Two cautionary tales

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I've been blessed multiple times to unknowingly move to communities that had favorable environments for manufactured spend. Now, that's not exactly a "coincidence," since many of the most hostile environments for manufactured spend are also the most expensive cities in the country (New York City, San Francisco), and my income doesn't support living there, so I've never lived there.

But I freely admit that it means this blog focuses more on successful manufactured spend techniques than unsuccessful manufactured spend techniques, since most of my techniques are successful!

MasterCard gift cards issued by U.S. Bank are a problem at Walmart

With that in mind, I took the recent occasion of fee-free MasterCard gift cards at Staples to deliberately revisit an old problem: can you use MasterCard gift cards at Walmart?

For several years after the Federal Reserve required prepaid debit cards to be PIN-enabled, MasterCard gift cards issued by U.S. Bank worked differently than Visa prepaid debit cards issued by Metabank at Walmart. Unless you knew about, and were able to convince your cashier to go along with, the "change payment" trick, MasterCards were unusable for money orders or bill payments.

This history means most people, under most circumstances, simply avoid MasterCard gift cards. After all, most merchants that sell MasterCards also sell Visas, and if a credit card or rewards program bonuses spend at a particular merchant, then your natural preference should be to buy the easy-to-liquidate Visa rather than the hard-to-liquidate MasterCard.

However, that natural preference hits a snag when a promotion comes along that targets MasterCard gift cards directly. For example, for folks who drive a lot, the cost of gas can make up a big part of their monthly budget, so when Stop&Shop offers bonus points on MasterCard gift card purchases, folks are understandably conflicted. How does the (relative) difficulty of liquidating MasterCards weigh against the accelerated earning when you pile gas rewards on top of the bonus credit card rewards you're already earning at grocery stores?

Plastiq isn't a good liquidation technique; Plastiq referrals are a good liquidation technique

This came up over the weekend when I asked a fellow travel hacker how he'd fared during the fee-free Staples MasterCard promotion mentioned above, since I'd only been able to grab 3 $200 cards (3,000 Ultimate Rewards points with my Ink Plus). He responded smartly, "what am I supposed to do with a bunch of MasterCard gift cards?"

I mentioned Plastiq, which allows you to you make payments to a variety of payees using prepaid debit cards, including bills that can amount to thousands of dollars per month: student loans, rent, mortgage, cable, and insurance payments, among others.

My friend again pointed out that under normal circumstances, Plastiq's 2.5% liquidation fee made the service scarcely worth using, let alone worth driving around town searching for gift cards.

The trick, of course, isn't that Plastiq is a good liquidation technique, the trick is that if you're good enough at promoting Plastiq as a liquidation technique, you get to liquidate an unlimited number of your own cards for free.

Affiliate bloggers rely on a constant stream of vulnerable newbies

The only income I get from this site comes from my loyal blog subscribers, Google Adsense, my Amazon Associates link, and the personal referral links I put on my Support the Site! page.

This gives me complete editorial freedom (manufactured spend is good, Membership Rewards points are bad, free night certificates are bad, companion tickets are bad), but it also means my income doesn't depend month-to-month on driving people to sign up for particular cards, chasing bounties or fretting when lucrative payouts go away.

It also means that I don't need to recruit any new travel hackers. My basic view is that most people who are mentally configured to be travel hackers are pretty easy to identify. You can give the absolute simplest task to someone: "buy a Visa gift card," and if they come back with a Home Depot gift card, you know they don't have the attention or precision to be a travel hacker.

That's not to say I "hoard" information; I love sharing information! I just don't have a rooting interest in recruiting additional travel hackers just because they happen to be eligible for new referral bonuses.

But if, on the contrary, your income depends on getting people to sign up for the first time for something, whether it's a Chase Sapphire Preferred card or a Plastiq account, then newbies are the world's most precious resource, and there is nothing more inevitable than a blogger trying to extend their appeal deeper and deeper into less and less appropriate target audiences.

That is to say, a blogger who successfully refers 100 people to Plastiq is correct when they say Plastiq is a good way to liquidate MasterCard gift cards fee-free, because they have $10,000 in fee-free dollars, but incorrect when they tell newbies, about whom they know nothing, to go out and buy a bunch of MasterCard gift cards and to liquidate them through Plastiq.

If you don't understand this reasoning, then a lot of blogger behavior looks absurd. Even setting aside the blogs that are actually owned and operated by credit card affiliate companies, why would Rich Weirdo Ben Schlappig participate in this humiliating spectacle for Rolling Stone? But if you understand that he needs to fish where the fish are, then it makes perfect sense that the more outlandish the venue, the more likely he is to find vulnerable newbies! After all, if your livelihood depended on it, you too would prefer to attract 10 signups from Brides.com than 1 signup from Flyertalk.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, even with a patient cashier and plenty of tries, I wasn't able to make the "change payment" trick work at my local Walmart. Thank God for grocery stores (and Plastiq)!

How I talked myself around on Chase ending pooled Ultimate Rewards points

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When the travel hacking blogosphere erupted in recent weeks with "rumors" that Chase might, maybe, eventually end the ability to combine points between fixed-value Ultimate Rewards accounts and flexible Ultimate Rewards accounts, I met the rumors with a yawn, for two reasons:

  • such a change would smash the value of their credit card portfolio and cause many heavy spenders to move their purchases to more valuable rewards programs, which you'd think Chase would want to avoid, or at least avoid admitting to their shareholders;
  • and as a travel hacker, there's no use whining about how great things used to be, how terrible they are now, and how much worse they're going to be in the future.

The second point is still true, but over the weekend I had the chance to chat with a couple fellow travel hackers while up in Boston and managed to talk myself around to Chase's logic in ending points pooling, should they ever choose to do so.

Chase Freedom, Freedom Unlimited, and Ink Cash are bad cashback cards

I love my Freedoms, with which I max out the bonus categories 3-4 quarters each year, and I love my Freedom Unlimited, which gets a lot of my unbonused spend, but we need to clearly understand that they are lousy cashback cards.

The golden standard for a cashback credit card is 2% cashback on all purchases, with no annual fee. There are several such cards; the two I happen to carry are the Citi Double Cash and Fidelity Rewards cards, but there are others.

Note, however, that 2% cashback credit cards with no annual fee are invariably somewhat cumbersome: the Double Cash pays out 1% on purchases and 1% on payments. Fidelity Rewards have to be redeemed into Fidelity accounts, and you have to meet payout minimums and deal with their somewhat primitive rewards site. Both cards charge foreign transaction fees, as well.

In other words, 2% is the ceiling on the value banks are willing to offer their customers in cashback on purchases made with a no-annual-fee card, and even then, they do so only under duress and in the expectation they'll earn at least some of that value back in interest charges and ancillary fees.

Freedom, Freedom Unlimited, and Ink Cash cards fall far short of that ceiling. Instead of offering 2% cashback, Freedom and Ink Cash cards earn just 1% cashback. Instead of 2% cashback, Freedom Unlimited cards earn just 1.5% cashback. The gimmick — and let's be clear: it's a gimmick — is that Freedom and Ink Cash cards earn bonus points in certain categories, with the idea that a person who carries the card to make bonused purchases will also reach for it when making unbonused purchases, giving up a whole 1% cashback on those unbonused transactions.

With the launch of the Freedom Unlimited offer for 3% cashback the first year, we see something similar: if you can convince someone to use their Freedom Unlimited for all purchases the first year, when it's a good deal, then maybe they'll keep using it in later years, earning just 1.5% cashback and leaving 0.5% cashback for Chase to pocket.

Chase Sapphire Preferred, Ink Plus/Bold, and Ink Preferred cards are replacement-level travel cards

All three of Chase's "premium" travel credit cards are middle-of-the-pack offerings for business travelers and other heavy spenders. If you don't manufacture spend, then deciding between the flexible travel rewards cards offered by Chase, American Express, and Citi is just an exercise in optimizing between imperfect airline and hotel chain combinations.

This gives us access to what I think of as one of the most valuable insights of the economics profession: revealed preferences.

Since the Sapphire Preferred and premium Ink cards earn just one flexible Ultimate Rewards point per dollar on unbonused purchases, but the Freedom Unlimited pays 1.5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar on unbonused purchases, we know for a fact that Chase values flexible points at least 33% higher than fixed-value points.

That is to say, if Chase has determined that a dollar of unbonused spend is worth, at a maximum, 1.5 cents in rewards, then a dollar spent with the premium cards earns 1 cent in cashback plus 0.5 cents in flexibility (adjusted for the hefty annual fees you have to pay whether you get any value from the cards or not).

This makes pooled points a problem for Chase

If fixed-value Ultimate Rewards points can be freely converted into flexible Ultimate Rewards points, then a dollar spent with the Freedom Unlimited costs Chase not the 1.5 cents they're willing to pay out on unbonused spend, but 2.25 cents: 1.5 cents in cashback plus 0.75 cents in flexibility.

It literally makes no sense that for a single $95 annual fee, someone can earn 2 flexible Ultimate Rewards points using a Sapphire Preferred for their travel and dining purchases and 1.5 flexible Ultimate Rewards points on all other purchases using a Freedom Unlimited. Even if the $95 annual fee covers the cost of making the Sapphire Preferred points flexible, it can't also cover the cost of making the Freedom Unlimited points flexible.

Points that are easy to earn are easy to redeem

Everybody knows my maxim that the least valuable point is the one you don't redeem. But for banks, it's just the opposite: when you redeem a point, they actually have to cut a check, whether it's to the airline or hotel you book a paid reservation with, or the partner you transfer your points to.

That means folks who redeem points confident that they'll be able to easily earn many more are much more expensive to a bank than the folks who, in making sure they only redeem points when they're able to get the "maximum possible value," never redeem their points at all.

So if Chase knows what they're doing, as I suspect they do, they've noticed that folks who are transferring in big balances from Freedom and Freedom Unlimited cards to flexible Ultimate Rewards accounts, and especially super-premium Sapphire Reserve accounts, are much more likely to also redeem their points for expensive partner transfers and paid reservations.

While they may be content with the rates they pay their travel partners, and even the redemption rate on paid travel bookings, Chase may not be content with the speed with which folks build up and redeem their balances. Restricting points pooling thus has the added benefit of slowing down redemption rates and leaving more points orphaned, perhaps permanently, or redeemed for cash.

Conclusion

If this change ever comes down in any form, whether it's restricting household pooling, restricting pooling between personal and business cards (forcing some folks to hold 2 premium cards), or eliminating pooling altogether, there won't be anything you can do about it, besides adapting and shifting your spending to more lucrative opportunities.

But in the meantime, you should certainly be combining all your Ultimate Rewards points into your most valuable account on every statement close.

Not because of any potential devaluation or restriction, but because it's common sense.

US Bank Real-Time Rewards: don't learn from your mistakes, learn from my mistakes

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Back in March when I first wrote about US Bank's introduction of "Real-Time Rewards" to their Flexperks Travel Rewards and Altitude credit cards, reader Chris left a comment warning about a problem he'd encountered:

"So I just learned the hard way that there seems to be a temporary glitch with real-time rewards. Or at least, this is what I experienced on a purchase a few days ago and how it was explained to me by a CSR. Apparently there is a current glitch in the system where it views (at least some) travel at only 1 cent/point rather than 1.5 cents/point. While you may be able to actually process payment at the correct rate, if you don't have a high enough balance of points in your account, the system will think you don't have enough points (even though you do) and not send out real time text. In other words, say you have a $100 flight. That should cost you 6.667 points. However, the system thinks you would need 10,000 points to buy this flight and thus won't trigger real time rewards unless you have at least 10,000 points. The CSR was also unable to manually process this either. The solution for now is that they gave me enough points to make me whole on the transaction, although I have to wait for the correction to post with my statement at which time I call back and have them make the manual adjustment. There was no word when the correction would occur so be warned - I would say don't use real time rewards unless you also have enough points in your account (at least until there is a correction)."

Being a travel hacker, I sensed an opportunity: if US Bank (or the company they've farmed their rewards programs out to) is aware of the problem, and has a procedure in place to correct it, this had the potential to be a points machine. You could book travel you have enough points for at 1.5 cents each, but not at 1 cent each, call in, have the points manually added to your account, and profit.

The Flexperks Rewards Center has no idea what's going on

I recently thought I spotted an opportunity to try out this technique, booking a $300 hotel stay in Philadelphia, with a little over 20,000 Flexpoints in my account. As expected based on Chris's comment, I didn't receive a Real-Time Rewards text message, since I didn't have enough Flexpoints to cover the purchase at 1 cent each (but did at 1.5 cents each).

I called into the Rewards Center, and the front-line representative told me that Real-Time Rewards were only available at 1 cent each, not at the higher 1.5 cent travel redemption rate. I told him that wasn't right and asked for a supervisor. The supervisor had, if anything, even less of an idea of what was going on, and as she frantically flipped through her troubleshooting manual ended up on, "it says here that you can't use Real-Time Rewards for travel."

At that point I told her we weren't getting anywhere and to open a support ticket for me.

I forgot the "lodging" minimum!

Eagle-eyed readers have no doubt already spotted my mistake: the $500 minimum for "lodging" purchases to trigger Real-Time Rewards!

I don't have any excuse for forgetting about it, except that I was focused on finding the right hotel at the right price, and calculating the Flexpoints I needed to trigger the experiment Chris's experience suggested might be possible.

However, based on my experience with the Rewards Center, I think even if I had purchased a $300 flight or train ticket instead of a $300 hotel room, I would have been out of luck given the incompetence demonstrated by both the front-line representative and supervisor I spoke with.

Conclusion

I still think Real-Time Rewards is a fine idea, but I won't attempt to use the system again for travel purchases unless I have enough points to cover the purchase at 1 cent each, at least until I hear that Chris's problem has been fixed.

And, needless to say, I won't try to use Real-Time Rewards for lodging purchases under $500!

A funny window for stacking World of Hyatt promotions in Las Vegas

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I was updating my Hotel Promotions page with the latest Hilton, Starwood, and Marriott promotions when I noticed some overlapping dates during which you should be able to qualify for 3 separate World of Hyatt promotions:

  • Between May 7 and July 31, 2018, earn 20% Bonus Points on eligible spend when you stay at Hyatt Place Las Vegas or any participating MGM Resorts destination in Las Vegas. Register for the promotion here.
  • Between February 20 and June 30, 2018, earn 1,000 American AAdvantage miles per qualifying stay at Hyatt Place and Hyatt House properties worldwide. Register for the promotion here by April 30, 2018.
  • Between February 15 and May 15, 2018, earn either 500 or 1,000 bonus World of Hyatt points for each qualifying stay you complete worldwide. Registration closed March 31, 2018.

If you registered for all three promotions, then for one-night stays between May 7 and May 15, 2018, at the Hyatt Place Las Vegas you should be able to earn 1,000 AAdvantage miles, 500 World of Hyatt points, and 20% bonus points on your room rate.

I also looked up room rates for the relevant dates (these are after tax):

  • May 7, $142
  • May 8, $193
  • May 9, $172
  • May 10, $142
  • May 11, $137
  • May 12, $152
  • May 13, $132
  • May 14, $132

These rates obviously aren't worth flying out to Las Vegas for, but if you were planning a trip to Vegas anyway and didn't mind moving between properties one night at a time, the three promotions mean that on a $132 night ($116 room rate) a Globalist member would earn 1,370 World of Hyatt points (5 base points per dollar, 30% Globalist bonus, 20% promotion bonus) and 1,000 American AAdvantage miles, which is a decent discount even if you value the points at just 1 cent each.

I'll never be a Hyatt Globalist again, but for folks who are chasing it and like visiting Las Vegas, targeting a stay or two at the Hyatt Place there may be worth considering.

If you qualify, Chase Freedom Unlimited might be the deal of the decade

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Last week, I saw via Frequent Miler that Chase was offering a new bonus for new Freedom Unlimited customers: 3 fixed-value Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent on all purchases for the first year. It's not for everyone, but for those eligible this has the potential to be one of the greatest deals since Office Depot stopped selling Vanilla Reload cards.

Most churners won't be eligible

The biggest obstacle for folks who chase signup bonuses is that they likely aren't eligible to open new Chase cards if they've opened 5 or more personal credit cards in the last 24 months (the so-called "5/24 rule").

Even if you are eligible for new Chase cards, the terms of the offer state, "This product is not available to either (i) current cardmembers of this credit card, or (ii) previous cardmembers of this credit card who received a new cardmember bonus for this credit card within the last 24 months."

Under those terms existing Freedom Unlimited cardholders should be eligible for the bonus if they product-changed to the Freedom Unlimited (for example from a Slate, Sapphire Preferred, or Sapphire Reserve card) and therefore didn't receive a new cardmember bonus, but they'd first have to request another product change for their existing Freedom Unlimited, e.g. to a regular Chase Freedom.

This might be a trap

For all my shutdown datapoint needs, I rely on Vinh at Miles per Day, who frequently shares readers' experiences getting the axe. Even if you're eligible for new Chase cards, and eligible for the Freedom Unlimited, just applying for the Freedom Unlimited might be enough to put eyes on your Chase relationship and get all your credit card and bank accounts with Chase closed.

That would suck.

Make no mistake: this is one of the greatest deals of all time

I wanted to get all that out of the way because I know commenters like to snipe whenever I leave caveats like that out. But for those who are eligible for this signup bonus, this is an incredible opportunity:

  • Unlimited 3% cash back on unbonused spend is as good as it gets. If you just redeemed your Ultimate Rewards points for cash, this is would be a phenomenal cashback opportunity, handily beating the BankAmericard Travel Rewards 2.625% cash back, which is only available to folks who qualify for Platinum Honors status with them.
  • Points are awarded monthly, so even if shut down you can lose at most a single month's earnings.
  • If you already have a flexible Ultimate Rewards-earning card, then you can redeem those 3 Ultimate Rewards points for 3.75 (4.5 with the Sapphire Reserve) cents towards paid airfare, or transfer them to Southwest, Hyatt, or United.
  • After the first year you can product change the Freedom Unlimited to a Freedom card and take advantage of that card's valuable quarterly rotating categories.

Conclusion

People sometimes ask me how I think a deal or opportunity is going to play out, and I often find myself giving versions of the same answer:

  • A deal can be shut down immediately, wasting your time and energy getting reimbursed.
  • A deal can be cut off prematurely, pay out less than expected, or end up disappointing in some other way.
  • A deal can pay off exactly as planned, leaving you laughing all the way to the bank (or the beach).

The essential thing to understand is that every deal has all three possibilities built into it from the start. There are no deals so certain of success that they don't contain the possibility of failure or disappointment, and there are no deals so certain of failure they're not worth trying (as long as the stakes of failure are low enough).

For example, a few years ago the shopping portal for Marriott Rewards briefly showed a payout of 120 points per dollar spent with an online merchant. I bought a few thousand dollars of merchandise assuming that the portal would not pay out — I assumed the deal would fail! But since the merchant had a generous return policy, the stakes of failure were low enough to be worth taking the chance of success.

On the flip side, after years of steadily paying off for thousands of travel hackers around the country, Wells Fargo suddenly started sending threatening letters to, and then actually closing the accounts of, folks who manufactured bonus spend on their 5% cash back credit cards. People who, with all the experience and wisdom of the community, were certain of success, nonetheless had the deal pulled out from under their feet!

Success is not a function of picking deals guaranteed of success and avoiding deals certain of failure. Success comes from distributing your time, energy, and of course money across deals, weighted by both their chance of success and their potential payoff.

Two takeaways from Starwood Preferred Guest merger announcement

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Since blog subscribers already knew about the changes coming to Marriott's elite status qualification in August, I want to highlight two additional takeaways from the details released Monday about the new program.

Starwood Preferred Guest cardholders see a 33% devaluation

Right now Starwood Preferred Guest cardholders earn 1 Starpoint per dollar spent on purchases, and can transfer 20,000 Starpoints to 25,000 airline miles with most of their partner airlines.

After August, they'll earn 2 Marriott Rewards points per dollar spent, and be able to transfer 60,000 Marriott Rewards points to 25,000 airline miles.

The same $20,000 in spend will only get you two-thirds of the way to the same number of airline miles, meaning that on a per-dollar-spent basis, you'll see a 33% devaluation.

Ultimate Rewards transfers look a little better for certain Starwood stays booked in 2018

Currently, flexible Chase Ultimate Rewards points transfer on a one-to-one basis to Marriott Rewards, where they can be transferred on a three-to-one basis to Starwood Preferred Guest. Since Starwood properties top out at 35,000 points, they require up to 105,000 Ultimate Rewards points per night (84,000 Ultimate Rewards points per night on a fifth-night-free award stay).

In August, standard awards will top out at 60,000 Marriott Rewards points, or 43% less than top-tier, peak-season Starwood stays cost today.

"Starting in 2019," standard awards will top out at 100,000 Marriott Rewards points during peak season, bringing the 2019 award chart basically in line with where it is today, although 70,000-point off-peak Category 8 awards will still look better than the 90,000 points they cost today.

Annoyingly, Marriott did not include information one way or the other about whether the new program will continue to offer the fifth night free on award stays. I feel like they could have cut 7 seconds off one of their garbage promotional videos to mention that important piece of information (note that embargoed-for-your-protection Gary Leff says the feature will remain).

Conclusion

Both these observations point in the same direction: if you have a Starwood Preferred Guest credit card today, you have up to 4 more statement closing dates before the changes go into effect. While the Starwood Preferred Guest American Express cards have always been decent for unbonused manufactured spend, especially if you had a particularly lucrative hotel stay or airline transfer partner in mind, all your spend that posts by your July statement closing date will be grandfathered in at the current airline transfer rate and benefit from lower point requirements at Starwood Preferred Guest Category 6 and 7 properties after August 1.

In other words, it's a uniquely auspicious time to pivot away from your other unbonused manufactured spend credit cards and towards your Starwood Preferred Guest, especially if you primarily redeem your Starpoints for Category 6 and 7 redemptions.

This post is focused on Starwood Preferred Guest members because Marriott Rewards members have been so screwed for so long I don't think it's worth dwelling on the fact that the beatings will continue for the foreseeable future.

It's true that the creation of three additional Marriott Rewards redemption tiers above the current maximum redemption rate of 45,000 points will create additional headroom for Marriott to inflate properties into more expensive categories, punishing people who earn Marriott Rewards points through paid stays (and certainly make the 25,000-point and 35,000-point free night certificates just as worthless as they are today). But my working assumption is that anyone who has been earning Marriott Rewards points through paid stays is already so thoroughly downtrodden they'll scarcely notice that the beatings have slightly accelerated.

April 2018 credit card applications

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It's been a long time since I've applied for a new credit card. So long, in fact, that I was astonished to log into the credit monitoring service I got for free from one of our semiannual security breaches (or maybe from one of the semiannual security breaches of the credit monitoring services; who can say at this point?) and see that I've only signed up for one new credit card in the last two years.

This practically puts me in the position of a complete newbie to the travel hacking game, albeit a complete newbie who already has a ton of credit cards. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to run down a list of the credit cards I'm considering and give readers a chance to chime in — especially if they have a particularly brilliant powerplay I should consider!

Bank of America Alaska Airlines Visa

I've never had one of these cards (not that that particularly matters given Bank of America's approval process), but virtually all my family members are on the West Coast and the 30,000-mile and $0 first-year companion fare ($99 after the first year) are both good deals for a $75 annual fee.

While I'm generally a very strong skeptic of companion tickets, the Alaska Airlines companion ticket differs from the companion fares offered by the American Express Delta Platinum and Reserve credit cards because you can use any credit card to book it (as long as the ticket is for the Alaska Airlines credit cardholder or the credit card used is in the Alaska Airlines cardholder's name). That means it's easy to combine with travel statement credit cards like the US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards card (with Real-Time Rewards), Barclaycard Arrival Plus, or Bankamericard Travel Rewards card.

Chase Slate

I don't want to bore longtime readers with everything I love about the Chase Slate card, but for new readers, it offers:

  • no balance transfer fees for the first 60 days;
  • 0% APR on up to $30,000 in balance transfers for 15 months ($15,000 cap per 30 days, but you have 60 days to transfer with the $0 balance transfer fee);
  • ability to product change to a new Chase Freedom (or Freedom Unlimited if you don't have one already).

I don't know how valuable 15 months of free money is to you, but 15 months of free money is extremely valuable to me.

Consumers Credit Union Visa Signature Cash Rebate Card

I've had a Consumers Credit Union Free Rewards Checking account for years, since it offers 3.09% APY on balances up to $10,000 when you make 12 $0.50 Amazon balance reloads per month (yes, this process is exactly as boring as it sounds).

But the account really shines when you combine it with a credit card, since spending $1,000 per month on that card increases the interest rate to 4.59% APY on up to $20,000 in deposits.

Unfortunately, they seem pretty stingy with credit card approvals, and I haven't been able to get approved for one of those cards yet. Now that my credit report is practically clear, hopefully they'll give me a chance.

American Express Amex EveryDay Preferred or Premier Rewards Gold

These two cards offer flexible Membership Rewards points and bonus points at US supermarkets, which make them obvious candidates to rack up some big Membership Rewards balances, even if I were just to transfer them to Delta SkyMiles.

The Premier Rewards Gold has a $195 annual fee, but it's waived the first year, which makes it a possible candidate for a one-year effort to accumulate a big balance before cancelling.

Meanwhile, the EveryDay Preferred card is the kind of low-key card I can imagine keeping for the long term, even though its $95 annual fee isn't waived the first year, since it can earn 27,000 Membership Rewards points per year with minimal time or effort.

Conclusion

It's no secret that most professional travel hackers pursue big signup bonuses much more aggressively than me. But it's also no secret that they constantly have big unredeemed and unredeemable points balances!

Simpleton that I am, my view has always been that your least valuable mile or point will always be the one you don't redeem, and so I devote all of my energy towards earning miles and points I'm sure to redeem, instead of accumulating them speculatively.

With that in mind, what big signup opportunities do readers see out there that my personal blinders have kept me from noticing?

If you're already buying Hilton points for 0.5 cents each, why not buy in bulk?

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I've never successfully bought one of the US Travel Association's "Daily Getaways," but when they're released I always poke my head over to see if anything jumps out at me as a fantastic deal. As usual, there's nothing too special, but the April 16 offer did catch my attention: buying up to 250,000 Hilton Honors points for 0.5 cents each.

Now, like all Daily Getaways, this is not, on its face, a very good deal, since 0.5 cents each is roughly what Hilton Honors points are worth (unless you have a particularly high-value redemption planned, and are certain to be able to find award availability).

However, I'm already buying Hilton Honors points for 0.5 cents each when I use my Ascend American Express card at grocery stores instead of my US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards card. The latter earns 2 Flexpoints per dollar spent, worth 3% cash back towards travel redemptions, while the former earns 6 Hilton Honors points per dollar: 0.5 cents per Hilton Honors point.

why not buy in bulk?

The reason I won't be going all-in on this offer is that one of the benefits of earning points through manufactured spend over time is that you can calibrate your earning to your actual travel needs. While I "spend" $1,250 in foregone Flexpoint value whenever I earn 250,000 Hilton Honors points, I don't do so all at once, and if I suddenly find myself in more need of airfare than hotel nights, or vice versa, I can swing the dial in the needed direction.

Not a terrible way to meet minimum spend requirements

The best argument for buying Hilton Honors points in bulk at 0.5 cents each is simply as a form of manufactured spend. If you believe, as I think it's not unreasonable to believe, that Hilton Honors points are actually worth 0.5 cents each when redeemed for hotel stays, then buying them up front is simply a way of shifting forward in time your future hotel spend.

That's precisely what we do when we manufacture spend: we incur known, fixed costs in the present with sufficient confidence that the rewards we earn will be redeemed for enough value to justify the upfront payment. Normally you'd want to do that with a margin of safety: we don't normally pay 1 cent in advance for 1 cent in travel, since if all you're getting is 1 cent in travel, you may as well pay later and hang onto your money for now.

But if you have a minimum spending requirement to meet, and especially if you have a minimum spending requirement on an American Express card, where the most common manufactured spend techniques have attracted scrutiny and can cause signup bonuses to be denied, then an opportunity to incur $1,250 in expenses for $1,250 in Hilton Honors points may be worthwhile even if you don't have plans to redeem the points for outsized value, due the potential value of the signup or high spend bonus the purchase may trigger.

There are no off-the-shelf travel hacking strategies

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Last week I wrote what I thought was a commonsense corrective to the din of blogger voices encouraging readers to sign up for the IHG Rewards credit card before it was replaced with a couple of somewhat-more-expensive co-branded credit cards.

The post attracted a fair amount of disagreement (mostly polite disagreement, because my readers are phenomenal) by folks who had the card and enjoyed the annual free night benefit.

But, of course, people who already hold the card could not possibly have been the audience for a post titled "No, you shouldn't rush to sign up for IHG's crappy credit card." You can't sign up for a (Chase) card you already have. The post was explicitly addressed at people who had not yet signed up for the credit card, to discourage them from making a rash decision based purely on the fact that the card was going away.

Money is a sensitive subject, but travel hacking is about money

I understand perfectly well why folks who already carry the $49-annual-fee IHG Rewards credit card were upset by my criticism of it. How people earn, spend, and save their money is an area of almost-religious devotion among Americans, so if I say you're overpaying for a bad credit card, you don't hear that I think you're overpaying for a bad credit card, you hear that as criticism of your judgment or intelligence.

Unfortunately, that's just not going to work if you want my unbiased advice about travel hacking. You're going to have made mistakes in the past, you're making them right now, and you're going to make them in the future. If, every time you disagree with me, you treat it as a personal attack on you, you're inevitably going to experience this blog as a series of personal attacks.

I'm not here to tell you what you want to hear. I'm here to help you spend as little money as possible on the trips you want to take.

And, to be perfectly clear, I'm just as critical of my own decisions as I am of your decisions. The Delta Platinum American Express card is a tough card to justify keeping (impossible to justify if manufactured spend no longer counts towards MQD waivers), but I still have it. I'm just as much of a sucker for the overstated, overwrought, underperforming Platinum companion ticket as you are for your free IHG night.

Using someone else's travel hacking strategy is an expensive mistake

I can and do write about my travel hacking strategy:

  • Grocery store manufactured spend on my US Bank and American Express cards;
  • Office supply store manufactured spend on my Chase Ink Plus card;
  • Unbonused manufactured spend on my Chase Freedom Unlimited and 2% cash back cards.

But it makes no sense for me to recommend that strategy to an anonymous reader:

  • The Chase Ink Plus is no longer available to new applicants;
  • Not all grocery stores allow PIN-enabled prepaid debit cards to be purchased with credit cards;
  • Not every community has access to convenient liquidation strategies;
  • Some people have enough money with Bank of America to qualify for Platinum Honors rewards and earn 2.625% cash back with the Bankamericard Travel Rewards card.

I don't know you, I don't know your travel habits, I don't know your credit score, I don't know your net worth, how can I possibly give you advice about the right travel hacking strategy?

I can say under what circumstances a card is useful. A lot of readers seem to have glossed over my endorsement of the IHG Rewards credit card: "If you've got a favorite IHG property you stay at every time you visit your family, don't let me stop you from knocking off a couple bucks by using a credit card free night certificate."

I can say under what circumstances a card is worthless, like a US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards credit card in a city without grocery store or gas station manufactured spend.

But I'm never going to try to tell you the best credit card, travel hacking, or manufactured spend strategy for you without a long, expensive conversation about your travel needs and opportunities.

Footnote: it doesn't matter if I was "right"

Today it came out that even existing cardholders will have their free nights limited to properties costing 40,000 points or fewer per night, and you might have seen Nick Reyes scrambling to cancel his son's now-worthless application, but I'm not gloating that I "called it" or that this somehow proves me "right." As a travel hacker and friend of travel hackers, I wish existing cardholders got their uncapped free night certificates grandfathered from here until the end of days.

But if I was "right," I was only right because you shouldn't apply for cards you're not interested in just because there's a sudden blogger pressure campaign, whether it's based on a card's upcoming retirement or the periodic higher affiliate payouts that send them into paroxysms of prose.

And all it took to be "right" was applying the same logic over and over again: pay as little as possible for the trips you want to take.