Frequent Miler on the Air - How we increase spend to earn big card bonuses | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep343 | 1-30-26

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

In today's episode, we discover that not all heroes have capes, some redeem rewards! We learn a trick for extending Southwest flight credits, and we tell all: how we increase our credit card spend.(01:06) - See our podcast episode 197, "13 ways to increase credit card spend" hereGiant Mailbag(01:37) - Mike: We can be heroes...just for one dayListen to our episode about sharing miles and points here(03:58) - Brent: Charitable givingListen to our podcast about rewards from giving hereCard News(09:15) - Bilt quietly removed eBay & Facebook Marketplace as exclusionsRead more about this hereMattress Running the Numbers(10:39) - Bilt Rent Day transfer bonus to AccorAwards, Points, and More(19:21) - Southwest credits are valid for 60 months in some situations(23:22) - JetBlue 25for25 stats(29:16) - Capital One Shopping Home Page Bonus OffersRead more about Capital One Shopping home page bonus offers hereMain Event: How we increase spend to earn big card bonuses(32:55) - See our podcast episode 197, "13 ways to increase credit card spend" here(33:57) - Today, we'll describe the ways we (Nick and I) increase spend in real life(34:15) - About paying fees(37:43) - Pay taxesRead about paying taxes via credit card here(45:23) - Use a service to pay bills that don’t ordinarily accept a credit card, like PlastiqLearn more about Plastiq here(52:07) - MelioLearn more about Melio here(53:49) - Fund college savings or pay student loansLearn about miles for college here(1:01:12) - Make loans through KivaLearn about Kiva here(1:03:40) - Pay bills for friends or family(1:07:10) - Fund new bank accountsLearn more about funding a bank account with a credit card here(1:11:52) - Buy and sell merchandiseLearn about buying groups here(1:13:13) - Buy and sell gift cardsLearn about buying and selling gift cards...

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's show, not all heroes have capes. Some redeem rewards. We'll discuss a trick for extending Southwest flight credits. And we'll tell it all how we, Nick and I, increase credit card spend. Frequent Miller on the air starts now. Today's main event, how we increase spend to earn

big card bonuses. Credit card bonuses can be fantastic. You might earn 100,000, 150,000, 200,000 points with a single new card. But in order to do that, you also have to not just get approved for the new card, but usually spend a lot to meet the minimum spend requirements. I mean, used to be that $10,000 spend was like the biggest we'd see, but these days, 15,000, 20,000, 30,000. even seen as high as 50,000 is not, you know, is not out of the question. So given that to get the biggest rewards, we have to spend a lot, how do we do it? We've talked about different ways of doing that on a past episode, which we'll link to in the show notes. But on today's episode, Nick and I are going to talk about the things we actually do in order to meet our spend

requirements so we can get new big bonuses. And if you want to jump ahead to that or you want to come back to something later on, don't forget, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. And wherever you're watching or listening to this, don't forget to give us a thumbs up, leave us some stars, leave us a review, leave us your comments with what you're doing to increase your spend. We love to hear from you. Let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. In today's giant mail bag, we have two pieces of mail from people who did some good with their points and miles and other rewards. So first is a message from Mike who writes, within about a week of listening to your podcast on January 9th,

Best Ways to Share Rewards, My wife and I were having lunch with a dear family friend of many years. The friend told us about how she had not seen her adult daughter in more than a year. Without getting into too many details, the daughter has a chronic illness and lives in Canada and was badly missing her mom, our friend. We live in D.C. The friend, who is not a person of means, would sometimes take a lengthy bus ride from D.C. to Toronto to see her daughter. But she could not even afford that these days. My wife offered to help find an economical way to help her travel to see her daughter this year.

But I, FM geek extraordinaire, remembered your recent podcast, which reminded me that buying a ticket on miles for a friend was a piece of cake. And, equally importantly, I have a hefty stash of Alaska Miles. So I pulled out my phone and noticed that Alaska Airlines via American Airlines had a round-trip flight to Toronto from DCA for only 9,000 miles total. Playing the role of the dashing suave movie hero for the first and probably only time of my life, I nonchalantly said, how soon can you pack your bags to go see her? It's on me. Needless to say, she was beyond thrilled, in fact, completely ecstatic. I got her the ticket and she is with her daughter now for the next week.

mom and daughter are very happy. Honestly, the cost to me was practically nothing, but what a thrill for me. That's incredible. That's awesome. Congratulations, Mike. I love that you shared this story, too, because it's wonderful hearing things like that. It's amazing what you can do with miles and points. The things that would ordinarily be out of reach or unreasonable or we wouldn't do for one

reason or another, someone wouldn't accept, but the ability to be able to do that for somebody. Wow. Terrific. That's so exciting. It really is. I mean, what could be a better way to spend your miles than an example like this? I just really can't think of anything. So fantastic job with that, Mike. I love that story. Now, Brent wrote in with a similar theme, Brent wrote, I listened to your rewarding giving podcast in November, and it inspired me to see what good I could do. And as an aside,

Brent clearly has a Amex platinum card because he's going to go on to talk about things he got for free after rebate thanks to the platinum cards, many coupons. So Brent says, I started by donating a $75 Lulu Lemon gift certificate, a $100 resi local restaurant gift certificate, and an aura ring for a silent auction at a charity. where I volunteer. The Lulu Lemon certificate sold for $70. The ORA ring went for a surprising $450, and the restaurant gift certificate was included in a bigger package which sold for $520. My next endeavor will be trying to create a travel package for a live charity auction. For example, two round-trip business class tickets to Tokyo and four nights in the park Hyatt. However, it's tricky and I need some advice. How can I offer this to charity, but yet still guarantee that I'm not paying a ridiculous amount of points for when the winner wants to travel.

I can't lock in the tickets ahead of time because I don't have their names. I would obviously like to pay 150,000 miles round trip instead of 650,000 miles round trip per ticket. That's incredible. First of all, great story on giving the gift certificates. I think that's a terrific idea that could be a lot of fun, especially for even if you don't want to donate all of your platinum things, but you're like, oh, well, I'm not going to use this benefit anyway. What a terrific way to hook somebody else up, hook up a charity, help them out with something that is going to be meaningful to the person who gets it and helpful for the charity

to raise some money. So well done, Brent, on that. The second part, that's complicated. It really is. Yeah, I wish I had some good advice there. I was hoping that Greg the frequent Miler would have the advice there. I mean, the only reasonable thing I could think of is that the auction item would have to come with stipulations saying, you know, that you would book these things for them when the saver rates are available. I'm not sure how you would word that so that it's clear, but I don't think you can, I don't think there's any good way to do this other than And yeah, I don't know. I mean, I suppose if you picked a specific set of dates, you could book it with refundable points for yourself and then hope that when you, and I'm talking about the flight now, hope that when you cancel it, that those awards go back into inventory right away and then you can book.

But there's no guarantee that that would work. Well, and I think the whole thing gets kind of messy because I understand what you're trying to. to do it and we're trying to accomplish thoughts come to my mind before too. But that gets messy because obviously you got all the logistics of, you don't know when they're going to want to travel and how much it's going to cost and getting like some some sort of unspecified black out dates would be a pain. But also in general, most loyalty programs have rules against getting any kind of consideration in exchange for your miles, like selling your miles or points. Now, I know that's not what you're doing here. You're looking to give money to charity.

But effectively, it's sort of like a three-person transaction, right, where the charity is money and you're booking something for someone. So I think you run the risk of running a foul of loyalty program rules. And I think that it's very low risk in terms of, is anyone ever going to know or find out? But I think there's too much complication there to make it viable, really. I think that if you want to help the charity out in that case, you'd probably be better off just making a donation of some sort. I think it'd be very hard to do it the way that you're looking to do it. Now, that said, somebody out there hopefully is going to have a good answer and chime in and let us know that I'm wrong and why I'm wrong and how they could do it. Now, there used to be a

charity called Miles for Migrants, so you could donate Miles to that would help various people out around the world. I think that that's no longer around, but I know that I have read about other similar types of services where you can donate Miles for specific types of things. I know View from the Wing has written about one, and I can't remember the name of it, but I know that the purpose of the charity is to connect people who are at the end of life with family members. But at any rate, there are, I think other organizations probably like that out there where you could donate miles to that organization. Again, I know that's not the end goal you're looking for. You've got a charity in mind that you'd like to help by offering a package. Admirable, awesome idea. It seems

like it would be difficult to execute, but I love where your heart is. Yeah. What about, what about if he just offered four nights at the park Hyatt and in the fine print basically said, or anywhere where points, you know, a points stay is available for this many points or fewer. And, you know, that way it's, I don't know, more restricted. Anyway, I think it might be possible on the hotel side. I think it's really hard on the flight side. Yep, agreed. Okay, that brings us next to card news.

So this week's card news, we've got built making the card news. So we had reported previously that they quietly added restrictions. or had restrictions in terms of certain types of transactions that were not going to qualify for rewards. Among those were transactions for eBay and Facebook Marketplace purchases. So originally the terms of the new built 2.0 card said you would not earn points for eBay and Facebook Marketplace transactions, but they've quietly removed that restriction. So that is no longer in there. So apparently now you will earn rewards on eBay and Facebook Marketplace purchases,

which we thought was important to report since we had previously reported the opposite. Yeah, and we confirmed with Bill that that was intentional, the removal of it. So what that leaves us is a long list of things that are like financial like transactions that most issuers don't offer rewards for. But the one really big notable thing that's still on there is paying taxes. It will not earn rewards when paying taxes. And that's, that's a shame. And as far as I understand, I think that's regardless of whether you're paying federal or state, local taxes, whatever. Hopefully they'll change that too.

No guarantee. There you go. All right. Let's talk about mattress running the numbers. For mattress running the numbers this week, we have a built transfer bonus. So for Bilt's rent day, which is February 1st only. So you'll have to be able to take advantage of this shortly after we publish this podcast. You're not going to have a lot of time left in order to take advantage.

this because this will be on February 1st only. So if you're listening to this after February 1st of 2026, this one is no longer available, but still probably worth hearing the numbers anyway as we mattress run these numbers for this transfer bonus. So what's the deal with the transfer bonus? How much can you get out of it and is it worth it? Yeah, so the transfer bonus is to a core. And you really have to understand a core points to make any sense of this at all. So the core points are worth two euro cents each with today's exchange rate, that's 2.4 cents per point. And so that's a lot per point. And that's why any transferable points currencies that have transfers to a core, they don't tend to transfer one to one. And in fact,

Bilt's standard transfer to a core is three to two, which with today's exchange rate still gives you 1.6 cents per built point value with your built points when you exchange to a core at less than one to one. With this transfer bonus, though, you get a higher exchange rate. So the transfer bonus depends on your elite status. If you have no status at all, that means you have blue status. It's a 25% transfer bonus. And so that brings it a lot closer to one to one. but not quite one to one brings it to six to five and then every level of elite status after that it increases the transfer bonus by 25 percent so if you have silver status you get a 50 percent transfer bonus which brings you directly to a one-to-one with a core if you have gold status you got a 75

percent transfer bonus with platinum you get a hundred percent transfer bonus and if you have platinum and you redeem seventy five dollars of built cash which you almost certainly don't have because most opportunities for earning bill cash are coming later. Then you would get 125% transfer bonus. So what does this all mean for the value of your built points, assuming you use these transfer to core points to pay for a core hotel stays? What it means is if you have no status, you're getting two cents per built point value. Silver status, 2.4 cents, gold status, 2.8 cents, platinum 3.2 cents, and platinum with the built cash option, 3.6 cents. Okay, so I think clearly, even at the bottom, assuming you can use these points effectively

for real, at course, stays, you can get good value for your built points. But what do you think, Nick? Is it worth doing at two cents each? So which is no status at all? Should people be looking at this? Well, I think we need to back up to the way you just qualified that because I think you overqualified. You said assuming that you can use these effectively towards a core stays, but the beauty of a core is that you like every use is an effective use. Apart from transferring them out of a core, like it's a constant value. You're getting X value. So it's not like other programs where you have to find award availability and you know, you have to do the math and figure out is it a good deal as an award. With a core, it's sort of like a purchase eraser at a

a fixed value. So you're locking in two cents per built point at the bottom level with no status. That's good for built points. So, you know, is it worth doing if you want to stay at a core places? I think I think you overqualified by saying, if you can use them effectively, if you're going to stay at a core hotels. That's a qualification I intended. That's it. That's it. Yeah. That's as far as the qualification goes. Yeah. So if you want to stay at a core hotels, then this certainly is worth thinking about. I mean, would I transfer all of my points speculatively, not me personally because I don't stay at very many Accor hotels,

although there was a situation last year where I was like, man, I wish I had a bunch of Accor points right now because hotel prices are crazy. There's no award availability in the area I want to be. But man, there's a couple of Accor places, and so at least I could be getting constant value out of the points. And the nice thing with Accor is you could be booking a suite or whatever it is that you want that matters to you

and still getting that same rate of return or paying for spa treatments and other things where you're on property. So I think if that's you, if you're like, yeah, I'm going to go stay at a Fairmont and I want to go to the spa and I want to redeem my bill points for two cents each. I mean, that seems like a pretty good deal to me. If you're not in that boat, then I would say, well, I'm going to wait around for something else because I know I'll use them more to greater value with either Alaska or Hyatt personally. I tend to redeem those for more than two cents per point.

So I'm not going to transfer in this particular one. But I could see the wisdom and doing it for a lot of people. All right, Nick. What if I could grant you silver status for a day? Would you prospectively transfer all your points at 2.4 cents per point value? I wouldn't prospectively transfer all of my points at 2.4 cents. All right. Let me just keep going.

Gold, 2.8. Would you do it at 2.8? You know, my hesitation is that for business and first class flights, I know I'm going to get, quote, unquote, better value than that. So I'm hesitant. And I also don't stay at many a course. So it's like all, I don't know. Maybe I would only because I know I can replenish the bill points pretty easily at this point with a new card,

you know, a new card bonus out, racketing, everything else. Maybe I would at gold at 2.8. And platinum at 3.2. I feel pretty confident. I would probably be. Okay. So, so, okay, there we go. That's the answer from Nick is that's the point of which.

The answer. That's it. Bold is where he would come. He would think about prospectively transferring. Platinum is where he would, would do it. And so, and let me go back and say, but if I had a huge pile of built points, would I prospectively transfer some of them. I think I would.

Yeah. I mean, I think I'd even at no status. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Like if I was sitting on 200,000 built points, I might transfer 50,000 and say, you know what, that's $1,000 worth the hotel stays. I don't mind having a stash in a core at that rate.

So the question you were asking me is what I transfer all of them. And that's a little trickier, I think, for me to be like, what I, would I go all in on this? That's harder. But yeah, I think if I had a huge amount, I would consider doing some. Right, right. Okay. Cool.

So the interesting thing there is Chase Sapphire Reserve Card. when the edit's offering 2x power boost or whatever the heck it's called, you're getting two cents per point value. Now, assuming the edit is not way overpriced, which it is a lot of the time, but it's not always. So in those rare situations where the edit hotel is not way overpriced and you're getting a 2x boost, then your chase points are worth two cents each. And you remember, I wrote a whole post about how I thought that was exciting by itself.

And you seemed a little skeptical about that. But here you're saying, built points at two cents for a hotel locked into a core would be interesting. But also I'm prioritizing using points from programs that are less established, right? So I'd be more interested in locking in two cents per point out of my built points. my chase points I'm like that's a stash that I'm a little bit more protective of. That's the stash I'm going to use later afterwards. I think I use my built points first, to be honest. So yeah, I think I'm happier to lock in some of those.

It's interesting though. This conversation is making me think because I just gave that example of the 200,000 and 50,000, and those numbers aren't exactly on for me. But I have a chunk of built points right now and I've got a bigger chunk coming with the next rackets in payment. in a couple of weeks. So should I speculatively transfer a two cents with no status? I don't know. Now you've got me thinking about it, though, Greg. All right. I guess we'll find out next week's show. We'll see. We'll see. All right. Let's move forward to awards, points, and more. So for awards,

points and more, I got a sort of a cool tip that fell in my lap. I say fell in my lap. I stumbled upon it. So I stumbled upon a way to make Southwest credits last for longer than what they typically do. So if you have been hiding under a rock for the last year and missed all of the customer unfriendly changes that Southwest has made, Southwest credits for a long time, they didn't expire, but now they do. And it depends on what kind of fare you buy. If you buy a basic fare, they expire six months after you purchased the fair. And if you buy a choice fair or higher, they expire a year from the day.

data purchase. But I recently had bought some cheap Southwest flights at the end of 2025 in order to use up some airline fee credits because, as you'll find in our post, there are situations where cheaper flights will trigger those. And so I had bought a flight that I knew I was going to cancel later on, probably. And so eventually I got to the point where I said, okay, I want to cancel. I went to cancel it. And apparently there had been a schedule change on this, 15 minutes, The schedule had changed by 15 minutes. And so I got a message during the process first that I could change without a difference in fare to another flight. And some people who fly Southwest a lot are probably pretty familiar with that where there are times where flight schedules are disrupted.

And Southwest will offer you to change to any flight within the next 14 days. And so you can sometimes get a flight that was much more desirable that way. What I didn't realize until this happened to me this last week is that when I went to cancel it, it said because it had been a a disrupted reservation. If I canceled it, I would receive a credit valid for 60 months, which is five years. And I was a little skeptical, but sure enough, I canceled it. And immediately, it showed a one year expiration, but it said in the fine print, it might take up to 48 hours to reflect the correct expiration. And sure enough, within 48 hours, it updated and now that flight credit is valid for five years. And so that's much better than one year. So I'm definitely going to have to

look for some of those situations where I think there might be a schedule change or I might have to become a storm chaser and find some of those situations to book my speculative flights where there might be a disruption because 60 months sounds nice. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. I have a question for you, which if you don't know the answer, that's fine. But if you had bought a basic fair ticket, does it allow free changes still? Like, so could I, instead of canceling it, change it to another trip that's like 11 months in the future?

I'm not sure. Okay. I was just wondering if like instead of instead of canceling and getting a credit back that might be worth nothing because you might have booked, if you booked a flight seven months in advance where the credit's only good for six months

from the date of purchase, then the credit's worth nothing. Instead of making worth nothing, could you just sort of roll it forward by changing the flight? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know. I have not been booking any basic fares with Southwest, so I don't know the answer. That's a great question, though. That's one I should probably figure out the answer to. But anyway, if you could just simply book a flight that is likely susceptible to changes, then this is a great way to get the credit back for a long time. So, I mean, you know, I bet if you just book a flight that has at least two layovers that the chance of it. you know, schedule change. And far in advance. So, so high. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So that's, I'm going to be watching

all my emails for scheduled change emails from Southwest from now on. So yeah, that's, that was good to know. I thought anyway, especially given the customer unfriendly changes that they have made this past year. All right, moving forward, JetBlue, 25 for 25. All right. So we, we talked all about JetBlue's 25 for 25 promotion last year where you had to fly to 25 unique destinations by the end of the year, then you could earn Mosaic 1 status for 25 years and a boatload of JetBlue points. And I did that with my family. But we had some stats. We got some stats this week. So JetBlue sent out some stats to probably various media outlets, telling them about how the challenge went. Were you surprised at all by the stats? A little bit. Yeah. So,

you know, first up, they said there were 2,370 participants. That didn't surprise me from 43 states. And I guess I'm actually a little bit surprised that there were seven states not represented there. Yeah. So just because with that many thousands of people, I would have thought that in just about every state in the country, there would be some people that, you know, travel enough that they would have been like, I'm going to go out of my way to do this just because it's this really cool thing. and would have, like, planted themselves on the East Coast, even if that's not where they're from. You know, there'd be like that one person that does it out of any given state. So I would love to see that list of the states that did not participate and also where they're not other territories and, you know, people from even other countries. Other countries, yeah.

The next stat they gave us was 90% completed all 25 destinations. What do you think of that stat? Well, I mean, I think that shows what we said before that whoever designed this deserves a raise. I hope JetBlue takes care of whoever it was that came up with the idea. Because we talked about how this promotion was such that if you did 15, you almost had to do the 20. And if you did 20, then it would be pretty silly to not continue on to 25. And obviously, 90% of people agreed with that assessment.

Because I assume what they're counting here are only people who did at least the 15. for 10, whatever it was that you needed minimum in order. 15 was the first threshold. Yeah, I was wondering about that because I don't remember there being a specific registration, right? It was just like, no, there wasn't. So everybody was, yes. So I assume that what they're counting here in the 2,370 participants is everyone

who did at least 15 because 15 got you out of 50,000 points. So I'm assuming 90% of the people that did at least 15 did all 25. And to me, again, that just reflects how well designed. the promotion was. Yeah, it would be crazy. Right. If you did 15, be crazy not to go for 20. And if you did 20, it'd be crazy not to go to 25. So smart. So only 10% of people are crazy is really what we've determined there. No offense to anyone out there who's in the 10%. Yeah, sorry. Fastest completion was six days. Wow. 811 million points were awarded. And there were two marriage proposals, apparently, that they know about. This one's,

struck me as like they say it so, you know, the stats seem so final yet, who knows? Well, well, I was more curious. Okay, there were two proposals, but you didn't tell me whether they said yes or not. Come on, that's a key part here, Jeplu. How are you going to release that stat and only tell half the story? But yeah, no, I thought that was fun. Actually, in there I noticed that there were 200-something people that had never flown Jepp

Blue before in 730 or so, I think that had flown Jepp Blue 10 times or fewer that when it had and flew to 25 destinations. And I realized my two kids would be included at least in that crowd that's flown JetBlue fewer than 10 times. They didn't have a JetBlue number before 25 for 25. So I don't know if maybe they were included in the number of people that had never flown JetBlue because Jet Blue maybe didn't know that they flown. I don't know.

Yeah, I didn't track them before. Either way, they definitely were in that crowd. And that to me, again, shows that somebody deserves a raise here. Because look at all the people that had not been regular JetBlue. customers who flew JetBlue plenty that either JetBlue at this point had their opportunity to impress them and did and they're going to come back or didn't either way JetBlue got what they wanted out of that I think. Yeah, totally. And I hope that encourages other businesses to do like similar like mega promotions because, you know, I think JetBlue got what they wanted out of this, a lot of

free, not free, but a lot of publicity. And I think that a lot of people, um, you know, had a lot of fun doing it, certainly were very, very highly rewarded for completing it. So a good combination there. Yeah, well, you know, the 811.5 million points awarded, that actually surprised me. The number was that low, but if that number is right, 800,000 million, 500,000 at one cent, let's say it costs them per mile. So what did this? We figured that'd be like $8 million, I guess, if I did the math right. And it actually cost them one cent per mile.

But it probably didn't. And the amount of advertising they got out of that, man, I think the return on spend was terrific for JetBlue. Plus, they got all those people to pay for all those flights in the first place. So, yeah, yeah. I also with that stat, I was trying to remember how many people, I don't know if we ever got a final number, but how many people completed the SaaS challenge that awarded a million SaaS miles? wasn't it around like 800 or 900 people somewhere in that one?

Yeah, this way. Yeah, I remember that. And so it's just kind of interesting that these two promotions are very different as far as like how you complete them and how the rewards were structured. Sounds like they gave out a similar number of points in the end, which was kind of funny coincidence. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. All right.

Next up, let's talk about Capital One shopping homepage bonus offers. So this is another one that is. interesting in that it's targeted and it may be really valuable. So Capital One shopping, we've talked about a lot before, how it's a shopping portal, has nothing to do with Capital One other than the fact that Capital One owns it. You don't need a Capital One credit card or login to get on there. And on the homepage, some people now are seeing these homepage bonus offers in a gray box. And if you've been looking at Capital One shopping, I'm not talking about the one at the top that shows what today's deal is or what merchants are coming up in the next few days. This is another gray

box that pops up just below that, but not for everybody. I don't have it in my account. My wife does have it in her account. I don't know how they figure who they're going to target, but there have been some really good one-time use offers in there. But you've got to be careful not to click through until you're ready to use one, right? Yeah. So apparently these are one-time use. If you click through one, you've got to use it right then, or it'll go away. And so, you know, you can you can read what the offer is on the homepage. And again, just don't activate it until you're ready. But some examples we've seen, I actually haven't seen this, but we read about this from another blog that people were targeted for $250 back on hotel bookings of $250 or more, which is obviously

a great offer. What I saw, some offers I saw between my wife and I, we both had these offers on our homepage. Hotels.com, $100 back when you spend $200. That's pretty darn good. Walmart, $30 back when you spend $50. Sam's Club, $50 back when you spend $100. Card cash, $50 back when you spend $150. So those are just some examples,

but tons and tons of really good offers in our accounts, many other people's accounts. And it just seems to be very a lot, who gets what? It does. And it's worth checking. checking back because when we published this post just within this last week, we didn't have any of the really good one. We had the Walmart one and the Sam's Club one you just mentioned, but we didn't have like the Hotels.com one, for instance, the 100 pack on 200. But I checked this morning before we recorded this. And my wife now has the Hotels.com 100 back on 200. So it's worth taking a look periodically and seeing because they do change things up. And yeah, and that's a really good offer. Now keep in mind that this is not cash back. It's rewards that you have to redeem for. gift cards through the Capital One shopping gift card redemption section. And in the past, the types of gift cards available have really varied and it's been hit or miss as to what's been available.

However, for the last several months now, it's been pretty consistent and the options have been pretty good. So I wanted to mention that because it was really variable for a while and there was a stretch of time where the options were just trash. But for the last like four or five months here now, I've been consistently having the same options. Marya has been in there. Hotels.com's been in there. REI has been in there, some cruise lines, et cetera. So there's been quite a few things in there that I think are useful enough. And in particular, Hotels.com, I've got some Hotels.com gift cards that I've redeemed already

from Capital One shopping. So I'm going to be looking to use that $100 back on $200 for an upcoming stay. Nice. Which I have stacked with a gift card before, by the way, worth mentioning. So paying with a gift card still did work to trigger Capital One shopping cash back. Okay. After a quick break, we'll be back with our main event. how we increase spend to earn big card bonuses. Regular listeners know that we love transferable points.

And Built has a terrific set of transfer partners, Hyatt, United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Air Canada, Air France, and many more. You can earn BillT points paying rent and at restaurants, fitness studios, pharmacies, online shopping, and more. And now, starting in February, Built members can earn points on mortgage payments too. Join the loyalty program for renters at Joinbilt.com. miles that's j-o-in-b-l-t.com slash miles make sure to use our URL so they know that we sent you and we're back with today's main event how we increase spend to earn big card bonuses so credit cards offer huge welcome offers but you often have to spend a lot in order to get them and we covered a few years ago we have to had a podcast called 13 ways to increase credit card spend and get most of it back.

So we covered a bunch of different ways in that episode, episode 197, on how to do this. How can you increase your spend so that you can earn those welcome bonuses without going broke, basically. And as we looked over that list from a few years ago, you know what? most of the methods that were listed there are the same. So you could go back to that episode. It's still perfectly valid. There might be a few minor details here and there that have changed since then. But all the basics remain the same. So what we're going to do today is we're going to go over the methods that Nick and I actually use regularly. And we're going to talk about how we use them. We'll get into a little bit of detail. You know, this is what we do and how and why.

And before we get into all that, a number of these methods involve paying some kind of fee in order to use your credit card. So, for example, there are services that will let you pay bills that can't usually be paid by credit card and they might charge around a 3% fee. I just want to address this at the outset so we don't have to talk about it each time it comes up. Normally, I wouldn't recommend paying a fee as high as 3% in order to use your credit card because most credit cards don't reward you more than 3% on basic spend. However, if you're going to earn a big welcome bonus as a result of spending a lot, it absolutely could be worth paying that fee. So just take an example.

Let's say there's a $100,000 point offer that requires $10,000 spend. So after spending $10,000, you'd have a minimum of 110,000 points from this credit card because presumably this card earns at least one point per dollar for your spend. All right. So now let's say you want to, before you make that spend, the way you're going to make it is to use a service that charges 3%. 3% of $10,000 is $300. So would you want to spend $300 in order to earn $110,000? points is a way to think about it. If those points are worth a penny each or more, that should be a no-brainer. And one way to think about it is like a lot of credit card points can be redeemed for

cash at a cent at one cent each. So you could even pay yourself back those 300. Let's say, you know, let's say you have 110,000 points after the welcome offer and everything. And you don't like the fact that you paid that $300 fee, well, redeem 30,000 of those points for cash back to pay yourself back for that $300 fee, and you've still got 80,000 points left over. And so obviously in that example and in most examples with a welcome offer, paying a fee, you know, of 3% or even 4% or 5% could be totally worth it if it's the difference between being able to meet the minimum spend for that offer or not. Yeah, and to be clear, because I know that somebody will question this, no, Greg and I generally are not redeeming our points at once and each. So in that specific example, would Greg really redeem 30,000 points at once in each? He might not, but that doesn't mean that you can't or couldn't think about it that way. And I think that it's important to be able to think about it that way, because I think that barrier, the $300 barrier, that would stop some people. It'd say, oh, but I don't want to pay $300 in order to earn the points. And I think it's important.

to point out that you can easily, if you, if that's the, if that's the barrier, then go ahead and pay yourself back and you're still 80,000 points ahead. No, that's not the redemption. I would generally recommend somebody make. However, if you don't have the $300 to sort of float for the points where you just don't want to for whatever reason, well, then I think that's a reasonable way to look at it and say, well, this, this welcome bonus was 80,000 points for me. And I didn't have to work hard to get it. So good enough. Now, in reality, probably you've got some other. things you can spend money on so you probably don't need to spend all 10,000 at 3%, et cetera, et cetera.

So we're not going to get into all that detail today. But there you have it. All right. So let's talk about what we do. So first up, I know that you pay some taxes, Greg. I do. I do. So when paying federal taxes, there are two payment processors that charge less than 2% of a fee under

certain conditions. So they made it kind of complicated because it's like, personal cards are supposed to earn with one processor, I think this thing stands out with something like 1.75% and other processors around 1.85%. And then they

say like commercial cards are going to cost more, closer to 3%, but sometimes like it's not predictable until you go to do it like what the fee's actually going to be. So for example, I often find

American Express cards, even the consumer cards are showing up with the higher fee unless I go through PayPal to pay them with the 1.85 processor, then it shows up as 1.8 5% by going through PayPal to the MX rate. Anyway, it's complicated in that way. But anyway, the point is you could have fees as low as 1.75-ish to around 3%. And if you have high federal taxes to pay, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, super easy way to increase your spend to meet welcome offers. So, you know, I have a business, frequent miler, where I have to pay, luckily it's a successful business. And so as a result, I have to pay very large estimated taxes every quarter. So I actually have five opportunities

a year to do this because there's the quarterly estimated taxes and end of year taxes. And each time, I could make up to two payments per processor. So I could make up to four separate payments of like under 3% fee and ideally under 2% for when it all works out well. And so for me, it's just been a super easy way to, you know, I've got this big spend coming up once a quarter. I'm going to sign up for some cards that have really big minimum spend requirements and just knock it all out at once. Yeah, I think that that's a really great point. If you are a business owner with a decent amount of revenue where you're paying a significant amount in taxes, that right there, like you said, what, four payments per quarter, you could be opening, what, 12 cards a year,

or four quarters, sorry, 16 cards a year that way, plus the end of year taxes and meeting spending requirements on all of them that way. So there's, depending on how much you have to pay and how much the spending requirements are in the various cards, that could be a really easy way to earn all the welcome points that most people would want in a year. So I think that it's very easy in that regard for business owners. On the personal side, I have paid personal taxes through those payment processors. And so a couple things there. You can make two payments per person per processor. Now, it does advise you that you should use the primary. If you're filing jointly, you should use the primary taxpayers, social security number on that.

And we haven't had a problem with player or two, making payments with her social security number. And because we file jointly, it ends up in the right place. So, you know, up to you as to how fast unless you want to play that and talk to your own tax professional, all those things. But, you know, we haven't had an issue with that. Another question that comes up from time of time is, should I mess with my withholdings so that, you know, my employer has a lower amount of withholdings and then I owe quarterly estimated payments instead. And that's certainly something you can do.

And some people might want to do in order to spread out opportunities for new welcome bonuses over the course of the year. Personally, I have not messed with that. I haven't made Greg change my withholdings at all because I, A, I don't want to have to remember to make the quarterly payments. I don't want to have that as another thing on my plate to remember to do. And B, at the end of the year, if I'm looking to open some new cards, I know that if I pay a little too much, I'll be due a refund. So I just consolidate my card applications. Usually around the end of the year, we talked about triple dipping around the end of the year, because I know that there's going to be tax payments due in February, March time. So, so there's plenty of time in order

to still be within the initial spending window on new cards. And we have often opened new cards at tax time specifically for this purpose. And I've done this also paying taxes for family members too. Yeah. And so a couple more things about that. I just want to clarify in case it wasn't clear when Nick talked about doing some payments in his wife's name, that's so you could get around the two payments per processor limit. So if you want to get in on that 1.75% fee from the one processor with more than two payments. If you have a spouse who's filing jointly, you should be able to get four in each payment period that way.

The other thing I want to mention is that Nick talked about when it's getting close to end of your tax payment time. That's when he might do more of this. And that's because when you overpay your estimated taxes, you're out that money until the end of the year when you can get a refund. So unless you could float that much money and want to float that much money, that you're giving the government a loan that doesn't pay interest, basically. So that's something to think about when you overpay your estimated taxes. Another question we get a lot is,

is it risky to overpay your taxes from the point of view of will there be? any tax consequences? Will there be, will you get audited more likely, anything like that? And all I can say is I haven't heard any evidence that audits are more likely. I've never heard of any negative consequences from overpaying. The impression I've always gotten is that the government's happy to get a loan from you. So, you know, if you're willing to give a no interest loan to the government, they'll be like, yes, we'll take it. But at the same time, you know, you have to understand.

I don't know anything about the inner workings of the IRS. I'm not a tax professional. So, you know, take all of that with a grain of salt or pepper, whatever kind of grain you like. Also worth mentioning that if you overpay, you have to be prepared to pay your credit card. heart bill because refunds don't always happen as fast as you might expect. I mean, most of the time, most, in my experience, most of our refunds have come within, I don't know, three weeks, four weeks of when I've made the tax, when I file my taxes, I should say. So I'm likely to make a payment around tax filing time usually, expecting to get that money back. However, there are times

when refunds get tied up for months. People have to wait five, six, seven months as things get tied up for one reason or another. So I wouldn't pay something I couldn't afford to pay for. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, there are other types of bills that you get besides taxes that you can't normally pay with a credit card. So what do we do then? Well, so there are a couple different services. The first one, I always say plastic. It might be plastic. I don't know. It's a P-L-A-S-T-I-Q. So it's a service for paying bills that you can't pay with a credit card. You can pay via check or ACH. Miliio also will talk about that in a second, similar service.

But plastic, I'm going to call it, charges a 2.99% fee plus 99 cents for electronic delivery payments or $1.49 if you need to send a paper check. Plus they've recently added a network fee. and I'm not sure if that varies by card network like Visa MasterCard American Express. It's very small relative to the payment. We're talking under a dollar for thousands of dollars worth of payment. So it's not a huge amount. I shouldn't say for thousands of dollars. I think I made a payment that was about $2,800 earlier this week,

and maybe it was a little bit over a dollar was the network fee. So it's a pretty small amount compared to the amount of the payment. So that's the basic gist of it. It can be a little complicated to figure out which types of payments are allowed. So I don't know, maybe you want to talk a little bit more about that. Yeah. So plastic has a big grid that's really hard to follow that shows what types of payments are allowed by Amex, Chase, Discover, and so on.

I'm sorry, no, let me back up. It shows by Visa Mastercard MX Discover, so by the payment networks, not by bank. And then you have to separately, in plastics guides, find the guide to, like, for example, Capital One specifically to find out which things are allowed and not allowed. So we created a little table that puts all that together in one easy place. So if you go to our plastic guide, which will be linked to in the show notes, you'll find that table there. I can't promise that everything, every type of payment you're looking for will necessarily be represented there, but the big ones you should be able to find within our little guide. And so, for example, in our guide, you can find that, yes, you can use a credit card to pay a mortgage if you pay with a master card, as long as that master card, is not issued by Capital One or U.S. Bank. Okay. So that's the type of complication that we have with

plastics, rules. And, you know, and plastic didn't come up with these rules themselves. It's all based on the card issuers and networks pushing back on like, we don't like people paying mortgage or this or that or the other thing. And so they had to accommodate that. Yeah. All right. So I actually use the service quite a bit still. Back in the day, we're bloggers. We've written about it. And I earned a lot of fee-free dollars. I've been using them for a long time for various types of payments. So that's part of the reason why I've been using it as much as I have. So I have some experience here anyway.

And there are a number of things that I pay regularly. For instance, I have a family member who has a car loan and you can pay the car loan through plastic. Again, there's rules. I know I pay that one with a master card that is not Capital One or U.S. Bank, but I'm not sure if it could have been Capital One or U.S. Bank. I'd have to check the chart. At any rate, I do pay her car car. payment with a credit card and then she just pays me back for that. So it does cost me the dollar

$49 in order to send the paper payment and whatever the network fee is now. But that's a set and forget. It just goes every month. I have it automated. But I've used it for lots of other little things. I pay property taxes for a number of family members and they pay me back. That's what I mentioned. I just made some payments the other day to various municipalities for property taxes for family members. So that's that's a way I've done it. They mail a check. It usually takes about a week. I'm going to come back to that in a second. Another way that I've used it is sometimes to pay contractors or my kids when they were in a 3K program, sort of like pre-pre-K mixture between daycare and learning. A lot of people have that these days in various places.

And so I paid them with that. And rather than send a check monthly, actually, what I would do with that is annually at the beginning of the year, I would inevitably find a sign up on us that I was interested in earning and ask them if I could just send them one check for the whole. whole year and pay the whole year all at once. And they had, of course, no problem taking the money up front. As Greg said, most entities aren't going to be unhappy to get a loan for the entire amount right from the get-go. So no issue there. So I've used it for that and other things of that sort. Again, like I said, I've used it to pay contractors that didn't think that they would take a credit card, but they did take a credit card ultimately. It just came in the form of a check from plastic. I should mention, by the way,

I've paid property taxes for other people. And so there are, fields in there to say who the payment is on behalf of, to enter information about the bill. There's a memo section so you can write stuff in there. So I'm very careful to make sure that it says who the bill is in the name of and what the bill number is, et cetera, the information that the person processing it will need when they receive it. So it does get applied to the proper person's tax payments. I wanted to mention here also that when you do that, like when I make those property tax payments for family members, there is a section, an area where you can upload a copy of the tax bill. And sometimes that's optional and sometimes it's required. I don't know if there's

a method to the madness as to when it's optional or when it's required. When it's not required, I usually don't bother putting it in there, although I have had plastic follow up afterwards. Even after the payment I thought was processed and done. In fact, one time I missed the follow-up email asking for a copy of the bill. And I have. the bill, but I didn't realize they had asked for it, and the payment didn't get sent. So now I'm very careful to make sure that I monitor those payments after I make them to make sure they actually get mailed out and they didn't actually require more documentation from me. So be aware of that. If you do run into it's optional, even though it says optional, they may still follow up later on for

a copy of the bill. So know that much so that you don't miss a payment that you want to make. But otherwise, anyway, I've been using it quite a bit and it still works as advertised. I haven't had a problem with anything getting paid other than, like I said, when I missed the email that they wanted documentation for a bill. Yeah, yeah, and good safety tip about that, the receipts, or the bill. Okay, so another service that could be used in a similar way is Melio, but that one specifically for business payments. So you have to have some form of business to sign up for Melio, and you're supposed to use it just to pay business expenses. It's much more straightforward though about what's allowed and what's not allowed a flat 2.9% fee and one cool thing is

we negotiated a sign-up bonus that's exclusively through frequent miler if you sign up through myler for milo then after i think it has moved to 500 dollars after spending 500 dollars or Melio, you'll get a $200 sign-up bonus. So that's pretty cool. You could go to frequent miler.com forward slash go forward slash Melio to get in on that offer or check the link in our show notes for our post about Melio for more information. And then you can click through from there for the sign-up bonus as well. Yeah, that's a great way to mitigate the fee. If you have a business payment to make, I mean, as a new user, if you haven't used Melio before, then that can be a great way to earn yourself a sign up bonus and mitigate a good chunk of the fee.

Yeah, seriously. So that's probably where I would be starting with that type of thing. All right. So that's paying bills that don't ordinarily take a credit card, including in my case, taxes. And by the way, I've paid income taxes as well. And that's pretty easy because the information's already in there for plastic. I typically use that for income taxes. I have used the payment processors as well.

They are a lower fee. I've just had the fee-free dollars to pay federal taxes through plastic also. All right. Next up, funding college savings. So this is an interesting one. Funding college savings or paying student loans. So for me, I have two young kids. And when they were born, we created 529 plans for them. And we bought Gift of College gift cards. So Gift of College is sort of an intermediary. You can buy gift cards in various places for Gift of College, load a Gift of College account with those gift card funds and then send them from Gift of College to the 529 plan of your choosing. And so I did that because there is a gas station chain in some parts of the Northeast.

They also exist in Florida called Cumberland Farms that sells Gift of College gift cards. And there are a number of credit cards that offer various category bonuses for gas station purchases. So I bought Gift of College gift cards at gas stations and loaded them to gift to college and move them over to the 529 plans for both of our kids when they were first born. And so I've just let that money grow. Now, if you're not familiar with this, if you're a new parent or you're thinking about becoming a parent, know that if you create a 529 plan, you can use any state's plan.

You don't have to live in the state whose plan you choose. I did choose my own state's plan, both because it was one of the better plans out there and because there is a tax benefit in my state for contributing to my state's plan. So if I contributed to somebody to a different state's plan, that would be fine. But I wouldn't get any deduction on my taxes for it. So my state taxes for it. So beware of those types of variables. You have to do your own research as far as that goes.

But at any rate, I earned some good bonuses buying those gift to college gift cards at Cumberland Farms. And I wrote about it. And we have a complete guide to Miles for College. I think it's, what is it, frequentmiler.com slash miles for college. We'll have the link in the show notes. A couple things to note is that different stores have different restrictions around the Gift of College gift cards. Some stores won't let you pay with a credit card, so then it's no use to you.

A lot of stores have very low limits in how much can be loaded onto the gift card, like let's say $100, and if the fee is around $6, that's a 6% fee, which is probably not worth it to you. The ideal is when you can load up to $500 for around a $6 fee, then it's very close to just a 1% overall fee. And that's a really good deal. And so if you can find that, that's kind of the golden ticket for the gift of college gift cards. And on that note, I should mention that Cumberland Farms in the areas where I went sold $500 gift cards with a $6 fee. So it was exactly what Greg is talking about there.

and I quickly learned where the limits were because you have to keep in mind, A, like Greg said, some places won't let you use a credit card, B, some places may tell you you can only buy one of them at a time. There you get all sorts of different things that are going to vary made up rules based on the manager, but it did seem that there was a hard-coded limit in the register before the register would kind of break and fail to activate cards. And I can't remember off the top of my head what that was. I'm pretty sure I've got it in the Miles for College Guide, though it was either $1,500 or

$2,000 at a shot. So if you've got a lot of money you want to contribute to a $529, you may have to do that over several trips or different stores. And then you may also see those gift of college cards in other places. And Greg sort of mentioned that in some places they'll sell gifted college cards that are only $100 or $200 cards, but the fee on those usually is high compared to the amount you can load. So you really want the $500 cards if you can find them.

Yeah. And if you can't find them and you don't mind paying a fee, another place to look is actually Gift of College's website itself. They sell their electronic gift cards, if I remember right, online. I think it's high fee. I just don't remember exactly what the fee is, but I'm sure it's too high to consider doing just to earn rewards off of a regular credit card. But if it's a way to meet a minimum spend, you know, big spend bonus,

then it very well could be worth it. So that's worth checking as well. And actually, on one more note on that before you move on, giftcards.com sells gift of college gift cards. And for a while, I think they didn't have a fee at all. I think that they do have fees now. Excuse me. But that's worth knowing because sometimes Capital One Shopping offers really good targeted offers for giftcards.com where you may earn a significant chunk of rewards. So it may be worth it, even though the fee per card is higher than it ought to be, then it may still end up being worth it if you're able to stack with a good portal bonus. Yeah, really good point about that. Okay, and I'll just quickly talk about how I used to use this. When I was saving for my son to go to college, back then, a gift of college gift cards loadable to $500 were available at Toys Russ, which still existed back then.

And I did my best to keep them in business by spending thousands of dollars at a time. at Toys R Us. Every time I went there, I would buy thousands of dollars in Gift of College gift gift cards, but alas, that wasn't enough to keep them in business. So that avenue is no longer available. But I'll talk briefly about how I double-dipped rewards with all this. So I earned rewards by buying, when my son was young, buying those Gift of College gift cards to put into a 529 account for him. And then when he went to college, instead of paying the tuition directly from the 529 account, I would pay through plastic in order to earn rewards. Now, I did have to pay the plastic fee, or maybe I had fee-free dollars, which no longer exist at the time. But the point is, so I earned

rewards again. So I was able to meet new big spend bonuses while he was in college and paying for the tuition. And then I would just pay myself back from the 529 account in order to pay those credit card bills. And so that's all legitimate. You don't have to pay directly from the 529 account when you're paying. The other thing you can use gift to college gift cards for is to pay your student loans. So if you have those, it's worth checking if that. will work for you because, again, that's another nice way to increase your spend if you can buy the Gift of College gift cards with a credit card. Absolutely. Yeah, I was going to make a joke about how old Greg is that his son went to college when Toys of Rust was still in business,

but who needs to make that joke? So anyway, yeah, and I'm going to make some additional contributions this year, I think, to gift of college, there are a number of benefits to, rather to the 529s. There are benefits, like I said, tax benefits in my state to contributing. So that may be worth looking into for some folks. All right. Next up, making loans through Kiva. This is all you, Greg.

I know you earn miles and points this way. Yeah. And we've talked a lot about this in previous episodes. And we'll have a link in the show notes to all about Kiva. But basically, it's a service that handles letting you make loans to, two micro lending organizations around the world. And you don't earn interest on the loans, but you do usually get it fully paid back in time. And the cool thing is that you can fund these loans with a credit card.

And the double cool thing is Kiva does not pay the transaction fee on those credit cards. PayPal does. So that's PayPal's generosity for that situation. And so I really like the fact that you can do good by helping people, you know, get the money they need for maybe their small business or just to get an education, whatever it is they're seeking a loan for, a microloan. And you get the money back and you get to earn rewards along the way and increase your spend. So it's a good combination. It is not something to do if you don't have the money. in your bank account to float because you are definitely going to have to pay your credit card bill

way before the loans pay off and fall. And it's costing you something then because there's the opportunity cost of not having that money earning interest or being invested, et cetera. So there's certainly some cost involved, but if you're willing to pay that cost because you feel like this is doing some good in the world, like I think is the case for Greg, then that can be an easy way to increase spend. And again, like everything else we've talked about, if you're you're using that in order to hit a new welcome bonus because there's a great new offer, but you're not sure you're going to otherwise be able to spend enough to hit it. But you do have the cash in order to be able to float it.

That can certainly be a way to increase your spend. Yep. Also, if you have Visa MasterCard gift cards lying around that are in multiples of $25, you can't do fund a loan for like, you know, $12 and $3 or something like that, but any increment of $25 you can do. And it could be a good way to just use up a gift card that you have lying around if you don't have a better use for it. Oh, that's a good point.

All right, paying bills for friends and family. This is one that I do very frequently. So I already mentioned paying property taxes for family members that then just pay me back. And I do the same thing with a number of other types of bills. I mentioned the car payment I make for a family member. Also, my in-laws have recently been going through a renovation. and I have in the past paid contractors through plastic as part of that. I bought a lot of Lowe's gift cards when they were on sale and materials at Lowe's

in order to earn welcome bonuses. In fact, early on, there was a large amount that needed to be spent all at once. And I said, oh, well, there's a great offer at the time. There was a great offer on the Amex Business Gold card. And it required, I think, $20,000 in spend to earn 175,000 points. And lo and behold, they were looking to. spend about $20,000. So I said, oh, hold on, hold on. Let me get a new card. Can you wait a couple days? And so I so I did that and was able to get the new card in the mail and earn a big welcome

bonus because they're not big into miles and points or rewards otherwise. And they were happy to let me do that. So so I look for those opportunities and I do frequently encounter those opportunities. And I have my my family now trained to the point where they recognize when there's a large bill to pay that they should ask me if I'd like to pay it for them. And so that's, I think, a really nice side benefit that's come out of it, that there are times when I would recognize, like I did with the, I just mentioned with building materials or whatever it was for the renovation, where I'll recognize and say, oh, wait a second, hold on, let me, let me jump in here. But there are plenty of times now where they naturally recognize. They say, oh, you know what, there's this big bill coming up. Would you like to use one of your cards on that? And so I will sometimes apply for a new card specifically because I know that those large spend times are coming up. I mentioned tax time before, and that's a time of year where we very frequently end up opening a card or two, whether that's just before the end of the year in order to double or triple dip, as we've talked about on a recent episode, or when I find out, oh, family member owes a large tax bill.

Let's see what we can do with that in order to earn more rewards. So I do that all the time with friends and family in order to increase spent. Yeah, yeah. I haven't done hardly any of this. I'm thinking about my mom lives in an independent living community. which has very high rent, which, I mean, includes the, you know, food component to it as well. So, you know, as you can imagine, it's very high. And that would be a great opportunity to earn lots of rewards, whether I do that through

built or another mechanism to be determined. So it's something I'm thinking about. But whether I want that complication in my life, I don't know. We'll see. Yeah, that's the potential downside. And I think that that's going to vary. the utility there is going to vary significantly from one person to another. And obviously, you would have to know that your family member is going to pay you or get paid in advance.

There's a lot of variables that from one family to another will either make sense or not make sense at all. So I do recognize that. But that has been a way that I have certainly looked to increase spend. And in fact, just, I don't know, a few months ago, there was a new card offer that was out. And I mentioned it. And my wife was like, oh, well, so-and-so's property taxes are probably going to be due soon. We could probably hit the spending requirement easily. You're right. So maybe we could do that. So that's certainly been something that we have used. So that's worked out well. All right. Next up. We got funding new bank accounts. So this is an interesting one. Funding new bank accounts with a credit card? What's that all about?

Yeah. So another blog, Doctor of Credit, does a good job of keeping a list of banks that will let you use a credit card to fund your new bank account. It's almost always just for a new one. Like, you know, you have to sign up new and then you can use a credit card. It's usually limited to Visa or MasterCard, but not always. And usually there's a small limit. Like, so probably the most common thing is like you could only do up to $500. But, but Dr. Credit keeps a list of probably hundreds of opportunities and some of them are more like $5,000 a shot. I don't do this often, but a post came out, I don't know, maybe it's a couple years ago now about the forefront credit union and the post mentioned that that's in Michigan where I live. And so that they were

allowing funding. And at that time, it didn't seem like there was a limit. So I jumped on, opened an account, and the card I wanted to use had a $30,000 limit on it. So I spent $30,000 to open that account, and it all went in, and that worked fine. I tried opening yet another account with the same credit union. I mean, not as a different person, but another type of account with them. And at first, the payment, like, went through, but then it was reversed. And I got a message saying this is, this ability to fund with a credit card is meant for just new customers only.

And fair enough, that makes sense. They are eating the fee in that situation to acquire a new customer. And it looks like from Doctor of Credits posts that they now limit to $5,000 and probably because of me. All because of Greg the frequent miler. That's where you can send your pitchforks, folks, send them to frequent miler lane. So anyway, yeah, I mean, but $5,000 is nothing to sniff at though either. I mean, that's like, there's a, that's something that could easily help you earn a new welcome bonus.

And there are a number of counts out there where you could fund with three or five thousand. Sometimes they're really limited. Sometimes it's only a few hundred dollars on a card. But even still, in those situations, I've still opened one last year that I think could only be funded with $1,000 or $2,000 or something. or other. In fact, I think it was a U.S. bank account because I think what happened was I tried to fund it with a card and then it didn't work and then I got an email later on that it did work and I can't remember all the details. But I do remember I opened it in part thinking, oh, well, I could knock out a chunk of a welcome bonus by opening this bank account. So that's one that's

worth keeping an eye on keeping a near to the ground for opportunities near you. I think it's much more likely that you'll stumble on a Greg the Frequent Miler type of opportunity with something local that is not as nationwide and perhaps established that's going to find this crazy. It is important to check out the doctor credit or wherever else you can find information about these things because in some cases the transaction could process as a cash advance, in which case, you not only don't earn rewards, but you'll have interest fees and stuff. And in, you know, in some cases like specific card issuers don't allow rewards on these types of purchases. So, you know, for example, I think Bill probably would not. And I don't know, there's a few others

that's here and there. Most of the big ones are fine, most of the time, as long as it doesn't come across as a cash advance. Yeah, that's a great safety tip. And so one thing that I know some people do when they're funding an account with a credit card is make sure they call their credit card issuer and drop their cash advance line to the minimum possible. Like sometimes it's possible to call your bank, call Capital One or City or whatever it might be, and say, listen, I don't want to use this for cash advances. What's the lowest cash advance limit I can get? And you might be able to lower that to a dollar or maybe it's $500, whatever it is. Hopefully, is an amount that's less than whatever you try to fund so that hopefully it'll get rejected

if it's going to code as a cash advance. That's what I was going to say. The key is that it should be less than the amount you're trying to fund and then you should be okay. Yep. You should be protected. Yep. Hopefully. All right. Next up, buy and sell merchandise. We have a post that'll be linked in the show notes. It is a guide to using buying groups to increase credit card spend. And so I've definitely used a lot of this type of activity over the years. I have focused more and more on larger ticket items, more expensive things where I can knock out a lot of spend at once with a single purchase or two. But I do still do a fair amount of that. One pretty specific instance. So that's another technique I use and a lot of people use. Now, the cautions here is I would say,

you've got to be careful about who you're selling to, whatever it is that you're selling, and not overexposing yourself to any one entity. I also, there are certain types of things that I'm less interested in buying and selling, you know, like when the new iPhone comes out, often there are opportunities to buy and resell whatever the new iPhone is. And I tend to avoid that type of thing more because I find that there's just more risk in those types of electronics, though I know that there are probably plenty of people out there listening who are like, what are you talking about? I bought 157 iPhones. I was fine. And if that's the case, great. But but my point here is that I have used buying groups or a particular buying group to increase spend

pretty significantly, so to make it pretty easy to hit new welcome bonuses. Next up, buying and selling gift cards. So this is another one that I use occasionally. I don't think Greg uses as much, and you can find more about this in that same guide to using buying groups to increase spend. Buying gift cards when they are on sale, whether online or at your local grocery store, can work out to be a good deal. usually you need to be part of a specific buying group in order to make that worthwhile. If you're trying to

sell the gift cards on your own, that's, I think it's fraught with issues with potential fraud and problems. And also the fact that it's just hard to get a good competitive rate if you're just selling a gift card or two here or there. So buying groups tend to be your best ticket here. I personally have been selling gift cards to aligned incentives for a long time now. I don't do it regularly. This isn't something I'm doing all this. time, mostly because I don't have a grocery store near me that has any sort of good rewards program, like a fuel rewards program where I'm going to save a bunch of money on gas or whatever. And so I don't use it all the time. But when there's a deal that is either easy to do in my pajamas, it can be done online and it's

like a break even or maybe a slight profit or maybe just a tiny little bit of a loss and I'm working on a welcome bonus, if it's like a 1% loss and I'm working on a welcome bonus, I might take that type of a deal. and when it's something that like I have a lot of dollar generals near me and a few times of your dollar general run a great gift card deal where you can make a small profit on the gift cards reselling them to an entity like aligned incentives and so I'll jump in on those because they're particularly easy for me so that's another method that some people use yeah and I've done some of it in the past and it's it can be really easy and I haven't had any problems with it it's just that because I have bigger ticket items like the taxes we talked about before. I haven't seen, you know, a need to work on these. What tend to be, at least in my experience, they're usually things like you could knock out like $150 of spend here and 200 there and kind of thing. And so it's definitely worth doing if you don't have other really big spend like I do. In my case, it's just dealing with a lot of little things is not something

I want to spend my time on when I don't need to. Yeah, in the same way. and that's why I'm kind of selective about the ones that I jump in on. I tend to jump in on the bigger ones when it's a $500 gift card. You can buy somewhere and you can buy a couple of them or like I mentioned dollar general. A lot of times those dollar general deals, you can go in and spend like $1,500 or $2,000 at a time and break even or maybe even make a couple percentage points there. And so I'll jump in on those deals that are sort of lower hanging fruit for larger amounts because I have the same thing where I don't want to track a whole bunch of $50 gift cards that I bought. So now like Greg said, if you if we're just looking to meet a few thousand dollars worth to spend, it could be an easy way to bridge the gap with those smaller amounts. So I think there's a place for that for some folks. Yeah. Yeah. All right. If you've hung with us this long, now you're in for a treat because we've added two new categories that weren't in the original podcast about ways to increase spend. One is donating to charity and the other is cruise ship spend. So I'm going to talk first about donating to charity. Now we did recently. did a whole show on this. So no need to really rehash all of that. We also have a post that both of these will be in the show notes. Anyway, the thing I do personally is I kind of, when I have plans to donate to charity, I often try to coordinate those donations around new credit card signups. And so that way, you know, I get the card and just immediately spend X, X dollars donating to that charity. It's a nice, easy win-win. The other thing I want to reiterate from

our previous show about it is the way I like to do that is to go through something called the PayPal Giving Fund fundraiser hub, which is a place where PayPal eats the credit card processing fee. And so the charity should get 100% of what you donate, whereas usually when you donate directly to a charity, they have to pay the 3% or whatever it is fee. Very good. Yeah, I think a point that Greg made there was that a lot of these things will look at and say, okay, well, if I can knock out an entire welcome bonus with a single purchase or two, that to me is valuable in and of itself because I don't want to have to carry a card around. and track how close I am to the welcome offer if instead I could make a single purchase or two

with one of these methods. And so that's, I think, where the appeal is on a lot of these to be able to knock out a welcome bonus easily. Greg's written before about how welcome bonus spend is not as everyday spend because we use some of these techniques to knock it out more quickly. So the cruise ship spend was the last thing that we're going to talk about here. So I've taken a lot of cruises over the last few years, we wrote about ways to match and get free cruises. And that's dried up pretty significantly overall. Although there are still some opportunities, there was recently Norwegian has been offering a match. And so if you've done one of the old matches and you still have screenshots of your old free offers, you can maybe email them to Norwegian and get a free Norwegian cruise offer. And I just did

Margarita Ville at C, which also has been matching other people's offers. And so there are still some out there. So if you're on that train and or you just cruise a lot, the way that I have increased spend on cruise ships is that in many cases, this is not true universally, but in many cases on the cruise ship, if you go to the casino and you go to the slot machine, the way you load the slot machine usually is just putting your room key card in and charging it to your room. And there's no fee to do that. And of course, at the end of the cruise, your bill just gets billed to the credit card that's on file. So I've done a lot of that on cruise ships. Now, I've done a lot of that on cruise ships. I should mention that, as I said, it varies by cruise lines. Some cruise lines will only let you do

smaller amounts. They might only let you load $500 at a time. And some may require that you've played through that $500 before you can withdraw it. But that varies. There are some also where you don't have to play through it before you withdraw it. So those types of rules will vary by cruise line and even by cruise ship within a cruise line, depending on the systems that they have in place. So may or may not be useful on your specific cruise. and also if you loaded the machines, typically there's no fee. If you try to take out cash at a table, some cruise lines will charge you a three or four percent fee. So if you're trying to play blackjack and take out money to your account, they may charge

a fee for that. So you got to kind of watch out for that. It does, like I said, vary from cruise line to cruise line and how they handle that, but it can be a way to get a lot of spend very easily. Of course, you've got the problem where you may be walking off the ship with a lot of cash in hand. And so you have to keep in mind limits in terms of you have to declare if you're coming back from a foreign country with a large amount of cash on you and your safety issues and whatnot. So there are certainly some considerations, but that has been a way that I have made a lot of spend on a number of cruise ships over the last few years. So it has made the free cruises feel significantly freer. So a question for you about the currency. So I assume if it's a U.S.-based cruise that the currency would be in U.S. dollars, but what if it's a European cruise that you're on? Do you get to choose? Is it?

That's a great question. That's such an important. I'm glad that you asked that question because I made this mistake. And I didn't think to mention it. So I'm really glad that you asked this. Most of the U.S.-based cruise lines use U.S. dollars even when they're overseas. So like my carnival and Holland America cruises in Europe, for instance, the casino is entirely in U.S. dollars and they're giving you U.S. dollars. So really easy there. And then the same is going to be true, of course, in the Caribbean and cruises to go to Alaska. You've got a bunch of port stops in Alaska, which have. banks that you might be able to deposit your money into. So there's lots of good opportunities there, but I cruised MSC in Europe and didn't really think about it initially and ended up with a lot of euros. And then there was no way to turn that back into U.S. dollars at a what I would consider a reasonable rate. I ended up having to bring it to a bank in the U.S. and I got an okay exchange rate, but not a great one, not the right one. So it cost me. And I, I, I, I realized in hindsight that was a bad idea. Now, I had earned a welcome bonus on that cruise, so it wasn't the end of the world,

but it was not as easy as I thought. I thought it would probably be, oh, I can either exchange this on the ship, or I can exchange it overseas, or I've got an HSBC account with a global component. Maybe I could just deposit it in another country. No, it was not. And you didn't want to buy a thousand euro worth of Starbucks gift cards. You know, and even, well, even if I had, those wouldn't have worked in the U.S., So I was really?

I thought it was Not to my knowledge Work everywhere Okay because I could have sworn I've read I've read somewhere Maybe it was from the way I don't know that that's a If you treat

If to you Starbucks gift card credit Is as good as cash That that was a way around transaction fees Foreign transaction fees By depositing your extra Local money Into Starbucks basically

So I have to look into that But yes, no, I would not have wanted a thousand dollars worth of Starbucks credit, and I certainly wouldn't have wanted four or five thousand dollars worth. So how much Nick did there. So anyway, that's that's that. So in summary, basically, what are you doing, Greg? Yeah.

So for the most part, I spend a lot on taxes. I already talked a lot about that. So that's my biggest category. The next two are charitable donations and Kiva loans. that like that describes those three things describe 90 some percent of my um how i spend towards uh credit card bonuses all right for me it's at this point mostly a buying group activity and uh and then i'm going to say paying bills for other people but there's usually tax bills so property taxes and income taxes for other people so taxes definitely are are an easy way

to hit a lot of spend. Those are probably my two biggest, though, cruise ships over the last couple of years have competed as another faction. That's great. That's great. All right. I think that brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week came in via email in the Facebook group and comments on the blog. It came in from a lot of different angles. It was the same type of question about our episode last week where we talked about discarding cards. And so the question that came up over and over again was some, variation of this. I hear you talking about downgrading cards like the business platinum to the business green, but at other times it sounds like you may fully cancel cards like your MX gold card or

Hawaiian personal. Could you share more specifics on how you decide when to downgrade versus cancel and how you think about keeping banks happy while managing your card portfolio? There were a lot of people that asked about concerns about pop-up prison and whatnot. So why do we talk about downgrading or How do we think about downgrading versus canceling? And how much time do you spend thinking about trying to keep the bank happy? The second one is easy. I don't spend any time thinking about that. The answer really depends on which card issuer we're talking about.

So if we're talking about American Express, normally I'm, and I think that's true for Nick, too, we're talking about downgrading primarily because MX will not refund the annual fee or a portion of the annual fee unless it's been within 30 days of when the annual fee was charged. So if it's been within, if you've paid the annual fee within 30 days and you cancel, then you get the whole annual fee back and you're fine. Cancelling is fine. But in 32 days, if you cancel, you get nothing back. So if you paid, let's say, the $8.95 for the platinum card and, you know, 32 days later,

you decide, oh, I don't really want this card, you could cancel and get nothing and also have no access to all those coupons that you haven't used yet. Or you could downgrade to the cheapest possible downgrade option and you will get a refund of approximately 1112th of the year of the 895 and then you'll pay a pro-rated annual fee of the card you downgraded to. So 1112s of whatever, that annual fee is and so you'll get a lot of money back is the net is the net answer there now there are other reasons you might want to keep your Amex account so for example it can happen that you'll get targeted for upgrade offers so maybe you get lucky and be able to downgrade from a platinum to a green and then later get points to

upgrade to a gold or a platinum and so that could be a reason but For me, most of the time, when I'm talking about it, it's just because of the annual fee situation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's exactly it. And I'm not aware off the top of my head of another issuer that does the pro-rated refund thing. Most issuers, not all, will give you the annual fee back if you cancel within 30 days of the annual fee posting. And again, I said not all because it's not true universally, but it's true in many cases anyway.

So the downgrade thing with Amex is specific because of that. Now, to take that a step further, there are times where I might be strategic and say, oh, you know, my annual fee on this, let's say, platinum card posts in May. And so I have 30 days to cancel and not have to pay the annual fee. But on July 1st, I'm going to get a new fine hotels and resorts credit. So maybe I don't want to cancel within 30 days because then I wouldn't get that $300 FHR credit. Instead, maybe I want to keep the card into July until I've used the FHR credit or August or whatever it may be and then downgrade in order to, again, trigger that pro-rated refund. So it's a combination of maybe I forget and don't cancel within 30 days or maybe there's a reason why I want to hang on to it a little bit longer to be able to use another benefit or maybe I have a trip and I want to be able to use the Centurion Lounge, but I don't necessarily want to pay $900 for the whole year of having the platinum card than I could later on downgrade if I need to. So there are plenty of situations like that.

In terms of other issuers, sometimes I'll downgrade just to keep a line open. Like if there's a no annual fee option, if there's a card I can downgrade two that has no annual fee, in general, I'm more likely to do that than I am to cancel a card entirely. So, you know, if I had a Sapphire Reserve card and I decide I don't want to continue to have a Sapphire Reserve card, I'm more likely to see, okay, can I downgrade that to a Freedom Unlimited or Freedom Flex or there's a I think there's still a no fee sapphire card do I you know can I do that instead in order to keep that account open especially if it's an old account and there are situations where I will downgrade to a fee free card but in cases like the Hawaiian card that you mentioned there is no

downgrade option so that that's going to be just to keep it or cancel it or in the gold card the the MX gold card the downgrade option there is the MX green card that's the only option if you have a consumer gold the MX consumer green is the only downgrade. And the difference in annual fee is pretty small. So you're not going to get much of a refund when you downgrade to that, depending on when you do. The timing vary how much exactly it is. So there's less incentive to downgrade in that type of situation versus canceling. And then a lot of people asked about, are you worried about pop up prison? And I know that Greg kind of addressed this already at the beginning, but I don't make a lot of my decisions based on

fuzzy assumptions about what might happen. I have no data to back up. So I don't tend to spend much time thinking about, oh, am I going to end up not being able to get a bonus on a future card? If I downgrade, I do typically put some purchases on a lot of my MX cards because usually there's some reason to put some type of purchase on one or another. And so I sort of spread that around a little bit. I do tend to keep cards more than a year with AMX. But that's not because I want to make MX happy. It's more so because I want them for one reason or another. And maybe that's what keeps MX happy.

I don't know, but I don't spend a lot of time worried about that either. Yeah, a couple other considerations with Amex, if you have a membership rewards card that you're canceling, you want to make sure you have at least one MX membership rewards card in your account, otherwise you'll lose your points. So that's an example where you definitely would prefer downgrading over canceling. Another is Citibank, where their thank you rewards points. it doesn't matter whether you've pooled your points together.

If you cancel a card, any points that were earned on that card are going to go away. So you're better off downgrading a, let's say, a Strata Premier or Strata Elite card to a no-fee, thank-you card, like the double cash or custom cash, so that your points stay alive. with Chase, same thing, like ultimate rewards points. Now, in that case, it does matter which card the points are on. So if you're going to, if you want to cancel a card, you could just move the points to another ultimate rewards card and then cancel your card. So you can do it with Chase safely as long as you have at least one ultimate rewards card to keep your points alive with.

And a final thought is AMX upgrade bonuses. Typically the terms, if you've, or retention bonuses, if you've taken a retention bonus or an upgrade bonus on a card. Typically, the terms require that you keep that account open for 13 months or else they may claw back that retention bonus or upgrade bonus. So that's another thing to keep in mind in terms of you wouldn't want to downgrade or cancel if you're still within that window unless you're willing to risk getting that clawed back because I think they do in practice tend to claw that back. So watch out for that. All right. I think that brings us to the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed this episode and you'd like more of this stuff

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