Frequent Miler on the Air - The best non-travel rewards for stuff-seekers | Ep69 | Oct 24 20

Episode Date: October 24, 2020

00:54 Giant mailbag 3:01 What crazy thing did Citi do this week? https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/citi-prestige-gets-5x-bonus-for-online-cable-streaming-up-to-7500-points/ 7:21 Mattress running the numbers: IHG's targeted free night offer https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/targeted-ihg-offers-earn-free-night-certificate-or-bonus-points/ https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/ihg-buy-renew-ambassador-membership-then-stay-once-get-40k-free-night-certificate-cert-expires-4-30-21/ 16:46 Best rewards for stuff-seekers https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/great-value-for-non-travel-rewards/ Additionally, for those interested in reading more about the Bank of America options: https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/bank-of-america-rewards/ 55:06 Post Roast https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/top-current-credit-card-offers/ https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/virgin-atlantic-mastercard-65k-offer/ https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/now-2x-3x-on-groceries-stack-with-travel-credit-and-pay-yourself-back/ 1:02:53 Question of the Week: Can you refer your spouse to two Amex cards and get two bonuses? Don't forget to like & subscribe! Music credit: Annie Yoder

frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event the best non-travel rewards for stuff seekers do you like stuff i like stuff do you like stuff i like stuff we're going to talk about how to get stuff for less sort of there's nothing that i like more than stuff for less well you know i take that back but one thing i like more is stuff for free, like the free spirit mug. One thing I like more, but generally speaking, that stuff for less is one of my favorites. Well, we're going to kind of be talking about free

because people think about using points to get free trips. And we're going to today, though, talk about using points to get free stuff. Free stuff're going to today, though, talk about using points to get free stuff. Free stuff. Free stuff, but for good value. None of this, you know, redeeming on Amazon for half a cent a point kind of stuff. Get out of here.

That is not the stuff we're talking about. We're talking about getting good value for your points for stuff. Good value, free stuff. Yeah. First, we've got the giant mailbag. And today's mailbag entry, because it's a giant mailbag, and we've got to reach in, grab something from this huge pile,

so we never know what we're going to get. Big contest. This one comes from a YouTube comment. And you might wonder, how would anyone get a YouTube comment into a giant mailbag? But it's just magic of the internet. So David says, these guys are great.

It is cool that they don't always agree because they have different perspectives. One is a young dad and the other is an elderly guy. I feel bad for that elderly guy. Well, I don't know why he thinks I'm a young dad. Ouch.

Sick burn there. Nicely done. He thought he knew what he was doing there, but you didn't know what Craig was going to do with that, did you? So, elderly? I knew. Oh, you did. You did.

You did. Nice. I'm glad you're enjoying the show anyway. So, yeah. So, David, no, thank you, I guess. I mean, you know, we're different ends of the spectrum, sort of. He did say we're great, and he did say that you're a young dad. And then just that backhanded compliment of, you know, and that elderly guy.

And that elderly guy who needs him. But we do need him because he provides a different perspective. And David correctly sees the value in that. That's right. What would we argue about if we didn't have different perspectives? Nothing. Nothing, right? It'd be boring if we didn't have anything to argue about, right? And for the record, David, I'm not that young of a dad, but that's all right. I'll take it.

Every morning I wake up and creak my way out of bed and I, I don't feel like a young dad at all, but I'll take it. And I creak out of bed and don't feel like an elderly guy. Despite being a little over a half a century old. Okay. All right. So that brings us next then to what crazy thing did City do this week? Yes. So City, we are going to talk about City. We don't always talk about City, even though the topic is City.

I mean, City is a trendsetter and that's the thing. They're a trendsetter and that's the thing they're a trendsetter and crazy they love crazy things all along every now and then they got to mix it up and toss in something crazy just keep that trend going so right thank you this one's this one's fun because it follows on what started this whole segment which is uh you know over the summer they introduced a promotion with like 5x for online purchases with your city prestige card but they failed to tell anyone except bloggers about it including like their their staff right didn't know anything about it and so that's that was the crazy thing that kind of i believe if my memory serves that's

what kind of kicked off this segment originally but now they've brought back essentially the same promotion, a very similar one, 5X for online purchases. And now what's happening is actually they did send out emails to customers. I don't know if it was to all customers, but to a lot of customers. I'm going to pop in and say, I probably owe somebody $10 because somebody commented on our post. Oh, this must be targeted. I didn't get an email. And I was like, no.

And so I was saying in the post, Citi's really bad at emailing cardholders. I doubt you're going to get an email about this. And if you do, it won't be until like mid-November. I got about $10 on that. Clearly, I was wrong because Citi has sent out. They were listening. They wanted to cost me $10. Thanks, Citi. Yeah, that's right. They were listening.

So they hurried and sent out the emails. What they forgot to do, what it appears they forgot to do was inform their IT staff. I mean, they can't tell everybody. What fun would that be? Because readers are reporting that they're not actually getting 5x so last time everybody was getting 5x they just didn't have any proof that they would if they spent the money but now they're spending the money it does not appear they're getting 5x so hopefully that'll get resolved i'm sure it will well i'm sure somewhat

strong word to you yeah i'm not quite sure i'm not quite sure. I think it's somewhat possible. Marginally confident. Yeah, I'd say likely. I'd say likely because they did send out the emails. More likely than not. And I'd say if you got an email, it's extremely likely that it'll eventually be figured out. If you didn't get an email,

I don't know, what do you think? You have the prestige card. It wasn't intended to be a targeted bonus, but you didn't get the email. Generally speaking, when they have told us that something is not targeted, it has not been targeted. So it's very rare that banks tell us something along the lines of whether it's targeted or not that's wrong, right? I mean, they typically do know how the promotion is supposed to work. Now, sometimes there are ways that promotions work in your benefit that might go beyond what the bank thinks. But when it comes to the basics, like this is a non-targeted promotion and you're going to get five points per dollar, I mean, generally you can rely on that. And especially if you ask and they're like, yeah, no, it's definitely not. Which we did. We did. We did. And generally then at that point you can usually count it.

So I would think, I would think that this is definitely going to be non-targeted open to everybody. As we were told, I'd be very surprised if not, it would seem kind of silly, but, um, but yeah, I mean, hello. They, I, I, I have to feel like this is somebody at city that's like, okay, we just can't tell everybody. So who are we going to leave out this time, guys? Okay, customer service. Okay, all right. We won't email customers.

Oh, okay, this time we're going to leave out the customers. Well, okay, if we're going to tell customer service and the customers, we've got to leave the IT guys out. Yeah. Well, and we love it because we wouldn't have this segment if it wasn't for Citi. No, we appreciate it. We owe it all to you, Citi. Thank you.

Keep up the good work. Hats off to you. That's right. That brings us to Match Us Running the Numbers, which actually would have been the perfect segment right after we talked about how old we were and talked about, you know, creaking as we got out of bed. Oh, that was a segue we missed right there. We'll have to go back and edit this and put it back. Yeah. And then figure out how to rearrange the words we just said. Now that sounds like too much work. All right. So here we go.

So I'm just running the numbers this week. What are we talking about for mattress running? All right. So IHG. IHG has targeted promotion, which they're targeting people with different things. And they've targeted some people with 5,000 points after a stay or two, I don't know, 10,000 points. But the one I want to talk

about is someone was offered, hopefully more than just a one person, but we know of at least one person who was offered a free night certificate after two stays. And the details are it's a 40K certificate, just like the kind you get with a credit card. It's valid until May 31st of 2021. So that's a bit, but still. And the other thing you need to know is there's no reason it won't stack with a couple other promos going on. There's currently, IHG is offering double points.

And also, currently, there's a deal. If you pay with your IHG card for your stay, your first day will get 10,000 bonus points. So, okay. So, book two stays within the eligible time periods, whatever they are, get double, earn double points, earn 10,000 bonus points, assuming you have an IHD card to pay with and a free night certificate. What do you think? Nah. All right, moving on. Why not?

That's my son's new thing. He just says nada to everything. I like it. I like it. No need to elaborate. So it doesn't sound like a bad deal on the surface. The way you just presented it sounds pretty good. So that's why Greg is laughing because it sounds like a decent-ish deal. I don't like the idea of a certificate that's limited to just a few months because we

got no idea what's going to be going on a few months from now. You know, certainly the way things have been going the last week here or so in terms of COVID in the U.S., I don't know. I mean, things are going to be open. You're going to enjoy traveling. You know, it's not just a matter of whether or not you feel safe traveling. It's a matter of what the experience is going to be like when you get there and whether or not it's worth using one of these certificates. So I'm not particularly enthusiastic about that to begin with. And if I was enthusiastic about that limited time certificate, I would do the IHG ambassador, right? The intercontinental ambassador thing. Same kind of idea, right? You need two nights and then you get a free night certificate worth 40K. the difference here is you can get really cheap nights so you get

two really cheap nights and get yourself a free night certificate the the ambassador thing though then you get the ambassador status for however long that is and you get yourself your free night your you know your supposed free night certificate that requires a but wasn't that only good until january something? I can't remember the details of that deal. I think you have to travel by then, but I thought the certificate was good until April 30th, if I remember correctly. So I thought it was... Could be. I'll double check while we're on here. But anyway, so I wasn't particularly excited about another limited time 40K certificate, but I have a feeling that you disagree with me so i'm going to turn it over to the elderly guy thanks young father

all right well no so here's kind of how i think about it is the the let's let's talk first about the 10K on your first day, the 10K bonus points on your first day. That is worth, you know, I can't remember what our most recent reasonable redemption value is for IHG points, but I think it was around 0.6 or 0.7 cents a point. So you could say that 10K is worth about 60 or 70 bucks. And if you could find a stay that costs in that range, let's say 60 bucks, and you pay with your IHG card, you're getting double points, you're earning points with your IHG card, you're getting those 10,000 points. It's almost a wash. Like it's almost like a free night. Like I wouldn't go out of my way to do that. But if you think of it as like, well, that sets me up for free to now do one more stay and get a free night certificate, then we could say, oh, all right, well, then one more, let's call it $60

night, as long as you make it a separate stay than the other one, is going to get you that certificate worth up to 40,000 points. So if you have a stay in mind that would be a decent use of that certificate, let's say 25,000 points or more, yeah. I mean, I think it's a very reasonable thing to do, to mattress run that in that situation. Obviously, I wouldn't do it because I don't have that stay in mind. And I think you really need that component. You, you need to be confident that you're going to use that certificate before May 31st. And if you are, and you have an IHG card, I think it works. I think it works.

I already have an IHG certificate that expires like around then. So I'm not, and I've got no plans to use that. So I'm not particularly interested in another one, but let me back up to what I was saying before because I was right. And so I just want to, you know, like kind of dig in here and say, hey, I was right.

So the IHG ambassador thing actually is a better deal because you buy membership with, I don't know if it's a better deal. Let me take that back. The IHG ambassador one is a parallel deal that I think might be more interesting. So if you pay for the Ambassador membership, it's what, $200 or 40,000 points or somewhere in that neighborhood, something like that, right? So you buy the membership and then you have to stay one time between now and January 31st and you get a 40K certificate that's valid until April 30th

of next year. Now, I assume when you stay that one time, you will trigger the same 10,000 point IHG bonus that Greg has just talked about. It's still an IHG stay, right? You're still going to get your double points. You're going to get all those things. You're going to pay a little bit more probably because you have to stay at an Intercontinental or a Kempton or a Regent. Though right now, there are some cheap Intercontinental, K Kempton or a Regent, though right now there are some cheap Intercontinental Kemptons and Regents out there. So you're not necessarily going to spend a ton and you'll end up with also the ambassador status and the buy one, get one free night. That's good at Intercontinental properties in the future. So I don't think that this other IHG offer is a better

offer than that. I think I, I would, if I were interested, I'd take the ambassador status, but I think it's, it's not the clear winner that I kind of made it sound like, cause you do have to spend $200 or 40,000 points on top of the stay, but you only need to say one time versus two. Okay. Yeah. I don't, I don't see the appeal on that because because of these upfront costs like so you're you're spending an upfront cost that's arguably more than the value well it is it's it's more than the value of the certificate you're gonna end up with depends on how much you value the buy one get one cert right i mean right right so so yeah so so it's it's a way of getting ambassador status for a year cheaply, I guess. I mean, you get the same 40K cert with only one stay and the buy one, get one.

So, all right. So your total cash layout in your scenario, you were like something like, would you say for your first, what did you assume? So $120 because I'm doing two one night stays. That are $60 each? Yeah. Okay, so your total cash outlay is 120 and you end up with a small boatload of points that you're gonna end up with either way and the 40K cert.

Other way around, you do the IHG ambassador thing and your layout initially is gonna be 320. So you're gonna spend, or so, I'm guessing, on $120. Yeah, that sounds about right. So you're going to spend an extra $200, and you're going to end up with the ambassador status too, which is the cost of ambassador status. I guess my point is it's not a better deal.

I love that you just slammed your own deal. I love it. Power of live TV here, folks. All right. I think Nick just proved that his whole scenario is worthless. It's not better. It's not better. It's definitely not better.

This other targeted IHG one. So here's your difference. The one that Greg is talking about is targeted. Mine is not. That's true. So you could get an untargeted bad deal. It's not the same deal. More or less.

Did you get targeted for anything, by the way, with IHG? No, nothing. All right, let's just wrap this up. So I think we've got one thumbs up and one thumbs down on the mattress. I'm not excited about it, yeah. All right. Okay. One of each.

Good. Different perspectives from the old and young. That's right. Sorry, elderly. about it yeah all right so all right okay one of each good all right different perspectives from the old and young that's right sorry elderly the elderly and young yes yes get that right all right so that brings us into the main topic so the main topic today you like stuff i like stuff we all like stuff how do we get stuff and get the best value to get stuff if you're not interested in traveling but you are interested in getting rewarded so you can get your free stuff. So you wrote a post about that this week. Tell us how we can get rewarded for stuff. So, well, you know, you could always get rewarded at bad value or at so-so value. So, you know, you could always use your points, as we mentioned in

the very beginning. Everybody, all the banks are advertising, oh, use your points at Amazon or use your points through PayPal. And if you dig into it, you find out it's a terrible, terrible deal. Don't do that. Except when it's one of those deals at Amazon where it's like you have to use one point

in order to save $15 off of 50 or something. Don't do that, but just use one point. And be careful if you do that, that you explain to your spouse that you did that. So the next time they log into Amazon to buy something, they don't come very close to hitting checkout using points to pay for your purchase. So just a tip out there.

I don't know anybody might run into that problem. There's other cases where it happens so automatically that you don't even have that sort of, you might not have that opportunity to have the conversation. Like some of the Amex relationships, you just find the option online to use your points, even though you've never enrolled in that ability, right? Right. So like my family sometimes uses my Grubhub account to order food. And one day I found they had paid with points. I was like, no.

Hopefully it was a cheap meal. Yeah, I don't think it was too bad, but ouch, you know, it hurts nevertheless. Anyway, we have a couple of good value options now that neither one of which existed, let's say six months ago, or at least in one case might have existed. We didn't know about it. But the first one we've talked about before is Citi. The fact that C city thank you points transfer to shop your way points with a 20% automatic bonus, basically. So one penny worth of thank you points becomes a penny point two worth those shop your way points to buy third-party gift cards to apple to ebay to walmart to lots of clothing stores things like that means that you could very easily get 1.2 cents value from your thank you points and if you throw in a rewards plus card, which gives you a 10% rebate on thank you point redemptions, it gives you on those that are rebated about 1.33 cents per point value.

All right. And on the earning side, we say, oh, Citi Double Cash now has the ability to transfer its cash back to thank you points. So that's basically earning, you're earning two, normally you're in 2% cash back with double cash, but now you're in optionally to thank you points per dollar that becomes at 1.33 cents value. If you also have rewards plus becomes a total of about 2.66 or 2.67% rewards on your spend so those rewards are things that you could buy with those gift cards you know anything you could buy at at walmart at ebay at at you know any of these many many uh stores that are available through there so um so that's that's one and of course

another one last thing to say about earning side on that is the City Premier, which now has 3X for grocery and dining and still has gas and most travel. So it has a 3X category. So you're earning even more with that card in terms of rewards that will become stuff instead of travel. So not to mention, I, I'm going to jump in there too, because I, I never liked the idea of turning points into gift cards, right? I mean, I, I'm averse to that cause I like to travel and I want to use them for travel rewards. Right. However, however, when you look at like the, the premier, for instance, it has had a 60,000 point offer now for like the last year and change, I think. And if you were turning that into stuff at the rate of about 1.33 cents a point, that's like $800 worth of stuff.

Now, I value the points at more. However, $800 worth of stuff is a lot of stuff. I mean, that's some decent for $4,000 spend. I mean, if there was a card offering $800 cash back on $4,000 spend, everybody would be jumping on it that's true i mean everybody'd be like oh my goodness eight hundred dollars on 400 spent like come on let's get it let's go now you know you gotta get this while you can because what what card offers that kind of cash back bonus none of them do so right in terms of cash now i say none of them do chase obviously now that you can use points i'm sure you're talking about that in a second too. Some of the chase cars also have very interesting bonuses right now,

but, but that I wanted to make that point there because that's a great return on spend as are some of these others. I totally agree. And then, you know, I think we'd be remiss to not mention some caveats in all of this. So one is that the process isn't simple.

Not at all. There's a lot, a lot of steps to It'll work for your $800 and stuff. It's not free stuff. If you're starting with the double cash, you have to transfer the cash back to thank you points. And then once you have your thank you points, you have to make sure your accounts are combined, which is easy, but you have to make sure because your rewards plus has to be in the same account in order to get the rebate. Then you have to transfer your points. So you got to figure out how to transfer thank you points to shop your way points, which means you have to have a shop your way account. And then once you have all that set up, it's actually very easy. And then you can use your shopper way points to buy gift cards that gift card purchasing ability seems to go down about once a week i think on sundays

but it always comes back up but trust us it always comes back up uh and then you got your 10 rebate right and then you gotta redo the process with the rebate well i mean then you have your yeah you have more thank you points and then you can buy more gift cards in the future, right? With those. But the, um, uh, the other caveat, and I think this is the bigger one is that many of the gift cards top out in value at very low denominations. So like the biggest Walmart gift card you could get is $30 and Walmart, at least online, I don't know if this is true in store, will only let you use five gift cards on a purchase. So that's $150 of free, basically, that you could get from Walmart,

at least Walmart.com. And, you know, so if your goal was to get a, you know, giant new TV for free through Walmart, that might not work. But it might work with some other of the vendors because of the gift cards, because each merchant has sort of different rules about how many gift cards you can use and how they're used. You know, I think the best case is where you can kind of load them up to your account and there's, there's no limit at all. That would be ideal. But, you know, And it's worth mentioning too, for the stuff people out there that, you know, if you were, this is a little more complex, what Greg said is right. There are definitely a few layers of complexity. You got to work a little bit for your free stuff. However, it's worth a few minutes of effort because if you were to use that 60,000 points

at checkout at Amazon, for instance, they're going to give you what? Is it eight tenths of a cent, six tenths of a cent? So you're talking about $560, $550, instead $800 worth of stuff. Maybe it's 560. Maybe it's even less. Maybe it's 360. I can't remember, but it's not much. And so you're talking about hundreds of dollars in more value by adding a few steps.

Right, right. Although you can also redeem thank you points directly for gift cards, and that's usually at a value of one cent per, you know, one cent each. But one thank you point per penny worth of gift card. And sometimes they run sales where they're 10% off or something like that. But still, this is a better value than that. Now, it's also worth mentioning, because I made this point when we talked about this weeks ago, that some of those gift cards you could buy on sale for less. And so that's one of my issues

with valuing these points too highly. Some of them like Walmart and eBay, you know, those don't typically go on sale very much. So, all right, if you're going to redeem your thank you points that way at 1.33 cents, fine. But if you're going to redeem your points for like, you know, an Olive Garden gift card, those are on sale like 20% off all the time. So then you're not getting to me the 1.33 cents that Greg is talking about. So you got to kind of be a little selective about which free stuff you're redeeming for. Yeah, there's some truth to that. Although, you know, I think there's,

the nice thing is the convenience of being able to get in on this deal whenever you want to, as opposed to like watching for the gift card sales, which do happen a lot with certain types of gift cards. But even then, you know, when you're actually ready to make a purchase, it might not be available at that time. So I do like that feature.

And another thing I love about this whole combination is you could do very well with no annual fee at all. So just the double cash and the rewards plus combination, you're getting great return on your spend for stuff, no annual fees. And then if you want to add in the three X categories of the Premier, you're only adding $95 a year. It's a very cheap way to do that. Right. I agree. I think that's probably the best $95 combination of cards, that three. And that's really whether you wanted stuff or travel rewards, either way for $95, that's a

pretty hard combination to beat. Chase has given her a run for its money these days, but a very good combination anyway. So all right. So the City Thank You ecosystem, that's a great way to get free stuff. What else? Right. So the other thing that has changed is the chase pay yourself back feature. So when it first came out, we had questions about whether it was expiring at the end of, I think, September. We had questions about whether it was an ongoing feature or just a temporary COVID promotion. There were things on the website that made it look like it's an ongoing feature. And it has since been renewed through end of April. And it's pretty clear to me because they advertise it like on the signup landing page of the Sapphire

cards, at least this feature. So it's pretty clear to me that this feature is intended to continue on. What's not known is whether it was what the categories will be that you could pay yourself back for. But at least through April, we can use our points Sapphire preferred and Sapphire reserve card holders can use points to pay back. So you use your card to buy anything at a grocery store, at a restaurant, a home improvement store, or select charities. And you can basically erase those charges using points. And the great thing is it's at very good value. So with Sapphire Preferred, it's at the

1.25 cent value. That is the same as if you had purchased travel through the Chase Sultan awards portal. And with Sapphire reserve, it's 1.5 cents value to, to redeem your points for anything from those locations. Now you might say, well, that's great, but I don't want stuff from Lowe's or I don't want stuff from, or it's not exciting to get stuff from grocery stores, which yeah, I mean, you're getting stuff. So it doesn't, it doesn't feel like a big win maybe, but both of those locations tend to have great big racks of third-party gift cards. So you really, just like

we talked about before, and more so, you could really get anything you want, including fees of gift cards that you could then use anywhere. And, and, and then pay yourself back and get good value for your points with that. So, I mean, that's, I think that's a great deal, especially, you know, if you're, if you're interested in trying to maximize your rewards and your free stuff, then particularly if you look for fuel point bonuses, because many large grocery chains frequently run fuel point bonuses,

and often they add bonus points to gift card purchases. I think especially as we head into the holiday season, you'll see that where you'll look at like 4X on gift card purchases. So then you'll use your Chase card to buy a gift card. Let's say Kroger runs these 4X promos all the time. So buy a $250, let's say, Amazon.com gift card at Kroger and get four fuel points per dollar. You get yourself a dollar a gallon off on up to 20 or 30 gallons or whatever it is. So you save yourself, let's say you got a 20 gallon tank, 20 bucks anyway, on top of the fact that then you pay yourself back for that purchase. So, you know, that's a pretty terrific deal when you're able to stack those kinds of savings. The software preferred are 3x with the reserve for grocery purchases up to $1,000 a month.

So to the extent that you buy things like gift cards or whatever at a grocery store and pay yourself back, you're not only getting good value for your points, but you're also earning a nice amount from those purchases at the same time, which is really cool. And then, as Nick said, it stacks with fuel points and any other promotions that your grocery store might be running. So including sometimes they have gift card sales. And so you could stack all of that together, which is fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's definitely one to look out for and look for a hard because the fuel points you got, and like you said, the sales too, sometimes there'll be 10 off of 50 or something like that on specific types of gift cards, or often we

see that too on Visa and MasterCard gift cards. So you might be able to get a few dollars ahead, even further ahead, and then be able to use those to buy whatever stuff it is, wherever it is you like to buy your stuff. Right. Now where things get a more complicated than the city story is in how is in which cards you need to to have sort of the optimal collection city it's a nice easy story like start with double cash and you're you're earning good rewards good enough throw in rewards plus you're earning better throw in a premier and even better, you know, and then you can really stop there in the story. Chase is a little more complicated. So to tell the story, I'm going to start with Sapphire Preferred, which is the one that gives you 1.25 cents value, and Freedom Unlimited. And the reason I'm going to use that pair is that Freedom Unlimited offers very strong earnings from spend, has no annual fee,

but you need the Sapphire Preferred to unlock this 1.25 cent pay yourself back value. So in this scenario, you're almost never going to use the Sappari preferred for spend except for when you're paying yourself back but um you you will use it at grocery stores while this uh 2x promotion's going on unless you've got a brand new right yeah limited in which case you'd be using that for 5x for the first year but then you can't pay yourself back that's a good point no yeah for the first year with the freedom unlimited you get 5x with grocery stores on up to 12,000 spend. So you'd want to do it there. But you'd also, with the Freedom Unlimited, you get 3X at drugstores.

You get 3X at restaurants. So it's very strong for those two types of purchases. 5X for buying travel through Chase. And sort of, in a way, the best part, part i don't know it's the best part but uh 1.5 everywhere else so it's it's way stronger than the sapphire preferred for your everywhere else spend where the sapphire preferred and most other cards only earn one point per dollar this earns 1.5 when you're when you're getting stuff at a value of 1.25, that's getting you to around a 1.9, just short of 1.9% value. Not very strong, but it's better than the alternative, which would be like 1% or 1.25 if you were just using Sapphire Preferred by itself. So that's the kind of starting point.

But then you can throw in, there's lots of opportunities at no annual fee to get additional 5X categories. So if you add in the in cash, then you get 5X at office supply stores. And guess what? They sell a lot of gift cards. So you could buy gift cards at five X,

get a lot of points that way. They also earn five X for internet and cell phone and cable TV. So you could just sort of set and forget your bills against that and get five X. Another one is a freedom flex. So you get five X and rotating categories each each month no fee again for that card so quite quite a few ways to earn points once you earn points on these other cards you move them to your sapphire preferred you get 1.25 cents value getting stuff as we talked about before with this pay yourself back feature um if you're redeeming a lot of points, you do better with the Sapphire Reserve

instead of the Sapphire Preferred. The kind of break-even point, depending on how much you value the... So the Sapphire Reserve costs $550 a year compared to 95 for the Sapphire Preferred. Sounds like a big difference, but depending on how much you value the Sapphire reserves, $300 annual travel credit and the $60 DoorDash credit, um, you know, I, I kind of smudge those together and, and give a discount on how

much I value them. And I, and I say I say, okay, the difference between these two cards is more like $150, the difference in annual fees after those rebates and discounting those rebates. So $150. And if you're not super familiar, it's worth mentioning that this year, if you get the Sapphire Reserve, that $300 can be used at grocery stores and restaurants, right?

Yeah, I can't remember exactly what the categories are, but they expanded the categories to make it much easier to get that. And I think they also extended that till June or July. They did till June of 2021. Yeah. Actually, I think it's grocery stores and gas. That sounds right.

That's what it is. Yeah. So anyway, it's very easy to use that $300 credit now, even if you're not traveling. I just thought it was worth mentioning that. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, the point is the difference between the two cards and anafes isn't as big as it sounds on first look but um uh you in order to sort of justify having this fr reserve

you you need to figure out where does that extra 150 dollars come from? And if you're getting that extra $150 value entirely from redeeming your points for stuff, you have to redeem about 60,000 points a year for stuff. So getting about $900 worth of value with the Sapphire Reserve instead of $750 value with the Sapphire Preferred. So that's where I calculate the kind of break-even point is. And if you redeem more than that, then you're much better off with the Sapphire Reserve. So, yeah, so that's a story there. And, you know, I think both of those kind of ecosystems are good, if you're, if you're sure you only want stuff and you're okay with the gift card route, the, the, the, the sort of barrier for entry seems to me much lower on the, on the city side. So I think I would point most people towards there if, if, if stuff is their

primary concern in both cases. So if you, if you think you might be interested in travel down the road as a redemption, so, you know, you might be interested in travel down the road as a redemption, they both offer options that are pretty good. And so you also have some additional options by transferring to various airline or hotel partners. Yeah, I mean, I think of the stuff lovers in my life, and I feel like it would be a hard sell to tell them that in order to get the best value on your free stuff, you have to pay $550 for this credit card. You know, that would be a tough sell in terms of convincing someone of that.

Although, you know, if you redeem the 60,000 points for $900 worth of stuff and you use the $300 because it's super easy to use that travel credit, even if you're not traveling this year, you're talking about $1,200 worth of stuff for your 550 outlay. That's still, you know, a $750 win there. You know, so there's a, it's definitely easy to come out well ahead, even if you're not traveling. And like Greg said, if you might travel down the road, then it might be worth thinking about. But like you said, I think the easy solution to point people to, if we want to call it easy, is the Citi Thank You system right now anyway. membership rewards. You can always cash out your points at 1.25 if you have the $550 Charles Schwab card. Do you know of any other good, you know, rewards where you could get stuff?

I mean, there's travel opportunities, but... Travel opportunities. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're getting something refundable and you're cashing out your points that way maybe there's ways but probably not advisable ways and probably not uh many ways so no i would say the the schwab platinum is probably your way to go there and that's again 550 dollars in order to tell someone to also get the business blue business plus for two points per dollar I mean, that's a relatively simple solution. Right.

But it's harder to justify the 550 on the Platinum card than it is. Right, right. So it's a sort of roundabout way to get 2.5% cash back everywhere. But then you've got to justify that big annual fee on the Platinum card. So it's a little tough. And if your goal is to get the 2.5% cash back everywhere, then it's worth noting, as we've talked about many times before, if you have investments, if you have a sizable retirement plan built up over years,

or you have investments and you can move them to Merrill Edge, as we've talked about a bunch of times, the Bank of America premium rewards card with platinum honors. If you have $100,000 in investments or cash with Bank of America or Merrill Edge, as we've talked about a bunch of times, the Bank of America premium rewards card with platinum honors. If you have $100,000 in investments or cash with Bank of America or Merrill Edge, then you get 2.625% cash back everywhere on the Bank of America premium rewards. So that beats the Amex solution without a $550 card. Right, right. And then if you use your, let's say your Bank of America checking account as your rewards account, then you really could use the rewards from that for anything and literally

anything because it's cash. But you could sort of compartmentalize it if you want it to feel free. You just say, okay, here's a checking account that its only purpose in life is for me to deposit the rewards from the premium rewards card and buy stuff and and there you go right so so that's a super easy solution for people who have the investments to be able to do that right and i think that that beats the amex solution for anybody who's got that yeah i mean and if you could do that, I mean, it, it, it beats the city solution for like everywhere else spent. It doesn't beat it for it. Well, it beats it in convenience. It's very, it's actually a very similar total amount of rewards, but since you're stuck with gift cards with limited denominations on the city side, this is literally anything. I think it beats it in that way but um it doesn't have the category

bonuses i mean it has a tiny bit extra that you get for um travel and dining i think well okay but with one card i mean city you got three cards so if you're gonna do three cards with bank of america you get yourself cash rewards and then you all of a sudden got yourself some pretty good category bonuses okay you're right you know right You're right. So as a one-card solution, it's pretty close to the three-card city solution. If you decide to go with two or three cards in order to maximize your free stuff, Bank of America can be a great option. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think actually the one-card Bank of America solution is more akin to the two-card city solution. And then you akin to the two-card Citi solution.

And then you can add another card in either case to get more bonus categories. Let's leave it at that. So that's a pretty good analogy. Two more I want to mention just real quick. Altitude Reserve, that's U.S. Bank. One place I can think of, it's not really stuff, but if you like getting Uber Eats. So this card gives you 1.5 cents value towards travel. And it gives you this option of redeeming points for real-time rewards, which is where you basically get text.

You want to redeem points for this. And you get one and a half cents value for those things if they are travel. Well, if you use your card to load money onto your Uber account, which that money could be used for Uber Eats, it'll trigger the real-time rewards. You can redeem points for one and a half and then get food. So roundabout way, not really stuff, but it's something that's non-travel, I think. And last one I have to mention is Discover It. I mean, this one's not new at all. This has been around forever, but Discover It cards, the cash back from that can always be redeemed through the Discover interface for a wide variety of gift cards at considerable discounts in many cases. So, for example, I recently had to buy something at Staples,

and the gift cards for Staples are 20% off through that. By redeeming Discover Cash Back for the Staples gift cards, I couldn't find a sale on Staples gift cards, even though there are often ones, but I couldn't find it at that time. So to me, that was like very close to real 20% discount off those Staples products using my Discover cashback. So that's a good way to get extra value from your Discover rewards. For sure. For sure. You know, so two other things that I'm going to add. One was also in your post, you just mentioned that Uber Eats Capital One Miles can be redeemed one cent each towards Uber Eats also. So that's another one to keep in mind if you're a Capital One type of person that you also

obviously can redeem those Capital One Miles for travel at a value of one cent each. But when it comes to stuff, you get less than one cent. Like if you try to do those PayPal redemptions that they just talked about, or they just released the info on that this week, that's not worthwhile. Don't do that. But one cent each for Uber Eats, I mean, hey, get yourself some free meals. That's fine. Or other restaurant delivery, I think counts. So that's not bad. The other thing that I think is worth mentioning, if you value stuff and you're looking for the most rewards to

get your free stuff, then don't forget third-party apps. There are a lot of third-party shopping apps out there. We've written about a number of deals using the Dosh app in recent memory, and that's an app that just has card-linked offers. So you're able to link offers to your card and then use your card in store. And the nice thing is that stacks with the rewards you earn on your card. So if you have a card that earns 5x at a particular store that you're going to shop at and you see it in the Dosh app, well then load that offer up to your card, go to the store and pay with that linked card and you're going to get even more rewards for your spend. So, you know, there are a lot of other apps like that out there. I just talked with Greg actually

before we recorded this about the Cash app. That's one that doesn't stack with credit card rewards, but certainly can stack with savings. And if you're using your cash back, like we talked about a minute ago, Bank of America, if you're using your cash back to get your stuff, you can link a Bank of America debit card to your Cash app, go to the grocery store like I just did, and buy yourself an Amazon gift card like I just did, and get 10% off the Amazon gift card and use the cash back that you earned on the card to pay for it. So I mean, there are a lot of different ways to stack additional things like that,

different apps. And then again, apps for buying gift cards. If you're earning cash back and you're able to use that cash, well then use it to get a discount. The Flues app has gift cards at discounts. Sometimes you pick up a couple of vouchers when you sign up for that. There's a lot of those types of opportunities. So keep your eye out for those. If you really are into maximizing your rewards for stuff, I think a lot of the tools that travel rewards people use are not limited to travel. You know, Dodge is cash. Absolutely. And the other thing is, is cashback portals. So if you do use your rewards to get gift cards, let's say, so I did this with the Staples deal. So I got gift cards as my reward,

but then I used a cashback monitor to find what's the best cashback portal for Staples. And it was not surprisingly as it often is top cash back. And so I went click through top cash back to Staples and got an additional, in that case, I think it was only 4% cash back, but the rates change often. So sometimes you'll get lucky and get a much higher rate. Or if you can wait on a purchase till it goes up, you can even configure cash back monitor to watch a store for you for it to go up. So you could do that kind of thing. And it adds up over time. And then also you got to look out for the promotions because like one of the

portals, it's not listed on a cashback monitor, but a couple of times a year now, or at least once a year, twice a year. So you promise is run these deals where if you spend $1,200 through their portal in a certain amount of time, you get $100 extra cash back on top of whatever you earned already. And so keeping your eye out for those types of deals too with shopping portals

when they run their shopping portal bonuses, often when we see shopping portal bonuses from the airline portals, if you're on our newsletter and you see, oh, American Airlines is offering a bonus, well, it's fairly common that you might find a cashback portal running the same kind of deal. It's a lot of these portals are run by the same backend. So you get the same kinds of promotions going through multiple sites at one time. So it's worth keeping an eye on those cashback portals

because that money does add up, especially with the portal bonuses. And if you're going to be spending money anyway, and you can go through a portal to spend the money you're going to already spend and pick up an extra hundred bucks while you're at it, why not? Oh, definitely. Definitely. And then another thing to mention is coupons. I mean, you know, often you could search the retailer's own website for coupons, but sometimes

you can find other ways. Like, for example, I once, you know, I had an immediate need for a purchase at Lowe's, and people on eBay were offering 15% off, I think, or maybe it was $15 off $100. I don't remember. It was perfect for what I needed. They were offering those coupons for a buck or something because they have ways of generating for free. I know I could figure out how to do that, but I'd rather just spend the buck and save $15, you know, really quickly without

worrying about those details. And so that kind of thing can work out well too. So yeah. There's a lot of different ways to save money. I mean, getting stuff is cool too. So everybody likes free stuff. I joked about my free mug that those of you listening in podcast form, I couldn't see but the free mug that you know, spirit sent me this week, but I mean, hey, it really likes their free stuff. I got it. My wife was like, Oh, another coffee mug. Great. The free mug, I'm taking free mug, you know, so. So if you're able to redeem your points for that stuff, I think that that can be exciting. I generally don't like to redeem points for stuff because I prefer to redeem them for travel rewards.

But I think especially now, between that shop your way option with thank you points and the pay yourself back from Chase, it is like better than it ever has been. It really is. And I think the gauntlet has been thrown down. Amex needs to respond. I want Amex to respond

because it's kind of pathetic looking at the membership rewards landscape. This actually came up because a reader asked me, they said, I have these points. I don't want to travel. What can I do with them? And it's like, nothing. Not much. Yeah. We talked in the show about how Amex in Canada offered like, you know, one and a half cents or 1.25 cents or something or other in terms of a cash out for their points, but they haven't done that in the United States. Come on, American Express, let's do something for the American cardholders and give us better redemption.

Well, actually, now that you say that, didn't we hear like some people were targeted with a bonus on cashing out your points and it made it worth something like 1.2 yeah that's so i checked all of my family's accounts and none of us none of us were targeted for that yeah so there's pressure on to do something another point that that greg made in a meeting just yesterday i think and i think it was a very good point is that now that people are getting used to this, are they going to be able to take this stuff away? You know, you talked about how you think Chase is going to keep this, this pay yourself back feature long-term, but we don't know what categories

are you going to be able to pay yourself back for. Right. Like, I think you made a good point there. Are these issuers ever going to be able to take these options away now that the cat's out of the bag, so to speak? Yeah, I think they're going to. I mean, obviously, we've seen issuers take away popular features before, so it obviously can happen. But I think people are going to be very unhappy when they do it, if they do it. I'm optimistic that Chase will keep this feature and with, with useful categories for spend, but we'll see. Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? But I think it's a great point though.

And I, I, I keep hearing readers talk about how they wish for instance, the MX airline fee credits were easier to use. Chase has really thrown things wide open. And also Citi threw things open on their prestige card in terms of being able to use the travel credits on lots of other stuff. Amex has done that to some extent. I mean, they made it really easy to use the resort credit

on the Aspire card for a few months. And they've also made it easy in some instances with some of the additional credits and things they've offered. But it is kind of surprising that they didn't do anything to make that airline credit a little bit easier for people to use. And people are kind of annoyed about that. I think they're going to be so used to being able to use the other types of credits that either Amex is going to have to make it easier to use those credits. And or it's going to be hard for anybody to go back to saying you have to use it for only travel and people are going to be unhappy right right so yeah so it'll

be interesting to see if fmx responds i mean uh it's kind of funny us complaining about them because because you know i think overall we were very happy with what they did for platinum card holders and and uh hilton aspireire card holders for to sort of make up for the COVID things with lots of new credits and, and, and other stuff. But, but yeah, this is an area where they just have not done anything. And now if they had done the if they'd done that, pay yourself back, well, the equivalent of pay yourself back bonus um that appears to have been highly highly targeted if they made that more widely available then maybe we'd um you know say hey good job but now this is the point in the show where i say that

the last like two or three weeks when we've talked about something like that we've like signed out of this and had an email that's right saying that something was going to happen. So I've just, I got my fingers crossed here that when we close this one up today, guys, hopefully we're going to get an email. Oh, that would be sweet. Yeah, you're right. So last week we were talking about

that don't sign up for the Hyatt card because we expect that there's going to be a better offer coming. And then we get off the call and there's an email sitting there from Hyatt about because we expect that there's going to be a better offer coming and then we get off the call and there's an email sitting there from Hyatt about their new offer. It turned out to be not that good, not very exciting, but yeah.

But better as we predicted than what it had been. And same kind of thing happened a week or two before that. I can't remember what it was, but it was another similar thing where we said, oh, blah, blah, blah, and then we hung up and we were like, oh, well, I guess we we were right about right it's a little awkward too because we tend to record on thursday afternoons but we drop the show on saturday morning so right so i know what it was it was the amex and chase bonuses on the marriott cards and we said oh well you know

maybe there was some secret deal there and so maybe amex is gonna you know release a new one and then sure enough you know we get done and it's like, oh yeah, new bonus. That's right. So, so anyway, so here's, here's hoping. So I guess that kind of concludes our main event. I think it does. So that brings us to the post roast. Yes.

All right. So the post roast this week, Greg wrote a pick or excuse me, wrote a post about his October picks for the best credit card offers, right? So you re-updated this post of the best offers right now, the ones that are the best, the ones that are kind of like the maybe, and then he also ran different categories. And so you get all these interesting offers in there. And what I want to know is how the guy who spent like 1.2 million Virgin Atlantic miles to spend a week on Necker Island didn't include the new 65K Virgin Atlantic offer.

Does that not belong in the list of best offers right now? I mean, 65,000 Virgin Atlantic points can get you business class one way to Europe, 50K on Delta. It can get you business class to Asia one way, 50K on Delta. It can get you business class to Asia one way on Delta One. You can fly to Tokyo. We had posted a deal recently where there was wide open availability around the time of the Olympics. Who knows if those are going to happen or we're going to be able to travel internationally. But 65,000 Virgin Atlantic miles can get you quite a bit. If you fly Air France premium economy, I think it was like what, 24,000 points one way.

So you get your round trip and premium economy and then some that's better than your $800 worth of stuff from the city. Thank you point. So I think that was an offer that was worth considering there. I'm going to yield the remainder of my time to the elderly gentleman from Ann Arbor. Oh, man, you just blew my joke. I was gonna say you could you could blame it on my elderly brain for not thinking of it. Thanks a lot, buddy. The ironic thing is that that was the post before, right? Like it was like the one before the one came out with the pics. And I was like, literally, they're back to back.

I don't know. You list? I don't know. I don't know. I could be talked into it. Just like when I first released it, some readers said, well, where's the 140K IHG offer? And that was one that I had thought about. I was a little bit excited, but just not quite excited enough to put into my top picks. But after I thought about it it after several readers asked about

it I put it in and this could be the same so maybe I'll add it in just for you there you go thank you done okay alright that's it that was my turn my turn uh oh so okay so this week you wrote about

Chase adding the 2X and 3X grocery bonus for the Sapphire Preferred and Reserve, respectively. And you were disappointed. Underwhelmed, yeah. Underwhelmed by it. Now, you had, if I remember right, when... You're bringing the past back here on me. Why are you living in the past, Greg? Why are you living in the past? Not even very far past. We not too long ago discussed, sort of predicted what we

thought Chase would add to the Sapphire Reserve card. And I said, I didn't think it would be grocery because I gave my explanations, not anything like travel. I said, gas maybe. You kind of predicted or maybe wished for, I can't remember, grocery. And so they were listening. And then you kind of slammed them for it. I did.

I poo-pooed it. Yeah. I did two, three X. How are you going to do two, three X? You're going to give five X to people with a fee-free Freedom Card for a year on up to $12,000. The same amount of spend essentially as this

because it's $1,000 a month for the next six months. So what they're expecting Freedom Card holders to spend at the grocery store anyway, you're only going to give 3X on the Sapphire Reserve. 3X now, Chase has cheapened that because they made the Freedom Unlimited give you 3X dining and 3X pharmacies and 5X Chase travel portal. So you can only give out 3X on the Sapphire Reserve. You can do something better than that, right? And Amex has 4X on the gold card that's only 250 a year now i talked about that this week too and why that card i think is of questionable value in some cases but but fact of the matter is 3x is not an eye

popping amount especially now with that little cap a thousand dollars a month come on right um but here's what i like about it and i don don't disagree. I think the cap is too small and the fact that they're not committing longer to it. We'll see whether I almost feel like it's going to be like the pay yourself back feature that maybe they'll renew it after April. But for whatever reason, they're not committing to it. But what I like about it is that it syncs perfectly with pay yourself back so we we had a problem with pay yourself back which was like it wasn't a big problem but it was it was it's awkward to spend anything in a grocery store and only get one x on the sapphire reserve in order to use the pay yourself back feature now Now, at least through end of April, you could get 3x. And so even compared to the freedoms 5x, if you have that first year bonus, it's not awful. Like, you know, it's only two points per dollar less. It's not awful to do that. and and and so i i think that's really nice because i i feel like it it it it makes the uh pay yourself back feature feel more completely like i'm getting full one and a half cents value

for my points and and uh and i like that and and and it's it the other thing, the $1,000 cap in one way sounds low, but if you think about how many points you'd have to redeem, if you want to redeem all your points every month, $1,000, that's like- 70-ish, 67,000. 67,000 points, right? So in one month of redeeming that way, you'd have justified the cost of the Sefri Reserve over the Sefri Preferred, because we talked earlier about a 60,000 point redemption is enough to justify that. So yeah, I think I really, yes, it's not what I would have dreamed up and it's not what I would have asked for, but I'm pretty happy with it. And so I think that that deserves a mention.

You're right. That is a good point. I think if I touched on it, it was only briefly if I mentioned it at all. You did mention it. Yeah, I might have. But it didn't get the highlight it deserved, because you're right. That is a good point, especially when you consider the fact that you do get a sizable number of points then back. So let's say you're redeeming your 67,000 points for the $1,000 purchase.

You're also getting 3,000 points back. So really net 64,000. So it's even a little bit better than the one and a half cents when you consider the rewards you're getting. So obviously you could have gotten rewards on any card. So a little bit more complex than that, but, but I think it's a pretty good deal and coming from somebody who said that I was going to redeem ultimate rewards points for gift cards at grocery stores to pay for my 30 night Hyatt mattress run.

You would think I would get excited about it. Right. You would think, you would think that'd be fair, be fair point so uh so all right touche i will uh you know lay down on my sword there and say that greg got me all right hey there you go the elderly guy on his game really guy you did it you did it guys you didn't think you didn't think you had it in him did you but there you go all right all right so that brings us to the question of the week then it is time for This week, this seemed like a really simple question, but then I was like, you know, if this question is out there,

I bet there's a lot of other people that wonder the same thing. And I don't think we've ever addressed this directly enough. So, and this is something that kind of came up in a presentation that Steven and I gave at the Chicago seminars last weekend. They did a virtual version of the Chicago seminars. And I talked about doing this and I realized now that maybe people didn't

realize you could. So Lauren asks us, she says, love your show. Here's my question. If I use my husband's Amex gold referral link to apply for not one, but two Amex cards, will he get the referral bonus twice? Or is it limited to one bonus for one person referred? So Lauren is interested in opening two different Amex cards. She's wondering if she uses her husband's referral link two separate times, whether he'll get one bonus because she's one new customer or two bonuses because she opened two new cards. Yeah, that's totally legitimate.

Good question. She'll get, or the person referring, her husband, will get two bonuses. The only reason he wouldn't is if he's at his limit. So there's a limit of, you know, 50,000 points or whatever it is. It depends on the card what the limit is. But yeah, he'll get both. Now, I believe if he has that plus three offer, I don't think he'll get plus six on his card, but at the minimum, he'll get whatever the referral bonus is.

Let's call it 15,000 points. If it's the Amex Gold, it's probably 20, right? It could be 20 or 25. Right. And so he'll get that bonus twice. I think, I'm not sure about this but i think he'll only have the plus three the ability to earn three additional points per dollar um you know for the next three months i don't think it'll be plus six but i kind of hope i'm wrong but

be great to be wrong but yeah so if he's got the mx gold offer for 25 000 points because some people have that as a referral offer, and you open two cards through his link, then that's 50,000 points for him. I mean, that's amazing. That's on top of the bonuses you're going to get for the cards that you open. So I talked about that during the Chicago seminars last week,

because that's a point that Greg has made in a number of presentations over the years. The number of points that you can earn just by referring your second player. We often refer to player two as the other person you partner with husband wife boyfriend girlfriend friend whatever whoever it is brother sister etc whoever it is that you're playing the game with just referring your player two back and forth i made the point during my presentation that if you guys just referred each other to the amex cards that are issued by amex that you can earn the

points on rather than cash back the swap on those Amex issued cards. It's like, I think I figured a minimum of like 480,000 points you could earn each just referring each other for all of the different- So that's not counting the signup bonuses, right? No, that's not counting the signup bonuses. We're talking about- That's the referral bonus.

That was based on an average of like 15, 000 points per referral bonus and some of those referral bonuses are 20 or 25 i mean basically around a million points just referring each other right for the cards so and there's a lot of points out there to earn just that way and you know something to keep in mind is that go ahead okay oh well i was just gonna say that it's worth mentioning in case people don't know that Amex has a unique capability, which you can refer if you have like, let's say the Amex gold card and you want to refer someone to a different Amex card, you can. You don't have to have the card that they want.

And that's what makes this possible, what Nick's talking about. Right, right. That's a terrific point and an important key point of this. So you want to find the card you have that has the best referral bonus and send them a link from that card to apply for the card they want. Now, it's worth mentioning that if you're referring from a Hilton card or a Marriott card or Delta, you can only refer to other cards within that family. And that's only the case with the co-branded cards. So if you use a Hilton card to generate a link, you can only refer to other Hilton cards. But if you use the MX gold, you can refer someone to an everyday preferred or a Delta card or a Hilton card or a business card or a business card. So that's sort of one of the rare situations where business and consumer

things cross. Like usually, for example, product changes, you can't product change from business card to a consumer card. But in this case, you can refer across, which is really cool. And another thing to keep in mind is that even if the other person isn't eligible for the welcome bonus, like let's say they've had the Marriott card before and they got rid of it because they weren't traveling. And now they decide, oh, they want the free night certificate every year. So so they want the card even though they're not eligible for a welcome bonus on the card if they get approved i think you still get the referral bonus right yeah i believe you do you know so that there's definitely you want to refer your player to right right and use use

the referral right definitely multiple and in other words stop using our affiliate links and keeping us in business. Refer each other for your MX cards. For your MX cards, I mean, yeah, if you have two players. Yeah, for sure. All right, that's great. All right, guys. Well, thank you very much for being here with us today.

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at the restaurant best of luck with that I'll send you any deal I find for depends I'm going to send your way. Alright great can't wait that's the stuff I need alright bye everybody Send your way. All right, great. Can't wait. That's the stuff I need. All right. Bye, everybody.