $3 and 22 cents there.

Heads up Greg. Meanwhile, meanwhile, we've been, we've been writing about, you know, getting hundreds of dollars just for making a phone call, getting 60,000 points just by spending $3,000. They stack $5 bills on top of each other.

Signing up for an Amex card and getting 100,000 points plus 10 extra awards for six months. And here you're talking about saving $5. Every $5 counts, Greg. Every $5 counts. It adds up. months and here you're talking about savings every five dollars every five bucks counts that's up stack those five dollar bills right up baby all right well I'm sorry you feel free sleep well but I need the cash it's kind of a I think it's a good plate so for me the cash app I ignored it for a long time too because I was like I don't care about saving dollar here two dollars there except it's true those dollar, $2 there do add up, especially

if you've got multiple people in your household, multiple cash app cards, then those start to add up after time. So it could be a stackable kind of a deal, especially with some of the offers they've had on there. I know that 20% back at the post office has been pretty popular. It doesn't work on money orders for anybody who's thinking of that right away, but it's been a popular one. So I think there's some good plays there and enough left between the lines

for the people who are reading it and paying attention. And then the additional piece for me is that it's made it really easy to meet debit card requirements. So I've done a lot of checking account bonuses this year. I've done very well with those, but every now and then I hit a bonus where I got to do X number of debit card transactions. And so I've been carrying a debit card with me so that if I stop at a convenience store and I buy a drink for two bucks, I'll buy it with the debit card so that I knock those transactions out, but don't really sacrifice

much in terms of rewards, which is true. But of course, I do, A, have to carry the debit card, B, sacrifice some rewards. And the Cash App makes it such that I don't have to do either of those things because I can load the Cash App multiple times, dollar here, $5 there, $6 there, whatever, in order to meet the number of debit card transactions that I've got to do for the bonus and then earn a bonus on that money. Earn 10% back in some cases, 15% back, 20% back. Better rewards than I would on a credit card with the debit card purchases that I have to do anyway.

So, and if you're like a, if you're listening to this, I'm sure you're not a Dave Ramsey, no credit card person, but if you were that kind of person, Cash App would be terrific for you because I mean, you get as good or better than credit card rewards, at least in some cases for some merchants, it varies by region, blah, blah, blah. And be able to fund it with a debit card. So that part was all, I thought that was good, Greg. I'm going to defend my Cash App. That part, that part, that part actually was good. When I got to that part of the post, I was like, oh yeah, all right.

There's some use here. The part about scaling up with lots of these cash app cards is I get it, but at the same time, like the thought of having to juggle like all these logins and everything and keep track of which one I've spent the money at a grocery store at or UPS or whatever. It just sounds painful to me. And so it's not something I want to spend my time on, but I could definitely see.

But you split tender like lows in order to get, you know, multiple chase offers before or something like that probably, right? Maybe not. With Amex offers, for sure. I mean, it's the same thing.'s just except that the mx you like one login okay so you're gonna juggle multiple logins that's the that's the downside you do have to you do have to juggle that and keep track of which cards you have what's yeah also i mean i was talking about you know with mx offers it's often like one stop at Lowe's results in, you know, a lot of money back.

Anyway, yeah, I guess. I mean, when they had the 10 back on 50 Lowe's offers and back when you could load the same offer to every card on an Amex offer and you had like a 10 back on 50, it's 20% back, right? And so people would go into Lowe's with a stack of their Amex cards for the 20% back. I mean, what's the difference? 20% back. So anyway, it's about the same thing. But anyway, so in fact, well, no, not quite the same cap, I guess, because it's $7.50 instead of $10.

But at any rate, there's a possibility there. So I'm going to fight back on that roast. It's possibly interesting.'s that's that's totally fair and i i think that uh i i think i think that this is a very interesting uh opportunity for a lot of people it's mostly not for me but i definitely would will be interested in it if when i i pursue more of the bank uh bonuses that require i've actually ignored ones that require multiple debit purchases. And so having a real easy way of fulfilling it. Yeah.

And not only fulfilling it, but like, I know there's probably a few people that are going to say, oh, you just buy Amazon gift cards or reload your Amazon balance. And I intended to do that too. And I was trying to mix up some real purchases with some of that. Nice thing here is that you can load it into the app and then you could just go to the ATM and take the money right back out. So you're not even locking it in Amazon. So, uh, right. So, so I think it's worth a look anyway, cash app is worth a look and worth a little bit of consideration. Oh, no, it definitely is. All right. I don't have a post for us for

Greg. Greg did a great job this week as usual. So no post for us for you this week. I'm going to go right into question of the week. I know, I know. You were sweating. You could see it. You're dripping down. Yeah, I was. I was worried. So question of the week this week comes from Kathy in our Frequent Miler Insiders group. And there was actually a two-piece,

there's another question that I felt like tagged onto this. But the first question from Kathy is, I have a $10,000 tuition bill coming up, and the school would charge a $275 fee, 2.75% basically. What card would you use to justify the fee? Not sure I want to pay $550 for a platinum annual fee. I have all the Chase cards already. So I think Kathy's question is kind of two pronged here. And then there's another piece that maybe I'll tag on we'll see how long this goes um but the first part of the question is is there a card that's worth paying the ten thousand dollar tuition bill at the 2.75 percent fee and then second question is if she's going to go after a

new card what should she go after and why wow um yeah I mean the top of my head, there's not that many cards where I would, where the rewards on regular spend are worth more than 2.75. And even if they are, even if you're going to 3%. You make 25 bucks on that. It's not very exciting. Yeah. So, you know, I think the one place where if you're short on membership rewards and if you have the Blue Business Plus, then you could get 2x on that. So you get 20,000 points and you could argue it's worth buying those points basically for 1.3 something each, I guess. But I wouldn't go on my way to do that. But for sign-up bonuses, sure, why not? You know, I don't think, like,

there's not necessarily a single card that pops in my mind is, like, the right answer, because there's so many good sign-up offers out there, and it kind of depends on what you value. And so, you know, the JetBlue offers for, for example, 100K points for, for I don't remember what the spend is, 3,000, 5,000, something, something fairly low. You know, you could get a, you could get two or three offers like that and use up the 10,000 spend,

assuming it doesn't have to be all done at once, which in my experience paying tuition, you don't have to do it all at once. So yeah, I mean, I would just look at, if it was me, I'm serious. I wouldn't just go by like what's off the top of my head is best. I would look at our best offers page, see what's most valuable that I can qualify for

and what i would value if you don't value jet blue points skip that um i'd also look at our um our page on greg's picks to see which one which ones are what is greg excited about because even though i wrote it uh i don't know off the top of my head what what's uh what's on there and and which ones uh necessarily apply to me. So that's how I'd go about it. All right. So I mean, that seems to make sense.

You go look through the list and see what's got the best offer that is valuable to you. So I think that's probably a good piece of advice. And with 10,000 spend, like Greg said, I would probably consider two or three cards because you can probably meet the welcome bonuses on two or three. Another thing to consider is big spend bonuses because some cards offer big spend bonuses. So if you've been spending on one of your cards and you might be in reach of a big spend bonus at $10,000 might bring you there. One of the things that I mentioned in response was the Radisson card, which I don't get hugely excited about Radisson points, but you know, if you had the Radisson card and you had that $10,000 tuition bill,

spending $10,000 on the card, I'd give you 50,000 Radisson points, which based on our reasonable redemption value is probably close, not quite the 2.75% fee, but close to wiping out the fee. And then you'd also get a free night certificate with Radisson for 10% spend. So the free night certificate's limited to the United States. So there's some limitations. It's not necessarily the world's most exciting thing, but you would definitely beat the $275, in my opinion, by putting $10,000 on the Radisson card. And there are other cards with big spend bonuses.

We maintain a page for that, of big spend bonuses, so you can see which ones offer something that might be worth going after for you. So that's something. Now, I know you didn't want to go to specific cards, but I will say also that in response to Kathy, she had said that she didn't think that she wanted to pay the $550 annual fee on the platinum card. So she was kind of eliminating that as a possibility. And, you know, if you don't want to get the platinum card, you don't want to get the platinum card.

There are plenty of reasons not to get the platinum card. So I'll say that that's fair. But in response to her, I said, don't be short-sighted. I think it's a little short-sighted to be like, I'm just not going to do it. And think about it and consider it when you're doing the math as to what makes sense for you. Because if you were to do that platinum card offer, and if she were able to split tender even and put 5,000 of her 10,000 tuition bill on the platinum card 100K offer, that's 105,000

points she would have from the signup offer and the 5,000 spend. And so if she did that right now, and then a year from now, cancel that and opened up the Schwab Platinum and got her 60,000 points from the Schwab Platinum bonus next year, when she pays her next tuition payment, right? Then she'll end up having altogether 170,000 points, I think I figured on $10,000 spend. And once she has that Schwab Platinum, she cashed that out for 2,100 bucks. She'll have paid $1,100 in annual fees, but she'll be $1,000 ahead

without using any of the credits. And she's going to end up having a Platinum card this year, for the rest of this year, right? All of next year, all the year after that. So there's a lot of statement credits she can get on top of $1,000 cash win. And $1,000 coming out of $1,000 ahead on the tuition bill is a decent deal. And's only using five thousand of the ten thousand spend

right then if she opens another card and and splits tender on that ten thousand dollar tuition payment she can end up you know easily a couple thousand dollars all together by the time it's all said and done ahead uh and that's again we weren't valuing the again, we weren't valuing the statement credits. We weren't valuing the 10X gas and grocery. If she does any of that stuff, that's gravy. So, you know, there's an investment involved, but don't necessarily be scared of the investment. Do the math and be rational about it. If you can afford to make the investment upfront. I love your answer. You know, to summarize Nick's answer, it's, it's you say you don't want the platinum card, but you really do.

You do. It's just too good of an offer to pass up. So you got to find that 100K offer or the 125K if you're really lucky. So that's definitely well worth it there. All right. So, all right. That kind of brings me to a related question

that another person asked. And so another person asked about this specifically and said or actually wasn't this kathy's situation but it was related said if i link my amex card to the paypal key account and use it to pay for paypal key stuff am i going to get shut down or is it okay okay? Can I spend in categories that Amex doesn't typically allow? So is it safe to add an Amex card to PayPal key and pay, for example, the tuition payment? Yeah. So PayPal key, you know, for anyone listening that doesn't know what that is, it's a feature that PayPal now has that lets you get a sort of a virtual credit card number that sort of sits on top of any of your credit cards. And it's a MasterCard. And so as a MasterCard, it can be

used for more types of payments than Amex cards can. And so one way of using your Amex card to spend in places that wouldn't normally take Amex is to go through PayPal Key. And that's kind of where this question comes from. Yeah, so the reader's wondering, am I going to get the signup bonus? Am I going to get the bonus points, et cetera, if I do that? Right, right. Yeah, so I mean, it's kind of too new

to know whether Amex will take exception to people using it in um for you know ways that they wouldn't want their cards used directly so um you know i i don't know the answer i i i can say that uh you know my my guess is it's probably okay, at least to do in moderation. But how can we know for sure? I mean, nobody knows. Nobody knows. Somebody recommended to Kathy do that.

And then another person separately had asked, will I still qualify for bonus points? And I think that's a good question to ask because we just don't know. It's too early to know. And really, it'll be too early to know for a long time because amex has clawed things back pretty far back in the past over these last couple of years they've stretched back months i mean sometimes six months or more exactly so you never know yeah like i feel like you're gonna have to sleep with what i open for a while um and you might be okay with that if you're right with that then give it a shot so if you've enjoyed what we've been talking about, you want to get on our email list.

You want to join our Facebook group, follow us on Twitter and all that stuff. Go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe. So you can get all of our posts via email and follow us on social media. Thank you guys very much for being out there listening with us this week. If you're watching on YouTube,

make sure you hit subscribe, like leave us a comment, leave us some feedback. If you're on Stitcher, hey, I appreciate the effort, all right? And if you figure out how to leave a review. And let us know afterwards. Thank you very much. Right. Tell us the trick. All right. Bye, everybody.