Two great, one good, and one marginal grocery store earning boost

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By now you may have heard that starting May 1, 2020, Chase and American Express have enhanced the rate that several of their cards earn miles and points at grocery stores. I was notified by American Express by e-mail on May 1 (subject line “FQF, your Amex Card Member benefits just got better”), but I still haven’t actually received any official communication from Chase.

Here are the four most attractive offers I see, from the no-brainers to the tough call.

12 Hilton Honors points with Surpass and Aspire, plus a lifetime status angle

The American Express Surpass card usually earns 6 Hilton Honors points per dollar spent at grocery stores, and the Aspire card just an unbonused 3 points. Through July, both cards will earn 12 Honors points per dollar spent, with no maximum.

Hilton Honors points are worth about half a cent each, and normally cost about half a cent each when manufactured at grocery stores (since the same spend could be put on a card that earns 3% rewards). During this period, the card earns the equivalent of 6% cash back, which is essentially unheard of for an offer with no limit on the bonused amount.

Additionally, if your travel hacking strategy includes hitting the $15,000 spend threshold for a free weekend night with the Surpass card, or the $60,000 threshold for a second free weekend night with the Aspire, you obviously want to earn as many points as possible along the way, and the next 3 months are going to be a great opportunity to do so. American Express is also extending the expiration date of all certificates earned after May 1 and allowing them to be redeemed any night of the week.

Finally, I want to mention — without putting too much emphasis on it — that there’s a lifetime status angle here as well: all points earned with the Surpass and Aspire cards through December 31, 2020, will be treated as “base points.” Base points are a legacy feature of the Hilton Honors program from when it was a hotel loyalty scheme instead of a credit card loyalty scheme, and are (normally) earned only on your room rate and room charges. If you receive Diamond status by holding the Aspire card or by spending $40,000 on the Surpass, then you have probably never had any reason to think about base points.

The reason you might care about base points now is that Hilton has a “lifetime” elite status program: if you earn 2,000,000 base points, and maintain Diamond status for a total of 10 years (they don’t have to be consecutive), you are awarded “lifetime” Diamond elite status. For those with access to especially plentiful and socially-distanced grocery store spend, this is an opportunity to earn a phenomenal number of base points towards that 2-million-point goal.

If, like me, you believe every deal dies eventually, then you can treat lifetime Diamond status as a kind of long-term insurance policy: American Express can fire you as a customer, grocery stores can refuse to serve you, but Hilton will be stuck honoring your status for years to come.

If you do decide to pursue this angle, contact Hilton and ask them what your current lifetime base point total is and the number of years of Diamond status they’ve credited you with. I don’t know of any way to look up this information online (leave a comment if you do!).

3 and 5 Ultimate Rewards points with Chase Sapphire Preferred and Reserve

Over time every travel hacker should be diligently accumulating as many Chase Freedom cards as possible, which in the second quarter of 2020 are already earning 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent at grocery stores, on up to $1,500 per card in spend. I personally only have 2, but I know others have many more.

In May and June, 2020, Chase has increased the earning rate on their premium Sapphire Preferred and Reserve cards to 3 and 5 Ultimate Rewards points, respectively, on up to $1,500 per month in grocery store spend. That means after you’ve exhausted your quarterly Freedom bonus categories, you have another $3,000 in bonused grocery store spend to go.

Points earned with the Sapphire Reserve are worth a minimum of 1.5 cents each (when redeemed for paid travel), which makes the spend a no-brainer, but even if you only have the Sapphire Preferred I think the flexibility of Ultimate Rewards points, compared to the relative restrictiveness of Hilton points, suggests you should knock out your capped spend on these cards before going all-in on the Surpass or Aspire cards.

3 World of Hyatt points with Chase Hyatt cards

The two offers above are great, in the sense that my recommendation is: if you have the cards, take advantage of them. The Chase World of Hyatt earning boost is attractive, but doesn’t quite fall into that category: in May and June, 2020, you’ll earn 3 World of Hyatt points per dollar spent at grocery stores, on up to $1,500 per month in grocery store spend.

My perspective here is that if you plan to transfer 9,000 Ultimate Rewards points to Hyatt any time in the near future, these 9,000 World of Hyatt points should be valued the same as Ultimate Rewards points: every point you earn in World of Hyatt is a point you don’t have to transfer from Ultimate Rewards.

But whatever your plans and your level of confidence in those plans, you should almost certainly value World of Hyatt points “somewhat” less than Ultimate Rewards points, which is to say, maximize your Ultimate Rewards earnings first before turning to World of Hyatt.

4 Delta SkyMiles with American Express consumer credit cards

I no longer have an American Express Delta co-branded consumer credit card, having swapped my personal Delta Platinum card out for the business version several years ago (a card I’m planning to cancel, if the increased $250 annual fee ever hits). That means I’m not personally affected by American Express raising the earning rate on consumer cards to 4 Delta SkyMiles per dollar spent at grocery stores through July, 2020.

Let me get the obvious out of the way first: if you value and chase elite status with Delta through the Medallion Qualification Dollar waiver (spending $25,000 per calendar year) and Status Boost (bonus Medallion Qualification Miles when spending $25,000 or $30,000 on the Platinum and Reserve cards, respectively), then you should certainly try to earn as many redeemable miles as possible while doing so! A high, uncapped earning rate at grocery stores makes the next few months a great opportunity to sprint towards those goals.

Likewise, if Delta American Express consumer cards are the only cards you have featuring enhanced earning at grocery stores, they’re the only ones you can use: play the hand you’ve dealt yourself.

But as much as I enjoy the experience of flying on Delta, there’s no escaping the fact that SkyMiles are simply hard to use for high-value redemptions, and I hesitate to value them at more than 1 cent each (their value when used on “Pay with Miles” redemptions). The risk of unredeemed balances, or low-value redemptions, is much higher even than with a program like Hilton, where even break-even redemptions come with a 5th night free, for instance.

That’s what makes this earning boost a “marginal” play: a 4% earning rate in normal circumstances would be great, especially with the potential of accelerated elite status with a good airline. But given the other possibilities available, I would turn to Delta only after meeting Chase’s earning caps and satisfying my need for Hilton points.

Bonus tip: free manufactured spend at Safeway & Co.

I’d been noodling this post for a day or two when I saw Doctor of Credit share a new Safeway deal for $10 off $100 in MasterCard gift cards. The discount reduces the cost of each card below face value, making it a great opportunity to score some early wins this month.

The offer runs through May 16, 2020, but in my experience these offers must be added to your Safeway accounts during the week they launch (after which they remain linked until expiry).

So, get cracking!

Mixed (overall negative) changes to Consumers Credit Union Rewards Checking

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I wrote recently over at my personal finance blog about my favorite high-interest checking account, the Rewards Checking account offered by Consumers Credit Union. In case any readers are as big of fans of the account as I am, I wanted to discuss some upcoming changes, and my reaction to them.

The bad: rates are dropping

I’m putting this first because there’s no sugar-coating these changes: each interest rate tier is dropping by one percentage point: the lowest tier from 3.09% to 2.09% APY, the next from 4.09% to 3.09%, and the highest from 5.09% to 4.09%. For an account with a maxed out $10,000 balance, this will drop your annual interest income by $100.

If you only meet the lowest tier requirements each month (or have more than $10,000 in cash savings), then you should seriously consider moving your balance over to a competitor like Western Vista, which offers 4% interest on balances up to $15,000 (for now).

If you’re meeting the highest interest tier requirements, then while the reduction in rates is painful, there’s little you can do about it: 4.09% APY is still significantly higher than any other current offers I’m aware of.

The good: deposit and transaction requirements are changing

There are a couple moving pieces here but all three changes are positive:

  1. in April and May, you need only make 6, instead of 12, signature debit transactions in order to meet your debit transaction requirement.

  2. Beginning immediately and going forward, your total signature debit transactions do not need to add up to $100 per month.

  3. Beginning immediately and going forward, you can meet the $500 monthly deposit requirement through mobile check deposit, in addition to direct deposit.

The 3.09% and 4.09% interest rate tiers will still require $500 and $1,000 in Consumers CU credit card spend, respectively.

Conclusion

On balance, these changes are negative: the reason to use a high-interest checking account is to earn as much interest as possible, so any reduction in the interest you earn is a negative change!

But they’re not entirely negative: I meet my debit transaction requirement using the Plastiq bill payment service, which previously meant making eleven $1 payments and one $89 payment to reach the $100 monthly transaction requirement. Starting in June I’ll be able to make twelve $1 payments, which will make both my Fee-Free Dollars and my student loan balances last longer.

I use my Consumers Rewards Checking account as my primary bank account since it offers unlimited ATM fee reimbursement in addition to the high interest rate, and I’ll probably continue to do so for now, although I’ll continue to re-evaluate as the situation evolves, and will of course keep my beloved readers updated.

How I did on the American Express Hilton Aspire card

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I wrote previously about using the American Express Hilton Aspire card to cover most of the cost of my honeymoon in Hawaii at the Grand Wailea, A Waldorf Astoria Resort. Since I cancelled the card as planned earlier this year, I thought I’d give a rundown of the total value proposition I ultimately got from it.

Signup bonus

For signing up for the card using my referral link, my partner received 150,000 Hilton Honors points and I received another 20,000 (we also got another 12,000 from meeting the minimum spend requirement for the card, but that’s less than I’d earn putting the spend on my own Hilton Surpass card, so we can set that aside). Hilton now allows you to easily and (relatively) quickly combine points from multiple accounts, so we pooled those points to pay for about 45% of our five-night stay, which I value at $1,900 (half a cent per point).

Total value: $855

Free night certificate

The Hilton Aspire card also comes with a free weekend night certificate on approval. To be honest, we did so much traveling in 2019 that I don’t remember which specific night we redeemed this award for, but since we typically stay in 40,000-point-per-night properties, I’ll assume we redeemed the certificate for “about” 40,000 points.

Total value: $200

Resort credit

If you’re a travel hacking junkie you may have recently read that American Express was issuing $250 resort credits to folks who had not completed eligible resort stays in 2020. There seems to be some confusion over exactly what’s going on, but this wasn’t news to me: after completing our stay in early January, 2019, our $250 resort credit posted automatically a week or two later. Then, in roughly April of 2019, a second $250 credit posted without explanation.

The most obvious explanation to me is that since the card was launched so recently, there were some early coding errors which kept some resort credits from posting automatically. When they discovered the error, American Express then manually applied an additional $250 credit to all accounts that had eligible resort activity, whether or not they had received an automatic credit.

I value the first, correct $250 resort credit at about $125 (we wouldn’t have run up the charges we did if they weren’t going to be reimbursed), and the second, incorrect credit at full value.

Total value: $375

Airline fee credits

If all the above makes it sound like I’m bragging, here’s the part where I prove that’s not true: I blew it on maximizing the card’s airline fee credits. The plan was to receive 3 years’ worth of airline fee credits while paying a single annual fee: in late 2018, in 2019, and in early 2019 before cancelling the card.

2018 went according to plan: we received the card in late 2018, quickly designated American Airlines as our airline, and bought 2 $100 electronic gift cards. The credits posted quickly, but we forfeited the remaining $50 in credits. Fortunately, the cards were used for flights my partner would have otherwise paid cash for, so I assign them the full $200 in value.

The right move in 2019 would have been to immediately buy another $200 in cards. But with our January travel, it just didn’t happen, and then I saw reports that gift cards had stopped triggering credits. Other options (JetBlue pet fees, etc.) still worked, but that would have involved switching the designated airline, learning the new technique, and monitoring the account all over again. So I did…nothing. We used the card for a few American Airlines checked bag fees in 2019, but I believe we received a total of $40 in 2019 credits.

For much the same reason, 2020 was a complete write-off, before we cancelled the card in late January.

Total value: $240

Unlimited Priority Pass membership

This is definitely the benefit that I was most surprised by: it turns out there are a lot of Priority Pass lounges! One issue when you have free lounge passes, whether through elite status, SkyBonus redemptions, or the 10 annual visits through the American Express Hilton Surpass card is that you constantly have to weigh whether you’re going to be laid over in an airport long enough to justify burning one of your lounge passes.

But with an unlimited membership, you can just pop in for some celery sticks or cheese cubes; it’s kind of an awesome feeling. It’s hard to put a value on something you would never pay for, but in a heavy travel year like 2019, an unlimited Priority Pass membership was very conservatively worth $100 to me.

Total value: $100

Diamond status

Worthless, I already have it and can book reservations for my partner when she’s traveling without me.

Total value: $0

Conclusion

The basic math here looks pretty good: I paid a $450 annual fee for what I have tried to conservatively calculate as $1,770 in value. Of course, part of that was a fluke: it would have been $250 less if American Express hadn’t awarded us two resort credits. Likewise, part of that was human error: it would have been $510 more if I had been able to trigger all 3 airline fee credits.

If you’re wondering whether the card is worth getting, the obvious answer is yes, if you can:

  • get it at the end of the year;

  • through a referral;

  • with a plan to use your points for a high-value stay;

  • and a plan to use your weekend night;

  • and a plan to use your resort credit;

  • and a plan to use your airline fee credit.

If you meet all those requirements, you can easily get several thousand dollars in value for a single $450 annual fee.

But this is the first card I had my partner sign up for in what Frequent Miler calls “two-player mode,” and let me tell you, it is absolutely exhausting. We ended up doing ok this time, but I’m not planning to try it again any time soon. You probably already know whether your partner has any interest in travel hacking, and if they don’t, you’re not going to convince them with some free cheese cubes in an Alaska Airlines lounge.

Some personal news

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Yesterday I lost my job, over what I would call a difference of opinion: I thought I was doing a good job, and my boss thought I was doing a bad job, and my boss had the tie-breaking vote.

Background

About 3 years ago I started working extremely part time in a remote “back-office” position. It was fun and I was learning a lot. Over time, the firm grew, and I got more hours. As I spent more time at that job, I had less and less time for my blogs (here and at Saverocity) and my readers. That felt bad, but I was making so much more money working than I ever did blogging that it seemed like the right trade-off. For the last few months I’ve been working full-time, and have barely had any time to write anything, and that felt really bad, but once again, the money was good so I felt ok about the trade-off.

And then I got fired, which obviously doesn’t make the trade-off look very good in hindsight.

Everything is fine for now

I’ve been incredibly fortunate that as my blogging has slowed down, and I only managed to get out a Subscribers-only Newsletter every month or two, a lot of subscribers stuck with me, so I still have a trickle of income coming in from my beloved readers.

After battling through 3 different broken IT systems, I have also put in my applications in for unemployment insurance, SNAP and Medicaid (after enjoying precisely one month of ACA exchange coverage), and while there will no doubt be lots of back and forth with those offices, now I have plenty of time to fill out paperwork, so I’m not terribly worried about paying the bills for the next few months.

All of which is to say, I’m not going to start a GoFundMe anytime soon. I’m not asking for charity — for now!

Going forward

On the other hand, now that blogging is going to be my only source of income for the time being, you should definitely subscribe to my blogs! To that end, I’m immediately reducing the price of a blog subscription from $25 to $15 per month. All subscribers with $20 and $25 subscriptions will see their recurring charge reduced to $15 (obviously readers with older subscriptions won’t see their rate increase).

Is this a bit counter-intuitive? It sure is! Reducing existing subscription rates will decrease my income from subscriptions by a couple hundred bucks a month, and needless to say, I’m not exactly thrilled about that. But the goal is to get my Newsletters and content in front of as many eyes as possible, to convince as many people as possible that my content is worth supporting. If the blog, my Subscribers-only Newsletters, and the (now vast) Newsletter Archive aren’t worth $15 per month, then so be it.

But I’d rather find out sooner than later!

Conclusion

If you like the blog, and it’s not going to break the bank, please subscribe! This site has always been a labor of love, and it’s an incredible feeling to make a living helping people pay as little as possible for the trips that they want to take. If you can’t afford a subscription for now, rest assured the blog itself will always be free (and hopefully a lot busier, now that I’ve got some free time on my hands).

Travel hacking during the plague

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I know my gentle readers have a lot on their minds these days, but so does everybody else. That makes the current crisis as good a time as any to step back and see if there are any unusual opportunities to deploy your very specific set of skills.

What to do with existing miles and points balances

This is the easy part. Since you already have the miles and points in your account, you should already be looking for opportunities to strategically redeem them, and those opportunities are now everywhere. Even with reduced flight frequencies as the airlines go into shutdown mode, there are thousands of unsold seats airlines are trying to remainder off by opening up award availability. To take as an example the first route I looked at, non-stop economy and premium cabin award space is wide open between Washington, DC, and Munich during Oktoberfest.

Remember: you don’t need to plan on taking any flights you book. If the crisis hasn’t abated by the time your travel dates come around, the flights will be canceled and you’ll be refunded. If the airline goes under, your miles won’t be any good anyway. The point is, as always, to redeem the miles and points you have for the trips you want to take. The fact that it’s hard to imagine what the world will look like 3, 6, or 9 months from now shouldn’t stop you from jumping on the opportunities that are available here and now.

The same goes for hotel reservations. For example, a casual check revealed 5-night award availability over New Years at the Grand Wailea, A Waldorf Astoria Resort. As above, you don’t need to actually intend to take the trip, but you should certainly take advantage of increased award availability now, while paid bookings are non-existent.

What to earn now

Your existing miles and points balances are a “sunk cost,” and you need to set them aside when considering what to earn now, unless you’re very close to redeeming one of the newly-available awards mentioned above. The last thing you want to do is chase award availability that’s gone by the time you earn enough points. Redeem your existing balance if you can, and forget about them if you can’t. If you don’t anticipate traveling, or even booking travel, for at least three months, you should pivot hard to cash back.

Fortunately, we’re in a great spot for earning cashback. Discover it cards will still earn 5% cashback at grocery stores for the next few days, and then you can pivot to Chase Freedom cards to earn 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar (in both cases on up to $1,500 in spending per card). Safeway, Meijer, and Giant are all running promotions on PIN-enabled prepaid debit card purchases (either in the form of immediate rebates or gas discounts) so this is as good a time as it gets to hammer out those rewards.

What about transferrable points?

So far, so good: if you have points, redeem them for refundable reservations while award availability is wide open. But what about your points balances which can be transferred in only one direction, like Chase Ultimate Rewards and American Express Membership Rewards points?

With these points, it’s necessary to think probabilistically. This is true all the time, but it’s especially true when we’re facing this level of uncertainty.

Once you’ve transferred a point from your flexible points currency to a given program, there are three possible outcomes: you’ll redeem it for a high value (expensive flight, premium cabin), you’ll redeem it for a low value (cheap flight, economy cabin), or you won’t redeem it at all (expiration, bankruptcy).

The same is true if you don’t transfer the point: you can redeem it for a high value (1.5 cents per point with a Chase Sapphire Reserve, for instance), or a low value (1 cent per point in cash, for example).

It’s common to ask the question, should you speculatively transfer points during promotions that award bonuses on inbound transfers? This is a version of the same question: should you speculatively transfer points to book awards you aren’t certain you’ll use just because award availability is wide open?

Manufactured spend, reselling, portal cashback

Two things are true: the present moment is characterized by unusually high risk and uncertainty. Many businesses, large and small, will survive the calamity. Many businesses, large and small, will not. That naturally creates an elevated level of uncertainty in otherwise-calm markets.

Metabank seems to do a pretty good job of manufacturing and distributing prepaid debit cards under normal conditions, but I don’t know whether they have enough cash on hand, or access to federal bailout money, to survive a total shutdown of economic activity.

Likewise most of the cashback portals seem to have low overhead and predictable cash flow. But if online spending shuts down for the next three months, where is their cash flow going to come from? Without it, how are customer cashback payouts going to be funded?

One response to these conditions is to scale back your activities to reduce your personal exposure to these vulnerabilities. That’s a good, natural response and no one will ask questions if you say you took the second quarter of 2020 off to see how things shook out.

But I’ve been around long enough to know that some people are going to be scaling way up, in order to take advantage of huge discounts today to reap outsized profits tomorrow. That’s not for me — I’m a small fish in a very, very large pond, but the folks who pull it off are going to be bragging about it on Twitter, or whatever the post-plague version of Twitter is, for the next 30 years.

Replacing a (potentially) compromised Visa prepaid debit card

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If you play this game long enough, you guaranteed to see everything eventually. In many ways, I think travel hackers have a better view into the guts of the US financial system than the people who designed it, because we get to see it from every angle.

There have been lots of report of compromised MasterCard gift cards over the years, typically taking the form of packaging that has been opened and resealed after the card’s data has been swiped. I still haven’t encountered that one, but during the recent Safeway promotion for $15 off two $100 Visa gift cards (a classic negative-cost opportunity to manufacture spend), I ran into what I suspect was a compromised Visa card.

Stuck packaging, missing CVV2, dead magnetic strip

My hackles were first raised when trying to open the card’s packaging, and found it was much harder to open than usual — remember I’d been loading up on these cards for several days, so had a good sense of how easy they typically are to open. This was annoying, but not alarming, since I’ve encountered multiple versions of these cards, so I assumed that I had happened to grab either an earlier or newer generation off the shelf.

Once I’d cracked it open, more or less shredding the original packaging, I immediately noticed that only the last digit of the security code on the back was visible. The obvious problem here was that it meant I was unable to check the card’s balance online, since the website requires you to enter all three digits. Now I was not just annoyed, but worried.

In principle to liquidate the card all I needed were the last four digits on the front of the card, which work as the card’s PIN at money order retailers. Nevertheless, out of an abundance of caution, I used my home credit card reader to see if the card itself had been tampered with, and discovered that the magnetic strip was completely dead.

I want to stress, despite these three clues, I have no proof that the card was actually tampered with in any way. Old packaging, sticky glue dots on the card’s backside, and improper handling could easily explain all three of the issues I saw. Nevertheless, I needed a replacement.

Metabank mailed me one for free

To request a replacement, I called the number on the back of the card and eventually navigated my way to a customer service representative. I explained the situation to him and he asked for the long string of digits above the card’s bar code. Using that information, he told me that the card’s value was still in place. Since I knew (but didn’t tell him) that the card had also been demagnetized, I insisted on a replacement.

I placed the call on the 18th and was assured the replacement card would arrive within 7-10 days. I actually received it on the 24th, just 6 days after my call.

Conclusion

In my case, requesting a replacement was easy since the card’s value hadn’t been used yet, and I want to stress, I do not know whether it was maliciously compromised or simply defective. Nonetheless, I want to make readers aware that if you run into a similar situation, resolving it is relatively painless, as long as you act quickly after discovering the problem. Had the card’s value already been drained, I presume the process would have been substantially more complicated and time-consuming.

Manufactured spend with and without promotions and bonuses

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On my way to the store the other day I realized that we hadn’t seen a really good grocery store promotion in a while. The beginning of December featured a Safeway deal for $10 off $100 in Visa gift cards, and Giant offered gas points on Visa gift cards during a similar period, but it’s been a slow couple months since then.

It occurred to me that it might be useful to write up a list of the most common promotions we see come up repeatedly, and why they’re worth watching for. These aren’t secrets, in fact the public travel hacking blogosphere and Twitter typically blow up each time they come around, but rather a sort of index of the most valuable promotions so less-experienced folks might learn what to watch for.

Grocery Stores

Grocery stores are one of the most widely, albeit not universally, available merchants for manufactured spend, since they’re present in most larger communities and typically sell one or more brand of PIN-enabled prepaid debit cards.

Without promotions, manufacturing grocery store spend depends in large part on the cards you have available. I think of grocery store spend as giving me “about” a 50% discount off paid travel, with the US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards earning 2 Flexpoints per dollar (worth 1.5 cents each), and the American Express Hilton Surpass earning 6 Honors points per dollar (worth “about” 0.5 cents each, albeit with the possibility of much higher value redemptions at top-tier properties and on 5-night award stays). The American Express EveryDay Preferred and Gold cards offer 4.5 and 4 Membership Rewards points per dollar, respectively, although with certain additional restrictions (I do not currently carry either card).

That’s a solid core savings on paid travel, and these days it represents the majority of my day-to-day manufactured spend.

During promotions, grocery store manufactured spend can be profitable even if you don’t hold those cards (and even more profitable if you do). The three main types of grocery store promotions are cash discounts, grocery discounts, and gas discounts.

A cash discount is the best form any promotion can take, and you should always be on the lookout for them. Here are some recent examples, and what to watch for:

  • Safeway: $10 off $100 in prepaid debit cards. For all such promotions, always pay attention to whether the terms apply to “$100 gift cards” or to “$100 in gift cards.” The former language may mean the promotion requires you to buy lower-denomination, fixed-value cards, while the latter language means you can apply the promotion to higher-denomination, variable-value cards. The “good” version of this promotion was available in September (Visa), October (MasterCard), and November (Visa and MasterCard) of last year. An example of the “bad” version was offered in September on MasterCard gift cards.

  • Giant Eagle: $10 off $100 or $150 in prepaid debit cards. This deal was offered in June and November (Visa) of last year, and in December of 2018 (MasterCard).

A grocery discount is a promotion that requires you to buy “something” in addition to a prepaid debit card in order to realize your savings. It’s not quite as valuable as a cash discount, because it virtually guarantees “breakage:” buying items in excess of the required amount in order to trigger the discount. If a promotion gives $15 off $15 in grocery purchases, you’re likely to grab items costing $16 or $17 in order to make sure you’re over the threshold to trigger the discount. Some recent examples:

  • Giant: $15 off $15 in groceries when you buy $250 or more in Visa gift cards (June) and $10 off $10 in groceries when you buy $100 in Visa gift cards (July).

  • Hy-Vee: $10 Hy-Vee gift card when you spend $125 on Visa gift cards (December, 2016). This form of promotion is actually slightly more flexible than a grocery discount since Hy-Vee gift cards can be spent on a wider range of items.

The final form of grocery store promotion, gas discounts, is the least valuable. I don’t say that because I don’t own a car, but rather because unless you literally drive for a living it’s virtually impossible to redeem as many gas points as you can earn during a single week’s promotion.

Take for example a typical promotion offering 3 fuel points per dollar spend on Visa gift cards at Giant. The first $500 Visa gift card you buy earns you $1.50 per gallon off your next tank of gas, worth $15 on a 10-gallon tank of gas, or $30 on a 20-gallon tank of gas. That’s a good deal, better even than the fixed cash or grocery discounts discussed above.

The trouble is, unlike cash or groceries (at least the canned, paper, and cleaning goods I typically buy), gas points both expire and are worth less, the more of them you earn. Filling up a 20-gallon tank twice in a month might be reasonable. Filling it up 4 times in a month is possible if your commute is long enough and your fuel efficiency low enough. But at that point you’ve only accounted for four $500 prepaid debit cards, $2,000 in spend, and perhaps $60 in credit card rewards. That lack of scalability is why I consider gas promotions to be the lowest-value grocery store promotions.

Office Supply Stores

Like grocery store manufactured spend, office supply store manufactured spend has the feature of being worthwhile all the time on cards that bonus office supply store spend, but much more broadly profitable during periodic promotions.

Without promotions, someone with a Chase ink Plus, Bold, or Cash card can simply buy $300 Visa gift cards from Staples.com, paying an $8.95 shipping fee and earning 1,545 Ultimate Rewards points per card. At 1.25 cents per point this is again a minimum discount of “about” 50% off paid travel booked through the Ultimate Rewards portal, with an even higher discount if you also carry the Chase Sapphire Reserve and redeem points for 1.5 cents each.

But during promotions, even unbonused office supply store spend may be worthwhile. When Staples waives activation fees on Visa or MasterCard gift cards, your only cost is your time and liquidation fees. Earning 300 Ultimate Rewards points with a Chase Freedom Unlimited while paying $1 in liquidation fees sounds to me like a good deal. At that point, the question simply comes down to whether or not you can scale the deal.

Likewise, when Office Depot and OfficeMax offer $15 off $300 in gift cards, as they did in December, it doesn’t really matter what credit card you use to earn rewards, since you’re virtually guaranteed to come out ahead no matter what.

Conclusion: promoted, unpromoted, or unbonused?

There are, of course, unbonused manufactured spend opportunities available year-round, like the Vanilla prepaid debit cards available at many drug stores, the Metabank cards available at Simon Mall locations, or the lower-denomination fixed-value cards available at stores like Bed Bath & Beyond.

The interesting question is: what is going to make you spring into action? if you’re grinding it out, manufacturing spend all day every day, then any given promotion on any given day is just icing on the cake, perhaps encouraging you to free up some credit limit headroom to maximize it on your most valuable credit cards, but nothing more.

On the other hand, even if your time is too valuable to justify manufacturing spend on a day-to-day basis, there may be promotions that come around every month, quarter, or year that motivate you to wring every last dollar, roll of toilet paper, or tank of gas out of them.

The calculation is up to you, but hopefully the suggestions above help get you on the right track.

Travel hacking in weak periods of manufactured spend

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Sometimes it feels like the travel hacking community only has two speeds: greed and panic. It’s always either the golden age of manufactured spend or its funeral. Worse yet, it’s people who have been playing the game the longest that are most prone to these mood swings, even though they should have enough experience to know better!

The unfortunate fact is, if you aren’t able to stay involved in the community through periods of weak opportunity, you’re not going to be around when periods of peak opportunity return. With that in mind, I thought I’d give a little pep talk and share some strategies for surviving through the lean times.

Clean up your credit card portfolio

This is always good advice, but it’s especially good advice in periods of limited opportunity. American Express recently announced they were breaking their Delta Platinum co-branded credits cards by increasing the annual fee to $250 and ending the bonus redeemable miles earned when you meet the $25,000 and $50,000 spend thresholds. In periods of peak opportunity, those changes might be negligible, while in periods of weak opportunity they have turned the card into a $250 companion ticket that doesn’t even include their entire route network, so I’ll be cancelling when my next annual fee is due.

Pivot to signup bonuses and annual benefits

If manufactured spend is going to play a smaller role in your travel hacking strategy, then logically signup bonuses and recurring benefits should take on a larger role.

Chase World of Hyatt credit cards aren’t very useful for manufactured spend (unless you’re spending your way to Globalist status), but offer a free Category 1–4 Hyatt night each year, which is almost certain to cover the card’s $95 annual fee, and currently give up to 50,000 bonus points on $6,000 in spend.

Likewise the Bank of America Alaska Airlines credit cards aren’t very attractive in periods of unlimited manufactured spend, but their annual companion tickets are extremely valuable; why not pick one or more up while times are slow?

Focus on one or two goals

When opportunities are plentiful, just about everything becomes worthwhile: hotel points, airline miles, cashback, chasing status, mileage running, reselling. When times are lean, you can focus on a few concrete goals.

A 5-night award stay at a top-tier Hilton property costs 380,000 Hilton Honors points, or roughly $64,000 in grocery store spending on an American Express Surpass card. If your liquidation options are limited, that may be all the manufactured spend you can do in a year — but you still get a 5-night award stay at a top-tier Hilton property! A quick glance at winter holiday rates at the Grand Wailea, A Waldorf Astoria Resort, suggests a cash price of about $11,000. I’m not going to pay that much for a 5-night stay — but $64,000 in manufactured spend is well within the realm of possibility.

I don’t fly Southwest, but it’s easy to imagine those who do finding it worthwhile to spend $120,000 per year on their co-branded credit cards in order to earn a companion pass. That works out to $10,000 per month, or roughly $1,000 every 3 days. In times of peak opportunity, that might be a rounding error, but even when times are lean it’s easily manageable if it’s your only goal.

Get creative

Everybody has opportunities they know about but don’t pursue because during fat years, the juice doesn’t seem worth the squeeze. There’s nothing wrong with that: most people pursue the techniques that are most interesting and rewarding for them. You may not like buying and depositing money orders, but love tracking gift cards in a spreadsheet for resale. We’re different, and that’s great.

But when your favorite liquidation avenues close, you may find that you have the time (and need) to at least explore those other options. Maybe gift card reselling isn’t at much work as you think it is. Maybe your office supply stores are better stocked than you thought. Maybe specialized gift cards are easier to liquidate than you expected.

Conclusion

In my experience, most people get into travel hacking through one big discovery. For me, it was finding out that Kiva loans triggered the “charitable contribution” bonus on the US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards card., which meant I was earning up to 6% in travel rewards on short-term loans.

And likewise, most people fall out of travel hacking when their one big discovery ends, as all deals eventually do. If you cut your teeth buying coins, then money orders seem like a pale imitation. If you started with Tio payments, then it’s hard to get excited about Plastiq payments. And if you flew around the world with Plastiq payments, the next deal isn’t going to seem very exciting.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and nobody is obliged to keep travel hacking after the hobby loses their interest. But let’s not pretend it’s travel hacking that quit; it was you.

Reminder: restrictions do differ between different shopping portals

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Starting online purchases at a shopping portal is one of the simplest techniques travel hackers use, and it’s also one of the most reminiscent of extreme couponing: click through an online portal (be sure to clear your browser’s cookies first), make a purchase, and you’ll earn some miles, points, or cashback from the portal in addition to your credit card rewards.

While there are dozens, if not hundreds, of different online shopping portals, with a little bit of experience they can come to seem more or less interchangeable (they’re mostly operated by the same firm on the backend), which can be both a good and bad thing. It’s a good thing when it means the same technique will work on multiple portals, like the Wall Street Journal/Barron’s subscription deal; it’s a bad thing when the same restrictions are imposed on each portal, or even across portals.

It’s worth keeping an eye out for differences between portal restrictions

For my sins, I’ve had to book a couple upcoming hotel stays with cash, and decided to see what the current situation was on my online shopping portal accounts. The problem, in general, is that merchants got wise to people double-dipping through both shopping portals and their proprietary rewards programs, and so began to limit portal payouts when you log into your rewards account before completing a reservation. To give a simple example, if you click through to Hotels.com through TopCashBack, you’ll receive 8% cashback if you make your reservation without logging in, but only 2% cashback if you log in first:


BeFrugal is slightly more competitive, at 10% and 2.5%, respectively:

While this may seem like a cheap move for Hotels.com (because it is), the logic is obvious: they already operate a loyalty program offering a rebate of “about” 10% on hotel stays (every ten nights booked through the site earns a free night of equal or lesser average value). Giving people an additional discount just for knowing about it must give their director of marketing enough heartburn as it is.

This compromise at least makes shoppers stop and think: it’s true 12.5% (through BeFrugal) is higher than 10%(logged into Hotels.com), but a 10% cash payout might be more valuable than a 10% in-kind payout with a 2.5% cash bonus. In fact, I think under virtually all circumstances it would be.

But not all shopping portals have identical restrictions

Ideally, what you’d like is a shopping portal with a competitive payout rate that still works on rewards-earning transactions, and that’s why it’s worth checking the restrictions on each portal, instead of just assuming they’re all identical.

Lemoney, for example, offers 5.5% cashback at Hotels.com without restriction on whether you’re also collecting Hotels.com free night credits:

To be clear: while my full cashback amount has already tracked properly, it won’t be payable for months so there’s no way of telling whether I’ll actually receive the full amount.

I found the same was true at Hilton, where BeFrugal offers 6% cashback to non-members and non-elite members, but just 1.5% to Silver, Gold, and Diamond elites:

While Lemoney offers 4% cashback to everyone:

Conclusion

Shopping portals have never played a particularly large role in my travel hacking game, simply because I’ve always been fortunate enough to have access to adequate manufactured spend to meet my travel needs, so this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive look into shopping portals, let alone a recommendation to use one over another (although feel free to find my own personal referral links on my Support the Site! page).

But it is meant as a reminder that while shopping portal terms are often similar, they aren’t always identical, and the differences between them can end up being more lucrative than you expect, particularly when you do end up needing to pay cash for travel expenses.