Frequent Miler on the Air - Nick's baller Bilt gamble | Coffee Break Ep02 | 2-27-24

Starting point is 00:00:00 Here we go. This is not your usual Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Today's coffee break, we're going to be talking about Nick's Baller Built Gamble. So back in January, Nick saw that Built was going to have this huge transfer bonus to Aeroplan, which is one of Nick's favorite mileage programs. And he didn't have a

Starting point is 00:00:48 built card, so there wasn't anything he could do, except he came up with a crazy plan where if everything went right, he would end up with over 100,000 Aeroplan miles. Now i the reason i want to talk about this during a coffee break nick is that you kind of mentioned this in our internal slack channel as you were doing the parts of this and each part i thought nick is insane there's no way this is going to work because your your Because your devious plan counted on getting this card physically delivered to your house, which is in way in the middle of nowhere in New York, right? Right. And it had to get delivered there. So you – actually, it was your wife, but applied for the card on January 26th. This transfer bonus that you were looking forward to was February 1st only.

Starting point is 00:01:54 So you had to at the minimum get the card on February 1st, but really you kind of needed it before that because part of your plan was also you wanted to get the the 5x offer that's offered to some people but not all who get the card and they you don't get that offer at all until you get the physical card and and uh activate it right so yeah so there were some elements of crazy in this plan i suppose when you put it that way it sounds crazier than it seemed in the moment. So so let's talk about this. So so January 26. You had this all on your mind, right? You were like, I've got to get I've got to get in on this big transfer bonus. Is that what I mean? As soon as we heard that this was going to happen, that this was, you know, they were going to do these huge transfer bonuses to air canada aeroplan i thought this just seems like such an opportunity because so it built very briefly for anybody not familiar built rewards it's like a rental rewards program which might not seem like a great fit since i don't rent uh it's a rental rewards program but they issue a credit card and they have an

Starting point is 00:02:59 incredible slate of transfer partners and probably the most interesting thing about the program is that they've been running these amazing transfer bonuses now and then and they're unpredictable we don't know when they're going to happen uh or if they're going to continue to happen but they have so when they announced a 75 to 150 transfer bonus to air canada aeroplan that's just like off the charts nuts right i mean you don't see that from other programs you know maybe you see a 15 20 25 transfer bonus. This was just a really wacky opportunity. And really, to be honest, I've been more and more interested in collecting built points,

Starting point is 00:03:32 in part because American Airlines miles have become valuable to me. And so the chance to earn those at 3x on dining or maybe 6x on the first of the month because of the way built doubles your rewards in the first of the month seems appealing to me or having hyatt as a backup transfer partner so to speak in in that plan or many of their other partners and unsaid and is that built is the only transferable points program that transfers one to one to american airlines so that's that's why you you mentioned american yeah correct yeah so that's a so it could be a good way to earn american miles a decent way to earn high points and then you there are other transfer partners are also partners that I use and with these big transfer bonuses potentially could be great. So

Starting point is 00:04:12 I've been marginally interested and becoming more and more interested in the card for a while now. And then when they announced this, it just seemed like the right opportunity to try to get it because of a couple of things. So first of all, yes, when they announced it on January 26, my wife applied for the card, in part because I knew that many people, not everybody, but many people get targeted for an offer to get 5x for the first five days. And like Greg said, that tends to happen after you've received and activated your physical card. And so I looked at the calendar and I said, well, you know, I know that Greg, when he wrote about his experience with it, he kept the card in three days. So if we apply on Friday, then that means if they ship it on Friday, then Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, maybe

Starting point is 00:04:56 it, maybe we'll get it in time before. Which day of the week was, was the first, do you remember? It was Thursday or Wednesday. Yeah, it seems about right. So I figured there probably was enough time, but I didn't know, of course, when they're going to ship the card and everything else. So I thought it was possible that it could happen. And I also, in the back of my mind, had the thought that there are some people who've reported that they noticed they were getting 5X before they got an email or didn't get an email, which in hindsight is probably just because the email went to their spam folder or something in the moment I had this hope that was like well maybe I'll just maybe it'll just work and you know it won't even matter because you

Starting point is 00:05:34 get a digital card right away so my wife applied and upon approval you get issued an instant card number in the app so we had an instant card number right away. And like I said, there's some people had said that they got 5x without having received the email. And I had a big spend to make that property taxes for a family member, they owed about $7,000 in property taxes. So I had a big purchase, so to speak to make that day anyway. And I thought, well, maybe, maybe I'll get lucky and get the 5x. And if not, it'll help me with spend towards elite status anyway. So I spent the $7,000 that first day. And a couple of days later, I hadn't gotten any points. Right.

Starting point is 00:06:14 So you were hoping for 5X, but instead you got zero. You got zero points. Right. I got no points initially. And I was like, oh my goodness, what's going on here? Why don't I have points? Because this also would be a problem in my plan if the points don't post quickly then that wouldn't work out with the way I was planning to do this so uh so anyway uh I didn't have any points and I thought oh this this isn't gonna work and then I realized it dawned on me

Starting point is 00:06:40 when I was poking around my wife's online account and it mentioned make sure you do five transactions per billing cycle in order to earn points and i realized we haven't done five transactions yet that's why the points haven't shown up so made sure to make a couple quick purchases a couple small things we needed on amazon i actually made four separate tax payments and so i think i needed to buy one more thing on amazon and then sure enough the next day the points posted they posted one x unfortunately not the 5x that I was sort of hoping they would. But they posted at 1x. And the good news is that I realized that, okay, yes, the points will post the next day.

Starting point is 00:07:15 Because even the Amazon purchase that I made the previous day, once I hit the five transactions, those points did post to the account the next calendar day. So I realized that if I could do the spend by January 31st the points would post on February 1st and if I was able to get the 5x and I'd be able to take advantage of uh of you know a nice nice haul so all right so it got the card got the digital number earned at 1x and when I got the shipping confirmation it said that the card would arrive on february 2nd and i said yeah that would be too late that'd be too late because the transfer bonus was only only

Starting point is 00:07:52 february 1st yeah yeah and so i i was very discouraged by that and uh and then the card did in fact ship and it was shipping fedex and and Greg mentioned I live in the middle of nowhere and that's true and and I know where from various locations I know how long it takes to get to where I am you know if it ships via FedEx or ships via UPS or you know whatever the case may be and the place they shipped via FedEx was very much on the cusp so I was like oh I don't know whether I'm going to there's not necessarily regular stagecoach service from that location to your house. Exactly. Exactly. And FedEx is also just not as reliable where I live. The drivers, a lot of turnover and drivers, they'll mark things sometimes as, you know, couldn't deliver it, even though just nobody showed up, couldn't find it. I don't know what the case was, but at any rate, so I was a little nervous already. But a day after it shipped,

Starting point is 00:08:44 sure enough, the tracking information updated and said, Hey, the card's going to arrive January 31st. And so that was just a stroke of luck. That worked out really well. That was so lucky. Okay, so January 31st comes and the card does arrive as expected? It sure does. And interestingly, I think now, now that I know how this process works, I think that if Built is going to target you for the 5X for the first five days, they have it somehow connected with the tracking information. So they know when it's delivered and that triggers the email because we hadn't even grabbed it out of the mailbox or wherever the FedEx person left it. We hadn't met up with the truck, but we received the email. So we hadn't even activated the card, but it had arrived and the email came shortly

Starting point is 00:09:31 thereafter. So it was right after the card was delivered, we got the email from Bill with the offer to earn 5X for the next five days, starting with January 31st. Again, that's a targeted offer. Not everybody gets it, though. Everybody that I know personally that's gotten the card has gotten it. So I was gambling on that a bit, but I was gambling thinking that it was a better than 50% chance. Significantly better, I thought. So you won that gamble. Now you had one last gamble. At least in my mind, this was a big gamble. So you made a really big purchase, maybe tax payment. What was it like?

Starting point is 00:10:09 $11,000, right? It was. Yeah. So in order to maximize the 5X for five days spent, you'd need to spend $12,500. But my wife's credit limit wasn't quite high enough with the $7,000 and change in purchases we had already done to do 12, uh, five total at five X. So it did as much as it seemed reasonable. Yeah. Yeah. Got close to it. So made an $11,000. Right. So I guess it wasn't a big land. You, you knew you were getting five X on that. What, what you, the gamble here was that the points would post in time

Starting point is 00:10:42 to take advantage of the transfer bonus the next day right well because that of course was the the main motivation here was the chance to do that because um one of the things about these transfer bonuses is that they increase based on your elite status so i said that it was a 75 to 150 transfer bonus so at a base level, if you had no elite status with built, you'd get a 75% transfer bonus, but then it goes up to 100, 125, and 150, depending on your elite status level. And the first level of elite status up from a base member is their silver status. And so if we could get to that level, then it would be 100% transfer bonus. So it'd be doubling the points that we had earned then if we were able to get to that

Starting point is 00:11:25 level and silver status requires ten thousand dollars in spending on the card which of course at this point they've done seven and yeah now i've met it with an additional 11 000 on a tax payment so i made a tax payment on january 31st for 11 000 hoping that that would post as 5x on february 1st so that i would have the points to be able to transfer them to aeroplan and sure enough it did the very next morning um early in the morning i woke up and took a look and sure enough there were the 55 000 points from that purchase along with the points that we'd already earned from the previous 7k and spend and her status had updated already to silver status so wow so i'm sitting here shaking my head because um i have found that that points at least on the first

Starting point is 00:12:16 don't always seem to post right away like so some some purchases like post right away but on the first they don't now that might be because that's actually when my statement close date is. And I don't know if that's a coincidence or if it was set up that way. But so, you know, so I'm thinking, wow, he was really lucky getting those to post in time for this transfer bonus. But all right. So altogether you spent what about $18,000? what, about $18,000? $18,000. Yeah, a little over $18,000. And you ended up with how many aeroplane miles with this 100% transfer bonus?

Starting point is 00:12:54 Well, with the 100% transfer bonus, so we got $55,000 from the tax payment and about $7,000 from the property taxes. So it was around 62,000 built points. And at 100% transfer bonus on February 1st that means they doubled so we transferred them to air Canada airplane and ended up with 124 000 air Canada airplane miles that appeared you know right away and so within the space of of five days yeah six days I guess we went from not being a built cardholder at all to all of a sudden having 124,000 air and plan miles to show for the new card. So essentially created in our own little welcome bonus. Now it did require a lot of spend. The good news is that I, again, I saw this opportunity. It

Starting point is 00:13:36 was just a number of things that converged because they announced this incredible transfer bonus. I thought there might be enough time to receive the card and get the 5X offer before the first of the month. And it's tax time. So I knew that I could easily make a tax payment. And if I overestimate and end up paying more than I owe in taxes, I know that I'll get a refund of that. And so I wouldn't have to float the money forever, hopefully, assuming that my refund is processed in a timely manner, which you never know. But I knew there was little long-term risk anyway here in terms of being able to meet this spending

Starting point is 00:14:10 requirement without really sacrificing anything else. So it really didn't hurt anything. And yeah, we ended up with 124,000 air Canada air plan miles, which looked awesome. I mean, I was excited about that. As it turned out, I also had some built points from referrals from a long time ago. So I didn't have a huge balance. I had less than my wife had, but maybe I had 45,000 or something like that, whatever it was that transferred. Also, I transferred mine on February 1st too. And I only got a 75% transfer bonus on the points that I transferred because I don't have any elite status. I don't have the built card. and I only got a 75% transfer bonus on the points that I transferred because I don't have any elite status. I don't have the build card. So I only got a 75% transfer bonus on that.

Starting point is 00:14:50 But the nice surprise that came from that was once I did that and the points transferred over, my balance, my aeroplane balance was way higher than I expected. And I thought, what happened here? And I realized only later I had forgotten the Air Canada Aeroplan offers points pulling. So you can pull with other people in your family. And I had previously set up to do that and totally forgotten that I had set up to do that. So now my wife's points, the 124,000 and the 80 something thousand, let's call it 90,000 to keep it simple. The 90,000 that I ended up with pulled together automatically. So all of a sudden we had 212,000 Air Canada Aeroplan miles that we could use together and that I could redeem entirely from my account with Air Canada Aeroplan. And now my wife doesn't have to deal with any of the phone calls or hassle if we book something

Starting point is 00:15:41 complicated. Right, right. Oh, that's, that's so cool. So I wanted to talk about it today because not because we're recommending to listeners that they do exactly this, not at all. It's just, this was like a situation where you saw it like this potential great opportunity and you, you took a gamble on it and it paid off big. Now, these kind of gambles don't always pay off, right? But if you always look at these things and say, well, it might not work, then you're never going to get any of these big rewards. A similar thing, although I think it was less risky, was a few years ago when American Airlines had this deal through Simply Miles where we could basically make a charitable contribution to – what was the name of the – do you remember? Conservation International. Conservation International.

Starting point is 00:16:41 And they gave us so many points for that or promised so many points for that. It was like buying American Airlines miles for less than half a cent each. So we each went in with thousands of dollars, if I remember right. And it worked, you know, and we both ended up with so many, so many American Airlines miles. and i think we both wish we had gone even higher with that first for sure and you know i think that it's important like greg said to emphasize that there was a gamble here so i didn't know that the card would come in time i didn't know that the 5x would happen i didn't know that the points would post in time so those were all pieces of gamble that if they didn't work out, I would have earned far fewer points. But I was willing to risk those things because at the

Starting point is 00:17:29 end of the day, I knew that it's not going to make a huge difference in my life. Now, yes, it would have added to my wife's 524 count, or did add to my wife's 524 count. And so maybe I would have been wasting a slot, as some people say, in the sense that it would have made it harder to get approved for a chase card in the future however she's got most of the chase cards she wants and she's opened a few ink cards in the last year and so it wasn't essential to be able to preserve that to me so uh so i wasn't too concerned about that and like greg said if you don't take a swing you're not going to hit any of these things and experience has taught me throughout the years here that these big gambles can be worth it because the big upside is really huge and the downside is relatively small yeah yeah all right not with a specific one let's be

Starting point is 00:18:16 clear like greg said i'm not recommending anybody else go out and do this but i looked at it at the opportunity i think that's more valuable it's like looking at opportunities like this and saying, oh yeah, there's not a welcome bonus on this card, but look at this. I have an opportunity. I think I can make it work. And if I don't, I won't cry myself to sleep. You win some, you lose some, but it worked out here.

Starting point is 00:18:36 Yeah, that was a great move. Great baller move. Good job, Nick. Thank you very much. Well, if you guys enjoyed that one and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you can go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe again. That's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. You can find our frequent miler insiders, Facebook

Starting point is 00:18:56 group where you can ask and answer questions about all this stuff. And of course you can catch our frequent miler on the air main podcast that's dropping now on Friday afternoons. So you'll want to check your favorite podcast platform for that on Fridays. And we'll see you guys again next week for another coffee break. Bye everybody.

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Frequent Miler on the Air - Nick's baller Bilt gamble | Coffee Break Ep02 | 2-27-24

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