Don't sleep on the Better Balance Rewards forced product change spending bonus

One of the interesting things about Bank of America credit cards, historically, has been that they were pretty indifferent to how many of the same credit card you carried. Bank of America’s credit card portfolio isn’t terribly impressive, but they had two gems where this indifference really shone: the Alaska Airlines suite of personal and business credit cards, with their generous annual companion tickets, and the Better Balance Rewards card, which offered $30 in cash per quarter, per card, as long as you simply paid off your card’s balance each month.

Knowing Bank of America’s willingness to let you carry multiple copies of the same card, many people used the Better Balance Rewards card as a target when requesting a product change from a card they’d already met the signup bonus on and didn’t have any more need for. $30 per quarter may not sound like much, but once you had a system set up to charge and pay off the card, it was also free money, which folks in our hobby are typically fairly interested in.

Back around May, 2023, those cards were forcibly product-changed into Unlimited Cash Rewards cards, which can be as good a way as any of earning 2.625% cash back on all purchases if you have Platinum Honors status with Bank of America. Of course, there’s no reason to have more than one 2.625% cash back card, so it wasn’t unreasonable to bemoan the loss of your cache of Better Balance Rewards cards which provided a steady flow of quarterly income.

Sidelined in that conversation was the fact that alongside the loss of passive income, the new Unlimited Cash Rewards cards came with a bonus of $200 when you spend $1,000 on the card by September 30, 2023. Since there’s no reason to put actual spend on more than one of these cards, I suddenly worried that folks who had more than one Better Balance Rewards card may have forgotten about the little glossy sheet that came in their new card’s envelope describing the free money they were entitled to.

So, since September is not all that far away, be sure to score the $200 product change bonus before you cancel your new Unlimited Cash Rewards cards or change them to a more valuable product.

"Transfer" timeline for Just 4 U Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan redemptions

Last month I wrote about the option of redeeming Albertsons (and their subsidiaries) Just 4 U rewards for Alaska Airline Mileage Plan miles. The option of redeeming, for example, 7 Just 4 U rewards for 1,300 Mileage Plan miles instead of a $10 grocery reward is the functional equivalent of buying Mileage Plan miles for 0.77 cents each.

If you can generate (or have stockpiled; more on that below) more Just 4 U points than you can use for actual groceries, that's a perfectly sensible redemption, especially if you’re saving up miles for a premium award on one of Alaska’s partners.

My April Alaska Airlines redemptions posted in one batch on May 1

What I could not answer in that earlier post is how long it takes miles to appear in your Mileage Plan account after you’ve ordered a redemption. That’s because one or both of the programs backdates your miles to the date of the Just 4 U redemption, not the date they become available for Alaska Airlines awards.

In April I could see that I had placed an order for 100 Mileage Plan miles on January 27, and I could see 100 Mileage Plan miles dated January 27, but I could not see when the miles actually became available.

[Note: I say I could see the order “in April” because Just 4 U only shows your order history for 90 days, so when I wrote that post on April 6 I could still see my January 27 order, but I cannot see it in my Just 4 U order history any more.]

That being the case, over the course of April I made four additional Just 4 U redemptions, on the 6th, 14th, 19th, and 29th, and made it a point to check my Mileage Plan account every morning to see if anything had posted. That way, while I might not catch the exact moment the miles became available, I would know within a pretty narrow window.

That’s how I found out that all four of my Just 4 U redemptions (three for 100 miles and one for 250 miles) all posted on May 1, 2023.

Obviously one datapoint is neither dispositive nor permanent. For all I know they post miles every 45 days and May 1 just happened to be 45 days after the last batch posted in March. But that seems less likely than all of each month’s mile redemptions posting sometime on or around the first day of the following month.

There’s no point redeeming aggressively but there’s no point waiting

Batched posting like this means, on the one hand, you don’t need to immediately redeem each reward as you earn it (as a reminder, you earn one reward for every 100 points you earn in the Just 4 U program, and larger redemptions give better value) since if you get your redemption in by (near) the end of the month you’ll receive the miles on the same day as you would have, had you redeemed earlier in the month.

On the other hand, each Just 4 U account’s redemption inventory resets every week so if you are earning more rewards than you know what to do with, you don’t want to miss a redemption opportunity by sitting on your hands either.

About that stockpiling strategy

Normally, “rump” Just 4 U points expire at the end of the month they’re earned and rewards expire at the end of the month after they’re earned. Back when it was trivial to amass unlimited Just 4 U points alongside credit card rewards a number of people pointed out that these rewards could be extended indefinitely by signing up for a paid FreshPass subscription. I’m sure there are plenty of people still eating for free on the rewards they earned back then!

This naturally raises the question: if another opportunity for unlimited Just 4 U points comes along, should you pay for a FreshPass subscription in order to redeem 22 rewards per week for Alaska Airlines miles? How many subscriptions? One for every member of your family? One for your dog?

This is not, fortunately, a question I can answer for you because it goes to the heart of how you choose to play the game. I chose not to get a FreshPass subscription and stockpile rewards back then simply because that’s who I am: after I’d filled up my fridge, and my freezer, and my cupboards, and my linen closet, and my local free pantry, I just stopped. Paying $99 per year to buy groceries I didn’t want or need for the rest of my life or until the program was devalued simply didn’t have any appeal for me. I wrote it up for my Subscribers-Only Newsletter and moved on.

On the other hand, I know lots of people who stockpile every currency under the sun on the off chance they find an opportunity to score the perfect luxury redemption. The thrill of finding first class award availability or consecutive exotic award nights with one currency is simply more exciting than seeing the value of another hoard whittled away by devaluations, mergers, or bankruptcies is discouraging.

And if you’re one of those people, then why not add Just 4 U into the mix? Of course, I don’t need to tell you that: you probably already have!

Just 4 U Alaska Airlines redemptions work, for what it's worth

A few months back a number of bloggers reported that Just 4 U rewards (the rewards program of Albertsons grocery stores and its countless sub-brands) could be redeemed for Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles.

How it works

The basic mechanism is simple. When a Just 4 U account has a store in Alaska designated as your “preferred store,” then you’ll see the following redemption options:

• 1 Reward: 100 Mileage Plan miles.

• 2 Rewards: 250 miles.

• 3 Rewards: 400 miles.

• 4 Rewards: 600 miles.

• 5 Rewards: 850 miles.

• 7 Rewards: 1300 miles.

Thus, you can redeem a total of up to 22 Rewards per week per Just 4 U account for a total of up to 3,500 Mileage Plan miles.

As a reminder, you earn 1 Reward each time you earn 100 Just 4 U points. Just 4 U points expire at the end of each month, but Rewards expire at the end of the month after they’re earned. Paid FreshPass membership keeps your Rewards from expiring indefinitely.

Mileage Plan Miles Versus Grocery Rewards

If you have access to unlimited Just 4 U points, then the “grocery rewards” double dip is the most valuable option because it allows you to stack multiple grocery rewards redemptions on a single purchase, even to the point of generating a negative balance (although since this will invariably raise suspicion, I recommend spending the negative balance instead, for example by buying a prepaid debit card).

That technique lets you redeem 44 Rewards for $64 off your bill when you buy $20 in groceries (leaving you with $44 to spend on dairy, alcohol, gift cards, or anything else that isn’t usually eligible for Rewards).

Note that the grocery rewards option is only more valuable because of the double dip. If you could not double dip grocery rewards, then redeeming 7 Rewards for 1,300 Mileage Plan miles instead of a $10 grocery reward looks a lot more attractive. Lots of people would be willing to buy Mileage Plan miles for 0.77 cents each, at least at the margin.

What this means is that while double dipping grocery rewards may be the best combination of Just 4 U redemptions, single dipping Mileage Plan redemptions at the 7-Reward level is a solid alternative after you’ve redeemed those and have Rewards left over each week. And this is, in fact, more common than you might think.

Leftover Just 4 U Rewards

Take, for example, last week’s offer for 10 Just 4 U points per dollar spent on Google Play cards. Since you can buy cards up to $500 in value, the maximum earning per card is 5,000 Just 4 U points, or 50 Rewards. After redeeming 44 Rewards through the grocery rewards double dip, you’re left with 6 Rewards. By earning a single additional Reward (or using a leftover Reward from a previous week), you can also redeem for the highest-value Mileage Plan reward the same week, before repeating the process the next week.

I don’t engage in much gift card reselling anymore, but when very high earning rates are offered on high-value cards (or even cards you plan to use yourself), you may be able to break even or turn a profit on Just 4 U rewards in addition to the credit card rewards you earn on the original purchase.

Comparing IHG's 4th-night-free with Marriott and Hilton's 5th-night-free

I was reading Danny the Deal Guru’s write-up of the latest Chase IHG Rewards signup offers and something jumped out at me: the 4th-night-free benefit offered to cardholders, including those who hold the no-annual-fee IHG Rewards Traveler card. To be clear, this isn’t a new benefit, it’s just one I haven’t had a chance to think about in depth.

Generally speaking, I don’t rate IHG or their rewards program very highly, because while they have an enormous global footprint, they’re rarely competitive compared with the main hotel programs I rely on, Hilton and Hyatt. For example, I regularly visit Portland, OR, which on a sample search turned up two downtown Hyatt properties priced at 12,000 World of Hyatt points, a Hilton priced at 37,000 Hilton Honors points, a Marriott priced at 30,000 Bonvoy points, and a Kimpton priced at 25,000 IHG Rewards Club points (plus a nightly “amenity fee”). For a one-night stay, it would be ridiculous to choose the IHG property unless you’d built up a large orphaned balance through various shenanigans.

Since my framework is manufactured spend, not signup bonuses, it’s easy to make a direct comparison between the options:

• 12,000 World of Hyatt points transferred from Chase Ultimate Rewards is worth $120 in cash.

• 37,000 Hilton Honors points earned at 6 points per dollar with the American Express Surpass co-branded card is between $123 (if the same $6,200 in spend had been put on a 2% cashback card) and $185 if the points were purchased for 0.5 cents each, an offer which is regularly available, including now through March 7, 2023.

• 30,000 Marriott Bonvoy points are worth between $240 (if you bought the points during one of their periodic promotions) and $300 (if you transferred the points from Chase Ultimate Rewards.

• 25,000 IHG Rewards points are worth between $150 and $175 if you buy them using the “points and cash” trick (purchasing points while making an award reservation, then cancelling the reservation and having the points refunded to your account).

This makes comparing the four sample reservation options, and indeed comparing all reservation options at the four chains, easy, if on average:

• World of Hyatt points cost 1 cent each;

• Hilton Honors points cost 0.42 cents each;

• Marriott Bonvoy points cost 0.9 cents each;

• and IHG Rewards points cost 0.65 cents each;

then on a one-night stay you can convert the points cost of any property into the cash cost of manufacturing, transferring, or purchasing the required points. In the concrete example above, we saw that Hyatt and Hilton were quite competitive, while Marriott and IHG Rewards were significantly more expensive options.

On four-night stays, the equation changes, but only for IHG Rewards points. On four-night stays at the other three chains, the cost per point remains the same, while the 4th-night-free benefit offered by the IHG Rewards credit cards increases their value by 33% or decreases their cost by 25% to 0.49 cents each — same difference. The four-night IHG Rewards stay now costs just $122 per night, putting it squarely in the middle of the “competitive” pack of Hyatt and Hilton, or even on the cheaper end (ignoring that pesky Kimpton amenity fee, which you obviously shouldn’t in practice).

Moving to a five-night stay, the equation shifts again, but this time against IHG Rewards, since Hilton and Marriott both offer the fifth night free on award stays. The cost per night on the sample five-night stays with Hilton is $123 per night, with Marriott is $216, and with IHG $130. Hyatt doesn’t offer free nights on longer stays so their cost per night remains flat at $120.

Reference Card

I wanted to use a specific example to explain why I personally don’t care for IHG Rewards, but in case you want to bookmark this post or paste the values into your notes app, here are the shortcuts when calculating the cost of stays of various lengths.

Stays of 1-3 nights:

• World of Hyatt: 1 cent per point

• Hilton Honors: 0.42 cents per point

• Marriott Bonvoy: 0.9 cents per point

• IHG Rewards: 0.65 cents per point

Stays of exactly 4 nights:

• IHG Rewards: 0.49 cents per point

Stays of exactly 5 nights:

• World of Haytt: 1 cent per point

• IHG Rewards: 0.52 cents per point

• Hilton Honors: 0.34 cents per point

• Marriott Rewards: 0.72 cents per point

Now you can easily calculate the cost of reward stays of up to 5 nights in length in every city in the world — not just in Portland, Oregon!

Seven of my favorite travel hacks for people of all skill levels

I was impressed by Greg’s post at The Frequent Miler yesterday, although I was a bit worried since I’d been planning my own post about my favorite still-working travel hacking tips. Fortunately, his list didn’t end up overlapping with mine much at all. Still I thought I should get this post up before anybody else had the same idea.

The list below runs the gamut from “using the program as intended” to “highly illegal” so as always apply your own judgment and discretion when deciding which of these are right for you.

Nesting Alaska Airlines companion tickets

One of the posts I’m most often asked about gives some examples of the zany routes you can book with the companion tickets you get when signing up for Bank of America Alaska Airlines co-branded credit cards and on your account anniversary. It’s such a good deal (a $95 annual fee and a $99 fare (plus taxes!) for any Alaska-operated flight in any economy fare bucket) that almost anyone who lives in or near a city served by Alaska and flies with a companion once a year is virtually certain to come out ahead.

The example I gave in that post is booking a flight from Washington National Airport to Los Angeles, then a roundtrip between LAX and Maui, then a flight back from LAX to DCA. Since you can spend an unlimited amount of time in both Los Angeles and Maui, that’s functionally two itineraries: one between DCA and LAX, and one between LAX and OGG — and the second passenger gets to take both while paying for a single companion ticket (a little over $170 in that example).

If you’re able to “nest” companion tickets on routes you fly regularly you can get even more value from multiple companion tickets. To continue the example above, say you want to return home to DC from LA before your trip to Hawaii. You could of course find that another airline has better timing or prices, but if Alaska is the best carrier for you, you can also book a second companion ticket partially “nested” inside the first one by booking a flight from DCA to LAX that meets up with your existing LAX-OGG itinerary. That gets you to LAX, but remember you already have your return flight from LAX to DCA from the first companion ticket. That means you can use the “return” portion of your second companion ticket to book any “reasonable” routing (see the original post for additional details on routing rules). For example, it’s perfectly legal to use a companion ticket to fly from DCA to LAX, then from Portland, OR to Missoula, MT, then from MSO to DCA.

Thus from two companion tickets we’ve built 3.5 round trips: DCA-LAX, LAX-OGG, PDX-MSO, and then a one-way ticket PDX-DCA.

Using closed or drained debit cards to pay for in-flight food and drinks

This trick has been around since the invention of the inflight credit card reader, but still works almost everywhere. For whatever reason (presumably so the flight attendants don’t screw around on Twitter while they’re working) the handheld readers flight attendants use to charge for in-flight food and drinks aren’t connected to the internet, or at least aren’t connected to a payment server. They apparently dump all the card data when they land, or at the end of the day. That means in flight, you can order whatever you like for free, as long as you have a card that will decline the charge once you land.

Obviously this doesn’t work on cash-only carriers (mostly regional flights these days), and some international carriers verify card data in real time as well. This also does not work for in-flight internet charges in my experience.

Earning free night certificates at hotels you stay at

A lot of people are paid to inflate the value of the free night certificates that come with many credit cards. I’m not, so I take a much more skeptical approach to them. One heuristic I like to use is: “would I use this certificate to extend a stay I’m willing to pay for?” For example, I used a Hilton free night certificate for a sixth night at the Grand Wailea resort in Hawaii, after paying for 5 nights with points (and getting the fifth night free).

On the other hand, in most cities I visit, Marriott properties are either non-existent or not competitive on price with Hilton or Hyatt, so I would never use a free night certificate if it meant locking in a higher daily rate on the remaining paid nights.

Of course, for road warriors who pay for their own expenses, having a trove of free night certificates in case of bad weather or other travel emergencies can save a ton of money on last-minute expenses. I think that’s perfectly reasonable — but it’s also not very many people.

Using Fluz as intended

I wrote about my first experiments using Fluz as intended back in 2021, and while I wouldn’t say I use it often, it’s become a resource I check at least a few times a week. Most travel hackers use Fluz to manufacture spend, but they do also sell gift cards to a range of merchants with automatic cash back (redeemable for cash once you hit a pesky one-time $26 payment threshold).

The basic premise of Fluz is that you can buy exact-denomination gift cards to a surprising range of merchants. Presumably Fluz buys this credit in bulk, then splits the discount with its customers. The value-add of Fluz is that it passes along not just the merchant category but the actual merchant for every card I’ve ordered. For my sins I occasionally order Domino’s pizza from around the corner, and I often have Chase offers on my credit cards for some percentage rebate on Domino’s orders. Since Fluz passes through the merchant to Chase, I can stack my 10% rebate through Chase with my 4% rebate through Fluz (after clicking through shopping portals and applying coupons).

Obviously, this isn’t a great idea at merchants you rarely shop at or are trying for the first time, since if you’re disappointed your payment will be refunded to a gift card you’ll never use. But for picking up a pizza or a burger, or at a store you shop at regularly, it’s a no-brainer.

Registering for hotel promotions

While this may sound like table stakes, I doubt there’s a person in the game who hasn’t gotten home from a trip before realizing that they could have earned a few thousand or more points on their hotel stays if they’d registered for an ongoing promotion in advance. It’s a bad feeling, so avoid it whenever you can!

I try to keep my Hotel Promotions page up-to-date with all currently ongoing and announced promotions, but I’m not always on the ball, so if the chain you’re staying with doesn’t have a promotion listed there, it’s a good idea to search Frequent Miler or go to the hotel promo page at Loyalty Lobby. Note that Loyalty Lobby publishes every promotion, even targeted and regional ones, for every chain so their site is incredibly cluttered, albeit comprehensive.

Using Hotels.com at non-chain hotels (or chains you don’t value)

For the most part, you’re better off booking chain hotels directly if you value the chain’s rewards currency or elite status benefits, since you won’t earn points and may not get elite benefits if you book through a third party like Hotels.com (or Priceline, Expedia, etc).

On the other hand, if you don’t value a chain’s loyalty program, or for stays at non-chain hotels, you can use Hotels.com to “lump” those stays together into Hotels.com’s rewards program. Plus you don’t need their co-branded credit card to participate, although it may help.

Hotels.com also appears in most shopping portals and in Fluz, so you can save money on hotel stays 3 times: clicking through a shopping portal, selecting your stay details, then going to Fluz and buying an exact-denomination gift card for the total amount. Credit cards periodically offer rebates on gift card purchases as well (American Express, Citi).

Knowing the difference between calendar year and cardmember year benefits

This one’s essential to maximizing the value of your credit card benefits, and if you’re paying an annual fee for a credit card, losing out on a benefit you’ve paid for is the worst case scenario. Take the Chase World of Hyatt credit card for instance: it offers a Category 1-4 free night award on every cardmember anniversary, and a second free night award when you spend $15,000 in a calendar year. That means you can get 3 free night awards during your first cardmember year, depending on your anniversary date. If you get the card in July, then you have until December 31 to spend $15,000 on the card to earn the first award, and until June 30 to spend another $15,000 to earn the second, before you even have to decide whether to renew the card for a second year (personally I value the free award nights so highly I plan to keep the card forever, but that may change down the road if my taste in travel evolves).

Other examples of calendar year benefits include most Global Entry and Precheck reimbursements, most airline fee reimbursements, and bonuses for hitting high annual spend thresholds.

Conclusion

My posts normally focus on one topic at a time so it was fun exercise to take a 30,000-foot view of the techniques I actually use to save money on my travel. I manufacture spend to earn the points and miles I need to pay for the outstanding cost of my travel, which makes it even more important to make those outstanding costs as low as possible by double and triple dipping my credit card rewards, portal cashback, and any other discounts I’m able to scrape together, since it means I don’t have to work as hard manufacturing spend!

How gameable are foreign currency refunds?

A funny thing happened during my August trip to the UK: I had an unusual number of foreign currency refunds. The refunds were unrelated: first I ordered a (surprisingly cheap!) £14 taxi from a train station to our first destination in the Lakes District, which was then canceled and refunded. When I went in to rebook the reservation they had fixed the “pricing error” and the trip would then cost £50. We took the bus instead. In the day it took between being charged for the taxi and being refunded, the exchange rate moved in my favor (the pound had appreciated against the dollar), so while I was charged $17.15, the refund was for $17.21 — a 6 cent currency fluctuation in my favor!

The second two refunds were errors at the Hampton by Hilton Glasgow Central, where they were not able to “find” the payment for two prepaid reservations, one I had made through Hotels.com and one through the US Bank Flexperks travel portal. This was especially odd, since they were able to find the reservations themselves — just not any record of the reservations being paid for. At check-in, I was charged $137.80 and $148.18 for the first and second nights. After finally invoking the Hilton Twitter account, they finally “found” the prepaid payment records and refunded the two charges. But this time, the exchange rate had moved against me, and the refunds only posted as $136.41 and $146.68 — a $2.89 exchange rate penalty!

Naturally, this got me thinking: if charges and refunds are processed on different days at the corresponding exchange rates, how should travel hackers think about refundable foreign currency transactions?

Hedging against a weakening dollar

The most straightforward way to take advantage of refundable prepaid foreign currency transactions is to lock in today’s exchange rate against the possibility of a rapid appreciation of the foreign currency. If a foreign merchant prices their products in their home currency (as hotels and airlines do), then the same product will become more expensive in dollars if the foreign currency appreciates: you’ll need more dollars to buy the same amount of foreign currency, so the foreign product will become more expensive to you.

This strategy can be combined with a refundable award redemption: a reservation may be too cheap to redeem points for at today’s exchange rate, but if you are worried about a weakening dollar, you can make a matching reservation using miles or points. You can then run the calculation again when your trip approaches and decide which reservation to keep. If the dollar has weakened sufficiently, refund the cash reservation and keep the points reservation. If the dollar has instead strengthened, keep the cash reservation and refund the points, since the value of the cash refund has gone down.

In many ways this is no different from what travel hackers and even ordinary civilians do with post-paid reservations all the time, and what sites like Autoslash make easy: by monitoring prices over time, and locking in savings as they pop up, you can reduce the final amount you pay for your trips. The only difference is that instead of monitoring the price of the product, you’re monitoring the price of the product’s currency, and instead of rebooking when the price of the product falls, you cancel when the value of the currency rises.

Just like booking a post-paid reservation, by using refundable prepaid reservations, you’re locking in the maximum amount you’ll pay, while using currency fluctuations to try to identify a new, lower minimum.

Other considerations

That’s brings us to a few final notes, which may seem obvious but are still necessary to keep in mind.

First, setting aside exchange rates, the price of foreign products also changes over time. We usually think of this as prices rising as inventory sells out and firms get a better sense of what price people are willing to pay, but the opposite also happens, as my experience rebooking my Glasgow nights to ultimately save 6,000 Hilton Honors points across two of my nights showed. The ideal situation would be the combination of a weakening dollar (increasing the refund value of your prepaid foreign currency reservations) and falling prices (allowing you to rebook a new, lower price).

Second, due to the risk of a strengthening dollar (which reduces the refund value of prepaid reservations), you should really only explore options for trips you’re actually planning or at least considering taking. Most exchange rate fluctuations, at least between major currencies, are relatively small, but you can find plenty of exceptions, like the recent Truss crash in the value of the pound and its Sunak recovery. More marginal currencies fluctuate more often and by larger amounts: a $100 prepaid reservation made in Turkish Lira a year ago would only refund $54 today, for instance. In the same vein, if you expect the dollar to strengthen consistently, then you should want to postpone payment as long as possible, to pay with the most valuable currency possible. If you expect it to weaken consistently, you should want to pay as soon as possible for the same reason.

Cross-post: My So-Called Gig Economy

[Dear readers: this is the first and only post from my new blog about the app-based delivery economy you’ll find here on the main Free-quent Flyer Blog feed. You can read or subscribe to that blog at its own home, My So-Called Gig Economy.]

I recently decided, due to a combination of boredom and poverty, to try to break into the gig economy racket before it’s too late, as rising interest rates are set to destroy the ability of the existing delivery companies to continue to finance their operations through endless inflows of venture capital.

Since I think the subject will be interesting to some, but not all, of my existing travel hacker readers, and some people who have no interest in travel hacking, I am breaking my experiences with app-based delivery companies out into a separate blog, which I’ve tentatively titled “My So-Called Gig Economy.” I’m hosting the blog so I reserve the right to change the title at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. Suggestions welcome.

Before I get into my usual way-too-specific specifics, I thought I’d run through some preliminary material first.

Why work?

I’ve been fortunate enough to live a pretty interesting life so far, accumulating degrees and qualifications like a good Millennial all along the way, but after getting fired from my last job in March, 2020, I’d frankly assumed I’d never work for anybody else again. And, judging by the astonishment of my friends and family when I told them I was looking for a job, nobody else did either.

But as my long-time readers know, I have an unfortunate literal tendency and even more unfortunate longing to prove people wrong, so when the pages of our national newspapers were filled, day after day, week after week, with pressing news of the “labor shortage,” I had to find out for myself what all the fuss was about.

So I started applying for jobs, everywhere and anywhere I could think of. I applied at the little grocery store I shop at 3 times a week. I applied at the medical cannabis dispensary down the street. I applied to be a front desk clerk at the Washington Hilton. I applied for every job in the DC government. I almost signed up for the National Guard but had second thoughts just in time.

No takers. Having proven my point, to myself at least, that the problem is an unwillingness by employers to hire, rather than an unwillingness by workers to labor, I was ready to consider my work done. That would have been the end of the story, but for a critical intervening factor.

Why app-based delivery work?

That factor is that I have unlimited free bike and scooter transportation. Once you remove the profit (or, in the case of delivery apps, the loss) taken by the middleman, app-based delivery work has essentially three inputs: social capital, time, and transportation.

This calculation is conducted differently depending on the context. Often, you’ll see people take their total income from a day or week of deliveries and then deduct a blended fuel/depreciation rate for the use of their private vehicle. This allows them to calculate a crude “pre-tax” hourly pay rate.

But that crude calculation makes no sense in my case: I don’t own a private vehicle and don’t pay to operate, store, or fuel one. Likewise, since I don’t have a job, I don’t have any benchmark with which to compare the hourly income from my delivery work. This is not to say my time is “worthless” (I like my time!) just that there’s no monetary rate to usefully compare it to, since no one will hire me to do anything else.

So I decided, once and for all, to figure out what the deal is with the gig economy, specifically the app-based delivery gig economy.

Prospectus

My usual approach is to go all-in on new projects all at once, but it’s remarkably difficult to find useful information about getting started in the app-based delivery economy, so I’m making an exception and am instead going to proceed one app at a time, and hopefully end up creating the kind of objective, unaffiliated, unsponsored resource I myself have been looking for the past few weeks.

I’ve tentatively decided that my first app to experiment with is DoorDash, so if you have a driver referral link, please leave it in the comments or send it to my usual e-mail address: freequentflyer@freequentflyerbook.com (there’s no way I’m creating a new e-mail address for this blog).

In my next post, I hope to cover signing up (with or without a referral link), figuring out what gear I want or need, and hopefully my first delivery.

My short, boring COVID-19 infection, treatment, and recovery

Since the beginning of the pandemic, my family has taken the novel coronavirus just about as seriously as anybody we know. In one way this was made easy since the United States imposed virtually no restrictions during the entire course of the plague, and we were already used to working remotely, so office closures didn’t make much of an impact on our day-to-day routines. And, at least in the period since rapid testing became free and easily available, we managed to avoid contracting the virus to the best of our knowledge.

Until now! For readers who have similarly been dodging raindrops since 2020, I thought a quick breakdown of my infection and recovery might be interesting.

Background: vaccinated, boosted

Since the initial rollout of vaccines, I’ve been eager to get to the front of the line, and received Pfizer doses on March 13 and April 13, 2021, plus a Pfizer booster on November 19, 2021. I had no reaction to my initial dose and booster, but the second dose left me with aches and pains and a very low fever for around a day afterwards.

Infection: possibly Saturday, August 27, 2022

As I said, my family is extremely diligent about wearing high-quality masks indoors, and if I had to guess I’d say mask wearing indoors in our area is roughly 30-50%. On Saturday I went to a crowded, hot, outdoor farmers market, and while I wore my mask much of the time, essentially no one else did.

First symptoms: Monday, August 29, 2022

I’ve been spending a lot of time at our outdoor community pool lately, since it is scheduled to close today, and on Monday started to feel pretty rough. I thought it was some combination of dehydration and heat stroke, and when I got home my partner seemed worried I was a bit out of it. Overnight I began coughing, and woke up with some chest pain.

First positive test: Tuesday, August 30, 2022

It didn’t occur to me to test Monday night, but on Tuesday morning I took one of the dozens of rapid tests in my linen closet, and it came back an immediate positive. It turns out you don’t really need to wait the full 15 or 20 minutes to get your test result: if you’re positive, the test will show it almost right away.

Since I had a pantry full of tests, I promptly took a second one, which if anything came back even faster. I had COVID-19.

Paxlovid telemedicine appointment: Tuesday, August 30, 2022

My city has contracted with a telemedicine provider to prescribe Paxlovid, the anti-viral medication that’s under emergency use authorization from the FDA to treat COVID-19 in high-risk adults. After a few minutes of fretting, I decided to go ahead and request an appointment. The nice lady on her couch in Arizona asked me a few questions, confirmed I was eligible, and said she’d send my prescription in to the pharmacy of my choice. Within 15-20 minutes I was notified my prescription was ready for me at my nearby Safeway pharmacy.

Now, you may have already foreseen an obvious problem here: the pharmacy is inside the Safeway. But I’m a highly infectious carrier of the novel coronavirus. But because this is America, there was nothing to do about it. I walked into the pharmacy, asked for the prescription, and the pharmacist recoiled in horror: “You cannot be in here! You are putting all of our lives in danger!”

Well, no shit lady, that’s why I need the pills. She ended up relenting, and thus my Paxlovid journey began.

(Failed) quarantine

During the first 3 days of my positive tests, my partner and I did our best to maintain an in-house quarantine. We knew I was positive, and we knew she was exposed, but she was still testing negative, so our logic was the more we could do to isolate, the higher a chance we could keep it that way. On Friday, 3 days after my first positive test, she finally tested positive as well. Given the near-certainty I was the source of the infection so we weren’t risking any radical mutations in the virus, at that point we broke down the quarantine and started a Lord of the Rings marathon.

Paxlovid treatment: Tuesday PM - Sunday AM

The Paxlovid treatment is pretty simple: 3 pills, twice a day, for 5 days. I only had two side effects, diarrhea on the first two days, and Paxlovid Mouth the entire time. For obvious reasons, I’ll focus on the latter.

Paxlovid Mouth is strange because it began almost as soon as I took the first evening’s round of medication, and is only completely wearing off now (about 30 hours after my last dose). If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s an extremely widely experienced side effect of Paxlovid that gives the entire inside of your mouth a single, rather unpleasant, bitter flavor. I compare it to the moment after you swallow a bite of grapefruit, when the sweetness is gone and your mouth is left tasting only the underlying bitterness.

It’s not that bad to begin with, if you’re expecting it, and after a while you get used to it, but it doesn’t really go away the entire time you’re taking the drug — except when you’re eating and drinking. If it bothers you a lot there’s not really anything to do but have a range of sweet and savory snacks lying around to suck on, since as long as you’re eating or drinking, the sensation goes away entirely.

First negative test: Saturday, September 3, 2022

As I said, since I have a closet full of rapid tests, I didn’t see any reason not to test every day. Between Tuesday and Friday all my tests were positive, but Saturday morning I got my first negative rapid test, and had the same result Sunday and today, so my total tested positivity period was just 4 days (although if I had tested Monday, August 29 I’m sure it would have been positive as well).

I’m now feeling fine, although mindful of the possibility of a “rebound” like Biden and Fauci experienced after their own courses of Paxlovid treatment.

Conclusion

I am perfectly aware that it’s impossible to say anything apolitical about the pandemic, and I am not going to try.

I got vaccinated and boosted as soon as possible.

I wear high-quality masks indoors and on transit.

I began Paxlovid immediately after testing positive.

I quarantined.

I had a short and uneventful experience with the disease.

Other people who took none of those steps had the same outcome.

Other people who took all of those steps died.

But I’m happy I took the steps I did and happy I had the outcome I did.

Interest rates are starting to get more interesting

One of my favorite resources is DepositAccounts, which performs the simple, essential function of aggregating interest rates across a vast array of savings products. As you’d expect, the site is financed by ads and affiliate links, but in my experience the data is extremely accurate, so they’re a great first-stop when you’re exploring what’s the best place to put your money. All of that is just to say, most of the datapoints below come from DepositAccounts, not any original research of my own.

Yes, higher interest rates are passed along to (vigilant!) customers

There’s a stale cliche that when oil prices rise, gasoline prices jump immediately, but when oil prices fall, gasoline stays elevated. Of course there’s no mystery there: when gas prices rise satellite vans park outside gas stations doing live interviews with regular folks complaining about the price of gas, and when gas prices fall the media move on to the next crisis.

Most people are even less conscious of how prevailing interest rates change over time. If you only buy a few houses in your lifetime, your awareness of mortgage interest rates is limited to may four or five snapshots in time. Even someone who replaces a car as often as every 3 or 4 years has much less awareness of auto loan interest rates than they do the price of gas.

Finally, most people don’t shop around for higher interest rates on their savings even as much as they do for lower interest payments on their loans. That’s why whenever I hear people complain that banks don’t pay anything on savings anymore, I ask them, “have you checked?”

Series I Savings Bonds are already interesting

A lot of folks have written about this deal already (myself included), but to summarize, Series I bonds have their interest rate for the next 6 months set twice a year, in May and November, but each reset is known several weeks in advance. For example, we’ll know the November, 2022 interest rate on October 13, 2022, when September’s consumer price index reading is announced.

This creates two opportunities, in April and October, to know the interest rate you’ll earn on new Series I bonds for an entire 12-month period. My favorite tool, although I’m sure there are many others, for tracking these interest rate adjustments is the very primitive Tipswatch. There you can see the rate you’re guaranteed to earn for 6 months on all Series I bonds purchased through October 31, 2022 (9.62% annualized), and the 4 known monthly components of the November rate adjustment, which you’ll earn for the second 6 months of your first year.

I have mixed feelings about long-term holding of Series I bonds, but I have unalloyed positive feelings about using them for medium-term savings in April and October, when you know the interest rate you’ll be paid for the entire initial 1-year holding requirement.

Rewards Checking accounts for high rates, benefits, and liquidity

While I was cruising around DepositAccounts I checked, as usual, what rates they were reporting on Rewards Checking accounts. These are federally-insured, fully liquid checking accounts that, when you perform a series of requirements each month, offer elevated interest rates and usually a few other potentially-valuable benefits, like refunded ATM fees (which can be worth more than the interest during months you’re traveling extensively!).

I was immediately confused because my beloved Consumers Credit Union Rewards Checking account, which has been at the top of the list as long as I’ve been checking it, no longer appeared at all!

Thinking I might have missed an e-mail announcing they were no longer offering those accounts, I hurried over to Consumers’s website and immediately discovered the reason for the omission: the site had been updated with new, even higher interest rates, and the new page must have broken the scrubbing tool DepositAccounts was using.

The highest rate is now 5% APY on balances up to $10,000, which is not quite as high as the 5.09% on up to $20,000 the account could earn when I first opened it, but still higher than any other accounts we’ll be looking at today. The requirement for 12 debit card transactions and $500 in ACH credits or mobile check deposits, plus $500 or $1,000 in Consumers credit card spending for the highest two rates, remains the same.

The next highest rate listed is 4% APY on up to $20,000 at Elements Financial. Besides the usual gimmick of requiring 15 debit card transactions, there’s one huge asterisk: you’ll only earn that rate for 12 months, before it drops in half to 2% APY. If you have $20,000 you want to keep liquid and an easy way to automate your 15 monthly transactions, that may be worth doing for a year (no direct deposit is required), just be sure to set a calendar reminder for 12 months from the day you open your account!

Certificates of Deposit are on the verge of being interesting

Next I scooted over to DepositAccounts’s CD page, which besides scraping rates off countless bank websites, also groups them by term. You can see how obviously helpful this would be when building a CD ladder, since it makes it instantly obvious which CD-issuer you should choose for each rung of your ladder. One thing to note is the system does group CD’s into approximate terms. This is important because many of the highest-earning CD’s are of odd durations, but DepositAccounts engine sensibly lumps a 49-month “special term” CD in with the 4-year CD’s instead of breaking it out separately.

With all that said, let’s look at what’s going on with CD rates by looking at the highest rates offered in each of the DepositAccounts term buckets:

• 3-month: 3% APY at TotalDirectBank (note the very high minimum)

• 6-month: 4% APY at Sun East FCU (9-month also available at same rate)

• 1-year: 3.14% APY at Lafayette FCU

• 18-month: 3.75% APY at NASA FCU (15-month CD)

• 2-year: 3.59% APY at La Capitol FCU (26-month CD, includes option of one-time interest bump)

• 3-year: 3.55% APY at Bread Savings

• 4-year: 3.85% APY at NASA FCU (49-month CD)

• 5-year: 3.65% APY at Bread Savings

• 6+-year: 3.25% APY at Marcus, Evansville Teachers FCU, and Discover (terms up to 10 years)

A few obvious things jumped out at me here.

First, in nine term buckets, there are nine unique institutions, so if were purchasing CD’s for multiple terms from a single issuer, you would be virtually certain to be leaving some interest on the table.

Second, these interest rates are almost high enough to begin looking competitive with rewards checking accounts. Earning 5% APY on $10,000 in liquid cash is great, but if you have somewhat more money you’re unwilling to risk losing, and are willing to give up just a little liquidity, earning 4% APY on 6-month and 9-month CD’s from Sun East is at least worth thinking about long enough to decide if it’s the right move for you.

Third, this combination of terms and rates has a peculiar feature: the longest-term rates are lower than the shortest-term rates, while the medium-term rates hover in a tight range. I say it’s peculiar because commonsense would say that long-term deposits are more valuable to a bank than short-term deposits, so banks should be willing to pay more interest to lock in those funds for longer. Instead, over the longer term we see rates collapse.

The reason is simple: when banks guarantee interest payments on a deposit, they’re not just betting that they’ll be able to make a profit while paying that interest rate today, but that they’ll be able to make a profit paying that rate across the entire term of the deposit, in other words, on the future course of interest rates.

Since the cost of your money is fixed (the interest they pay you), the profitability of the deposit depends on how much it earns them (the interest their borrowers pay them). If interest rates go up, the cost of the deposit remains the same, but interest revenue and profits increase. If rates fall, then your deposit earns the bank less money, but costs them the same to hold.

Limiting the premium they’re willing to pay long-term depositors is a way of hedging that bet on interest rates. If banks expected rising interest rates over the medium and long-term, they’d reduce their hedge and be willing to pay more to lock in long-term deposits at today’s (compared to the future) cheap rates. The more worried banks are about falling interest rates, the shorter a period they’re willing to commit to paying today expensive rates for.

Treasuries may already be interesting in high-tax states

I was glancing over the Vanguard Fixed-Income page and was genuinely a bit surprised at how much rates had risen recently:

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Over the short-term these rates are already close enough to compare favorably to CD’s, especially if you prefer to keep all your fixed-income in one place like a brokerage account rather than scattered all over the country.

But even over the longer term, remember that the interest treasuries pay, unlike CD’s, is taxable only at the federal level. In a high-income-tax state, a slightly lower interest rate may leave you with more disposable income after taxes.

Conclusion

To offer some quick takeaways:

• Both higher and lower interest rates are passed through to customers.

• Shop around. No one financial institution is going to have the best version of every product.

• The interest rate structure shows that banks are betting on flat and falling interest rates in the long term. If you think they’re wrong and that rates will rise instead, then keep your money in higher-interest shorter-term accounts to take advantage of those rising rates. If you think they’re right and that rates will in fact fall, then lock in today’s relatively high rates for as long as possible.

Leaving money on the table: you can use Railcards for Heathrow Express, too

I was playing around doing some research for my recent posts on my trip to the United Kingdom and made a discovery that left me equally pleased (that I get to share it with you) and frustrated (that I didn’t realize it at the time): you can and should use Railcards on the nonstop Heathrow Express service between London’s Paddington Station and Heathrow airport. It’s not exactly “tricky,” but you do need to know what to look out for.

As a brief refresher, Railcards offer savings on all National Rail services in Scotland, England, and Wales. They can be purchased online in advance, are typically valid for between one and three years, and they are virtually never checked by conductors on-board (although supposedly if you get caught without the applicable Railcard you have to pay a “penalty fare” or buy a full-price ticket).

My error was simple, although hopefully readers will find it excusable: Heathrow Rail, despite only operating a single 15-minute route between two stations, still belongs to National Rail, and consequently Railcard savings do apply to these tickets — and the savings can be substantial.

Add your Railcard on the Heathrow Express search results page

Unlike the other National Rail booking engines I looked at, which allow you select your Railcard up front, Heathrow Express’s own booking page only allows you to add a Railcard after searching for tickets. You’ll find the option on the right-hand column of the search results page:

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Adding a Two Together Railcard to a £50 one-way itinerary reduced the price by £17 — over half the price of the Railcard itself, meaning the Railcard would pay for itself with a single round-trip ticket for two at that price.

Since Railcards offer a percentage discount, the savings are naturally lower on cheaper tickets booked further in advance, but the point is the same: if you’re traveling by rail in Great Britain, it’s simply irresponsible to do it without a Railcard!

Heathrow Express tickets can be booked through some (but not all) National Rail companies

In my previous post I highlighted how each National Rail booking engine differs in subtle ways, including how accurately they code the precise requirements for each Railcard. The example I used was that Greater Anglia correctly requires a child ticket to be added to a reservation in order to apply the Family & Friends Railcard, while Avanti West Coast would price out the discount with an itinerary consisting solely of adults (violating the requirements for that Railcard).

Once I realized Heathrow Express participated in National Rail, I naturally wondered if tickets could be booked through those other booking engines. The answer, it turns out, is “sometimes.” Greater Anglia and Northern Railway (which seem to share a backend, with only a modestly different branding), will not apply a Family & Friends Railcard to Heathrow Rail booking at all, but will apply a Two Together Railcard (I have a theory for this I’ll explain in a moment). Avanti West Coast will show schedules, but will not allow you to book Heathrow Express tickets at all.

When you can (and can’t) book Family & Friends Railcard tickets on Heathrow Express

It’s going to sound obvious once I say it, but it took me a few minutes to figure out so I hope you’ll indulge me: children under the age of 16 ride free on Heathrow Express (although they seemingly must be accompanied by an adult). That means when the third-party National Rail engines try to validate the conditions for the Family & Friends Railcard on Heathrow Express, it fails the requirement to purchase a children’s ticket!

Fortunately, when booking through Heathrow Express directly, they seem to have identified and fixed this issue. To test this, pick a date and search for 4 adults without a Railcard, 4 adults with a Family & Friends Railcard, and 4 adults plus one child with a Family & Friends Railcard.

In the first two cases the price is the same (because the Railcard’s conditions aren’t met), and in the third case the base price won’t increase (because children ride free) but the conditions of the Railcard are now met and the price drops by the expected 34%.

Conclusion

It would be tiresome to say that this illustrates the importance of interrogating systems by looking under the hood and examining how they really work instead of relying on the nonsense put out by their public-facing organs.

Instead, I’ll simply conclude that entry and exit from the Heathrow Express is automated, and no one is there to check whether you actually have a child, or a Railcard.

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