Frequent Miler on the Air - Strange bedfellows and secret alliances | Ep178 | 11-26-22

Episode Date: November 26, 2022

Did you know that Amex partners with United and that your favorite UR card might be the one that indirectly offers Grubhub+? On this week's Frequent Miler on the Air podcast, Greg and Nick discuss some of the strange secret partnerships you can find in your wallet and why they may be of interest. Join our email list: frequentmiler.com/subscribe 1:26 Giant Mailbag 3:25 What crazy thing...did Wyndham do this week? 8:15 Mattress running the numbers: Bilt offers 100% transfer bonus to IHG 12:35 Awards we booked this week 15:45 Strange bedfellows and secret alliances 16:25 Amex Platinum Declared partnership: Disney+, Hulu, ESPN through Digital Entertainment Credit Secret relationship: HBO and Showtime (through Hulu) Secret relationship: Paramount+ (through Walmart+) 19:12 CSR Declared relationship: DoorDash Secret relationship: GrubHub+ (via Lyft Pink) 22:56 Amex Declared relationship: Marriott. Easiest path to Marriott Titanium status Secret relationship: United MileagePlus (for elite status) 28:10 United Declared relationship: Marriott Weird relationship: IHG 31:34 Question of the Week: Can I stack Rakuten and the Capital One Shopping extension? Where do I find my Capital One Shipping money? Music credit: Annie Yoder

let's get into the giant mailbag what crazy thing did city this week it's time for mattress running the numbers ready for the main event the main event frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event strange bedfellows and secret alliances what's going on there things that make you go yeah that's that's sort of the intent of the title make you go what's going on this is intended to be a fun look at some rewards programs and how there are these strange alliances like the the one we've talked about many times in the past is amex platinum you know that luxury card and Walmart Plus, which is not exactly the luxury brand. So that's an example of a strange bedfellow, but there's also these secret alliances, which are places where different programs have both like publicly declared

relationships between each other. And there's certain situations where people, where different programs have almost accidental relationships due to different perks that different programs have. And we'll talk all about us. I'm confused now. Examples. Yeah. If I confuse you, that's good. That's, that's we want, we want you, you know, at the edge of your seat waiting for today's main event. Today first is a giant mailbag. So today's giant mail comes from me, and I imagine Nick will chime in too, because we're recording on Thanksgiving week, and this will air Thanksgiving weekend. And so I just wanted to give my thanks to everybody who listens to the podcast or watches on YouTube. We have so much fun doing this show. And it's amazing to have a ever-growing audience who seems to enjoy listening and watching the show as well. So I just want to thank you. This past week, our last show, Extreme Stacking for Extreme Savings, hit number three in Apple

podcasts in our category. That's fantastic. That's exciting. Yeah, it is exciting. Our category, of course, is points and miles blogs where there are five employees. Right, right, right. And they start with frequent and end with mylar and we still came in number three somehow somehow we're only number three in that category now our category is uh united

states places and travel and so that seems fairly broad so it's it's pretty amazing to see our show hit number three in that category for apple podcasts wow for sure for sure yeah so thank you to everybody out there who's listening who listened to us rant for an hour and 42 minutes last week. We'll try not to do that to you this week. Okay. That's right. This week, we're going to try to get through the show quicker so that everybody can enjoy their Thanksgiving weekend. And if you, if you say, well, I really enjoy it more if I could have more FM, well, there'll be more FM next week. So there will, there will.

So thank you. Thank you all very much. Readers and listeners alike. So if you're mostly a blog reader and you only listen now and then you're like, what are these guys talking about? I never listened to this podcast. Thank you for listening to it today. There you go.

All right. Okay. podcast thank you for listening to it today there you go all right okay so that i think should bring us next to this week's what crazy thing and we want to know this week what crazy thing did wyndham rewards do yeah what did wyndham rewards do so they're out with their annual bad math promotion where last year i call it the bad math promotion more accurate year, I think their promo was five times rewards on everything in their portal. And this year it's three times. And as far as we can tell, last time there was nothing that was exactly five times the rewards from before the promotion. And this time I think that's the same story that, that there's nothing that is actually three times

anything else, but that's what they call it. So, uh, you had some fun with this. Uh, yeah. So weird, you know, the way that the promotion originally anyway, it was worded certainly made it sound like you get three times the displayed rate. Now, experience told me that that probably wasn't correct, that probably the rates that they showed on the site were meant to be triple something. Triple what? Who knows? Because, like, for example, I made a purchase through Dell and Wyndham displayed a rate of seven points per dollar spent. Now, that would be three times. I don't know what, like 2.333 or something like that.

Right. Yeah. I mean, so like clearly they were never paying out two point, whatever it was, you know, to triple that. But so anyway,

I knew, or I thought that, you know, what if Wyndham gets crazy here and they give me triple rewards? They ended up giving me 21 X. Let's give it a shot and make an order through Wyndham for this Dell purchase I was going to make. And then later they updated the sort of the homepage to say, hey, the 3X is already reflected in the payouts. So the 7X at Dell is 3X, whatever it is Wyndham thinks it is. And so I made my purchase for $249 at 7x.

So I expected to get, I don't know, multiply the seven times 249, 1700 ish points or something like that. And, and hoped that maybe I'd get lucky and get more. And I got not one, not two, not three, your order has been tracked emails, but four emails indicating that my order at Dell was tracked. Now it tracked one time at the $249 that I spent and tracked one time at $329, which was the original price of the item I bought before it was on sale, like the full price, so to speak. And then it tracked once once at like 578 dollars i think it is which i think is like 329 plus 249 i have no idea where they came up with this stuff so yeah i don't know how many points i'm gonna get but right now it's certainly more than 21x if they all posted

um but like the odd thing is that none of the numbers of points. So like I said, right now attract as though I made four purchases of different amounts, right? Who knows where that came from? I like, that's just not yet. And in and of itself, but then additionally nutty is that the number of points for each of those

transactions, none of them are seven times the amount that they show up for. So are they consistent though? Like, so no, they're not. Whatever the multiple is, isn't even consistent. No, one's like 3.2, a couple are 7.2. It's like, yeah, no, they're not even consistent with the multiples.

It doesn't make any sense at all. The good news, no matter how many points you end up with, it'll be three times something. Three times something. That's right. Some number at which you got three times as many points it's totally true that's totally true and for somebody out there who's like well maybe they 7x the total with shipping and taxes and what no like it doesn't work out there either i did the math every which way just and it never does work out with windham that's the the crazy thing like i've made other purchases, and they never work out to be exactly the payout that they say. It's always some weird number, which I guess is maybe there,

maybe it's true. Maybe Dell really is at seven X is three times, whatever they would have paid you. The site would have probably showed a different amount, but maybe it's three times what they actually would have paid you. But then you would think each of those emails would have a consistent point multiplier above what it says you paid. Right. And they don't. Yeah. It makes no sense. So congratulations for continuing to roll out these bad math promos and to really stand behind the bad math credo in everything you do. So good job there. Keep up the good work. Keep up the good work. All right.

So that finishes that up. And that brings us, I think, next to, what's the next segment? Is it a mattress running the numbers? There we go. Trying to get it out of order. So mattress running the numbers. This week, mattress running the numbers.

We've got Built Rewards out with a promotion. They're offering a 100 transfer bonus when transferring your built rewards points to ihg so ordinarily it's a one-to-one transfer one built point equals one ihg point but with the current promotion running through december i think no i think that is only on december 1st that only on on December 1st. Only on December 1st. Only on December 1st. So you can get, instead of one-to-one, you'll get one-to-two. So every one Bilt point you transfer will give you two IHG rewards points. That sounds pretty good, Craig.

Double points. I mean, double points. That sounds awesome. And, you know, we've talked before about how Bilt has some of the best transfer partners. You can transfer Bilt rewards to Hyatt. You can transfer them to Turkish, to Aeroplan, to United, to American Airlines. I mean, they're the only one that allows one-to-one transfers to American Airlines right now. Yeah, we have. We've talked about how great it is. And in that list, where was IHG in that list? Yeah, we don't usually talk about IHG. That's kind of a throwaway one because, you know, you can so often buy IHG points for half a cent each. Every time IHG has a 100% bonus on purchase points, that means you're going to be able to buy points for half a cent each. They do that regularly. So I think of this double transfer bonus to be a way to get basically one cent per

point value from your built points, which is that exciting? It doesn't excite me. I don't find it particularly exciting at all. It doesn't excite me either. I mean, I guess 1%. If you're mostly just earning points from your rent, maybe you'll be happy. You got 1% back sort of on your rent, but yeah, no, that's, it's not good value. You can book travel through the built portal for 1.25 cents each. So there's a good chance you could book that IHG property probably still for fewer built points. If you just book a paid stay through their portal, right? It could be. Yeah. Unless you, you know, if you found a really good award through IHG and if there wasn't a double points promo at the time, then, you know, I could see it being okay.

You're not going to get incredible value from this, but it's, you know But it's nice to see them starting this double transfer bonus thing and looking forward to when they offer double to Hyatt because that'll be extremely exciting. I know you're joking about that sort of, well, not really, that you'd be excited. Of course, you'd be excited. I don't think you probably think that's really going to happen. I don't think that's going to happen. But here's the thing, if they started, and probably won't, but if they started with Hyatt, then what would we say that every promotion after that,

we'd be like, well, it's not as good as the Hyatt one, but here's this one. So, I mean, if you're going to start somewhere, you might as well start at the bottom and work your way up and get

better. Right. So, so I'm just excited that they're doing this at all, that they're doing a transfer bonus period. I think that bodes well for us long-term. I mean, built has continued to build pun intended, uh, you know, better and better stuff along the way. So every time they add something like this, I'm like, well, there's probably something better coming behind it. That's a really good point. I hadn't

even thought about it that way, but a great point. It bodes well for the future. So here that built, we're looking forward to the next big thing. I can't wait until we get to Hyatt. All right. That's what we're really looking forward to. You're just going to keep that out there so that these companies have, but my assumption is that it costs them a lot to that they have to pay for Hyatt points when you transfer or to any to any of these programs. They have to pay for them. And of course, they're more likely to offer double points when they don't have to pay much. My assumption is they have to pay Hyatt quite a bit. And so that's why I'm doubtful about a double Hyatt transfer bonus, but who knows? I mean, even a, you know, a 50% bonus would be, would be very exciting as well. So we'll see, we'll see what they cook up. Very good. All right. So let's talk about awards we booked this week. I have a quick one this week because this week I stayed at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, one of

Greg's, you know, sort of, I don't know if I want to say favorite properties, but a property you like quite a bit, right? I like it a lot. And I've stayed there many times in the past. It's been quite a few years since I've been there. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I had this stay booked here.

And the piece of it that I want to talk about is that we decided we wanted one more night here. And the problem was that single night was not showing up as available for an awards day. So it was a Friday night. So I couldn't get Friday night by itself, but I could get Friday night as long as it was in a multi-night stay. For instance, if I looked Wednesday to Sunday, it was available. If I looked Thursday to Monday or whatever, I don't know what the minimum stay was, but the minimum stay was more than one night, clearly, because it wasn't showing up as available for only a one night stay. So instead, what I did was I booked a three night stay and then I just called Hyatt and

said, hey, listen, I really just wanted one more night. I'm meeting the minimum stay requirement. Can we modify that? And it was no problem. It only took a couple of minutes for a phone agent to modify it down to one night. We've talked about that in the past, but I think it's worth repeating for anybody who has missed that concept before that you can take advantage of it that way, so to speak, and just modify it after you've made the reservation. Just out of curiosity, did you try it the other way of just modifying your

current reservation to be one more day longer? Well, yeah. So the reason I didn't do that is because I had booked the VIP suite at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress, and that wasn't available at all. So that was the problem. Although now I see that it is with the multi-night stay. So of course, we're recording this while I'm still here. So I'm going to have to go to the desk today and see if we can switch that up for the last night. I got a cough. Hold on.

Got it. All right. All right. So that's good information. It's something that, you know, I think we've talked about before that there are some places where Hyatt has, or it's the individual properties really have minimum stay requirements and they can vary for award stays versus paid stays. And so sometimes you can get what you really want by booking a longer stay and changing it to what you actually want. So that's a great tip. And here's a real example where you're able to take advantage of it.

And the other thing we've, we've talked about is you can also you can switch which nights are paid and which nights are award, right? You can mix different things just like with Marriott, right? Is there a, Hyatt has a capability to do that. And so if you want a particular night as an award, you don't have enough points maybe to book the three nights day. Like I did on points and then modify it. You can book some nights on points and some nights with cash, I believe also. So that's right. It's doable anyway. So there you have it. That's a little

tip for you there. Now that out of the way, the next thing up we've got to talk about here is I lost myself here. I put my notes down. Next thing we got to talk about is the main event. My goodness. Let's talk about the main event time. Strange bedfellows and secret alliances. Yeah. So, you know, we mentioned at the start of the show that the kind of motivation for this topic is the ridiculous alliance or ridiculous seeming, I should say, alliance between the American Express Platinum Card and Walmart, because the Platinum Card gives you free Walmart Plus. But as you dig deeper into things, you find that there's lots of interesting alliances

that go well beyond that. So let me just jump right in and start with Amex Platinum, because there's a lot of kind of hidden relationships there. So for example, they have a public relationship with Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, and Peacock through the Amex Platinum has a digital entertainment credit where paying for any of those things I just mentioned will give you, you'll get the money back up to $20 a month. But there's sort of a secret relationship there with HBO Max, Showtime, Cinemax, and Starz, which is that you could sign up for Hulu and add any of those services to your Hulu account. And because you're paying through Hulu, it'll still look like Hulu to Amex Platinum, and you'll get, again, up to $20 a month back. So

that's an example of a secret relationship that Amex has a secret relationship with HBO and Showtime and so on. So now are you able to get those HBO and Showtime, like the apps separately? Or do you have to watch them through Hulu? I haven't tried. I haven't tried. So I think, you know, when you go through Hulu,'ll see those those um services there i think okay um another one that people are more familiar with i think is a secret relationship with paramount plus which is if you sign up for walmart plus you get uh through walmart, you can get access to Paramount Plus. Now, this is the version with commercials, unfortunately, but Walmart Plus gives you that.

Nice. So there you, I mean, that's a nice little stack there. And that's one that makes that Walmart Plus partnership more interesting, I think, for a wider range of people. Even if you don't shop at Walmart, hey, you probably watch something at Paramount. Right, Right. So, you know, this is kind of fun because the platinum card, you know, we complain about it being, becoming a coupon book and having all these little deals here, there, and everywhere that you have to, you know, take advantage of all these different things in order to really get your money's worth with the platinum card. But, but you know what,

more and more, at least in my household, we find ourselves paying for all these different streaming services because there's things we want to watch here, there, and everywhere. And so being able to get a lot of these for free is really nice. Yeah, and widely applicable. Because I think more and more people are doing that. You're not alone in that. So it really starts to add up. I feel like the savings adds up here. DoorDash, I forget what it's called, DashPass, and some DoorDash credits. Meanwhile, the AmeriExpress Gold Card has a public relationship with Grubhub. So the Gold Card

gives you $10 a month towards certain like dining things, and Grubhub is one of them. So you can get $10 free of Grubhub each month with your Amex gold card. So you have Chase on the one hand with DoorDash, you have Amex with Grubhub. But now, Sapphire Reserve has a secret relationship with Grubhub, which extended their Lyft Pink relationship where they give you Lyft Pink All Access if you have the Sapphire Reserve through the end of, I don't know, for a couple of years. For a while, yeah. And Lyft Pink All Access gives you Grubhub Plus for a year. So it's kind of a fun thing where, whereas Amex has the public relationship with Grubhub, Chase has kind of snuck in. And, you know, if you have both cards and what you could do is you get your Grubhub membership through indirectly through Chase, and then use the gold card to pay for orders to get $10 a month back for anything you order from Grubhub. So you get the discount from Grubhub Plus and you get the rebate from Amex Gold. So pretty cool little.

I have a question about that. So do you personally use this one? Is this one of you, the Grubhub one, this one you've been using or no? Very rarely. Very rarely. Okay. Yeah. Because, you know, I have all these Uber Eats credits that I have to use up monthly. So I usually turn to Uber Eats for food orders. But yeah, well, me too. Me too.

The reason I ask, though, is because I know with, for instance, with DashPass, right now I have a World Elite MasterCard or a World MasterCard in there that gives you free DashPass for X amount of time, whatever it may be. But if I try to change the payment method to any other card, it'll tell me I can't get Dash Pass benefits. I only get the Dash Pass benefits if I pay with the MasterCard that gives me the Dash Pass. I see. So I wondered if the same thing applied with Grubhub. But if you don't use it a lot personally, probably you haven't.

I think it's very unlikely to happen there because you's not, you're not getting Grubhub because of the Sapphire Reserve. You're getting it because of Lyft Pink. So it should be divorced of what card you're using. I'm pretty sure this would work. Yeah, you're right. You're right. It totally should.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't use Grubhub myself much because it's just not, not available at all near me. So it would only be when I was traveling somewhere and then it's only 10 bucks. So it's like, Oh, that's not going to cover enough for everybody to eat. Whereas like you said, I have a bunch of those credits stacking. So it makes it a lot easier. Yeah. Before all those Uber credits stacked up, I used to do grow hub quite a bit. And with the grow hub plus membership, you often get these deals that's like, I don't remember exactly, let's say $10 off of a $20 pickup order.

And so, you know, I was able to frequently order things in town for, again, like almost nothing, especially after the rebate. So, you know, that was a nice way to take advantage of that benefit. For sure. Yeah. Very good. And I need to get back to doing that. All right. Moving on to the next one. So Chase, they're tight with United, right? So they're a transfer partner with United. They have a bunch of United credit cards. Well, the only bank in the U.S. that has United Airlines credit cards. United, meanwhile, has a relationship with Marriott. They have their Rewards Plus or something. I forget what their relationship is called.

But basically, due to that relationship, you could transfer United points to Marriott and Marriott points to United at slightly better rates than you get without that relationship. In both cases, there are not great deals to do. Um, more exciting part of that relationship is if you get Marriott, um, titanium status, then you get United premier, uh, silver status status so you get united silver status for basically for free um so where this gets interesting to me in this secret relationship is that this is how sort of amex kind of weasels into a relationship with united indirectly

interesting yeah because amex has has Marriott credit cards, and they also happen to have the easiest path to Marriott titanium status, which is if you get the Bonvoy Brilliant card, that gives you 25 qualifying nights per year. Throw in the Bonvoy Business card from Amex, that'll give you another 15 nights per year. So you've got 40 Marriott nights every year without doing anything other than paying for your annual fees. And then you would only need, what, 35 more nights at actual Marriott's to get titanium status

each year and get United Silver status. So it's kind of interesting to me that Amex provides one of the easiest paths to United Silver status. Yeah, that is crazy, isn't it? Yeah, that Amex provides the easiest way to get a low-level elite status with United if you want it. And that low level Silver United elite status, I mean, it's not there. Obviously, you're not going to get top tier benefits, but it's not bad, right? I mean, I've had, I've enjoyed it actually. You've, you've been able to use the benefits once or twice, right? Yeah. Yeah. I don't fly United often, but when I do it, it tends to be on a odd route or a not very traffic route because United is so far from having a hub in Detroit

where I fly out of, I mean, they only have a few flights and so they don't tend to be heavily flown. And so getting an upgrade, even a silver is not at all out of the question. I've been upgraded a couple of times, which is great. Well, and one of the benefits that I used recently was flying back from Chicago. Many people probably know I don't have clear TSA pre-check. Yes, I got lots of cards that reimbursed it, but no, I don't have it. So of course, I'd be facing long TSA lines there because it's a very busy airport. But if you have silver status, you can go all the way down to the end of the hall there where the check-in is to the security point that you might

think is closed because it looks like there's nobody there because there isn't anybody there because there's no line. So you go all the way down to that one. It's the United Silver. Remember, you can take the special line that's also Star Alliance Gold Fast Track. That's great to know. I didn't even know that existed there in Chicago. Well, I just happened to stumble on it when I was looking up information ahead of time because I was specifically curious if I'd have any way to get through security any faster with it and sure enough it worked. So yeah. And of course there's other benefits like being able to pick preferred seats when you book into economy, getting a free check bag. So there's quite a few nice things about having United Silver even if you don't fly very

often. Right. Right. Yeah. So that's a nice little thing you can stack together, put together. And it is relatively easy to get to titanium status if you travel a moderate amount. I mean, actually staying 35 nights in hotels to get titanium status in United Silver, that's actually one of the better deals probably in terms of like fast tracks to elite status out there. Right. Wouldn't you say? Yeah. I mean, well, if you're, if you're a Marriott fan, I mean, 35 nights for some people would sound like unobtainable, uh, but depending on how often you travel and how often you stay in Marriott, I mean, that could be a really easy way to get there. And, uh, plus once you get 50 nights, once you have 50 nights with Marriott, you can pick, uh, five elite nights as a choice

benefit. So now you're down to only needing 30 nights total, um, at Marriott's in order to get to titanium status and unite silver. So, yeah, well, and I guess what I mean there is in terms of like, you know, compare that to staying 30 nights in any other chain or 35 nights in any other chain, you're getting far more than you would with 30 or 35 nights a year. So if you're in that range where you're like, ah, I don't stay enough to get like high globalist status, for instance, uh, you know, and the 30 nights is going to get

you what, like, you know, explorest with Hyatt and what is nothing important with Hilton, maybe Hilton gold, but you get that from a credit card anyway. Like this would be the program, I think to put your 30 or 35 nights at if you just got those two cards. It sounds like it, yeah. All right, so the last relationship we have to talk about,

it's not really secret, it's more weird. So United has this weird relationship with IHG. And I don't know where it came from, but, you know, the IHG Premier Cards, the business and the regular consumer card, both give you $50 a year of United credit, like in $25 chunks. So it goes into your United Travel Bank for six months, then it disappears. If you haven't used it, you get another $25 after that. Unfortunately, they don't stack, is my understanding. If you have both IHG Premier and Premier Business, I don't think you get twice as much. But still, they're giving you United credit. And then on the other side, if you have the top of the line

United card, the United Club Infinite card, you get $75. Now, this is only this year, but so we don't know full extent of next year, but you get $75 towards IHG spend, like rebate it automatically. It's so strange, isn't isn't it i mean they have this this big partnership with marriott where did this come from like this comes out of left field somewhere right right i don't know i mean they they must have found some way they they must have had some reason to want to kind of partner with ihg but they couldn't really declare it. But they're allowed to have these reciprocal credits somehow. I don't know. I don't know what's going on there.

But if I was Marriott, I'd be kind of disturbed about this. United playing around behind my back. Maybe they have an open relationship and it's all okay. Who knows? Who knows? None of my business. United and Marriott and IHG. But this twisted love triangle is a little bit strange anyway.

It's an odd one. You wouldn't think that all sides would be happy with that. But I mean, apparently they are. But the other thing is also that it's just not, it's not particularly useful. I don't think if you're getting like the $25 United Travel Bank credit, it's in terms of usefulness in the sense that it's not going to save you very much. It will if you're able to use it, but you have to be able to pay out of the travel bank. And so that, for instance, won't cover award taxes. I don't think you can use travel bank on that anyway. And so there's some restrictions there and you got to use it or lose it every

six months. The IHG credit may be a little bit easier if you've got the Club Infinite card only because it's $75. It's at least a little bit more significant. It probably gets you a free night somewhere. But yeah, the small amounts are just kind of strange to me. I don't get too excited about those tiny little credits, but I guess it's better than say a $5 a month IHG credit. So maybe I should just shut up and be happy. That's true. Well, you know what? We promised a shorter than usual show.

And that's all we have about these strange bedfellows and secret alliances. If you have thought of other ones that are in the same vein, you know, let us know through the usual channel, which is mailbag at frequent miler.com. Let us know what, what you thought up and along these lines. Very good. So, well, we have a question of the week to discuss before we finish up. So this week's question came in our frequent miler insiders, Facebook group. And so Brianna asks, I've got a couple of questions about the Capital One Shopping Portal. Now I'm going to stop right there and say, we talked quite a bit last week about Capital One

Shopping Portal and Capital One Offers and all the confusion and stuff. So if you're a little bit not totally sure about Capital One Shopping, you need to go listen to that show last week, show the Extreme Stacking Show, because there's a long discussion about it. It gets confusing. So go listen to that one. So she's got a couple of questions about Capital One Shopping Portal. I thought it was worth reading this because people who listened last week may have this fresh in mind. So Brianna said, if I click through Rakuten, okay, so Rakuten Shopping Portal and the Capital One button, the shopping toolbar that she has installed, right? The Capital One button gives me an additional offer and I click on it. Am I forfeiting Rakuten or do I get both? Also, where does the Capital One money go? I can find my account balances on Rakuten easily, but I have no idea where to find

and liquidate the Capital One money. So that's a separate question. But the first question again, is that she's clicked through Rakuten and then Capital One Shopping says, hey, you can get 32% here at Macy's cash back, click here to activate. What happens to Rakuten? Yeah, in almost all cases when there's a toolbar type thing like that that says click here to activate,

what you're doing is you're transferring your click through from the shopping portal you started at to this shopping portal that you have the toolbar for. So, so what's supposed to happen, and I haven't tried exactly that path, so I can't guarantee this, but I'm, I'm pretty sure what will happen is that you'll earn the cash back from Capital One Shopping, not from Rakuten. And so that's, so you need to, so only click to activate if, if you prefer what Capital One Shopping is offering. But, you know, if you follow our advice from last week, you wouldn't be shopping through Rakuten in the same browser that has the shopping portal toolbar installed anyway, because there's always

that risk of a shopping portal toolbar sort of stealing the click and becoming your portal rather than what you intended. So if you decided, if you did your homework and decided, oh, I want to go through Rakuten or another online portal that's not Capital One Shopping, use a different browser from the one that has any shopping toolbars installed. So that was my first thought, right? If you follow our advice from last week, you wouldn't end up in that situation at all. Now, however, level two, or the more advanced play, perhaps if you look at it and say, okay, well, Rakuten has a really good payout, but Capital One is giving me this, you know, targeted offer for 32% and you're willing to gamble a little bit. You could try to do what Brianna said,

click through Rakuten. And then when the Capital One shopping offer comes up, click to activate it and see what happens. Now I would only do that in a case where the Capital One Shopping Portal offer is good enough that I would be happy only getting that. But I think the chance you're taking there and what Brianna is hoping to hear and probably won't work, but might be worth a shot if you're, again, a gambler, is that maybe you end up getting both. Now, you shouldn't get both Rakuten and the Capital One Shopping. And I don't know if that specific combination works, but again, if you're willing to gamble a little bit, you could try that, but you would try that recognizing that A, you'll probably only get whatever Capital One Shopping is showing. B, maybe you won't get that and you'll end up with just what Rakuten was showing. Or C, maybe everything will get all mixed up and you won't get anything at all.

So know that you're making a risk when you do it that way. If you try to intentionally play it the way that Brianna is saying, the safe bet is to do what we've said and just use a separate browser that doesn't have any toolbars and go and check out that way.

That's what I would recommend for most people. But more advanced play, if you want to give it a shot, give it a shot. Yeah, and if the opposite, from what Nick nick just said which is try uh activating the capital one shopping toolbar first and then go through racket in or whatever your preferred portal is and and buying buying it and see what happens uh you might get lucky there right there you go there go. There you go. Okay. So that I think my friends brings us to the end. Oh, no, I'm sorry. You know what we had? I only answered half of her

question. Let me finish her question there, Brianna, because you asked, where do you find the rewards for Capital One Shopping? And that's an easy answer. You just go to CapitalOneShopping.com, log into your account, and you'll see the rewards there in your account. You know, if you go under your account purchase history. So I know you're talking about the toolbar. The toolbar is the same thing as the desktop version of the shopping portal. So you just go to the desktop site, CapitalOneShopping.com and log in. Or on the app, same thing. The rewards in the app and on the website will show the same thing. Again, that's for Capital One Shopping, not your Capital One login. Your Capital One Shopping login is where you'll find those rewards. And another quick way from the toolbar, you click

the little like a gear icon, which is usually for changing settings. This will also bring you to the Capital One Shopping website where you can see your rewards there. Oh, good to know. There you go. I didn't even realize that that was there. So good to know. All right. Very good. Well, that brings us to the end now of this week's episode. Thank you guys very much for being out there with us today. And again, thank you for being with us every week. We really appreciate it and wanted to take a second to say thank you this week. If you're enjoying all of this and you'd like to get our posts in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe again, that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe wherever

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