Frequent Miler on the Air - The amazing 250K offer | Ep72 | 11-14-20

Episode Date: November 14, 2020

00:26 Giant Mailbag: Don't fly over the head of the beginners 6:16 What crazy thing did Citi do this week? Amex is wasting money marketing Canadian cards to us. 9:44 Mattress running the numbers: Are the Marriott spending offers actually a good deal? https://frequentmiler.com/bonvoy-business-amex-offer-spend-20k-get-25k-bonus/ 22:01 Main Event: The amazing 250,000-point offer https://frequentmiler.com/incredible-125k-10x-platinum-offer-for-some-targeted/ https://frequentmiler.com/my-plan-for-maximizing-the-incredible-amex-platinum-offer/ https://frequentmiler.com/big-new-75k-offers-pick-5x-office-supply-or-1-5x-everywhere/ https://frequentmiler.com/huge-new-100k-offers-on-jetblue-plus-business-cards/ 1:10:50 Post Roast: Did Greg get the top 8 hotel credit cards wrong? https://frequentmiler.com/best-hotel-credit-cards/ 1:17:32 Question of the Week: Could opening a "lesser" Amex card help you get rid of the no-bonus-for-you pop-up? Don't forget to like, subscribe and comment - thanks! Music credit: Annie Yoder

frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event the amazing 250k offer wow wait to get into that hey 250k and this is real points not not like marriott points which we'll also talk about today but first the the giant mailbag. Let's see what we have today. What do we have? Today's mail came from me. From you. How nice of you to reach out. I have to, I have to use up all those stamps that I've been getting month after month. Even more of them, maybe not more of them now, I guess, but, but yes, lots of stamps from the business platinum card, right? That's right. So, all right. So, so here's what I have to say. So here's my feedback that

apparently we're not doing a great job informing our audience about, about sort of the basics of award travel. And, and I'm going to say that because, so in a conversation with a friend last night, he follows several blogs. I believe he watches our show or listens to our show, at least occasionally, I don't know how regularly.

He asked about getting from Chicago to Detroit and whether he could transfer his membership rewards points to American Airlines or United because he had already looked at Delta and the prices weren't good for when he wants to go. And he was trying to see if he could use his membership rewards points to fly American or United. And of course, as you know, that was just completely the wrong question for what he needed to know. So, you know, I explained to him that he could transfer his points to, for example, Avianca Life Miles or to Air Canada in order to book United, assuming there's SAVR award availability. And I suggested, because I thought it'd be easier for him, British Airways for Flying American. I think Qantas is probably another option there.

Yeah, especially for such a short flight, Qantas might even be, might be better. I don't know. It might be. Yeah, because it's a very such a short flight Qantas might even be might be better I don't know it might be yeah because it's a very very short flight uh yeah and if it was round trip I guess Iberia would be a great option right it's a really cheap uh round trip um so and you know what I forgot to tell him this wouldn't help with his membership rewards but that i think i read southwest is now flying out of uh or will be so i don't know whether i don't know when that starts yeah and they might not fly they probably won't fly to detroit now that i think about it directly so that doesn't really matter anyway um yeah so i just wanted to bring that up i don't know how he uh missed it i

feel like we talked about that a fair amount but i mean that's a great point yeah well that kind of thing comes up a lot i feel like i often notice that you know but just from questions that people ask i realize oh you know it's you know it's kind of like you take some things for granted after a while that we mention a lot but we mention them in passing and you know somebody who, somebody who isn't as immersed in all of this world of award travel doesn't necessarily catch every single passing mention. So you're right. I think a lot of that stuff is confusing. And I find that to be the case all the time when I talk with friends and family members

about the travel on a rare occasion that somebody asks me about miles or points, which happens much less than I would expect. But, but in the rare occasion they do, I realized that, you know, there's just a lack of that basic level of understanding. And that's what makes for the opportunity to get great values because not

everybody knows how to do it. Right. So that's why this game is valuable in the first place. Right. The, the complexity certainly makes it possible that there's a lot of different options out there. And so you can find hidden nuggets like we're talking about that, you of, I think the rule of thumb is that it's usually the case that the airline you want to fly is not, you don't need the miles from that airline. Often those miles are not the best or even a good way to book that flight. Now, Air Canada seems to be trying to

prove us wrong. At least right now, using Air Canada's miles to book Air Canada seems to be often a very, very good deal. And there are exceptions with the other major airlines, variable pricing, but that is a good general rule. And I think that the rule helps you keep in mind the fact that you have a lot of options, that you don't need that airline's miles or lots of other airline miles. And the whole value in having these transferable currencies with all these different transfer partners is being able to find the one that gives you the best value for the flight that you need because there are often six or eight or ten different prices, just like cash tickets. Depending on when you buy your cash ticket or what fare bucket you buy, you might pay a totally different price than the person next

to you. It's the same thing with award travel. One person may pay 12,000 miles and another person may pay 7,500 and somebody else pays 85. So you want to try to do the best you can. But when you're looking for that, if you are one of those people who's listening and you're like, yeah, I don't live and breathe this stuff, so I don't remember what the options are with any of those major currencies. You can always just go on our site and look at Amex membership rewards, sweet spots, or how to get to, you know, the cities in the U S with points and you'll find a lot of the best ways to get to Australia on miles, best way to get to Europe on miles,

those kinds of things. Yeah. So we do have some of that stuff, but I think you're right that we really need a little bit more. So that's good. That's great feedback. Thank you very much for mailing that one in, Greg. You bet. It's the least I could do. Well, that brings us then next to what crazy thing did Citi do this week? Right. What's Citi up to? You know, Citi's not up to very much at all, really. What a crazy week it's been for credit card offers, and Citi has been nowhere to be found. But we'll talk more about that in a few minutes, I'm sure.

But the crazy thing this week is not Citi at all, but rather Amex. So I've been noticing over the last couple of weeks that whenever I go to my promotions tab in my Gmail, and I mean like my personal Gmail, I get these advertisements and a lot of times they're for credit cards. And I'm sure that's because I'm looking at credit card stuff all day long and Google knows that. So I get lots of credit card advertisements, but I started noticing this card that I had never heard of. And it didn't even register the first couple of times. It should have the fact that there was a credit card I haven't heard of. And it should have even more so because it was an Amex card.

Like, I mean, what Amex card would I have not heard of? Right. And after the, you know, fifth or eighth or 12th time I'd seen it, I was like,

what is this Amex business edge card? I've never heard of that before. So I click on it. And I, again, I was getting it like daily in my email and I clicked through and it tells me that there's like a 42,000 point welcome bonus. And I was like,

42,000 points. Like, when have we ever seen a welcome bonus that's for some odd number like that? I mean, it just doesn't happen, right? You don't ever see a card with a 42,000 point bonus. And I start looking at the earning structure and stuff. Sorry, it's a Hitchhiker's Guide fan who came up with that. The answer is 42. Right, exactly, exactly. So, and then there's like 30,000

points when you spend 5,000 and then three points right there were these different bonus categories and things I was like what is this and how have I never heard of this like is this a brand new card am I gonna write about this today and be the first person out and then of course after I did a little bit more digging and I noticed up in the top bar that there was an Aeroplan Reserve credit card in the top bar, I realized something was odd here. And sure enough, this Amex Business Edge card is not a card for Americans. It's a Canadian Amex card. Why Amex is advertising to people with a U.S. IP address, I have no idea. But I kept getting this advertising. So that was crazy to me. The fact that they were advertising a card I can't get,

especially when you consider the fact that this summer they were giving Canadians better value for cashing out their membership rewards points than the people here in the U S and then on top of all of that stuff, you know, you got the fact that aeroplan this week has announced these brand new credit cards. So you've got this whole awesome looking credit card lineup, including an Amex card and including some TD bank cards.

And none of them are for us. What are they doing here? Why do they keep like dangling this stuff that we can't get to? I don't know. I mean, this is crazy because they're spending, you know, real cash and advertising,

you know, Google doesn't display this stuff for free. So, uh, yeah, I mean, maybe, you know, maybe Google kind of looked out your window and

saw a lot of snow and thought you're probably in canada it's close enough i mean just keep walking through the woods for a few days and you'll get there right right so you know that's plausible yeah i don't know what's up with the marketing team from amex and and so i was i was gonna joke about how i'm confused by ammex's marketing team and why they're wasting money on that and not on something good for the rest of us here in the United States, place their advertising. But obviously I would have been speaking too soon because this week we're going to talk all about the fact that they decided to throw some of that marketing budget our way too. So we'll get back to that in a minute. But before we do, that brings us to

Mattress Running the Numbers. So what do brings us to Mattress Running the Numbers. So what do we have for Mattress Running the Numbers this week? Right. Okay. So Marriott is back on the schedule for Mattress Running. But this time, we're not talking about actually staying in hotels. We're talking about spending on the credit card. So the Marriott Bonvoy business card, the one from Amex, is out with spending offers, and they target different people

who have the card with different offers. By the way, for those wondering, because it is hard to keep track of all the different Marriott Bonvoy cards, this is the old SPG business card, for those who remember that this used to be a Starwood Prefer guest card. Anyway, the new offer that I got was spend $20,000 and you get 25,000 bonus points. Right. So 20 grand, get 25,000 points. Right. Bonus points. Bonus points. points right bonus points bonus points so you know if you just sort of look at the if you reduce the

numbers to uh to uh uh points per dollar then it's getting i think 1.25 extra points per dollar over normal spend normally you get two points per dollar so 3.25 um it's not bad, but before I talk about is this good or bad, let's talk about some other offers we've seen. Now you saw, what was yours again? Mine was much easier. Spend $500, get a thousand bonus points up to three times. So I spend $1,500 and I'll get an extra 3,000 points. So yours is an extra 2x points for dollar and it has a fairly small, like doable spend. Very doable. Yeah. Another person I saw had spend 7,000 and get 15,000 bonus points. So that's tiny bit over two X bonus. Right. Um,

the funniest one I saw or most ridiculous one was spend a hundred thousand dollars and get a hundred thousand bonus points. So up to three times, up to three times. So if you'd like to spend a hundred grand on your, uh, your Marriott business card three times, then I gave yourself 300,000 bonus points. Greg, I mean, that's huge, isn't it? So if you'd like to spend a hundred grand on your Marriott business card three times, then yeah, get yourself 300,000 bonus points, Greg. I mean, that's huge, isn't it?

It's something. Big numbers, big numbers. Big numbers, that's for sure. So, I mean, you don't sound very enthused about this. They seem like pretty good offers though, right? I mean, like your offer you said was terrible that you're like, you gave it an LOL. You were like, LOL. Yeah, no. Right. And so you're looking at an extra 1.25 points per dollar. The card naturally earns two points per dollar everywhere.

So that's 3.25 Marriott points per dollar everywhere. That's better than the SPG card. The SPG card that everybody held up is like the magical, you know, one card to rule them all for years and years earned the equivalent of three Marriott points. This is 3.25 Marriott points per dollar. A, isn't that a great deal? And B, that card has a bonus category, doesn't it? Gas stations are 4X, I think. So you could be getting 5.25 Marriott points per dollar if you spend it all at gas stations. Yeah. Does it have that or is that just the Chase business? I don't remember off the top of my head, but anyway, you're probably right. So yeah. So, so that's a great question. So, so you're saying I would earn slightly better than the old SBG card.

Right. My offer. If I spent exactly the $20,000. If you spent exactly the $20,000, correct. And first, let me first say why it obviously makes no sense for me, which is that because I have the plus three offer from having referred someone on an Amex card, I can get 4X membership rewards points anywhere. So if I have $20,000 to spend on an Amex card, you know, should I get 4X membership rewards or 3. a little bit X Marriott?

It's obvious, right? Fair enough. No brainer. Obvious answer there. Right. I mean, even if I wanted Marriott points, I could transfer them one-to-one, which I wouldn't normally do. But I could. Right.

You could if you want. Right. So that's why for me, I mean, I didn't even have to do any math, but your question about the SPG card is really relevant here. And it almost for a moment made me think, oh, did I, you know, not think through this correctly? But then I remembered back when we used to all rave about the SPG card, it was because it, it would only

earn one point per dollar. Um, but it would correct me wrong, but it would transfer to airlines at a 1.25, I think it was. 1.25 if you, if you transferred in the 20,000. 20,000 at a time. So, so it was like earning 1.25 airline miles per dollar everywhere. Back then, that was good. Back then, that was great. That was the gold standard of credit card earnings. Now, that's laughable, right? Right.

It certainly is. You're going to get one and a half everywhere easily, two everywhere with a lot of different cards. So 1.25 miles per dollar is not nearly as exciting as it was. Right, exactly. So that's why the SPG argument doesn't make sense in today's market. And then if you just take the value of Marriott points, about 0.7 cents each, you look at it, it was like, okay, I'd be earning a little over two cents. You know, I don't remember the numbers, but let's say 2.2 cents per dollar, which, or maybe even 2.4. I don't remember, but that's good for an everywhere spend card, but for a bonus, that's not pretty good. Right? I mean, if you have a spend bonus on,

let's say, your Blue Business Plus card, which earns 2x everywhere, that's going to be way more valuable. And arguably, 2x on Blue Business Plus for regular spend is more valuable than 2.4 cents value. So anyway, and of course I have the bank of America premium rewards where I'm getting 2.62% value everywhere. So anyway, all kinds of reasons why it's not a good deal for me. What about you? So you're, you're getting more better. You have a significantly better deal than me. Right. Is it worth it? I mean, I, I definitely thought i would use it and i thought i would probably use at least the first 500 or so

at gas stations because i that card does i did double check it card does earn four marriott points per dollar at gas stations so it's like six six points per dollar at gas stations i mean that seemed like a great idea until today so you know until this week anyway it seemed like seemed like it'd be a great return and that would be my gas card and you know i'm gonna do a little road trip to see family for the holidays so i'm going to spend some money on gas so i was like all right great you know i i maybe i'll mix in a gift card here or there or something i know that mx doesn't typically like gift card spend but i figure if it's a small one here and there maybe maybe i'll sneak by right so so i figured i would probably do that and yeah i mean the two extra points per dollar makes it four marriott points per dollar so for cheap you know sort of things i felt like that wasn't bad that was a reasonable return on spend not a

great return on spend but if you value those marriott points at seven tenths of a cent each four points per dollar is like about 2.8 that's a pretty good return so yeah i felt like i was definitely going to use it now i'm hesitating a little bit because of the platinum card offer we're going to talk about a little bit later that's going to require you know quite a bit of spend so now i'm rethinking whether or not i have the capacity to to to do this but i probably will i mean if i'm being truthful i probably yeah five hundred dollars for a thousand points i'm probably going to do it and and i think that if you've got an offer like that it's worth it seven thousand you know you're starting to push do I really want to put that much right on the card right right um also if it's if it's an either or thing like so it's one thing if you're

if you can dig up extra capacity um but if it's an either or thing I think it is worth looking at what else you could be earning more and like you're saying with the platinum card, which is an extreme example, but everybody probably has. So for example, if you have a premier card, which earns 3x at gas stations, and you're looking at, oh, well, I could get 6x Marriott or 3x thank you points. It's not obvious to me which you should pick. It depends what your needs are, I think. And so, yeah, you kind of go from there. And I'm in a mode where, because hotel points typically aren't a great value to pick up, if I can get a reasonable value, if I'm earning hotel points at a reasonable value, I'm usually happy to do that because I'll earn a lot of transferable currencies because there's going

to be a lot of those opportunities for 4X and 5X and you know who would have known it the 10x maybe too and so you know i i know i'll pick up a lot of those transferable currencies i pick up a lot fewer hotel points because it you know two points per dollar everywhere i'm not going to put any spend on the marriott card at two points uh but you so that that's why i'm more likely to take advantage of those opportunities where it's like okay i can get a reasonable number of points and then hold out for an opportunity to leverage those points for a really valuable stay. So right. Right.

The cash rate for it. I think there's something there that we need to explore more at some point, like try to figure out a sort of a theory behind this because, because there's definitely something there about what you're saying where, where Marriott points and actually a lot of hotel points, IHG points. I think Hyatt and Hilton are the only ones where you could sort of regularly spend at decent value to get those points. Radisson, too, I guess.

Oh, wait, and Wyndham. Let me back up. Because there's lots of opportunities to get hotel points i'm throwing myself in a hole but anyway barry at an ihj it's certainly it's very hard to get those points and get good value while getting those points so when so there seems to be something there like like should you grab those opportunities when you get it and yeah and i want to look at it and i say okay so hyatt obviously there's lots of great values to be had for hyatt and i earn a lot of chase ultimate rewards points so i'm always going to have a stash that i can use towards hyatt hyatt just isn't everywhere i need to be so if i'm going to be a hyatt person i've got to also

have a backup program right and so for years h years, Hilton was that program. And so Hilton would be where I would put that kind of spend, especially with the Aspire card, giving such great value for just for card period. And then, you know, you pair that with a surpass and you're in pretty good shape. However, because I've gotten titanium status with Marriott the last couple of years, I'm somewhat invested in the Marriott program, at least for another year or two here until I run out of status with them. So that's part of the reason why I'm willing to pick up stuff for Marriott because they're everywhere I want to be. And I've got the status with them right now. So. Right. Right. All right. Well, so high level mattress run, thumbs up or thumbs down on this offer? You know, I'm going to say thumbs up if you've got a low spending threshold to meet. If you have a

high spending threshold, I'm not going to bother to track $20,000 in purchases to get an extra 1.25. So if you got $500 or $1,000, something like that, that you can meet easily, thumbs up. Right. Okay. And, you know And even though I sort of agree with you the way you caveated it, I'm gonna just sort of say, on average, my thumb is down for this offer. So that'll give us both a thumbs up and thumbs down on this mattress, what we're calling a mattress run.

All right, so that brings us to the main event. Welcome to the main event. Welcome to the main event. The amazing 250,000 point offer. 250,000 points. What? All right. We have to back up because there is no 250,000 point offer. Not really.

Exactly. But sort of. Sort of. They're offering you 250,000 points. Because both of us successfully signed up for a card now as of a few days ago or at least the day we're recording this I should say.

And in both cases if we spend $15,000 within the first six months on groceries and gas stations in the U.S., we'll earn a total of 250,000 points. Now, we don't usually, when we're talking about offers, like include the points you earn on spend outside the bonus points. Maybe you could track 1X out of that 15,000. But still, you still will end up, we will end up with 250,000 points.

And these are not just any points. These are Amex membership rewards points, transferable to a whole bunch of different airline programs. And so it can be extremely valuable. Quarter of a million membership rewards points you could have. I mean, that's a hefty number, right? can be extremely valuable. Quarter of a million membership rewards points you could have. I mean, that's a hefty number, right? I mean, it's not, it's no slouchy kind of a bonus. And like Greg said, it's not all the bonus exactly.

Part of it is that spending offer where you get the 10X points at U.S. gas stations and U.S. supermarkets. But that's pretty unheard of. I mean, 10x points on 15 grand in spend. I mean, we've never seen anything like that, right? Yeah, right. I can't think of any time. And so, you know, even if you're looking, even if you have a card that earns 5x, like, you know, as a bonus, this is obviously much better than that. And it's even with 100,000 point part of this by itself,

it's a great offer. I mean, it's something we have seen that before. Yeah, we've seen the 100,000 points for 5,000 spend. It's a targeted offer that comes around now and then that some people get targeted for. And it's pretty much conventional wisdom that if you get targeted for that, you should at least consider it and probably go for it, right?

Because it's a great offer, yeah. Right. And so now it's not only that, but also the 10x part. And I guess we should talk about how to get it. We should. Yeah. And the story is going to get a little bit, the plot will thicken also,

because it's not the only strong offer. That's right. That's right. So we're going to talk about, I think we're going to talk about three different Amex Platinum offers that are on the table right now. Hopefully we'll still be once the show goes live. Hopefully. So the one we're talking about, as we said, 100,000 points after 5K spend in six months, 10X points for grocery and gas for the first six months up to 15K spend. That's the offer. That is not a public offer. That's one where

when you click a link to MX site, sometimes you see it, sometimes you don't. And the times you don't, it's a much inferior 75K offering, which we'll talk about later. Maybe we should have started with that one, but go ahead. Yeah, maybe we should have, but let's just confuse our audience with that. So as an aside, this is kind of important. Amex doesn't like for its affiliates to talk about the fact that targeted offers sometimes appear when you browse in a incognito, if you put your browser into incognito mode or private mode and you browse to their website, sometimes you get targeted offers that way that you won't see unless you do that. And so we're not going to talk about that because we are a partner with American Express. So, so that's why it's going to be a little weird how we talk about this, but just, you know, keep that in the back of your mind.

And so, you know, to get this offer, you go into Chrome in a certain way and you go to the, to the Amex website and you see if you get the offer, you go into Firefox, you go into Safari, go into Opera, go into, what did I miss? Oh, Microsoft. And every now and then, like I had a lot of luck with it coming up in Chrome. No luck at first, no luck at all in Firefox. And no luck at first with the Microsoft Edge browser, but later it popped up. So and I got it in the Opera browser. Yeah, you struggled for a long time. I did two hours two hours not seeing this thing

not giving up like being persistent doing the same stuff over and over and over again like no i'm gonna make this thing come it's gotta come up it's coming up for everybody every time like i refresh my screen i'd have somebody else in frequent myler insiders like oh i just got it and be like i can't get this thing once i can't get it once finally i did opera so i did it but yeah there you go at any rate so you know who knows it's it's weird that it it's not predictable and right and that it works so much better for me in chrome and not for you anyway um and another funny thing about it i was convinced that the offer had died because i stopped being able to get in chrome for like 45 minutes and then all of a sudden came back and who knows what.

So luckily, even if you can't recreate this, there's an excellent, excellent offer. That's a step down from that, but it's not the one that you see if, if you're not targeted, right? Right. So if you click, if you do what we're talking about here, and you click through to the MX site, and you don't see the 100,000 point offer,

what you do see is the offer that you see at a lot of other blogs that's for 75,000 points after you spend 5,000 points in the first six months and the 10X at U.S. gas stations, U.S. supermarkets. So it's a 75,000 point offer. If you get targeted for the 100K offer, it crosses out the 75,000 and shows you 100,000 written next to it. But if you don't see the 100,000 offer, you're going to see that 75,000 offer. And that's an offer that you might see. If you go directly to the Amex site, you might see that. If you go to some other blogs and sites out there, be advertising at $75,000 after $5,000 offer. And that is not the offer that you want. Right. Now, don't get me wrong. In any other world, you'd be raving about that offer,

but there are better offers. And so the alternative, if you look on our site for the platinum card, the public offer that we link to is not an affiliate offer. So we've talked about a million times. If there's a better offer that we know about, we don't show our affiliate offer at all. That's the case here. The better offer is through Rezzy. What's Rezzy?

What's that? I assume it's a site for reserving restaurants or something. Yeah, it is. It sure is. What's a Rezzy? What a weird name, Rezzy. It's a site for reserving restaurants, and yet they did this thing with the Calm app a little while ago

where you had to reserve a spot for a virtual event with Scottie Pippen. Their branding just doesn't make any sense to me. At any rate, Amex seems like they've invested in Rezzy. It seems like they're a partner of some sort. So that's why Rezzy has had a couple of times now in the last few months, Rezzy has had a tailored offer for people applying for Amex cards. Right. And so, so this one, it's exactly the same as the regular public offer. It'll say 75 K,

but it adds a 20% rebate at restaurants for six months, 12 months for 12 months for a maximum rebate of $300, I think. And, um, so that, so that's1,250? Am I remembering that right? No, $1,500. $1,500. Okay, it's a gold card. So $1,500 a restaurant spend, you get 20% back. And it's over the course of a year, so it wouldn't be that hard. Pretty doable, yeah.

I mean, it comes out to about $29 a week on average. If you spend about $29 a week on average at restaurants, you're going to max that out and get your $300 back. Right, right. So it's basically the public offer plus $300. Plus 300 bucks. Yeah, exactly. Right, ish.

Right. So, yeah. So you've got the targeted offer, which is the regular offer plus 25K extra points. You've got the resi offer, which is the regular offer plus 25K extra points. You've got the resi offer, which is the regular offer plus $300 back basically. And then you've got the regular offer, which is the 75K bonus points plus the 10X spend. They all have the 10X spend part. What doesn't have the 10X spend, at least in the time that we're recording this, and who knows by the time we publish it, that might change, but the referral offer doesn't have the time to spend yet. Right.

Or does it? No, I think it does. I think it does. Yeah. Okay. All right. I saw when I, so after, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, no referral. I thought you're talking about affiliate offer the referral offer. I think you're right. It does not have that. Or if it does after, after I finished applying, it said, I could refer friends and they would get 60,000 points. That's not very nice. No, that's not very nice.

I expect that'll change soon, I hope. Hopefully by the time this publishes. But it won't. The referral offer definitely won't have the resi $300 rebate. Right. Whether anyone sees the 100K offer, it's possible, possible. Sometimes that happens on those referral links. And right, right. Have an open one, you may find one of those better offers, and your friend will still get their referral points. So

right. Yeah. So that's, that's always nice. If that happens, if you see the increased offer, and you've gone through a referral link, so that your friend or family member gets that, that could be a great deal. But so far... But if your referral offer is for $60,000 and doesn't include something else in addition, don't be that friend. That's not nice. Right.

Right. So here's something I want to talk about with this. So out of these offers, which offer is clearly the best? Well, I think the a hundred K is clearly the best. So you're because it's between, I mean, it's between the resi offer and the a hundred K offer that are, they're both better than the standard offer. The, so the difference is whether you get 25 K pretty much automatically, because when you meet the minimum spend, you get that $25,000 membership rewards points, or $300 with a little bit of effort.

The effort being basically swapping out your usual restaurant card for this platinum card until you maximize out the $300. So I don't think that's a lot of effort, but there is some opportunity costs there. And it's just another step, right? And it takes a while to get it. Now, here's where I'm going to argue with you. Here's where I'm going to argue with you. And I'm going to post roast myself. Because when the Resi offer came out this week, I said, this is amazing. Best offer I'd ever seen on the Platinum card, which is true, right? I mean, it's got to be the best offer anybody's ever seen, I think, on the personal platinum card between the $300 and 75,000 points in the 10X, right? So that seemed like an amazing, amazing offer. And then the day that we're recording this Thursday,

this 100K offer started coming around, this targeted 100K offer. And immediately everybody was like, oh my goodness, it's a hundred K plus the 10 X. That's terrific. That's the one that's the best offer. You got to get that. And on the surface, it looks like a pretty good deal because essentially you're trading the ability to get the $300 in restaurant credits for instead 25,000 membership rewards points. And I mean, anybody who follows miles and points will tell you that 25,000 points is probably worth more than $300. I mean, if you're going to use them towards travel, anyway, they're going to be worth more than $300. Right. But when I started thinking about it, I was like, wait a second, though. So you got to follow a little bit of math here. All right. And if you're

listening late in the day to be doing math, I know, but if people are listening to this, they're listening to this like Saturday morning. So they're wide awake and ready to go get a cup of coffee. So this is going to be a little tough to follow, probably if you're just listening to this and not seeing numbers. So trust me when I say don't, if you're listening to this, don't question me until I get to the end of it. Okay. But Greg's going to question me right through it. I'm sure he is.

But just follow along with me for a second. So if you do the Rezzy offer. I'm just going to go take a break while you're talking. Just go ahead. Keep talking. Don't worry. If you do the resi offer, okay, basically. So if you're, if you're the type of person who's going to spend $1,500 a year at restaurants and I am, and I'm sure that a lot of listeners are 29 bucks a week, that's pretty doable for a lot of people in terms of restaurant spend. So if you're going to spend the 1500, Amex is saying, okay, we'll pay you $300 to put your restaurant spend on our card, right? Now, if you want cash for your restaurant spend, let's forget about the Amex gold card for a second,

because you can't cash out the membership rewards points easily. So let's, let's take a look at the Chase side and say, I've got the Sapphire Reserve in my household. So my alternative for restaurant spend, if I want to get cash in my pocket, is three ultimate rewards points per dollar, which right now is worth four and a half percent if I pay myself back via groceries. So on $1,500 of spend, the four and a half percent would come out to $67.50, I think, is what it is. So I could have $67.50 with my Sapphire Reserve. Amex is saying, no, leave that card at home. We'll pay you $300. So it's a win of $232 if I pay with the Platinum card instead at restaurants.

So they're offering me $230 in my pocket for using the Platinum card for my restaurant spend instead. So now my option, I feel like I'm on let's make a deal, right? If my seventies, eighties kids out there, it's like, let's make a deal. Like Amex is saying, okay, you can apply through Resi and we'll put $230 in your pocket for your restaurant spend this year. Right. Or you can let us keep that $230 and we'll give you 25,000 points. Now, my question for you is, would you pay? Would you make that trade?

Would you pay $230 that could be in your pocket for 25,000 Amex points? So that's less than a penny a point. It sure is. It's less than a penny a point. But would you buy? I would. I would definitely. Yeah, in a heartbeat.

Even though you've got millions of points, first of all. Yes. Okay, all right. So if you feel that way, I knew you would say yes. I can't believe you don't know why my answer is yes. Well, I probably do. But before you ruin it and go there, I'm going to ask you something else. Yeah.

Did you read Steven Pepper's post this week about LifeLock? No. Short version of the story is Rakuten was offering, maybe still is, probably not, was offering 90 points per dollar because you can earn membership rewards points at LifeLock. You can buy a LifeLock membership for 70 bucks and get 9,000 membership rewards points.

That's less than a penny a point. Did you do that deal, Greg? I did not. Why not? You're a buyer at less than a penny a point did you do that deal greg i did not why not you're a buyer less than because i didn't read the post but i mean that deal's come up a number of times before it has it and i have done it once not that exact deal but i did do a lifelike deal once and it was a pain in the ass so it was like i could get a fixed number of points at least back then it was like I could

get a fixed number of points at a really good deal but um I don't remember what the issue was but but it you you had to start up lifelock and that caused some issues I can't remember what but I remember thinking afterwards like oh it just wasn't worth it well that's why I'm not going to do it either, because I imagine it's a pain in the butt to cancel. But my point there was that there was an opportunity this week, easy opportunity to buy MX points at less than a penny a piece. And I figured for sure you were going to tell me you didn't even read the post, forget about actually buy those MX points for less than a penny a piece. So you're not really necessarily

a buyer of MX points at less than a penny apiece. And I know that you probably are able to MS those points for less than that cost too. If I could easily, if there was no work involved, I could just buy MX Membership Rewards points for a penny each straight up, I would do it all day long because I have the Charles Schwab Platinum card,

which lets me cash out those points for 1.25 cents each. So would you grow your cash by 25% every opportunity you could if it was easy? Of course you would. So here's why I think... Why didn't you buy the LifeLock deal, Greg?

Gotta get another LifeLock dealike deal buddy i already told you why uh so so for those watching on video for podcasters aren't gonna podcast listeners aren't gonna notice but my my window like the sun has has dropped to a certain place where my chin the the sun is shining on my chin super brightly, but not on the rest of my face. So it's totally distracting me to see myself. So for those listening, this was Greg's way of trying to take the focus away from the fact that he's not really a buyer of membership. I just, I just covered up the part of the screen that shows myself. So everybody else can be distracted who watches this, but now it's not me at least.

What were we talking about? So we're talking about how you had the Schwab Platinum, so you obviously would buy the points for that. All right, so here's what I think people should do. If you already have a lot of membership rewards points or you don't know what to do with that many membership rewards points, I think you should be thinking of it as a multi-year adventure. So the first year, you get in on the $100,000 offer if you can. And in December of next year

is when the annual fee will be due for this card. You're going to cancel this card after the annual fee shows up on your statement, but you're also going to sign up for the Schwab Platinum card, which has a standard 60K offer. And that's the perfect time to sign up for it. Because if you sign up in early December, as long as you learn how to do this, you could get the $200 airline fee credit three times before you have to cancel that sucker. Once in December, once the next calendar year, and then in January of the calendar year after that, before canceling the Schwab Platinum if you decide you didn't want to keep it. And while you have the Schwab Platinum card, you can then cash out all those points that you earned in the previous year at 1.25 cents. Again, if you don't need all those points for basically luxury flights, which is what they're best at. They're also good for some cheap economy flights, but once you have hundreds of thousands, it would take a very long time to use up those for cheap economy flights.

But yeah, no, I think that's the play. So Greg thinks easy question or easy answer there. And obviously, I went for the extra 25,000 points today, too. Went for the 100K offer. So I think that's a good offer. My point here, I guess, is that when I thought about it more, I was like, it wasn't necessarily as much of a no-brainer. And when I thought about it, I was like, oh, maybe I would take the cash.

Now, another piece of it here is another factor to consider is with the resi offer, it gives you something to spend your money on outside of the grocery and gas station spend. Because right now, if you pick up that $100,000 offer, anything other than those two bonus categories, basically, I know the Platinum card has what 5x if you book flights through the, you know, Amex travel, or maybe directly through the airlines these days, but who's booking flights at 5x, you're not going to spend anything

significant there. So the other thing is that it does give you another category to meet spending requirements on if you don't think you can meet all the spend. Let's come back to don't think you can meet all the spend in a second. So is this offer so good that if you have two eligible players in your household, that two people should sign up for it? That's the question. So I debated with myself like crazy about whether my wife should sign up for the card as well. And I decided not to, that she shouldn't. How about you? Yeah. So we decided to do one card now. And my hope, I got my fingers crossed, is that at least the Rezzy offer sticks around. And particularly, I'm actually hoping crossed, is that at least the resi offer sticks around. And particularly, I'm actually hoping for the resi offer instead.

Sticks around until December because exactly what Greg just said, I would always rather open a platinum card in December if possible for the triple dip that he's talking about with the airline fee credits because then you can get the airline fee credits once this year, once next year, and potentially once the year after that. So again, it requires a little bit of maneuvering and knowing what you're doing, but possible to do that. So I would rather sign up in December if possible, but I didn't want to miss out on the 100K offer either. So I felt like this was too valuable to miss out right now, but I was willing to gamble. It's what, December's 2018, 19 days away here. Pretty close. So I thought, what are the chances that the Resi offer doesn't stick around for at least like three

weeks? I figured, hopefully it does. And part of the reason I hope that it does is because if you sign up two people for this, how do you possibly hit all the spend? Right. I mean, that's, that's why I didn't, that's why I decided not to sign up my wife for it. Why she shouldn't sign up for it is that, yeah, I mean, Amex does not like people buying gift cards. And so I think you could get away with some gift cards here and there, but if you've got two cards and you're going to have to do almost entirely gift cards on one of them, unless you have incredible amount of natural grocery and guests you should spend. Right.

So, yeah, that, that, that was the driving factor for me. The question about the triple dip, I think is really interesting and important because if I knew for sure that the resi deal would still be around in December, I probably would have waited for me as well. And the reason is that I'm losing out on $200, right? $200 back by picking the 25K offer. I mean the 25K extra. So now that 25K is costing me, you could argue, what did you say? $230 plus $200, so $430. Now that's real money and that's something I wouldn't want to pay that much for the $25,000. But I don't know. I don't know if it'd be there. So I decided I'd better just grab it while I could, which is...

And let's be clear. I'm saying I hope that the Resi offer is still around. But obviously, if the $100K offer was still around too, that'd be great. I think that probably both of us have very little faith that that 100K offer will continue to work for weeks. Right, right. I was just assuming that that would be gone. You know what? Honestly, I mean, even if the Resi offer disappeared, if the standard affiliate offer of 75K plus the 10Xx was still around it's still worth considering

i still i don't know what should it i don't think i can manage that spend uh safely with with another card so i'm not sure it'd be worth it yeah so so well okay so here's part of the problem and and this is a problem that I noticed with readers. And I think you're having the same problem that I noticed amongst a lot of readers. I think a lot of people are looking at this the wrong way. And that's the way that we advertised it at the beginning. As a 250K offer, so to speak. As an all or nothing, you have to do $15,000 worth of bonus category spend.

And you don't. Because the best offer that you're ever going to get, and I say ever going to get, I'm not a fortune teller but at any point up until now the best offer you were going to get on the platinum card was a hundred thousand points for five thousand dollars spend and realistically you're not going to probably do very much of that spend in any kind of a bonus category since the bonus categories are so limited so realistically after you did the five thousand dollars spend you were going to end up with 105,000 membership rewards points and you'd have been thrilled. You'd have been tickled to get that if you were

eligible for that offer for the most part, right? So with this offer, if you do 5,000 spend at gas stations and grocery in the first six months, you're going to end up with 125,000 points. Actually, you and I will end up with 150,000 points, right? With 100K offer, we're going to end up with 150. But even if you sign up with a resi offer, you'd end up with 125, which is more than you would ever have if you only do 5,000. And the 5,000 in six months is manageable. It's $192, $193 a week. A lot of people probably spend that much already on gas and groceries. And if you don't, you got to mix in a $50 gift card here and there, a hundred dollar gift card now and then that's, I mean, we don't know for sure that'll be okay, but it's more likely to be okay. Well, okay. But let's, let's look at it. Isn't it? I, I, yeah,

I agree with you for a one person scenario, one signup scenario, but take, take our scenario where we're talking about adding a spouse's card. So whatever grocery and guests spend you have, let's just say it's less than $15,000 over six months. For sure. So yes, for the first card, spending whatever you have, as long as it's $5,000 or more in those um categories that's an awesome offer the second one uh if you move some of that 5x the 10x spend sorry from your first application over the second one you're not gaining anything by doing that are you? Well, so, no. So here's the thing.

And that's why the resi offer appeals to me for the second card. Because for the second card, then I can consider $1,500 worth of spend at restaurants. Right. Right. Okay. So then it sort of becomes worst case. If you say none, let's just say worst case, no grocery or gas station spend goes to that second card. Then the resi offer becomes a 75 K plus $300 offer, which it's not mind boggling, but it's very good. So it's, it's not, it's not worse than you're going to do

in a regular offer, right? Right. No, I mean, I've been happy before when I've gone to sign up for a Platinum card and have gotten targeted for a 75K offer instead of the 60K. So this is 75K plus $300. Right. That's good. Right. So good, but not show-stopping

the way the primary one would be. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a good argument. She probably should sign up in december um i think at that point though when i'm looking at a good offer versus a show stopping over then i have to look at what other things could she be signing up for and is this really the best one

probably is but i don't know well i don't know because that'll segue us into the next other offers in just a second but i i think that you do have to consider for yourself anyway, when we talk about all this, how much you would reasonably spend, because in six months time, some people will spend a good chunk of that 15,000 organically, and some people won't. And that's really in a very person to person in terms of, you know, what you actually spend. And, you know, I, there is no way that my wife and I are going to spend $30,000 on things that Amex likes. So that's something that certainly we would have to consider. And I don't think we have any chance of hitting that threshold, but we don't necessarily have to, to come out ahead. And so we'll have to consider that.

There's some more math to do, but at least I have a few weeks before I have to make that decision. So I don't think it makes sense to sign up for two right now. I think we can agree on that, right? Yeah, yeah, for most households. You know, now if you have like eight kids

and you spend $1,000 a week in a grocery store, then yeah. Or if you have a lot of reimbursable gas spend, you know, I know some people who spend all day on the road and use their own cards to spend on gas. And so if you're in that kind of scenario, or maybe you own some sort of a small delivery company or something like that, and you're able to put that spend on a card, I mean, there are some scenarios where maybe you're able to justify that. Or maybe you've got a family member who doesn't care at all about points, and they're

willing to be an authorized user or to just take your card and put their gas spend on it, et cetera, et cetera. There are some scenarios where maybe it could pan out, but for most people, it's going to be a little unattainable to do that, especially times two. So, okay. So like you said, when you get to December, you'll have to consider that 75k offer against what else is available. And if in December, the same things are available that are available now, we got to talk about a couple of the other big offers that have come out this week. Yeah. So in any other world, we'd be leading with the Ink Cash and Ink Business Unlimited, the Chase cards, that no fee cards, 75K signup bonuses. Crazy.

What? Right, right. I mean, I remember when the ink, the no fee cards went up to a 50K bonus, like originally, because they used to be 20K standard. And then they went up to 50K and that was incredible. And I couldn't believe it. And, you know, and we kept kind of holding our breath, like how long will this last, but that's gone forever. And now 75k don't know that this will last or not. But that's awesome. Yeah, that's a that's an incredible offer. I mean,

really, this this 10x thing that from Amex has been stealing the show. But before that, we were super excited. And I think most people were and probably still are to some extent about the fact that with a no annual fee card, you can pick up 75,000 valuable points, right? And a card not to mention just the point a card that you want to keep, you know, with the in cash, for instance, the 5x office supplies, man, with all the office supply deals, we've seen all the fee free visa gift card staples has been running five per person per day. There's just been a lot of opportunities to pick up 5X spend. So that's a card that you'd be happy to have 5X on up to $25,000 in purchases a year. And it's a keeper card to begin with. They didn't offer much of a bonus.

You'd be like, this is a card you probably want in your wallet. Exactly. Yeah, the Ink Business Cash Card is a card every points collector, if you're getting into Chase Ultimate Rewards points at all, this is a card to get. Actually, you could argue it's a card to get even if you want cash back. Yeah, for sure. I mean, the equivalent of seven and a half percent. And I know some people, I don't do this, but I know some people will buy those Visa gift cards when they're fee-free and then take them to the grocery store and use them for their groceries, use them for the other expenses. We've talked before about how we feel like that becomes more tedious

than it's worth in keeping track of the small balances. But I know there are readers out there that they do that all the time. And it's hard to argue with that. Five points per dollar. And if you've got a Sapphire reserve, you can cash those out at one and a half each seven and a half percent back. I mean, that's. Yeah. Well, even if you, if you have no premium chase card at all, it's still 5% back. Yeah.

Which is also great. So, yeah, I mean, so amazing. Now, how about that the ink business unlimited? I mean, that card we used to say was a card that you would really want because it earns one and a half Chase points everywhere. It's a great return, but things have kind of changed there. Well, yeah, I mean, things have changed because the Freedom Unlimited, which used to be sort of the personal side equivalent of the Business Unlimited, the Freedom Unlimited has become better.

So, you know, Chase added three X categories. So drug, uh, drug stores and restaurants, the freedom unlimited gives you three X and at travel book through Chase, the freedom unlimited gives you five X. The business unlimited doesn't offer either of those bonus categories yet. Maybe they'll add it at some point, but least for right now uh i give the you know freedom unlimited a edge over the business unlimited that said if you have the freedom flex which is the same bonus 3x and 5x bonuses as the freedom unlimited then the ink business unlimited is the way to go to get your 1.5 X. Right. Right.

Right. And it's a business card. So it's nice because then that utilization isn't going to count against your utilization percentage on your personal credit report. So there's some advantages there in terms of having it for that. It's, it's probably for most people, a better card to have and hold than the ink business preferred is because the

ink business preferred bonus category, main bonus category is shipping 3x shipping i mean if you ship a lot that might be nice but if you don't ship a lot then then the ink business unlimited is the card that you want at one and a half right right i think anyone who's who's getting into ultimate rewards points in a big way needs one of those one and a half everywhere cards so that when you're you know unless you have a good alternative, like if you have a 2X or better cash back card, you know, that might be your preferred way to go. But, you know, I know a lot of people

who just want their ultimate rewards points. And so you need one that's earning better than 1X on your miscellaneous spend. And then go for the bonus categories for the spend where you have a bonus category. And when you look at it, $7,500 spend is the requirement on either of these for 75,000 points. Now,

if you do that 7,500 on the ink business unlimited, if that's the card you open, you're going to get one and a half points per dollar on that spend. So you're going to get 10, 11, 12, I don't know more than more than 10,000 extra points or more than 10,000 points on top of the 75. So you're talking in the end after your 7,500 spend having more than 85,000 ultimate rewards

points, that's $850 to be just straight cash it out for a check that's better than 10% back. I mean, we're talking about getting excited about 10X membership rewards points. This is also a pretty terrific offer at more than 10% back cash in your pocket. And if you're able to cash them out at better than one cent each, because you have one of those premium Chase cards, then you're looking at over a grand back. I mean, that's terrific. Right, right. And bizarrely, so even though you have to be under 524, you have to have signed up for fewer than five cards in the past 24 months, at least fewer than five have to show

up on your credit report for Chase to approve you for these ink cards, but they won't add to your account because they're business cards. They don't show up on your personal credit report. So let's say you've signed up for four personal cards in the past 24 months. Now you sign up for the Inc. Business Unlimited and you're approved. You're still at 424. Now you sign up for the Inc. Business Cash and you're approved. You're still at 424. Sign up for some Amex business cards, still 424. So there's that big advantage that it keeps you open to more chase cards. Of course, you've argued, and I've agreed with you, that some people are making too much of that 524. You don't want to pass up on some amazing offers

like this Platinum offer we've been talking about to keep your teep under 524. No, I mean, these ink offers are special and they're rare. We don't often, I mean, forget about don't often, we've never seen a 75K offer, I don't think, on either of these. So 50K forever, like we said before. So generally speaking, you would be silly to turn down the chance to get one of these 100K Amex offers that really could turn out to be

as much as 250K or anything that's more than 100k anyway it's a better offer than those chase offers so don't pass up those amazing offers and we're talking about the points and we totally glossed over for the people that aren't familiar with the platinum card all the credits that the platinum card comes with so you know i put in the post that you could end up with eleven hundred dollars and change worth of credits in the first 12 months with a platinum card on top of all of those points. So I mean, to turn down, and I'm not going to value it at face value, but turn down more than a grand in statement credits, whatever you value that at, plus six figures of points so that you can maybe down the road get a 50,000 point Hyatt card or a 75,000 even point

ink card of some sort, I think is a silly trade to make. So I hesitate to overvalue those 524 slots. I think sometimes people are like, oh, is this worth a slot? I'm like, yeah, it's worth a slot. If that's not worth it, then what is? That said, if you are under 524 now, those ink cards are like a no-brainer and you would want to go for one of those before you go for the platinum card because A, the platinum card is a personal card. It's going to add to your 524 count. B, the ink cards anecdotally have been tough to get, although it seems like things are loosening up. So you talked about applying for the ink business unlimited and the ink business cash. I mean,

is there any chance of that actually happening though? People getting approved for these things? Have you heard? That's a good question. I don't, I don't know. I haven't signed up for them recently or no one in my family has, I know in the past, I mean, that was common. People will sign up for multiple ink cards and get approved. But that's a good question. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question either. Certainly appealing. But again, I would certainly

tell you that you want to look at those ink cards first and apply for one of those first before you go for the platinum card so that you're hopefully in the best position to get approved. So the nice thing about those cards is that they tend to be a little bit easier to get approved for in terms of Chase business cards, the ink cards, the ink cash, and the ink business unlimited, that is, because you can get approved for those with a pretty low credit limit,

whereas they require a higher credit limit on some other cards. And keep in mind, if you get denied on the card, that you can call reconsideration. This is something we talked about in our Ask Us Anything recently, and it probably bears repeating that if you get denied for a card that you apply for, you want to look at our best offers page, find the reconsideration number, and call.

Because if you've got another Chase business card open, you may very well just be able to shift some credit around and say, okay, well, I've got a $15,000 limit on my Inc. Business Unlimited, and I really want this ink cash. Can we move $5,000 and limit over 8,000 or 10 or whatever the case may be? And they may very well let you do that. So you wanna keep that tool in your belt, so to speak. Yeah, no, exactly.

And that's not just something we're saying. I mean, I've personally done that many times and gotten approved for cards that were initially denied. And so it feels bad when you get that initial denial, but it feels great when you call and, and the, you know, they often, I'm not going to say this always happens, but often the agent, you know, you're kind of expecting like to have to defend your position or something, but I, you know, you get the right agent and they're just, they're actually trying to help you. And they're like, well, let's see what we can do. Okay. We'll move some credit

from this or that. And, uh, they, you get the right one. They seem to try to work for you. So that's great. Right. Right. And if you can tell from the get-go that you don't seem like you have the right one, then, you know, I've before, when I get that feeling right off the bat that, that the person that I'm speaking to doesn't really want to help me, when something comes up, and I got to go and I'll have to call back later on and talk to somebody else and hang up and give it another call. So I can usually tell in the first couple of minutes, whether I think somebody is one of those people that wants to be helpful, or one of those people that is looking to see, you know, what excuse they have to not be helpful.

Yeah, I know what you mean. So I can usually tell early and I don't waste a lot of time. I'm not going to, you know, bang my head against the wall with somebody that I don't think is going to want to help me. So that's just my approach to it. I used to know somebody who said that within like the first three sentences, he knew whether he was going to continue the conversation with that particular rapper, just hang up and try again. I've never done that, but I could, I could see that. That's funny. So, all right. So, so,

you know, there, there've been like these incredible offers. So good that like, it's almost like these JetBlue 100K offers. I know, I know. Almost like not even worth talking about. I know, I know. They're for a specific airline that you might not fly that often. Which is what it feels like to me. But then you look at it and you're like 100,000 JetBlue. Oh, they're amazing offers. Yeah.

That's incredible, right? But not incredible of the level that the other offers we just talked about are. You know, and it's funny because we say that. It's not incredible of the level that the other offers we just talked about are. You know, and it's funny because we say that, and if you go to our best offers page right now, and you look at the best credit cards sorted by first year value on the personal side, this Barclays JetBlue Plus MasterCard with its 100K offer is numero uno. Yeah, it is. And it was that kind of thing that drove me to create the Greg's picks page for credit card offers, because there's nuances for all these things. So, you know,

what's on our best offers page is a calculation. It's, it's just a card, hard, cold, you know, we think the points are worth this much. You're going to get this many. There's the annual fee is this much and figures out your, your first year value for the card. But there's the annual fee is this much and figures out your, your first year value for the card. But there's nuances like, you know well, I don't want to get into all the nuances, but you know, there are reasons why we're more excited about a platinum card offer. For example, all these credit, there's a lot of credit. Let's be clear, that reason is not

at an affiliate commission because all we're talking about is no affiliate. Yeah, exactly. For either of these, right? So that's not why. It's just that it certainly can be more valuable than, our first year estimates are conservative for the most part.

They are. And when they're conservative on a platinum card, that makes a big difference. When it's conservative on a JetBlue card, the conservative estimate there is not that far off of what your max value is. Well, yeah. On a platinum card, there's a big spread there. Right, right. Also, if you're a regular JetBlue flyer, you could probably make great use out of the full $100K, but it's a very specific thing.

Just like when there's a great Amtrak offer, it looks very valuable from the point of view of the first-year value, but it's only that valuable if you're actually going to use all the points. And so it's such a specific thing that I just can't, like in Greg's picks, put those as high as a transferable points currency that's in that range. So yeah, so that's why that's good. Now, you know, that said, the JetBlue card is in my list.

And I did divide up my list. I originally just had it as Greg's picks. And then I had a section on like, you know, you probably want to wait to get these other ones. So it was sort of like, here's my picks and here's my don't pick. Don't pick list. But now I actually put separated out show-stopping offers from more great offers because, I don't know know it just felt to me like some of these

including the jet blue cards are so much better than usual whereas others on the top top list like like the uh sapphire preferred 60k offer is still there i mean that's always been a great offer it's still a great offer but it's not show stopping i mean the 80k offer would have been up in show stopping so yeah um so so that's all there and hopefully uh readers will find that useful um hopefully and i mean i and i almost part of me almost feels a little bit bad that we haven't given a lot of air time to the 100k jet blue offers but part of the problem for me is that i can't get excited about it because they're not useful for me because the jet blue flies like one or two places from my home airport and you can't connect to most places.

So I love jet blue. I enjoy flying them when I get a chance to, but they just, I fly them once and twice in the last like decade almost. So, um, you know, there's just not ever the right fit for me.

So I'm not super excited about jet blue points. If I lived in New York or lived in Seattle or something, and I had those trans cons and mint available at decent prices, I might be a lot more excited about the JetBlue offer than I am. You bet. And once travel opens up again and they start flying to London, if you can get, you know, we have a JetBlue flight that goes to Boston. And so if they have Boston to London and that looks nice, that'll suddenly become a lot more interesting to me. But for now, yes.

I've personally, so I got, I have a bunch of JetBlue points from a deal that happened a while ago. And I spend like maybe 3000 points a year or something in that ballpark. And so my points are lasting forever so if i signed up for one of these hundred thousand point deals you never yeah i might still do just because it's low-hanging fruit but um but yeah that'll last me like infinitely long unless again i start spending it on like flying to london which would be fantastic then i'll then i'll be very happy if i get those points so but the nice the nice thing is anyway, we're looking at, I mean, we're

talking, we're talking about our unenthusiasm or lack of enthusiasm over an offer that'll buy a $1,500 worth of flights. Like that says a lot about what kind of a week it's been this week that we have a lack of enthusiasm about that. Right. I mean, it's just mind-boggling. These are offers we just didn't expect to see. I mean, we knew there'd be good offers, but we're just seeing really amazing offers. And it occurs to me, it's just kind of ironic that we talked about the Platinum Card as being a 250K offer.

We clarified it during that segment, but it just occurred to me that that's funny because the first show-stopping offer that's not around anymore was the five free 50k nights from marriott and we specifically every time we mentioned it said this is you know you might think of it as a 250k offer but it's not that and here's all the reasons it's not that um now we did the opposite. We said, this is a 250K offer. And then later we were like, well,

not really. Right. Right. Right. It is kind of the other end of the spectrum there. Yeah. That said, this is,

this one is actually, it is possible to get the 250,000 points. Whereas the other one, it would be very, very hard to get 250,000 point value. And 250,000, much more valuable points than Marriott points. Oh yeah, that too.

Right. Yeah, so much more valuable there too. Okay, so if you're looking for credit cards, good time. I mean, competition is heating up. That's exciting to me. Yeah, it's awesome. It's great to see these big new offers. We've been predicting all along that as things kind of normalized,

we would see big offers coming. I don't think we expected this big or this soon, especially at this stage of things. I don't think I expected this yet. I expected that this period of great offers would happen at some point. I didn't see the ones that came out this week coming though. This is a pretty cool week. So it is.

All right. So, so that said, now we've gone from the high down to the low. I got to do a little post-roasting. And I'm going to keep it brief because I know we've been kind of long here today. But I got to do a little post-roast. And, of course, we're going to end up talking about another credit card thing. Because you wrote a post at the beginning of this week that's almost easy to forget about at this point with all the big news there's been this hoping you would you were hoping i would but but i didn't you wrote

a post about the top eight hotel credit cards and you said that number one and number two were really easy but after that it was really difficult to put them in order and i i totally agreed with your number one pick hilton aspire card bam totally agree and if you want to know why see greg's post because that one's a clear number one number two i was a little iffy on the ritz card being number two but i was like i mean you made a good argument so i was like okay i can get on board with that but then after that you really started to lose me like like i started to fall off the deep end here as we moved down the list and i got all the way down and I was like, how in the world did the Wyndham card, this

new Wyndham business card, end up at like, what was it, number eight or something like that? Like behind all these other cards? That Wyndham card is a fantastic value. That Wyndham business card that now offers eight points per dollar at gas stations. Eight points. Eight points per dollar at gas stations. Okay. Let me repeat that one more time for the people in the back, eight points per dollar at gas stations. Right. And you might say,

you know what? I don't really love Wyndham points because I don't really want to stay at the days in or super eight or whatever else. Wyndham does have some nice vacation properties though. They've got some places that are, you know, I've stated several that were pretty nice. And there's been short-term opportunities now and then to book through like cottages.com and get different places in Europe, et cetera, that you might use down the road at some point. And when you look at it and you say, okay, so this card offers 15,000 points

per year, which we always agree that we like points more than a free night certificate because points can be stacked together with other points. They can be held onto for a couple of years. And yeah, I think you and I probably generally say Wyndham points are worth around a penny a piece, right? I don't know what they are if they even are on our reasonable redemption value page, but, uh, but 15,000 points got to be worth more than a hundred dollars. So easily worth more than the annual fee, right?

Easily worth more than the $75 annual fee, and it's in points. It's not a certificate that's going to expire. So unlike the Marriott cards, you don't have any risk of breakage or being pressured to use it at like an airport overnight that you could have bought for $95 or something because you're going to be able to keep those points

and wait and kind of scope things out, find the right opportunity. And then if it's not enough that you're already definitely going to get more value than the annual fee out of those points and eight points per dollar at gas stations, you get Wyndham diamond status. And as you pointed out yourself in the number eight slot or whatever that you put this in, that gives you Caesar's diamond status. And those who are playing at home know there those have been reading our posts for a year here know that caesar's diamond status is pretty valuable because that gets you a hundred dollar celebration dinner at caesar's properties in las vegas or maybe atlantic city too i think so you can get a hundred dollar

dinner for the year you can get a four-night stay at atlantis and the bahamas which you know maybe you don't want to go there right now but generally speaking that's a get a four-night stay at Atlantis in the Bahamas, which, you know, maybe you don't want to go there right now, but generally speaking, that's a pretty valuable four-night stay option if you are the type of person who wants to stay at Atlantis in the first place. Now, you might have to do some gambling in order to keep that. It gets a little bit murky, I don't know. But then your Wyndham points, you can transfer over to Caesars and use those for comps at Caesars. And in that case, then they do become worth a penny a piece towards comps at Caesars. So that 15,000 points that you're getting every year could be $150 worth of stuff bought at Caesars. That card should be higher than number eight.

Okay. So, you know, I was very aware that everyone's going to have their own ordering. These things are so subjective. And so, you know, in my personal case, like, I hardly ever go to Vegas. I've been there twice, I think, for conferences. And so the Caesar stuff, it sounds very very appealing but it's just not worth anything to me um the uh and then the windham points yeah i love the fact that you get points instead of free night cert but when was the last time i stayed at a windham it's been a while been quite a while um so you know uh yeah i i and i stayed at two last year so that there's a difference between the two of us there yeah yeah so i think any i think anyone could look at that

list and we'll arrange them in a different order than i did and i think that's totally fine it was actually meant to be more like here here's the the best ones overall. Like, you know, I, I did order them, but I didn't really think of it that way when I was including them. I thought you were going to roast me for not including the Hilton surpass card, which is the second piece card or the, yeah, or the business card. Although I, I would say the surpass because of the six X groceries. And so a 15,000 spend gets you the Surpass because of the 6X groceries.

And so $15,000 spent gets you a weekend night that's much more valuable. I totally agreed. It was Aloha808 that commented on the post and said that it finds that weekend night certificate much more valuable than a Marriott certificate because you can use it uncapped at various places. So I think the Surpass card too at $95 getting you free breakfast status with Hilton you know i think that that's that's all worth being in the list too i agree and so that's i don't have a roast for you so that's my roast for me is that i i flubbed it i flubbed it by not including the hilton cards i i'm i'm not going to argue with you about the ordering of, of all these cards, because as I said, I think that's totally subjective. Um,

but, uh, total mess on my part, not including the Hilton card. Um, one person asked about the best Western card, which, uh,

I, I'm not going to roast you on that one. I have no idea. Right. I have no idea about that card. I mean, we have it in our, in our,

you know, best offers page, but honestly i've i don't think i've ever used best western points so i have either they did a promo the last couple years i think where you could book places for 10 000 points per night yeah i remember that right something like that so so i guess it could get you like a week at a best western well if they rerun that problem if they rerun the promo right yeah yeah but so all right so there there you go that was that was post roast that's post roast and so question of the week then question of the week i actually don't have the question up but i have the general question general question which we've got a lot of questions about the mx pop-up and obviously with the platinum offer that's something that some people are going to run into the mx pop-up

when you go to apply sometimes you get a message saying, you're not eligible for this card because of your history with Amex. And so people have often asked us, how do I get beyond that? And the anecdotal evidence has been sprinkle some spend on all of your existing Amex cards. And then after a few months, that pop-up may go away. Now, what somebody asked today, and i thought was a good question was okay well i already canceled my other amex card or cards or whatever it was that i had so so i've got no ability to sprinkle spend on other cards i'm really interested in this new platinum offer and i'm getting the pop-up does it make sense to book or to open a lesser amex card

like an everyday or an everyday preferred plus or whatever else put some spend on that is there any chance that that will help me get rid of the pop-up yeah i mean maybe i that's a great question what what i don't know is is the pop-up like less likely to come up with a different card? I don't know. You know, are there cards where they're like, well, we want everybody to get this? Or maybe there's cards without any, I don't know. Do they have any cards without a sign-up bonus?

But, you know, maybe the pop-up wouldn't come up and then you can get it that way. That's a great question. I have no idea. What's your idea yeah i don't know either i i saw it and i was like i don't know what to tell her because that that came up in the freaking my insiders today talking about the platinum card offer and i didn't answer it yet because i looked at it and i was like you're like i'll get greg to answer this yeah i'll ask greg on frequent miler on the air because i don't know if that would do anything for the pop-up uh and like you said i don't know as though you would be successful with a lesser card with lesser bonus i'm not sure i don't think

we've probably collected enough data on that so kind of interested so readers if you have had any experience with that where you got the pop-, were you able to get a different card with like a low signup offer or something? I mean, I'm curious. That's a great question. Yeah, let us know if you know anything about this. Because I still, it's been years now since the pop-up has been a thing.

I've yet to see it. Literally has never come up. I've had the platinum card before. It's been less than seven years. I'm glad you addressed that, because a number of people asked, and I said, well, I didn't even ask you. Yeah, it was, I think, five years ago I canceled it.

Maybe that's long enough for Amex to forget the conventional wisdom at seven years. But yeah, no pop-ups. So I don't know. I don't know why I'm uh sort of seem to be exempt from the golden touch with mx yeah yeah maybe they're so happy with me because of all the delta spend i do that could be i mean and it probably isn't all that far-fetched you definitely sprinkle enough spend around on your other mx cards that right maybe that's the ticket to not get the pop

up ever i mean if that's the case a perk of delta pop-up ever. I mean, if that's the case. A perk of Delta Elite status. Well, you know, and you're joking about it, but I wonder if that doesn't have something to do with it. And if that's the case, those other folks out there who are big spenders that are spending in that way might have access to more bonuses than they realized. That's right. That's right. That's a good point.

So if you're a heavy spender, you're listening this far along here, you're a heavy spender, you're listening this far along here, you're a heavy spender on your Amex cards. Maybe that's worth a shot on a card, even if you didn't know that you were going to be eligible for it. Now on the flip side though, didn't we have some instances where people didn't get a pop-up and then still didn't get the bonus?

I don't know. Maybe. I mean, well, and we'll now when in the past, but it's been a few years now, when I didn't get the pop-up and I knew I was ineligible for a card, I still got the bonuses. But it's certainly possible, even likely that could happen the other way. We recently had someone apply for the Marriott card who got the pop-up, but didn't believe they should have gotten the pop-up. Went ahead and applied anyway, did not get the bonus,

tried escalating it, no dice. So if you do get the pop-up, you know, probably should listen to what it's saying. Good advice there. Good advice there. All right. Well, my friends, I think that brings us to the end for this week of the long show. So thank you guys very much for being out there and listening, following along. If you would like to subscribe to our email list and join our Facebook group and follow us on social media and everything like that, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash

subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. If you are watching this on YouTube, hit that subscribe button, please. Give us a thumbs up. Leave us a comment. And if you're listening to us anywhere else, do the same kind of thing wherever you're listening. Leave us a comment, give us a review, et cetera. That stuff all helps us. So thank you very much for that. And we will be here again with you guys next week. Yeah, I can't wait. Bye, everybody.