Frequent Miler on the Air - Rewards for Rent | Ep104 | 6-26-21

Episode Date: June 26, 2021

3:00 Giant Mailbag 4:22 What crazy thing...did Alliant Credit Union do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/alliant-looks-to-reclaim-the-throne-as-cash-back-king/ 14:26 Mattress Running the Numbers: Nothing this week 15:17 Main Event: Rewards for Rent https://frequentmiler.com/renters-rejoice-bilt-mastercard-offers-points-for-rent-transfer-to-hyatt-aa-and-more/ https://frequentmiler.com/how-to-earn-rewards-by-paying-rent/ 40:42 Question of the Week: What are the best websites for buying low or no-fee gift cards? https://frequentmiler.com/best-options-for-buying-visa-and-mastercard-gift-cards/ Don't forget to like & subscribe! Join our email list at https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event rewards for rent rewards for rent does this mean we're renting out rewards what are we talking about today nick it sounds that way it sounds like we're we're in a totally new business here how do you rent rewards out i mean is it booking an award room and then renting it to somebody else? Is that what we're doing here? Rent it by the hour, yeah. No, no, no, it's not that at all.

This is all together. Let's not get into that. How to earn rewards for paying your rent and what's the best way to do it? Because there's a number of ways we wrote about this past week and they're not all created equal are they no definitely not definitely not all created equally and we'll have to talk more about that delve into it a little

because there was a hot new thing that hit the scene this week but there's more than one way to to to do this and earn points so we'll talk more about that more than one way to skin that cat okay well i wasn't going to say because i was only talking about skinning any cats greg i'm not not cruel to your cats, okay? I know you probably would like me to skin one of them. Well, yeah. That's right. No, no, no, no.

On a previous episode, we established that we were both cat people, right? We are. I mean, that was kind of surprising. Yeah, that's true. Surprising but true. But there you go. We are better or worse cat people. So we do very little cat skinning around

here. Very little. But Nick is right. There is a cat at my house that every now and then, usually in the middle of the night when I'd rather be sleeping, I do think about skinning that cat. Okay. All right. So now that we're going to get an angry call from the dog lovers, before we get into any more trouble here, open it up. Right. All right. Let's see what's in the mailbag today. We have a feedback from Kray2.

Kray2 via Apple Podcast Reviews. So Kray2, which I don't know, was there a Kray1? It was taken, I guess. Anyway, Kray2 said, I very much appreciate Greg and Nick's perspective on the points and miles hobby

and love their chemistry. Chemistry. We've got chemistry. Look at that. Who would have known? I didn't know. But where they really shine is on maximizing value on the redemption side of the equation.

Keep up the great work. So I thought that was really nice. We're going to be talking not at all today about the redemption side of the equation. We're talking about earning rewards rewards uh for paying rent but on future ones of course we'll talk a lot more about that kind of thing um well i mean what's the point in collecting the points if you're going to redeem them right so we got to talk about redeeming them exactly it's not today and that is also where it's really fun i mean it's fun

kind of racking up the points you know like like it's game but then it's really fun when you get to use it travel yay okay um so that was that that was the giant mail very good all right so that brings us to what crazy thing did alliant credit union do this week so alliant credit union oh my goodness alliant they they decided to go ahead and make their cashback Visa card a much better card, but they couldn't just keep it easy. Couldn't keep it simple. So hold on a minute. So Alliant is the card that was the flat 2.5% cashback everywhere

with no foreign transaction fees. So what could be better than that? How did they make it better than that? Well, they started by making it worse. And so when you make something worse, that gives you at least a little room to make it better. Because about a year ago, they started limiting their rewards. You could only earn that 2.5% back in the first 10,000 spend each month. And that might not sound so bad, except they also increased the annual fee at some point to $99 per year. So, you know, it kind of became a game

of diminishing returns. You're only going to beat that 2% card by so much, depending on how much you spend. And so it had gotten a little less interesting than it was when it launched a few years ago anyway. So that was a bit of a bummer. And so now they have turned things around a little bit. So a year ago, like I said, they had said two and a half percent of the first 10,000 spend each month and then no rewards after that, which

might sound reasonable. You might say, well, I don't spend more than $10,000 on a single credit card in a month. And I mean, okay, of course, yes, that's probably true for the vast majority of people, but they were targeting people with higher incomes and theoretically higher expenses. And to me, the more annoying thing was, you know, if you hit an expensive month where you've got a big vet bill or hospital bill or car needs a repair or whatever it might be, I mean, what are you going to sit there and go through all your transactions and figure out, am I over? Am I going to have no rewards anymore? And what a pain. So I wasn't too thrilled with that, but now they announced that they're going to make it better.

And so their way of making it better was that they decided, okay, we're not going to give you no rewards anymore after you hit 10. We'll give you the 2.5% on up to 10,000 spend per month per billing cycle. And we'll take away the annual fee. And then after you've spent, that is very nice. And after you've spent $10,000 and earned your two and a half percent, you'll earn one and a half percent rewards on anything above that.

As long as you like stand on your head and rub your eyeball and pat your tummy and they give you some things you got to do in order to be able to get that deal. So they created two tiers for the card. So people who don't put in any effort are going to get one and a half percent cash back. So the two and a half percent card now suddenly becomes a one and a half percent card for the people who aren't going to jump through any of the extra hoops. But if you want to jump through extra hoops, the hoops now are that you have to have an Alliant high yield or high, whatever it is, high interest checking account. And you have to have an average daily balance in that account of a thousand dollars. So the high yield checking account has pretty simple requirements for that account. You need to a, make a deposit every month of some sort of electronic deposit.

So it could be a mobile check. It could be an AC. Is this to keep that account for free or, or. No, in order to get the two and a half percent cash back. So they're eliminating the annual fee altogether. So there's going to be no annual fee. And as far as that checking account, I don't think there are any fees on the checking account to begin with, but in order to get the two and a half percent cash back, you have to have the high yield account and an average daily balance of a thousand dollars. And to have the high yield account, you need to have one

deposit every month. And like I said, it could be a mobile check, could be an ACH. But this is what I don't get. So you have this checking account and if you don't do this deposit every month then it's not yeah exactly you wouldn't get the high you wouldn't get the high yield anymore of it so to speak okay you would i say you wouldn't qualify for the high yield checking which is like 0.25 apy so don't get too excited when you hear like so there's sort of like two two different two level tiers going on here right there's the two level tiers of your checking account right it's either high yield or or not low right no yield or and then and then the credit card is either let's call it high yield two and a half percent up to 10k or low yield one and a half

percent if you want the high yield credit card you need the high yield two and a half percent up to 10k or low yield one and a half percent if you want the high yield credit card you need the high yield checking and if you want the high yield checking you have to make the deposit if you have to keep it oh and you need the e-stay fits you gotta opt in for the e-stay so if you like paper and mail you know this card is not going to be for you anymore because you can't do that you gotta have the e-stay and you gotta have the deposit so what what alliance done so you know one of the one of the reasons we often tell people you know maybe you're better off with a cash back card instead of doing the points and miles thing is because points and miles thing is complicated in order to get the

maximum value and if you just want something simple go for like a two percent cash back card or whatever it used to be two 2.5% with Alliant. If you want to keep things simple, but they're like, no, we want to compete with those other guys and make things really complicated so that the people who like the complicated stuff will come to us because we're looking for more complication in life.

Clearly, that's what they're looking for. Clearly. Right. But their cash back, there's no like transfer partners or anything like that to get no outsized value from your rewards. Right. No, just cash. Yeah. Your outsized value is all on you to be a bargain shopper, I guess, with your cash. So, yeah, you know, and I'm making it sound more complicated than it really is, because truth be told, if you've got a checking account anywhere else, you can probably automatically do a transfer of a dollar every month. You can probably just set that up

to do a dollar a month in perpetuity forever and ever. And you would be able to keep that as long as you keep a thousand bucks in the account and just set that up one time in an external account. You could probably easily do this, but it adds a lot of complexity. And then it's two and a half percent on the first 10,000 and then one and a half percent beyond that. And then it's 2.5% on the first 10,000 and then 1.5% beyond that.

So then you have to think about, okay, well, so that means that I've got to spend less than $20,000 a month. Because if you spend more than 20 now, you're going to earn a rate of return that's less than a 2% cash back card. And you jump through some extra hoops and you put $1,000 in an account that only earns a quarter of a percent interest in order to earn less than a two percent card so you do still kind of have to keep track though of course i imagine for most people it's not going to be hard to make sure they're under twenty thousand dollars in transactions a month but still it makes it just a little extra

complicated like i have to explain all that to tell you about and you had to stop me like three times and you're correct the frequent miler like come on explain that to the average person this is this is crazy this is nuts this is not well so then then as if that isn't nuts enough they added some terms and conditions here and so there's a couple of new terms one is that you have to have a minimum redemption of 50 so you can't redeem like 10 or 25 or 30 or 40 or 49 it's got to be a minimum of $50 in cash back to redeem. And then I don't know if this is new or just something that I newly caught. I didn't actually look back at the old terms,

but cash back is going to expire now. And listen to the way that it's worded. It says cash back will accrue over five calendar years and will expire on a rolling first in, first out annual basis. Cash back earned in a calendar year will expire on a rolling first in first out annual basis. Cashback earned in a calendar year will expire on the December cycle date of the fourth calendar year following the year in which it was earned. For example, any cashback unredeemed cashback that you earned in 2021 will expire in

on your December 2025 cycle date. So it's not even like December 31st is your December 2025 cycle date unredeemed cashback earned in 2022 will expire in your December 2026 cycle date, et cetera. I was like, what? If I need to read it three times to understand when the cash back expires, it's too complicated. And on a rolling date, what? So this whole first in, first out, so you can't keep your cash back a lot. If you leave your cash back where it's not earning any interest at all and alliance i mean why would you want to right so the issue the issue is if you have less than 50 dollars accumulated right so if you're not using it enough then yeah so if you just hang on to it for a long time and leave it there and you're like i don't know buy myself something nice someday right let me forget about it's not necessarily a good idea

but at the same time you should at least move it to that high yield checking account you got. For your quarter of a percent back. That's right. Of course you should. But I mean, come on now, how many of us have kept rewards on an account like for way longer than we probably should have? And then you can remember like three years from now, which one's like on its way out and which one's not on its way out. I'm not going to, I mean, I think what they're doing is they want to keep that two and a half percent number as like a, you know, headline and, and they want to headline the new no annual fee. And they're looking for all kinds of ways to have breakage, basically make sure that people don't really earn two and a half percent and and pull it out of them so uh yeah uh yeah that's some city like stuff that's city yeah it's

it's just it's just too complicated i mean i i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to have to like ever have this conversation about this card again it's it kind of makes my head hurt if you already have the Alliant card, I think I personally think it's a no brainer to toss a thousand bucks in the checking account and just automate it. But if you don't already have the Alliant card and you're not familiar with the Alliant card, I mean, good luck making sense of it. And I don't want to waste the time explaining it to somebody either. Cause it's like, I know by the time I'm done explaining, they're going to be like, Oh, that sounds too complicated. It's just a waste of time right i mean right absolutely

forget about it i mean okay yeah okay all right moving on moving on next uh yeah let's not just running the numbers right running the numbers so this week for mattress running the numbers we're going to talk about i think nothing right nothing right we've got nothing i said next up and you said mattress running the numbers and i was thinking to myself i thought we were skipping it but maybe you got something all of a sudden no no i just wanted to make it clear that we were actually skipping it so i think you know because if we didn't say anything about it all the mattress running the numbers fans would be sitting there saying oh what's going on are they going to get to it after the main event?

I'm sure they talk about the Radisson double points this week. Yeah, I mean, who knows? And it would be very disappointing. So now they don't have to sit through the credits and wait and hope that we're going to do one of those little videos at the end. We're not going to do that. But we should. All right, so that brings us next up to the main event.

Welcome to the main event. Main event today. Rewards for rent. We're going to be renting out hotel stays and flights. No, we're not. Get out of here. No, we're not. No, no, no, no, no.

We're earning rewards. So earn rewards for paying your rent, because I hear that some people do that. I don't mean earning rewards. I mean, some people pay rent. They do. And some people pay a lot in rent. Yes, I believe that's true. But so what's interesting is that this week, a new program called Built Rewards was introduced. And it's all about that, right? It's all about earning rewards for paying rent.

And why don't you tell us a little bit about that before we go on to what alternatives are out there? So Built developed this rewards program to reward people for paying their rent because rent is the most significant expense for a lot of people, millions and millions of people. And it's an expense people haven't been largely haven't been earning rewards on. We'll talk about the way that the ways that some people earn rewards for rent in a few minutes, but Bill developed this app where you can pay your rent through the app. And even if your landlord doesn't participate in the built rewards alliance, if they're not a part of the program, so to speak, you can still pay a rent through the app. And even if your landlord doesn't participate in the Built Rewards Alliance, if they're not part of the program, so to speak, you can still pay a rent through the app and

they'll send a check to your landlord. But if your landlord joins or you're renting from one of these companies that are already part of the Built Rewards Alliance, then you pay your rent through the app and you'll earn a minimum of 250 points per month paying your rent. And then you can juice up those points and earn more points when you get the Built Rewards credit card. But before we talk in depth about the credit card, it's worth talking about Built Rewards. So the Rewards program are transferable points. So the 250 points a month I was just talking about are the additional points, the juiced up points you can earn, that we'll talk about in a second, are transferable points. And Built developed an incredible list of transfer partners. I mean, it's pretty amazing to look at their one-to-one

transfer partners. They're not playing around. This was shocking to me. I mean, absolutely shocking. So there isn't a single partner on the list that I've never used. I think I've used all of these partners before. So there are partners with common transfer partners like Air France and Air Canada's Aeroplan and Virgin Atlantic and Turkish Miles and Smiles, one that's kind of been obviously on our, our radars quite a bit the last couple of years. I mean, a few seconds ago, it feels like the city was the only one that

transferred to Turkish and then it was Capital One and now Build Rewards. And yeah, everybody's looking to jump on the fun bandwagon for these cheap award flights to Hawaii. And actually a lot of great deals can be had on with Turkish miles. For sure. For sure. And they're partnering with Emirates and they're partnering with, wait, hang on a second. They're partnering with American Airlines. American Airlines. Let's let's let's go through the list of all the other transferable points programs that transfer one-to-one with American. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to start with.

Yeah, no. Bill Rewards. Bill Rewards. Bill Rewards, that's right. That's it. That's it. That's it. Marriott.

Like you could transfer three to one from Marriott, but there's no one-to-one partners besides Bill. No one-to-one, yeah. Bill, Bill does it. So Bill's got American Airlines, and as if that's not enough, Bill is also partnering with World of Hyatt. What? Hyatt. What?

So Hyatt, now just to be clear, Hyatt is the number one reason I love my ultimate rewards points. Because ultimate rewards points were the only one-to-one transfer partner to Hyatt. And now we've got this out-of-left-field Bilt rewards. And now I need to go find someone to pay a lot of rent. So yeah, find an apartment to rent. Sell your house, go find a place to go find an expensive place to rent. We'll talk about why in a minute. All right. So World of Hyatt. Yeah, I mean, that's incredible. If only transferred or rather partnered with Ultimate Rewards. Amazing to see the chance to earn world of high points for paying your rent so pretty terrific pretty interesting there may be some better options but the key is to take a look at the built rewards credit card because 250 points

a month for paying your rent small potatoes that's not going to get you anywhere really where the game is really played is if you get the built rewards master card, which has no annual fee. And when you use the master card to pay your rent, you're going to earn up to two points per dollar paying your rent. So max of two points per dollar. But there's a lot of caveats. If you thought Alliant was making you jump through some hoops, I hope you were jumping because I hope you've been doing your exercise, right? I hope you ate your Wheaties this morning because there's more ho oats to jump through. All right, what do we have to do here?

All right, so if you want to earn points for paying your rent with your built MasterCard, first up, you need to spend at least $250 a month on the card and stuff other than rent. And if you spend $250 a month on the card, you know, getting your takeout, buying your groceries, et cetera, that's all going to earn one X. a month on the card, you know, getting your takeout, buying your groceries, et cetera, that's all going to earn one X. And then when you also pay your rent with the card,

you're going to earn one mile for every $2 you spend on rent. So half. One mile for $2. Okay. So this is where you were talking about, you have to have like a lot of rent because if you have a $2 million rent, you could be earning a million points a month. So that would be pretty sweet. Right, but wrong. Yeah. Right, but wrong. Right, but wrong. No, come on now.

I said there's some hoops. I hope you've been lifting. I hope you've been working out over there because there's some hoops to jump through. So one of the hoops here. Well, it's not like I, I mean, one hoop is having a $2 million rent. I mean, that is a tough hoop to jump through. So maybe, maybe who's charging me that this is ridiculous.

Aim lower, aim lower because maximum of 4,000 points per month paying your rent. So you're not going to earn more than 4,000. You spent $2 million on your rent. You're just spending money on your rent. The same as you always bought without earning any more. That's not bad though. I mean, cause you're talking about earning up to 4,000 points a month for rent, which is like 48,000 a year. Right. I mean, it's not like huge numbers, but for someone who's like, you know, they're paying the rent anyway.

And so if this is like just on top of what they're doing anyway, that's pretty awesome. Right. Almost two nights at a really nice high at 25,000 points per night, I get you a really nice high for two nights. Right. But they're earning a little bit more than that, right? Because they, in order to get to that level,

they have to do a certain amount of spend. Right. So you got to, exactly. So you got to spend $250 a month on their credit card in order to earn one mile or one point rather for every $2 spent. So you're gonna earn half the number of points than the cost of your rent.

Now, if you spend a little more, you get a little more spending on your built rewards card. If you spend $1,000 a month in those 1X non-rent purchases, then your rent payment, when you pay your rent with the card, is gonna earn 1X, one point per dollar spent on the rent. So now suddenly, you know, you're in a different ball game in terms of how many, how much money you can afford to spend on the rent, still earn

points, but you'll earn one point per dollar, however much your rent is. Okay. So now what you want is a $4,000 rent so that you're going to get 4,000, the maximum 4,000 a month, right? So if your rent was less than that, you got to go to your landlord and say, hey, can you up that a little bit? I want to earn more points. Bump it up. All right. Got to move into a bigger, but going to need a bigger boat and a bigger apartment because

you got to spend 4,000 on your 4,000 points a month if you want your 48,000 a year. You know, I would say many landlords would be very cooperative with that. They probably would be. They probably would be. They probably wouldn't. So that's the mid tier. That's the silver status, right? If you want to go all out,

you're like, well, it's top tier elite status type folks. I want that. Of course you do. Of course you do. So you're going to want gold status, Greg.

So gold status will get you two points per dollar spent on the rent but you need to spend three thousand five hundred dollars on your card in that those unbonus 1x purchases non-rent purchases thirty five hundred dollars a month and then your next rent payment will be 2x so now, so I'm not saying it's a good idea to spend $3,500 at 1x, but if you do, then, then the ideal amount of rent to pay is only $2,000, right? So, am I alone here in saying it seems a little funny that the bigger the spender, the cheaper the apartment you need to live in? Right. Well, no, I mean, I think, I think as part of the perk of being gold, you need to go to your landlord now and say, you know, that $4,000 rent, you need to cut that in half because this is suboptimal.

You got a studio I can look at. I mean, they should recognize your status. Right. Exactly. I mean, they participate in the program presumably so they must know who you are so yeah but they don't have to they don't have to participate in the program do they no you know what and but i skipped one i skipped why you know oh man i just called that gold status and i made a mistake that was platinum status that was i was wondering i skipped right over gold no program uses gold as like the top tier that's no you never see that no no that was the platinum tier i skipped right over the gold tier all right you know what there's a gold tier there's also a gold tier it's fine it's fine i'm gonna let you go because you know what if people really want to know these tiers they should go read your

read the post it's linked in the notes all right read the post right i mean if you're making decisions about how much to spend on your built rewards card from listening to this podcast, like, that's just not a good idea. It's crazy. We're just making stuff up. Like, we don't even know what we're talking about. Here's the key takeaway. You're listening to this. Here's the key takeaway.

You're going to spend a lot of money on the card at 1X in order to earn one or more points per dollar on your rent. Right. I mean, like, and it gets kind of ridiculous. It gets to the point where you spend way too much at 1X to even be worth it. But if you spend that 250, even though you're only getting half a point per dollar of rent spend, that's half a point more than you'd be getting, you know, otherwise. And so that seems like almost like a sweet spot for many people, you know, because that's not a stretch to spend that much. You're not losing that much by earning 250 points with that spend instead of,

you know, 500 points. I mean, it's not a lot of points on the board anyway at that level. Right, right. So the entry level is what we're talking about, that first status tier where you spend $250 a month on the one X spend, then you learn your one point for every $2 spent on the rent.

And that makes a lot of sense because yeah, I mean, so on your $250, what if you had a 2% cash back card you're talking about, you would earn $5 and instead you're only going to earn 250 points and earn $2.50. So you're going to leave $2.50 on the table. But in exchange, you're going to earn a bunch of points on your rent that you wouldn't have earned otherwise. So I mean, that's pretty good. I think if you rent, it's almost a non-brainer or no-brainer.

Right, right, right. And I could see people realizing that at that level, at that level, $8,000 rent is the sweet spot, right? Because that would be getting 4,000 points, which is the maximum. So what you do, I'm not saying, I mean, yeah, you could go probably is get together. If you have roommates that had been paying rent separately, make a deal with them where you'll simplify things by sending in the payment if they pay you through Venmo or whatever, and try to get that rent up as close to 8,000 as you can through that. For sure, for sure.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely the sweet spot because you spend the $250 a month, the $8,000 rent is a sweet spot because you earn the maximum number of points the four thousand points per month and you'll also probably have a killer pad for eight thousand dollars a month right i mean that is definitely a sweet spot i mean i want to come hang out right i mean that's that's yeah i mean i would think in most places anyway most places though by pretty expensive you know Really expensive, you know. Yeah.

City like, you know, like your neck of the woods, I know. Right, right, right, right. Here, $8,000 a month will buy you a palace. So, yeah. So, there's a few different levels. It's a little complex. And, you know, we've had a few laughs about it. But really, the only thing most people should be considering, most people listening to this podcast, the only thing you should be considering is that $250 a month level. And one of the things that my takeaways about the Built Rewards Mastercard was,

I feel like this is actually really good news for people who've been ignoring credit card rewards altogether, aren't familiar with the world that we all live in and the games we play, because they're suddenly going to get some really valuable points and maybe it'll inspire some of those folks to do some research, learn about how to use miles and points. And so if you have friends that rent and they aren't really into this hobby

and you can say, hey, listen, do this and you're going to earn a bunch of points and I'll help you book a flight or a hotel stay or whatever it is at the end of the year. It's something that doesn't cost them anything because the card has no annual fee. And if they're building already participates, it's kind of an easy way to get somebody into this game and learn how to do it better. Right. And there's no fees, right? Like

there's no fee for the credit card, no fee to join Bill Rewards or anything like that. No fee to pay your rent through the app. Exactly. So there's, I mean, the only thing I guess, presumably the cynics out there will say, well, the landlords that participate in this are probably going to charge more for rent because they're participating in this rewards program. So that's going to be the cynic angle. But then, of course, the other half of me is going to say, but if that's the building you want to live in, you're going to pay whatever it is they charge anyway, right? So you make more points on it.

I don't think they're going to charge more because I think it's, it's sort of like a, you could think of it almost like a advertising, but you know, it's a marketing tool for them to, to get to renters and, and keep them engaged. And I think so. It sure is. And they're going to, you know, theoretically, presumably offer incentives. So presumably landlords will offer incentives, like, you know, pay your rent on time X number of months in a row, earn some bonus points or refer a new tenant and earn some bonus points. And I think that there's really a lot of potential there. I think that Bilt is really smart in building this program because I think you're going to reach a whole bunch of people that wouldn't have necessarily participated in the rewards program to begin with. And I think landlords are going to be happy with

the rewards maximizers out there, right? I mean, because probably a lot of these people that are into maximizing rewards, probably going to be paying their rent because they want their points, right? I hadn't thought about it that way, but that makes sense. Yeah. All right. So, but built isn't the only way. I mean, even before built, we've had ways of earning points when paying rent. And for those really lucky, there are some landlords out there that accept credit cards and might not even charge a fee or might charge a low flat fee,

which depending on how much your rent is could be a tiny, tiny percentage and totally worth it if you have a good rewards card. Most of them though, when they do accept credit cards, it's more in the like around 3% fee range kind of thing. And another alternative that everybody has is to use the plastic bill pay service. They charge 2.85% to pay bills with a credit card and so you always have that option it it's not like i don't recommend it if you just like you have a credit card and you just want to earn points on

that credit card so you're going to pay your rent because most cards don't give you 2.85% or more value from your spend, except in certain situations. And the situation where you're going to get the most bang for your spend buck is when signing up for new cards. And so, you know, if you look at the new, new card signup bonuses that are out there where you can get, I mean, 50,000 points is, is like the far low end these days. I mean, if a card isn't offering 75,000, a hundred thousand, it's, it's looking kind of weird these days, but, but anyway you're talking, and if you're talking about points being worth at least a penny each, we're talking about 500 to a thousand dollars for signing up for a card and meeting the minimum spend requirements. And that's where, that's where I think the sweet spot for earning rewards from paying rent is,

is meeting that minimum spend. So, you know, you sign up like right now for Chase Sapphire preferred and get, you can get a hundred thousand points after what? $4,000 spend. So, you know, you sign up like right now for Chase Sapphire Preferred and get, you get a hundred thousand points after what, $4,000 spend, I think. So if you have a $2,000 rent, you know, in two months, you can meet that $4,000 requirement by paying plastic the 2.85%. Which comes out to $114. So you you pay 114 in the processing fees to plastic to meet your full four thousand dollars and spend on the rent and and boom you've got a hundred thousand points that you could immediately cash out for a base level a thousand dollars so you're coming out cash out four thousand eight hundred eighty-five dollars ahead but you could do even

better of course yeah right you could use it to book travel through Chase for $1,250 in value. You could use it to pay yourself back for grocery and other purchases for $1,250 in value. That's $1,250. Right. So you're talking about more than a $1,000 win without even learning how to maximize the transfer partners. Right. So it's well worth paying the fee if you need to meet minimum spend.

So if you were to open, if you have a $2,000 a month rent, for instance, you were to open just a couple of credit cards a year. I mean, if you were to open one credit card a year and pay the fee on paying your rent, you would earn a lot more rewards that way than you could even possibly get with the bill, right? Right.

Because the max you're going to earn on your rent anyway with the rent is 4,800 points a year, 48,000 points a year, rather. That's the absolute maximum. If you just happen to have exactly the right amount of rent and the right number of purchases, the max you're going to earn is 48,000 a year on the rent. So, I mean, yeah, like you just said a minute ago, $50,000 is like a base level welcome bonus on a credit card. That's not even a good bonus. Good bonuses are $75,000, $100,000 or more.

And so, yeah, you just need one new credit card bonus a year to be built. stickler for this like well i don't like the idea of paying for like this stuff you could withdraw you know enough of those chase points to cover your fees you know sort of pay yourself back for those fees at one cent per point and still have way more left over than you would get um as you said this one sign up bonus would be way more than you get for. Right. Because like the one, the Sapphire preferred, you get a hundred thousand points for the welcome bonus on the card. And so, yeah, if you, if you paid through plastic and you paid $114 in fees, just pay yourself back with 11,400 of those points.

And you've still got 88,600 points for paying your rent. 90,000 because, because you got 4,000 from doing the spend. Yeah, so 90,000 points left. More than you. Well, then there's the annual fee of the card. Anyway. Way ahead with one good

bonus. And so if you're willing to open two or three cards a year or four or five, you can come out worlds ahead of what built is offering right right and you know boy i don't know when we've last talked about this but people who are new to this stuff yeah look at it and say wait isn't that gonna hurt your credit score if you sign up for lots of cards and what do you think is that is that gonna be a problem no no and we don't say that because we're bloggers i mean we wouldn't do it ourselves if that's you know if that was the the outcome

then nobody would be writing about this stuff because nobody would be doing it right so i mean it's a common misconception a lot of people have that misconception and that's not to say that there aren't ways you can get in trouble and create problems for yourself. But opening the cards themselves, there's a very small initial hit to your score for a few months for the card inquiry that you receive. And when I say small, we're talking about usually like five points, maybe 10 points for a new inquiry. And 10, if you have very few cards, it depends on your credit profile. There's a lot of complexity to it. But the vast majority of your score is made up by things that are not going to be hurt by opening new cards, like your utilization percentage. Average age of accounts is a

significant part of your score. So if you're just opening a bunch of new cards and you don't have any old cards in your wallet, that's going to have some negative effect. But again, it's a limited negative effect. It's a short-term negative effect. Opening two or three cards or four cards a year, or even five cards a year is going to have a negligible impact for most people. And if you're not looking to do five, you're only looking to do two or three, I just don't think you're going to notice any sort of impact. And in fact, I think the opposite is likely to occur over the long term. You're probably going to see a higher score than you would have otherwise. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Now you do have to be careful with some things. Like for example, every year, you know,

you need to look at the annual fees that these cards have. And in many cases, what you're going to want to do is call and downgrade to a no fee card so that you're not paying like all these annual fees because of all these cards that you've opened. And but in some cases, you know, it depends on the card, because some cases But I do highly recommend keep track of every card that you sign up for, whether it's a spreadsheet or use a tool like Travel Freely, where it keeps track of everything for you. And then that's going to be important, too, because as you do more of these signup bonuses, like suddenly these rules kick in, like Chase has the 524 rule where they're not going to prove you if you've signed up for more than five cards in the last 24 months. And so the only way you'll know whether you're going to be eligible for various cards is if you keep careful track of it. So highly recommend doing that.

But yeah, the benefits you can get from signing up for a few cards a year is just, just incredible. And so a tool like plastic, even, even though, you know, it does charge a 2.85%, uh, if it means the difference between being able to meet the minimum spend to get a signup bonus or not, I mean, it's worth it. It is. And being able to utilize your rent as a tool to be able to get those bonuses is smart. And I think built is, is latching onto the right idea here. It's just probably not the most efficient, not even probably, it's clearly

not the most efficient way to earn rewards for your rent. Even if you only pay your rent once or twice a year and it triggers a new card welcome bonus, it's probably going to be worth more than what you'll earn through built and involve fewer hoops to jump through. Figuring out how much one X spend to do and blah, blah, blah. It's going to be very simple.

But yeah, but on the flip side, many people are not into signing up for lots of cards. We get that totally fine. This is great. This is a way to get into signing up for lots of cards. We get that totally fine. This is great. This is a way to get into the points and miles game without having to do that. So that's it. It is. And for people who've been in the game for a long time and can be kind of immersed in

it, I'm sure a couple of them out there saying, oh, there's a lot of other ways you buy gift cards and use your gift cards to buy this or that or pay your landlord directly and pay a lower fee. There's some other things you can do to earn better than the one or two X, but the fastest way is going to be the welcome bonuses and built is not going to be for the people who are thinking those types of things. It's just, there's not a play there with Bill. There's not some hidden thing with Bill, right? I mean, it's,

it's like a simple, it doesn't appear to be sort of way for people to get into rewards. That's basically what it is. Okay. Right. Right. All right. So I think that wraps that up. So then that my friends, it does to the post roast and Greg, you know, he's like kind of half in vacation mode already this week. So I know you're taking a trip, Greg. And so you're probably even thinking about posting this.

I see you've no post roast, right? Actually, you're right. I don't have post roast for you. Good, because I don't have one for you either. So we're going to move right into the question of the week. So this week's question of the week ties into what I was just saying about gift cards a moment ago, sort of. So Tom and our Frequent Miler Insiders group asked a question that I hope you can answer

for them. What are the best websites for buying low or no fee gift cards? So I assume that Tom is probably talking about Visa gift cards, because of course, most websites will allow you to buy gift cards for the store or for store brands with no fee. There's not usually any fee on those. So what are the best websites for buying low fee or no fee gift cards, Greg? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's easy enough to find out. You just search for frequent milers. So we have a page that's called something like best ways to

buy Visa and MasterCard gift cards. And in there, we have it divided by the best options for in-store purchases and the best options for online purchases. And I don't memorize this stuff. So that's where I would go to look. And so that's where I'd recommend. I mean, it sounds like a good recommendation. Tom, yes. Yeah. Sounds like a good recommendation.

Do you have a different answer for Tom? No, I mean, I think that there's, yeah. I mean, all of the things that I would recommend are in that post. So in terms of low fee or no fee, if you want to do it online, because Tom specifically said online, I'm not aware of many options to regularly buy online for no fee. There are times when that pops up. Staples every now and then pops up their MasterCards online with no fee. You can buy $100

MasterCards usually on their website with no activation fee. Now that happens maybe once or twice a year. It's not something that recurs often, not nearly as often as their in-store deals for no fee. So apart from that, and maybe some options through the Flues app, there just aren't very many ways to buy online without a fee, but low fees or normal fees anyway, there are a whole bunch of different options. Simon Malls, if you're going to buy in huge volume, they have a volume program. We've written a lot about that. So that's something you'll find in that guide that Greg is talking about, but they do have a volume program. And so you got some hoops to jump through there in terms

of getting approved, but then you can buy thousand dollar cards and very high quantities. So you could reduce your costs by buying in large quantity and making sure to take advantage of their promotions. Cause they run regular promotions like they did this week. So there are some opportunities there. And then of course, if you're able to stack things, there are times when you might be able to stack a portal or this or that,

and be able to do okay. And buying from other sites. So, so options are there for you, Tom, and anybody else who's interested in buying Visa gift cards online, though I will say most of the time you're going to do better buying them in-store when there are promotions in-store. For sure.

Yep. Okay. All right. My friends, that brings us to the end. We hope you've enjoyed today's podcast, today's episode. There we go. That's the way I do it. What are we doing here? I hope you enjoyed your rental rewards.

And so thank you guys very much for being out there with us this week. We always enjoy and appreciate having you here. If you want to get our posts in your email inbox each day, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com

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you know where to go. Bye everybody. Bye everybody.