Frequent Miler on the Air - Manufacturing spend & cash with buyers clubs | Ep71 | 11-7-20

Episode Date: November 7, 2020

Topics & timestamps: 00:08 Giant Mailbag: Were we wrong about the Hyatt credit card spend promo? 3:28 What crazy thing did Citi do this week? Now redeem Shop Your Way points for gift cards in useful denominations! https://frequentmiler.com/shop-your-way-gift-cards/ 8:53 Mattress Running the Numbers: Which card should you be using for grocery right now? https://frequentmiler.com/targeted-3x-10x-chase-spending-offers-on-a-plethora-of-cards/ 18:48 Main Event: Manufacturing spend and cash with buyers clubs https://frequentmiler.com/is-a-buyers-club-a-good-idea-for-you/ 47:41 Post roast Greg roasts Nick: Credit card cewll phone insurance https://frequentmiler.com/cell-phone-insurance-success-lessons-learned/ Nick roasts Greg: Pandemic battle: Chase Sapphire Reserve vs Amex Gold https://frequentmiler.com/pandemic-battle-sapphire-reserve-vs-amex-gold/ 1:00:04 Question of the Week: Are Simon Mastercards any good? Don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a comment!

frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event manufacturing spend and cash with buyers clubs first giant mailbag time drag it out let's see i'm curious what are the people saying this week right all right this week's mail comes from kevin and i have to say this kevin kevin's uh mail is sort of representative of a lot of feedback we got in the past week or several bits of feedback but i had to pick just one so kevin says i have to disagree with your assessment that the Hyatt 4K spend offer isn't worth pursuing. The valuation of 8K that you used is almost half the award's actual value, so far too low in my opinion. But regardless, when tied to the current bonus offer earning 5X at Amazon and 3X at grocery stores, it's a no-brainer either way, in my opinion. If you max out the grocery and Amazon piece, that's 10 to 16,000 points or more if

the other 1k is spent at Hyatt or other bonus categories, plus a free night worth up to 15,000 points. I know I'm going for it, already spent $1,500 at my local grocer. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think especially now with those extra bonuses for Amazon and grocery, and maybe it becomes more compelling than it did. So here's the thing in the 8K valuation, when you say it's worth 15K, it's not because you wouldn't pay 15,000 points for a 15,000 point certificate. You wouldn't do that. So you would only pay for the certificate with points if you were going to get a discount. So at max, you're going to pay 14,000 points for it. And then you'd be pretty silly to do that, I think. So the reason

I picked the eight was because if I don't use it at a 15K, I'd pay eight for a 12K cert. I don't really think I'd pay much more than eight for a 12K cert. So that's where the valuation comes from for the people who are stuck on the fact that you can use it for a night that costs 15,000 points. That's right, but it's not. Right, right. Also, I thought, I need to go back and watch our show again from last week, but I thought we had said, well, if you stack it with that promotion, then it probably is worth doing, but maybe I'm just remembering it wrong. I think I tried to argue that it wasn't. Oh, okay. You probably won that argument. I guess you did. So, yeah, I mean, there were a lot of people that said they were definitely going to do it.

And I imagine that if you have the Hyatt card, you probably are going to, especially with the extra 5X and 3X categories. I mean, that's – Yeah. I'm not going to argue it's a bad idea. No, I mean, I think it's, it's totally good with that combination. And yeah, I mean, probably we did math and said, okay, it's not the greatest thing out there, but, but not everyone has every opportunity that's out there either. So, so if

that's the opportunity you have, it's a good opportunity. It's right. So sure. For sure. Yeah. I mean, if you have every single credit card, then things change a little bit, but if you don't, then, you know, it certainly is a better opportunity than most. Right. Right. Okay. I can concede that. There you go, Kevin, you got it. You win, Kevin, you win. And so does several other people who gave us feedback that was virtually identical. Right. So then that brings us then to what crazy thing did Citi do this week?

Yeah. So this week, it's not Citi, but it's related to Citi. And that is that we've talked a lot on the show about how Citi thank you points became more valuable when shop your way points became more valuable when it was discovered that you could redeem those points for useful gift cards. And so the reason this related to cities is because you could transfer your city thank you points, but you get a 20% bump in value when you transfer your city thank you points to shop your way points. And okay. So what's the crazy thing that happened this week was we've talked before about how the, the, the site for redeeming for gift cards keeps going down. It's, it's been, I mean, it'll work for 10 minutes and it doesn't work for three days.

And then it works again for a day. We've also talked about how it sometimes is a very limited use because the max value for a lot of gift cards is like 30 bucks. And if you want to buy something that's like 500 bucks, you're, you know, you're, you're stuck. Well, what happened was they've changed all that now most of the gift cards have much much higher values now so if you click in a different ones you'll find a $200 limit a $500 limit $2,000 limit on some of them what well and those make a lot of sense like before these cruise

gift cards like princess cruiser whatever with like a $50 loan no sense at all but now with a couple thousand suddenly it's like yeah you could get decent value from your city points to book a cruise so and there are a few ways to do to get a great value for a cruise out of points i mean so obviously you can book travel through chase but apart from that people ask me all the time like what, what about cruising? And I always say, A, I don't really know because I'm not really a cruiser. But B, I just don't think there are any practical ways to get a great deal on a cruise with points. And this at least gives you a really good way to get good value out of your thank you points towards a cruise. It does.

Potentially so. It does. And I would, you know, one of the great things we've talked about with chase cards and their travel protections is they apply even if you only pay part of your of your travel with your credit card. So I would use the gift cards to pay, you know, even 90 percent of your cruise and then use your Sapphire Reserve or your Ritz card to pay the rest to get some excellent travel protections built into that trip. So you know what happened here? Shop Your Way was listening to the podcast, Greg. Oh, that's awesome. It's about time they listened to us. Right? Isn't it?

Somebody from Shop Your Way was listening. They were like, these Freak on Milo guys, they're right. Look, we only have $30 gift cards. Let's get people to cash in. Because, I mean, come on. Look at Searsars look at sears and shop your way struggling for years right wouldn't they love to get city buying some shop your way points right so this was this is their in they heard freaking out and they said you know what we can get people to redeem a whole bunch of those things there you go and i didn't even mention in some cases you can actually pick

exact dollar values you want so if you're about to buy something at Walmart for $492.16, just get a gift card for that exact amount, which is really, really handy, because then you don't have to keep track of the extra balance and everything. So loving that. And so the crazy thing, I actually think the crazy thing here is that i'm excited about shop your way points that is crazy it is crazy i'm still you know i'm still only like a third sold on this idea because you know i've said before i feel like a lot of these gift cards you can often get discounts on necessarily walmart although ibotta has had that 10 off off for some people on Walmart gift cards for a while now. But at any rate, I didn't get as excited about the shop your way angle. But I think it does make a lot of sense for people who've got a big pile of thank you points and aren't traveling right now. It probably makes sense.

Yeah. And hopefully we'll see more useful vendors popping up. We lost a couple, like we lost eBay and Southwest, gained a bunch, gained American Airlines, gained Vermont and Raffles and things like that. Well, was there any indication that those losses of eBay and Southwest are long-term or permanent or whatever? Because I mean, we lost the whole thing. Like the whole darn thing has gone down like six or eight times since we wrote

about it. Right. Right. I have no idea. I have no idea how they pick what's on there. Right. And you know, we'll see it also. Like, so I got kind of excited because audible was on there and I thought, Ooh, I think there's some tricky ways to turn that into actual amazon gift card credit and uh if i could do that that'd be awesome but there's a bug with the audible gift card so they won't actually let you redeem for that yet so you weren't the only it saw

me coming we're the only person that thought of those tricky moves huh maybe not i don't know all right well so there you go there you go. There you have it. If you have thank you points, you can potentially get great value out of those again in large enough denominations to be worthwhile. So then next up after that is mattress running the numbers. And we talked about that Hyatt thing a few minutes ago, the Hyatt free night spend. And we talked about how the math changes a little bit because now Chase has these targeted spending offers and so for mattress running the numbers this week what i wanted to talk about was if you have like all of the various chase cards you've got the mx gold you got the city premiere you got sapphire reserve etc etc what do you use at the grocery store right now because like

everybody's got a grocery bonus what's the right card i mean have you thought about it at all do you have a strategy what card do you are you using on grocery store spend yeah uh so ihg because who wouldn't want five five hd points three three only three with it it's five at amazon it's three at the grocery store yeah all. I'm glad you knew that was a joke. Hopefully. I did. Hopefully no one's taking their IHG card, putting it in their wallet to go run out to the grocery store. Somebody just paused it right after that.

Wait, IHG? So we're joking because IHG points are worth less than a penny each. So getting 3X or even 5X, it's just not that exciting. Some of the airline cards are offering 5x i think so the british airways and presumably i believe i assume probably the iberia and aerolingus ones the southwest airlines united i think also offering 5x if i remember correctly i'm going to double check that uh so yeah so a number of different options to get 5X Miles, you get 5X Marriott. Now for me personally, you might remember that my Amex gold card has the plus three deal going on it for the next three months. Thanks to having referred someone while Amex was doing that

promotion. And so I get three extra points per dollar for everything. That means a minimum of four membership rewards points per dollar wherever I spend. And at grocery stores, it means seven membership rewards points per dollar until I use up the full 25K on that. But then it drops down to four. Either way, that's a really good bonus. It is. It is a really good bonus. Are you not concerned though, that points will start getting clawed back if you uh well i'm not doing like manufactured spend with it it's just my go-to for everything right right well for everything so we're 4x everything and 7x grocery that that seems fair that makes sense all right so if you if you referred somebody i can't stop right but

7x at the grocery store, membership rewards points. Can't beat that. All right. So what's next up? So you haven't referred someone. You didn't get the plus three. Right. What about you?

You know, I'm not sure. I'm kind of in a conundrum here. Because I said over the summer when a number of these bonuses came about that I was happy to take advantage of the Marriott bonuses because there just aren't very many ways to earn Marriott points that don't make me feel a little icky inside for getting such a poor return on my spend. So, you know, if I can get five and I feel like, okay, that's, that's reasonable. It's not a horrible return on my spend. And I get some Marriott points that I'm going to use later on for hotel stay

because there just aren't a lot of great ways to get your hotel stays covered apart from cash back basically. So, so I, I tend to lean towards Marriott when there's a bonus that makes them a reasonable value right now. Anyways, since I have titanium status with Marriott however, you know, I look at it and I say, I'm definitely going to get more value out of the Southwest points. Eventually out of five Southwest points and five Marriott points.

Very rare that I'm going to get better than one and a half cent value out of Marriott points per point. For sure. So I feel like I should probably be going with the Southwest card, but I got a bunch of Southwest points and I'm not flying anywhere right now. What about your your sapphire reserve 3x and what don't you also have a freedom that's on the 5x deal i do so the freedom has actually been the go-to i you know i'll probably ms that to keep it easy but that's been the go-to in the short term and i think that that's a clear winner over the different co-branded cards so if you've got a first year freedom card that's the answer oh wait i don't think it is though now i think

about it all right not if you're going in place max those out and because you only have 12k of spend right on your freedom to get 5x on that and so uh yeah i think i think you're right want to max out the ones that are temporary the deals that are temporary before you uh before you use up the one, the one that lasts for 12 months. Totally right. I've been using the freedom on the, on the Samsung watch at the grocery store, mostly to get some like normal 20 or $30 transactions here and there.

But yeah, I mean, I will easily max that out. So you're right. You're right. I guess you should put that aside. If you think you're going to be able to hit the max cap on that after these promos are done now of course the way they keep offering more and more spending promos i don't know when these are going to be done done i mean the current you know group of them expires december 31st i guess but who knows what's going to happen after that so so all right you convinced me freedom

aside so now okay so well let's go back to the Sapphire Reserve. So it is 3X per month up to $1,000 a month through April. Right. And in many cases, I would take 3X ultimate rewards over 5X of a specific currency. But not all cases. I mean, yeah. i don't know that's that's a tough call so 3x ultimate rewards over like i know you're not a southwest person but we have a companion pass 5x southwest yeah you get about a penny and a half a piece and oh yeah if i was if i was fairly confident that i would use those points, yeah, you're right. I would definitely go with the Southwest in that example. But let's take even United. So I have a lot of United points already, miles, largely thanks to COVID. So I had to cancel all these trips. And so I have all these miles orphaned in my account, basically.

I would not pick five, at this point, I would not pick 5X United over 3X Ultimate Rewards because I don't know when I'm ever going to use those United miles. Okay. So you're going to take 3X Ultimate Re rewards over that to do what with the ultimate rewards even even if i get one and uh the one and a half cents for pay yourself back i'd be happy with that so four and a half percent back basically so you've got a value you new united miles less than a penny a piece that's true that's true that's true. That's a good way to frame it.

The truth is I have so many United Miles. That's actually true. I would not buy United Miles. I don't, I mean, it would have to be dirt cheap for me to even think about buying them. Why would I? I'm just struggle to use how many I have.

See, so here's my issue with that. So I think you're, I mean, it sounds like it makes sense in that case that you wouldn't value the United miles. And the truth is, I don't feel like United miles are often the best option. So I feel like it's pretty rarely the best option for booking a star Alliance award these days. So the very niche uses. So I'm not huge on United miles. I don't have a bunch of them because I just don't find them particularly valuable. But if you don't find them particularly

valuable, what are you doing with ultimate rewards? I mean, you know, it's time to move on, isn't it? Because like the only unique partners they have are Southwest, which, you know, not super exciting since you're basically just going to get a penny and a half all the time, United and Hyatt. So, I mean, unless you really, really, really, really, really love Hyatt, then you should just get out of the Ultimate Rewards ecosystem. You got to, you know, earn your 5X at Staples when they have their fee-free stuff. Use your gold card for 4X. You wouldn't use the gold card for 4X over...

Oh, no, I would. I pick. I was just saying if it was just between those two. Just between the two. Just between those two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I would. I was just saying if it was just between those two. Just between the two. Okay. my preference for transferable points fair even if it means earning fewer of them um over over specific points especially when i don't see a future where i'm going to be using them up like with united example you know you know i i hear you there but i i feel like i got to disagree because it's so right now staples just keeps keeps running these fee free gift cards, right? I mean, every week they're running these fee free visa gift cards and up to

five per person per day. So you can walk in any day of the week by a thousand dollars worth of cards, earn your 5,000 points and walk out. And then, you know, whatever techniques you might use to liquidate those cards, you're not going to spend very much for 5,000 ultimate rewards points. So I have a hard time getting excited about three acts at the grocery store. It just doesn't, doesn't excite me in terms of a return. So I think I would be going for either Marriott or Southwest still.

So that's going to be my pick. Greg says Sapphire Reserve. Curious what readers think or listeners. Yeah. Which are you using? Let's get some feedback on that yeah all right so that then i guess brings us to the main event yes main event manufacturing spend and cash with buyers clubs were offering a big profit. If you basically buy your one allowed per household from the U.S. Mint, send it to a buyers club, and they pay you back not just how much you paid, but with a big profit. And we highlighted, for example, the PFS buyers club that was offering just over a thousand dollars profit for this one gold coin. And let's, so I think before we get into buyers clubs in general, let's just talk

about what actually happened. So this was my first time ever doing anything with the buyers club. I did sign up for the PFS buyers club and I followed their instructions, the letter, like I set up my U S mint account ahead of, you know, well ahead of time, like a few days ago, uh, I put in, I made sure my credit card was in there. I made sure my address was correct for shipping and it was all lined up and then it said to about 10 minutes

the coins will go on sale at noon on Thursday it said you should log in to the US Mint 10 minutes till and then it had all these other things you should do so following everything to the letter as far as I could tell, go to log in. The site's already not working, so I can't log in.

I'm trying for the next 10 minutes to log in and never succeeded to log in. Finally, I see the coin is available to add to my cart. So I'm not logged in, but I figure, okay, add it to my cart. That failed a few times, but eventually it worked. I kept refreshing as it did say to do and got it in my cart, tried to check out. It actually, I think at that point, let me log in, which was probably a mistake. I probably should have tried to buy it as a guest. I'm not sure.

Let me log in. I tried to pick my credit card, and it didn't auto-populate it. So I put in the numbers, which I had ready, copy and paste in there. But before I got even anywhere on that, it changed from this is in your cart to this is sold out. And there was, yeah, it was just an exercise in frustration. And then, all right, so my consolation prize was supposed to be earning about 80 bucks, I think it was. Somewhere in that range, I don't know, 60 bucks, whatever. On the silver coin i couldn't

buy that either i got that in my car eventually uh and then there's a bunch of steps to checking out and each time i got a little bit further and then i would say there's an error and and i'd have to start all over and and so i tried that on and off for about an hour and uh eventually i mean i actually left for lunch eventually but so it wasn't quite an hour of work but still um eventually it was sold out too oh man nothing to show for it that's that's right you know the mint deals really they take some practice so yeah as a first time you're not gonna probably score it well i mean you know i truth is i got one of each so i got one gold and one silver so uh not not to gloat all right not to gloat and rain on greg sprayed but i i did i can't believe i got the gold coin

you know only 1945 of them minted and and amazingly i did score one and i have scored one of the mint coins on almost every mint deal for the last couple of years that's come out and I don't know as though it's because I'm particularly talented with getting things in my card I think it's a lot of luck of the draw and I just happen to have not very many people competing on the internet where I am or something or other I don't know what it is but a, but a couple of things I do, first of all, you got to follow the directions they give you. Like you said, there's a lot of directions in there. I get logged in ahead of time. This time around was a little tougher because normally if you log in about 10

minutes beforehand, you'd be fine logging in 10 minutes beforehand. This time there was so much demand that the site was so bogged down. I happened to have been logged in about 15 minutes ahead of time. I'm glad I was. I wasn't sure if it was going to stay. I wasn't sure if it was going to log me back out. But I happened to have already been in because I wanted to switch around my payment methods and play with that. And one of the tips in the email this time was to get your payment method stored in Chrome so that you could just click in the box and add your CVV and, and, you know, go ahead forward with that. And that worked. That is how I got my payment method

in. So I tried to pick it out of the dropdown, didn't work, nothing populated there. I ended up doing the Google method and that worked both on the gold and the silver coin for me in populating everything. So when I say the Google Chrome method, if you signed up for it, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you didn't sign up for this deal, then it's just a matter of saving it in your Google Chrome payment methods. So that way, when it sees that you're trying to click into a payment method area, it'll automatically enter your name and your credit card number and the expiration date and all the rest of that. All you got to do is verify the CVV. So that made the process a lot faster, but it was the same kind of thing. You know, I was refreshing and seeing nothing for a while and then refreshing.

And all of a sudden I could add it to the bag and I went forward to check out. And, you know, it was slow and wonky, but I got there. So I was pretty excited about that. I went for a second one. I had it in my cart in a second order, a second separate order where I was going to place with a separate billing address and all that. And I had it in the cart and I messed up. I got to that last, that very last section. So once you get used to the flow of the mint, you'll start to realize that once you get it in

your bag, you got to pick your payment method. You got to pick the address out of a dropdown. And then after you do that, you have to continue to the final step. And there's a little check box you have to check and then hit place your order. And I forgot to hit that stupid checkbox. And so I didn't realize that I hadn't hit that. And I hit the go ahead and order a couple times. And then when I realized that that's what was missing, I hit that. And then, of course, it was gone.

It was out of stock. Oh, man. I don't know if I would have gotten the second one or not. I mean, probably not. But certainly, I had at least clicked it the first time. I would have gotten the second one or not. I mean, probably not, but certainly I had at least clicked it the first time. I would have given myself that. There's also a box for text alerts and I always left that empty. Leave it empty. Yeah. I try not to add anything that doesn't have to be added because the Mint site stinks. And, you know, after a while, of course, when I

got done with that, I was trying to refresh in order to get the silver coin. And I started to get the error saying that I was getting I got banned from the mint site because of, you know, repeated attempts to access it. I think lots of people got that little message. It said they were temporarily banned from the site because they seemed to interpret it as like a denial of service attack. So, yeah, they just couldn't handle the traffic and they never can. It's just the site's built poorly it can never handle the traffic it's always a matter of refreshing like a madman goes on sale right at noon and you got to keep refreshing sometimes you think that that thing will be sold out in 60 seconds but because the site is so crashy sometimes it'll be 15 or 20 minutes

into the sale when finally i'm able to open the page and i'm able to add it to my cart and check out you just have to be willing to be persistent and And if you hit the big one once or twice, it makes it worth the couple of times when you miss. So congratulations on getting on. Thank you. That's awesome. It is. It is awesome. And maybe next time, maybe next time I'll be lucky. So I've had problems with Chrome on a lot of websites so I had decided to use Firefox going in and I don't think that really cost me any time because like I said I had the credit card number stored in my copy buffer so I just had to paste and you know yes maybe it took me a little longer to pick the date than it would have with Chrome.

But I mean, that was so fast. I don't think that was the issue, but I could be wrong. Yeah, I mean, you're talking about thousands and maybe a million people trying to fight for 1,900 of these coins. So I mean, it's like a lottery. And when it's that low of a mintage, that's what it's going to be like. Often when they mint 20 or 30,000 of something the site just completely crashes and it's hard to get it in your cart so yeah minting less than 2,000 this

was just like a lottery ticket and I happen to get a winning lottery ticket today and and that's the way I'm looking at it and that's what I'm telling myself because I had committed to sell it to PFS and they are selling for a lot more online but but, you know, I committed to sell it to BFS. So I'm going to sell it to BFS and take my $1,000 and be very happy with that and try not to look at eBay for the next week. So, you know, I left out one little part of my story, which is, you know, as I said,

I had the gold coin in my card. I was in the checkout thing, putting in the credit card information and everything. And then it not only said, you know, this is sold out. It said, the item in your cart was sold to Nicholas Reyes. Well, and then he tried to get the silver coin and my two month old son got that one because that was the account that bought the silver coin so because as regular readers will know there was a bonus for adding an authorized user on one of the marriott

cards and i had signed my son up for an authorized user account and i needed you know and i talked about that previously on the podcast so he bought the silver nice so congratulations so that'll be that'll be like a toy he gets to play with, or are you selling that? You know, I didn't. So, so here's the irony and the people who followed the coin deal this week will find the irony here. I didn't opt into the silver deal with PFS. I did opt into the gold deal. So the silver deal, I guess I'm on my own to sell. Okay. So he can play with it then. So he could play it yes i i may have done that backwards i probably should have opted in for the silver and not opted for the gold but so it goes

yeah i mean the risk is much higher with the gold because you're putting in uh what was it 2600 versus i can't remember how much the silver was, but it was much, much, much less. Yeah. 83, 83, something. Yeah. Yeah. So it was a much cheaper investment and yeah. You know, and the nice thing about the buyers clubs, which I guess we'll talk a little bit more here about now is that they do make it very easy to, to hit big spend. And, and believe me, there was part of me after I scored the coin that was tempted to

say, but why am I going to sell it for $1,000 when I could sell it? I mean, eBay people were selling them already for $10,000 today. So they were selling at the $10,000 today. They were completing the listings at $10,000 today. I can only imagine it's going to go up. So I'm sure there are plenty of people who are going to say I'm stupid to do that. And I understand why. On the flip side, I look at it and I say, you know, I never in a million years would

have known that this thing was on sale today if not for the Buyer's Club. So it's the only way I even knew about this. And I stumbled on $1,000 in profit that I just never would have found. Super lucky. Most people aren't going to trip over that on a Thursday afternoon. So, you know, lucky me. And you know what? They're going to trip over that on a Thursday afternoon. So, um, so, you know, lucky me and you know what, they're going to win some too and good for them. So, so yeah, at a high level, this concept of a buyer's club sounds almost too good to be true

because one of the ways of, or the primary way of, of earning lots of points and miles and even cash back from home is, is through credit card spend. So the biggest, you know, way that we talk about often sign up for a new credit card and as a signup bonus that requires 5,000, 10,000, maybe even $20,000 spend to get the full bonus. And here, and, and so that's the, that's the sort of the catch in, in these, in these deals with credit card signups is like, well, how do I spend that much to get this, this big payout? And now along comes these things, these buyers club that sound amazing. It's like, they tell you what to buy and you use your credit card to buy it and they buy it from you for often more than you bought it for. So you're getting a profit plus all that credit card spend. And a predetermined promised profit that you know in advance how much you're going

to make, wondering how much it's going to sell for, you know. Right. So what's the downside? Well, I mean, of course there's downsides. And obviously, what's the downside? If you just heard me talk the last few minutes, the downside is that I bought a coin today for $2,600. They're going to pay me $3,600 for it. But if I sold it on my own, I could very well get $10,000.

Or, you know, who knows? The way that one of these deals went last year. I wouldn't be shocked if in the next few days it goes up from there and could sell for even more. And so the downside is that I'm giving up and ahead of time, I chose to give up on the opportunity to earn a heck of a lot more profit. Now, there aren't going to be very many situations like that. It's rare that something happens like this where it skyrockets so much in value right away. Most of the Buyers Club's deals that I've seen are things where you may have made a little bit more. Let's say you bought something for $100 and you sell it to them for $200.

And maybe you could have sold it for $300, but this way you don't have to deal with any of that. You get your $200 for a few clicks of the mouse, and you get your $100 profit anyway for clicking the mouse around a few times and wash your hands of it. You don't have to deal with finding a buyer and listing it in customer service and all those types of things. So it's potentially worth the cost to you. Yeah, so most people listening are probably thinking, well, I wouldn't be speculating

buying and selling coins anyway. Right. So I'm still not seeing a downside. And why not just follow the instructions, do what it says? And not all deals are as hard to get into as this coin deal. So why not just do it? And I think that's where we need to talk about the plastic merchant as a caution. You want to tell that story? Yeah.

So I wrote a post this week about buyers clubs. Are they a good deal for you? And I titled it intentionally that way because it's not a question of whether or not they're a good deal. They certainly can be a good deal. They also can be a good deal. They also can be a bad deal. And so it's something that you have to kind of decide your tolerance for risk because the plastic merchant really taught us all a lesson.

And so if you weren't around during that time, the plastic merchant was a gift card reselling site kind of built for frequent flyer enthusiasts. And basically they would post deals all the time when there was an Amex offer or a discount to get 10% off of a gift card here, 15% off there. And they would often pay you a little bit of profit or maybe just a break even as to what it costs you. So let's say there's 10% off of Lowe's gift cards

by $100 Lowe's gift card for 90 bucks. Maybe the plastic merchant would say, okay, we'll buy that for $91. And so you make a dollar profit and easy points. And you could sometimes scale that up and buy a whole bunch of those gift cards at 10% off. And so this went on for, I don't know, a couple of years, I think. And, and, you know, lots of people were into this. I was into it like lots of other people and it was going great, you know, selling, getting checks every couple of weeks, just kind of printing points from home, so to speak. And then, you know, at some point I stopped and I guess I'll come back to that in a second. And shortly after I stopped with it, one day a bunch of people got checks that bounced.

And then, you know, the the checks somehow he made good on it the guy who owned the site made good on it and people started selling to him again and then all of a sudden one day all the checks bounced and the plastic merchant disappeared and everybody realized that nobody really knew who this guy was or much about the business and where to get their money back or you know know, what to do when they had all this outstanding money and gift cards that they had sent and sold, but not been paid for. And, you know, when I say all these gift cards, some people, it was hundreds of dollars. Some people, it was a couple thousand dollars. When I looked at the bankruptcy filing last year,

I saw one woman lost $98,000 and change. Yeah. that's awful. So some people went really, really big and got really, really burned. Right, right. So yeah, so that's the downside is that, now if you're buying and selling stuff yourself, you can get burned too, but it's usually by in dribs and drabs, right? Like you get burned on this deal's it's usually by in in dribs and drabs right like you

right you get burned on this deal or this deal did a little bit but with with a buyer's club thing especially if you go big there's an opportunity to get burned big um i think it's you know and a reader a reader once compared and i put this in the post reader once said it's like extending your credit to a stranger you know it's like taking a stranger off the street and giving them your credit card and saying, here, you know, go buy something with it and pay me back in a few weeks. And so from that perspective, it's a little bit crazy, isn't it? Right. Yeah, I mean, it is. You know, I mean, we do that in a way we do that all the time. Whenever we buy anything, you're giving a merchant money and then you expect to receive it, whatever it is.

This is sort of the opposite. This is you're selling something to them and expect to get the money. But, you know, there's just no, there's no built in protections. Like, so when you're buying something, you can always go to your credit card company and file to dispute the transaction. Can't do anything like that here, right? Right, right. No, I think you're just out of luck if you don't get paid. Right.

And so that's a risk that you have to consider. And so I often tell people to consider that risk and not play with more than they can afford to lose. And I mentioned that I stopped selling to the plastic merchant and it was just really a stroke of luck that one day I said to myself, wow, I looked at the total amount of gift cards that I had outstanding that I was waiting to be paid on. And I said to myself, who do I know who I would lend this much money to under the promise of being paid back in a few weeks? I realized that that was a non-existent list. And I said, you know, I met this plastic merchant guy once or twice at a frequent flyer event, but definitely didn't know him better than most people in my life. And I had extended

all of this merchandise. In this case, the merchandise was gift cards under the promise that I would hopefully be paid back. And sure, I had been paid back plenty of times in the past. So I had all that to go on. But just like any financial advisor will tell you, past performance is not necessarily an indication of future performance. And so I realized just, you know, stroke of luck one day that maybe I needed to not go quite as hard on that. And that was a lesson that I was thankful to have learned early and caught before. That was very lucky. Although I'm kind of hurt that I wasn't on that list. I mean, you can trust me. I'm sure that I could. And perhaps I would. But, you know, thinking about it very quickly, I said, maybe Greg. Yeah, no.

Yeah. So that's the risk. That's the risk you're taking. So when you're talking about a lot of times these deals are not huge. Like today, this week, the silver deal, the silver coin that Greg mentioned was $83 and PFS was paying, I think, $150 for me. It was $87 with shipping. I think they were paying $150 for it. Now there, the risk is low. It's 63 bucks you could make in maybe 20 minutes of refreshing the page and adding something to your cart.

Hey, that's not bad. And if you've got two different billing addresses, two different cards in your family or something you can use, you can double that up and make 126 dollars in a few minutes you're only risking about 160 bucks that's probably an acceptable level of risk for a lot of people but are you willing to risk 2600 on the gold coin i mean that's that's certainly a different ball game altogether and then you know i was of, going to try to get more than one of those coins if I could. But I wasn't going to commit to sell more than one of them this time around anyway to the Buyers Club. Although I will say that in September,

they ran a deal with a coin that was $3,000 and I sold two of those to PFS. So, you know, so maybe I didn't learn my lesson well enough because I did get some more money there than perhaps I should have. But at any rate, a lot of the deals, though, are like that. They're great opportunities to earn some spend, but they are not risk-free. So you have to consider whether or not that's worth it to you. So you opted in with PFS even though you've never done any of the deals before.

Did you feel okay with it? Yeah. I mean, you know, I felt okay about it because I'd heard from you before, as well as other friends who have done it, that, that it's worked out well for them. You know, and I thought in the comments of your post about, about buyers clubs, or there are people saying about how, how risky it is because, you know, they could just, well, there were like terms that you have to agree to that says they could come after you, even if like, it made it sound like, even if you weren't able to buy the coin, they could come after you for it. And I thought your response was great, which was basically like,

what is the possible end game for them to do that? So why would they spend all their time suing people that are really their source of how they make money is these same people's? It just doesn't make any sense. But I mean, yes, they could take the coin and not pay you. Then their business would be done after that because they wouldn't go forward. So there is some risk. But, you know, it just sounded like it sort of like playing the lottery. You know, it's like a little bit of time and a potential great reward. And so I wanted to give it a try. That said, as you also pointed out, I think I would have said the same thing about the plastic merchant. So back when, if there was a smoking hot deal, now they didn't tend to offer much profit. So I think that's why I never did that one is, is it just didn't seem worth my time. But if they had one, if they had some that were like very profitable, I might've jumped in with the exact same thing saying, well, I know a bunch of people that have been happy

with it and I would've gotten burned. So, right, right. Yeah. I, you know, like I said in the post and I said, when it's come up, these things are always fine until they aren't. And you don't want to be the person that always fine until they aren't. And you don't want to be the person that's there when they aren't fine. So you have to understand that risk going in and be okay taking that risk. And so I had a family member actually who asked me about

the gold coin and they said, you know, what's this gold coin thing? Cause they saw it on the blog. And I said, well, you know, this is the deal, but, and I explained the whole plastic merchant story to them. So that was before I even wrote this post and I came up, I said, this is the deal, but, and I explained the whole plastic merchant story to them. So that was before I even wrote this post and I came up, I said, I want you to understand this because I'm going to tell you that I'm going to do it. And, you know, and hopefully it'll all work out well. I'm fairly confident, but I don't know. And I know that it's a risk. So you have to know that too, right. Before you go in. So, so i i wonder like so pfs buyers club that's the only current one that any of us have any experience with i believe um any of us meaning

any of us on the frequent miler team um you know we know there's other ones out there i'm wondering if any of them have cracked the the nut of like come up with some way of making it safe for both parties and you know i don't know what the answer is but it seems to me like there could be ways to put money in like a uh i don't know you know it's just in that way you know and so people mention i saw in comments maybe on our facebook something like that, a couple of other buyers clubs. One of them, I looked at the website and it had very little information before you sign up, which is the way that these things always are. In fact, the website reminded me so much of the way the Plastic Merchant website looked. And then I realized when I wasn't logged into the PFS website, it looked about the same way too.

If I hadn't been using PFS for a long time, I would probably not feel super comfortable signing up for it now in the same way that I didn't feel super comfortable signing up for another buyers club that I don't have any personal experience with. Cause how do I know that they're going to pay and they're paying more, but I've worked with these other guys before. It's a little tough. It's a hard game to get into. So you do want to get to know other people who do it in order to get some recommendations from them. But keep in mind, like Greg said, we all would have thought that the plastic merchant was fine.

Right. So, you know, I was going to say, I guess the ideal situation is when you know someone well enough to trust them and they're the one that's organizing this kind of thing and and so you you trust them but then as i think about it like i don't know as you said like do you have any friends that you would trust that much like you might think you do but if they make some bad bets there's there's real risk to these buyers club from the point of view of the club, right? Because they're committing to paying all this money based on the idea that they'll

sell it for more. And if the coins, as you mentioned in your post, this has happened before, I believe, where the mint decides to make more of them than they initially said, that will plummet the resale value of them. And the buyer's club would be caught with these commitments to pay you, but they don't have the money. So there's real risk on that end. So let's say you're doing it with a friend, and that friend runs out of money. What are they going to do?

So there's risk no matter what. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, don't judge it solely by the gold coin thing this week, because, you know, that was the headline this week that you can make a thousand dollars profit on this gold coin, but normally it's not that big. You know, back in September there was a coin deal and it was $3,050 and it was a $55

profit on buying a $3,000 coin. So it wasn't a huge amount of profit. The whole deal was that you're getting easy credit card spend that's going to be profitable. Whereas a lot of people spend money, manufacture spending here, you're going to make a little bit of money and get a big chunk of spend all at once. So oftentimes there's small, small margins like that. And if they're offering to pay $55 on top, I don't know how much they're selling it for, you know, $150, $200, $300 on top. I'm not sure where their margin is, but they're taking a little bit of risk. Obviously, if they're only willing to spend $55 in that case on top of the purchase price,

it's because they're not confident that they're going to sell it for thousands more. Most of the deals aren't going to be that way. So they're taking some measure of risk and so that's another definitely a concern that you know what's going to happen if their buyers back out because sure enough that's how these buyers clubs work right they have a buyer that they're selling to to earn a profit and what if their buyer gets cold feet and decides that they're not going to do the deal anymore is the buyers club going to be able to pay you? So those are questions you have to ask and there's no easy answer. So you've got to make that up for yourself. I've done well,

you know, I've done well with the PFS deals over the years. I've gotten a lot of spend. I've earned some easy, super easy, you know, mouse profit, pajama profit, I call it an easy point. So it's worked out well enough for me, but it could change. So, all right. I would love to hear from our audience. If you have experience with other buyers clubs, let us know good or bad. We want to hear about it. For sure. All right. So then I guess that brings us to the post-rose time. I think it does. So right. So go ahead. Sounds like you're ready.

No, okay. Give me the chance. All right. So you wrote about credit card cell phone insurance. I did. And so you wrote about how you had paid for your bill with the Inc. Business Preferred card, which has cell phone protection.

You cracked the glass, I think, and used your coverage. There was a good post talking about both the advantages and disadvantages of the insurance. So for example, because of the high deductible 100 you uh you know if the repair costs 160 you're only getting like 60 benefit out of that coverage and if you had so you're earning 3x rewards by paying with your ink business preferred whereas you could have earned five x rewards paying within cash. And you probably could have used the profit from those extra two X to pay for your repair. You know, it depends how much time goes by. So all that actually was very good. So I'm not going to let you off that easy though. I knew there was something more coming.

Well, so, so the thing is you kind of brought up the subject of other cards that have different like lower deductibles. And so I wanted to see, you know, a list of, of here's the, here's the popular cards. Here's what, what kind of coverage they have. And, and you know, just that really is, is, is RIT was really needed there. The other thing I wanted you to do was pay a bill with every one of those other cards and smash your glass, test out the coverage and report back. That would be the, that would be the right thing to do for our readers.

The right test. You're right. You're right. That's what I should do. Take one for the team and just smash my phone over and over again. You know, I bet your son would do that for you. He probably would. If you asked him to. If you asked him nicely. Even if I don't, he might. These days, you know.

So, yeah, no, I agree. I originally had intended to include that as well, a comparison of the different cards. It just felt like the post got kind of long um but uh but i i think that we do need that a comparison of the coverage which i didn't necessarily before i ended up needing it think was such a big deal but then after i used it especially because like i said so many screen repairs i found are relatively inexpensive now it's not necessarily true on apple phones as a number of Apple people pointed out. But on Android phones in general, screen repairs are typically relatively cheap. And so those deductibles really do come into play then.

And so I think there's something to be said in terms of figuring out which one to use. I also thought it was interesting. A lot of people brought up the fact that it also just depends on your family. A number of people said they have teenagers, and their teenagers have broken phone after phone. And so that would make a difference. Then you may say, you know what? Forget about the rewards because I know I'm gonna be using this

at least once or twice a year. I need to just figure out what's gonna give me the most bang for my buck in terms of the best payout for the phones that I buy and the best combination of deductible and payout for the phones that I buy and the best combination of deductible and payout. Because if you're buying high-end phones, then you might want something like the Prestige card that covers up to $1,000 per claim. If you're buying lower-end phones, then you want something with a low deductible, like the $25 deductible on the

Wells Fargo cards. So yeah, that's your right. Sorry, we need a comparison post with more detail about that. So there you go. Done. All right. I agree. So then, Greg's turn for post roast. So Greg wrote a post this week saying that the Sapphire Reserve and the Amex Gold card are going head to head.

And at the end of the day, he said that the Sapphire Reserve card is now coming out on top. But during the Sapphire Reserve card is now coming out on top. But during the pandemic, the gold card was coming out on top because 4X Grocery, 4X Dining, that was kind of ruling our world. But Chase has kind of turned things around now with their 3X Grocery and a couple other ancillary benefits. They are now the king of pandemic rewards cards. Yeah. Right? Is that essentially what you said? Close enough. Close enough. Close enough. Yeah. Right. Is that,

is that essentially what you said? Close enough. Close enough. Close enough. Okay. All right. So, so,

you know, I looked at it and I said to myself, you talk about this chase, pay yourself back thing at one and a half cents each. And I said to myself, what are the bloggers going to stop flogging this one and a half cents each? Great deal. And so,

so like who does that? Who redeems their points for one and a half cents each i mean i can use those at hyatt for at least two cents a piece so uh so you know why would i even consider using them at one and a half cents each who should do that you know i see a lot of readers saying that greg they're they're greg's greg's laughing because because readers say that readers jump in and they say come on now this. This is not a good, exciting redemption, the one and a half cents each. So why do we keep pushing it? Yeah, it's not exciting, but it's valuable.

So, you know, people, you know, what's funny is people didn't complain a lot about us talking about using the travel portal to book travel at one and a half cents per point. And now what we're talking about is you can get virtually anything, not just travel, but virtually anything by going to a grocery store and buying gift cards and redeeming for those gift cards. So everything's, any reward you want, you can get at 1.5 cents value. But the reason I'm excited about it, I was never all that excited about the travel redemption at 1.5 it was fine it was a good sort of floor value you could get for your chase ultimate rewards and i started using it more when i had more ultimate rewards than i knew what to do with as far as for transferring to partners um but we're at a point now this is why it's the king of pandemic cards, is that the gold card might earn more points, but it's points are worth almost nothing. If you're not going to travel, the points are only valuable for travel. And, and so this post was about like, you want for during pandemics you want a card that that's not just

rewarding in terms of earning points but also rewarding in terms of getting rewards and and um chase gives you the ability to get anything you want things that you actually want during a pandemic um and get good value for your points and And that's what I'm excited about. You know, it's kind of funny because I think that the same people that get upset about the one and a half cents saying, you know, oh, I would only do that if I was hard up for the cash

and I absolutely needed to get groceries at one and a half cents, each kind of a thing. The crowd that feels that way, I bet if I said, would you rather earn one ultimate rewards point or one Hyatt point, for instance, no brainer, ultimate rewards, right? Sure. Why?

Because it's flexible. You do lots of different things with it, right? So when you look at it here and you say, would you rather earn an ultimate rewards point or a membership rewards point? It is the same no brainer, right? The membership rewards point is like your your single currency right now because the only thing you can use it for is for a travel partner whereas chase is giving you this wide open thing that's adding not just transferring to a partner but

this wide open redemption that basically you can redeem for anything you want so it's like that kind of comparison mx has got your like you, pigeonholed point and Chase is giving you the point that's super duper duper, the ultimate flexibility. Right, right. No, I mean, the flip side of it is Amex points. So if you do want to look forward to travel in the future, Amex points, they have more partners where you can book high-end luxury flights at reasonable cost. So ANA, for example, is some amazing award redemption values, both for flying ANA as well as Star Alliance partners. And so, you know, I understand that it's more exciting to earn points in a currency where you're dreaming that you're getting, you're going to get like 10, you know, cents per point value because you're going to be flying, you know, international first class. But, and actually I shouldn't say, but, I mean, that's fine. If, if, if, if that's exciting to you, that's fine. I think if you're at the point like I am where, and I think many of us are

where you have a lot of points in a lot of currencies, especially after canceling all your travel pre COVID, there's not a lot of extra value to earning more at that point. You know, if you already have enough to get that luxury travel you're looking forward to, then why not, you know, you have your eye on a new cell phone that seems like it's like too expensive for you. Why not think about, oh, I can go to the grocery store, buy Apple gift cards, and then go buy that new Apple phone, for example. Right. It makes sense. And there was part of me that wanted to roast you and say, our reasonable redemption value for Amex points is about a penny and a half each. So the chance to earn four of those is a relative 6% return versus earning three alternate rewards points, a relative 6% return versus earning three alternate rewards points, a relative four and a half percent return.

So it was part of me that wanted to roast you and say, this is ridiculous. Why would you take three over four? But that's why, because you can use them right now. Exactly. You know, and so, you know, I hope like everybody else that I get to use the membership rewards points down the road. And I'm certainly still collecting membership rewards points.

I'm still collecting transferable currencies. But I think that people who are ignoring the Chase one and a half cent redemption, I'm not doing it. Let me put it, let me say that. I'm not doing the one and a half cent grocery store redemption, but I feel like I should be. And I think that anybody who's just dismissing it should probably take a few more minutes to at least consider it and think about it. I also think I think there's there's a lot of people, you know, yes, that some of the commenters on the blog are diehard into the flight redemptions. But I bet you that a much larger percentage of our readers and our audience are actually interested in getting stuff.

And it's probably the reason they weren't getting stuff before is because it was lousy value from almost any rewards currency other than cash back. But now here's a way you can actually get one and a half cents per point value. That's amazing. It is worth. It is. I think that's exciting. It is. It is. And who

doesn't like to get something for free? I mean, you know, I made the joke about the spirit airlines. Oh, here it is. The spirit airlines coffee mug, right. That I got for free a couple of weeks ago, spirit Senate, Senate to us. Thanks. I mean, the jokes about it, but it's fun getting something for free, right? If you can get yourself like a new phone or a computer or whatever else using these, you know, points you know points that you you printed at staples uh and why not that's also why i'm excited about the shop your way stuff so now you know before you were limited to those 30 gift cards now you could use your city points to get 1.2 cents per point value or have the rewards plus card also, getting stuff.

And there aren't the limits that you had before. So it's actually, I think, pretty exciting. I think so, too. Okay, so I didn't even really roast you. I ended up agreeing with you. That was lame. That was lame. That's the kind of roast I like.

I'm just going to go right to the question of the week. I'm done with this. Let's do it. Question of the week came from Frequent Miler Insiders this week. And this one was late this week. And I don't think you're going to be able to answer it. I know I can't, but I think it was a question that we should be considering and thinking

about and probably experimenting with. So Anthony asked, has anyone bought the Simon MasterCard gift cards online? MasterCard gift cards online. With all the trouble reported with their Visa cards, I'm wondering if MasterC the fact that a number of people are reporting problems with Simon gift cards and other Visa gift cards that are not working properly. People are having to swipe them two or three or four times. Sometimes they're not reading at all. And so this reader is saying, hey, what about the MasterCards? Because Simon also sells MasterCards online. That's a great question. I didn't even know that Simon sold MasterCard online. We switched to preferring Visa cards a while back for a number of reasons. One is that a lot of people were liquidating their gift cards at Walmart where with MasterCard, so let me back up. With Visa cards, when you swipe it, it knows it's a debit card and defaults to asking you for your PIN, whereas with MasterCards,

it's like you have to do some magic to make it realize it's a debit card and ask for your PIN. And so that's awkward. Another reason is MasterCards, for whatever reason that I don't understand, like bought at office supply stores, tend to have problems where there's a lot of issues with them. I don't know if it's criminals somehow getting the numbers and clearing them out. It seems to be more hacking. Yeah, some kind of hacking is happening. I shouldn't say some kind of hacking is happening. For i shouldn't say some kind of hacking is happening

for a long time they seem to be getting hacked i'm not really sure if that's the case anymore because i think a lot of people started laying off the master cards for a couple of years so for all i know that's all fixed but everybody's possible we don't know yeah yeah so so you know i expect that you'd still have that issue at Walmart with your MasterCards, but if you go to other places to liquidate, it's probably not an issue. We don't know that there's any, I don't think we have any reason to even suspect that the MasterCards from Simon are more likely to be hacked than the visas from Simon. I don't, I wouldn't know. But I think that's a great question. And I guess we should have led with the fact though, that there are problems going on right now with the Visa cards, that people are having trouble

using them. And sometimes they get them to work after two or three tries, but it's just kind of weird stuff happening. And we've asked Simon for for information they haven't gotten back to us about that yet so maybe master cards are better we don't know if anyone's tried it and can tell us please do we're we're counting on our audience now for to help us with like three different things i think we've asked just during the show yeah we're asking a lot aren't we it's a lot yeah i mean you know hey a lot of homework. You gotta do a little homework. You want all this content for free.

You gotta do a little bit of homework for it. That's right. That's right. But you don't have to answer all three things we asked for. Just pick one, whichever one you're most interested in. That sounds good to me. That sounds good to me. And by the way, with the Visa gift cards, I've been using the Visa ones from Staples lately.

I haven't had any problems with those. So I haven't placed assignment order in a while because I wasn't going around and liquidating, but I have been past Staples a few times and pick those up and use them without an issue. So, so I, I haven't had a problem with that in my locality, my area, whether at Walmart or elsewhere. So, so that's been good, but I haven't used the Simon ones. And like you said, there have been some issues reported to us. So, so worth being aware of that. And yeah, the MasterCard's out or not but I haven't used the Simon ones. And like you said, there have been some issues reported to us. So worth being aware of that. And yeah, the Master Cards, I don't know.

I might have to place an order and grab a couple of Master Cards and see how they work and which places they work at. So good idea there. I wouldn't have even considered it because basically, I think most of us had stayed away from the Master Cards whenever we could. But I don't really think there's necessarily a reason to suspect that with the Simon Cards. So, all right. All right, good my friend brings us to the end today yeah so thank you guys for listening today if you enjoyed what you were listening to and you want to learn more about what we're talking about get our posts in your email every day you want to go to frequentmiler.com

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Come on, guys. Come on, guys. Come on, guys. Yeah. All right. Thank you guys very much. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye, everybody.