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How to double your sign-up bonuses… and free money from Amex

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IT DEPENDS ON WHAT THE DEFINITION OF ‘PRODUCT’ IS: Most credit card companies will only let you have one of any card product at any given time, but those of you who went to law school should be asking, “What exactly do you mean by product?” Great question! It’s one posed by a reader over at The Points Guy, who was wondering if a MasterCard and a Visa flavor of the same card count as different products and therefore make one eligible to get a sign-up bonus twice:

“I’m currently holding a Visa Sapphire Preferred card and the annual fee is due to hit soon.  I was told that I could get the Mastercard version, hence saving on the annual fee for another year and also getting another sign-up bonus.  Do you know if this is true?  My friend actually has the opposite issue, where he has the Mastercard and is thinking of getting the Visa, so I’m assuming it could work both ways if possible.”

TPG posed the question to his readers. It was not unanimous, but most reported that they were able to get the sign-up bonuses on both the Visa and the MasterCard Sapphire preferred. Advice for people who want to try this: cancel one before you get the other, and transfer your Ultimate Reward points out before you cancel the card.

Keep in mind that the product definition loophole works with several other products so that you can get the same sign-up bonus twice. Off the top of our head:

  • Chase Ink Bold / Chase Ink Plus
  • Barclays NFL Visa / Barclays NFL Mastercard
  • Citi AA Visa / Citi AA Amex
  • Bank of Hawaii Hawaiian Airlines Visa / Bank of America Hawaiian Airlines Visa

And that’s not even taking into account the personal and business varieties of many cards…

AMEX SELLING $25 GIFT CARDS FOR $15: Amex is running another one of its Twitter promotions. Their latest one lets you buy a $25 Amex gift card for $15 when you sync with your Twitter account. Note that you can do this for every distinct Amex account number that you have, and note that the Amex cards actually issued by Amex give different numbers for both the card owner and the authorized users.

In other words, if you and your wife both have a Blue Cash card, your wife’s account number will be different from yours. That means that you can do the $25/$15 deal for your card and she can do it for hers… and you can do it for every other Amex card you have as well, though you’ll have to create new Twitter accounts for all of them. (H/T: SlickDeals)

AN AVIOS BENEFIT WE WEREN’T AWARE OF: Thanks to Mommy Points for pointing out an Avios benefit we didn’t know about. Check out the last bullet point in her summary of the benefits of using the British Airways frequent flyer program:

• No close-in booking fees
• No online cancellation fee – just lose the taxes that you paid for the flight which is often $5 – $10 for domestic flights.
• Just a $40 change fee – which is much lower than many other airlines (of course, you could potentially just cancel and rebook for even less)
• Free checked bag, priority access in the airport, and priority boarding on American Airlines (this is not a published benefit anywhere I know, but my family was still getting this “perk” as of last week, though some in the comments report they have not been getting free bags, so YMMV)

We have the AA credit card, so we didn’t notice that last perk. We’re big fans of Avios, so we’re always happy to see another perk on top of what is already a great program.

Turn that frown upside down with the reconsideration line!

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ON SECOND THOUGHT: We just stumbled upon a great post by Hilary Stockton over at the TravelSort blog on how to turn credit card denials and deferrals into approvals. Not only does she go through all the ins and outs of exactly what to say to the banks when you’re trying to get them to change their mind, she lists the phone numbers to call for all the major issuers. It’s great advice, here’s a sample:

5. Have good reasons for applying for the new card: “I really like the current bonus mile/point offer” is NOT a good reason. Some good reasons could be:

  • The no foreign transaction fee is important to me, as I do a lot of international traveling, and/or buy things from foreign-based companies that would otherwise incur foreign transaction fees
  • The EMV Chip is important to me, since I travel internationally and have run into situations where my magnetic stripe card doesn’t work (Hyatt Visa)
  • The 2x points for dining is such a great benefit, since I dine out a lot / entertain clients often (Chase Sapphire Preferred)
  • I travel frequently and the 3x points for airline spend is a great fit for my needs (AMEX Premier Rewards Gold)
  • I’m planning a number of trips with [Airline X] because [I’ve moved and Airline X offers more nonstop flights from here / I’ve decided I prefer Airline X for __________]
  • My spouse/friend has this card and highly recommended it to me

Read the whole thing here.

SHOCKING REVELATION ABOUT GOLDMAN SACHS: Michael Lewis has been one of the finest financial writers out there for a few decades now. So we were glad to see him review the book by Greg Smith, the ex-Goldman employee who wrote the notorious NYT op-ed piece last year claiming that Goldman Sachs bankers–sit down before you read this–are primarily interested in money.

We greatly enjoyed Smith’s piece when it came out, though we wondered what his motives for writing it were. After all, he did spend 10 years at Goldman, and you don’t stay there for ten years without having a certain cunning.

Happily, Michael Lewis is in top form. Here you go:

In the end, the reader puts down Why I Left Goldman Sachs a little mystified. Why exactly did Greg Smith leave Goldman Sachs? What did he hope to achieve? If it’s change he is after, his particular story comes too late. If, say, back in 2004, someone such as Greg Smith had stepped forward and explained to the world what was going on inside Goldman, he might have spared us all a lot of pain and trouble. But today’s insider confessions feel like vain and useless acts. And what would he have us do, four years after the Great Collapse, to fix the system, or to change in any way his former employer’s behavior? The dystopia often imagined in the world of artificial intelligence—in which computers somehow take on a life of their own and come to rule mankind—has actually happened in the world of finance. The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own, beyond human control. The people flow into and out of them but have only incidental effect on their direction and behavior. The firms may not be intent on evil; they aren’t intent on anything except short-term profits: they’re insensible. If anyone attempted to seize control of one of these strange machines and impose upon them a clear moral direction, the machine would hit its own button and he would be ejected.

Why indeed. But the best part of all is Lewis’s summary of what’s happened and how Smith’s book relates to it all:

Stop and think once more about what has just happened on Wall Street: its most admired firm conspired to flood the financial system with worthless securities, then set itself up to profit from betting against those very same securities, and in the bargain helped to precipitate a world historic financial crisis that cost millions of people their jobs and convulsed our political system. In other places, or at other times, the firm would be put out of business, and its leaders shamed and jailed and strung from lampposts. (I am not advocating the latter.) Instead Goldman Sachs, like the other too-big-to-fail firms, has been handed tens of billions in government subsidies, on the theory that we cannot live without them. They were then permitted to pay politicians to prevent laws being passed to change their business, and bribe public officials (with the implicit promise of future employment) to neuter the laws that were passed—so that they might continue to behave in more or less the same way that brought ruin on us all. And after all this has been done, a Goldman Sachs employee steps forward to say that the people at the top of his former firm need to see the error of their ways, and become more decent, socially responsible human beings. Right. How exactly is that going to happen?

Magical thinking, indeed.

CORNERING THE MARKET IN NORWEGIAN DIAPERS: Today’s odd gaming-the-system story of the day: price competition in the Norwegian diaper market has become so intense that eastern European shoppers have been driving there, buying thousands of dollars worth of diapers, and reselling:

Some have been stopped with diapers worth up to 50,000 crowns ($9,100), roughly 80,000 diapers, a legal shipment even though Norway is not part of the European Union.

“They told us that the only reason they came to Norway was to drive around and buy diapers to bring back home and resell,” Breilid said.

(H/T: Fatwallet Finance)

NEW: 55K Miles from United! Plus a $100 bank bonus, the GM credit card is back, and labor-market hacking

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55,000 MILES FROM UNITED: There is a new non-publicized 50K offer for the Chase United MileagePlus Explorer card, plus another 5K miles for adding an authorized user AND a $50 statement credit. There are some specific steps you have to take to get the 50K offer, so we’re just going to direct you to the relevant Fatwallet Finance thread for instructions and wish you good luck.

$100 FROM FIRST TRADE UNION BANK: FTUB is willing to give you $100 for opening an online checking account. You get $50 for setting up a direct deposit and another $50 for paying a bill from your account. There’s a $100 minimum to open the account and there are no monthly maintenance fees. (H/T: Fatwallet Finance)

THE GENERAL MOTORS CREDIT CARD: 5% CAPPED: We just received a mail solicitation for this card from Capital One, who recently took over ownership of this card portfolio from HSBC. We were hoping there’d be a new twist to this card, but no such luck. You get 5% back on all purchases, but those rewards can only be used for the purchase of a GM vehicle, and the amount you can use on a vehicle is capped at a fairly low rate. The amount you can use ranges from $500 to $3,000 depending on how expensive your vehicle is. Redemption allowances can be found here if you’re interested.

All in all, not a compelling deal. If you’re not in the market for a specific new GM car in the next year or two, don’t bother with this one.

EMPLOYERS ARE CLUELESS, AND HOW TO HACK THE LABOR MARKET: There’s a great read in the University of Pennsylvania magazine about Wharton professor Peter Cappelli, author of Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It. Cappelli contends that most companies do a poor job of hiring due to overly-specific job requirements, HR cluelessness, and low wages. This meshes with our experience; a few weeks ago we talked to a “technical recruiter” who didn’t know what data mining or SAS are (and he was recruiting for a data mining position). We talked to another one a while back who was looking to hire a statistical modeler for $30,000 a year (good luck doing that in this country).

The whole article is thought-provoking and worth a read, as is this interview with Cappelli, and there’s also a sidebar with some of Cappelli’s advice on how to get past the resume-screening software. His counsel:

Don’t use headers or footers. They jam most parsing algorithms.

Customize each resume based on language used in the job description. If the description says “CPA,” make sure “CPA” is on your resume. Don’t go too far, though: copying and pasting the job description won’t land you the gig.

Use conventional formats. While fancy fonts, strange layouts, and functional formatting might impress an employer, computers hate them. Stick to a simplistic style and reverse chronological formatting.

Put it in context. Modern resume parsers check the context of buzzwords such as Java or C++, so if you want to seem different from the kid who took one “Java” class in high school, go more in depth about what you know and how long you’ve known it.

Submit your resume in text format. While .pdf might be convenient, MS Word generally ensures the least parsing errors.

Never use graphics. Graphics always hamper the parsing process and generally show up as white noise to the algorithm. White noise is just what you don’t want.

Include your postal address. Your address is often how your resume is filed. If you don’t include it, you might not get considered at all.

(H/T: Lion of the Blogosphere)

PNC points credit card: a weird, confusing rewards card with a slight chance of being lucrative

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GREATER THAN 2%?: Yesterday we received a solicitation offering us 25,000 points for the PNC Points Visa credit card. 25,000 points will at least get our attention, but a closer inspection revealed that this is a lousy sign-up bonus and a confusing card, even for those of us (ahem) who actually enjoy scrutinizing the minutiae of credit card offers. But for all that, this card may be worth a serious look for a few of you. If you want to see how to (maybe) get greater than 2% on all your purchases without messing with Bluebird, Vanilla Reloads, and so forth, then read on.

The PNC rewards program is different from those of other issuers. Rather than offer 1 point per dollar spent on most purchases as is usual, PNC offers 4 points per dollar. But the points have a value of around a quarter cent each, so this is just a much more confusing way of offering a 1% rewards card. PNC’s rewards catalog is odd, too: take a look at it and you’ll see gift cards for most mainstream retailers going for $.002193 cents per point, or $.002315 cents for point.

It’s almost like they’re (a) intentionally trying to scam customers, and (b) daring us to figure out loopholes to exploit. And on that note, we did notice that you could get a $500 gift card for Bloomingdale’s or Talbot’s for 162,500 points, for a value per point of $.003077, which would make this a 1.23% card if you really, really like shopping at either of those two retailers.

But wait, there’s more! You can increase your 4 points per dollar by having certain other PNC accounts. Quoth PNC:

Get a 25% bonus on the base points you earn with a PNC Virtual Wallet.

Get a 50% bonus on the base points you earn with a PNC Virtual Wallet Performance or PNC Performance checking account.

Get a 75% bonus on the base points you earn – the best level of reward – with a PNC Performance Select checking account.

So if you value the points at a quarter cent each, this potentially becomes a 1.75% card if you have the right account open (you’ll need a $5,000 balance or $25K in investments with PNC). And if you’re a Bloomingdale’s junkie, this is actually a 2.16% card. Note that PNC also has a cash card which works the same way. A 1.75% cashback card is not bad at all; only the Fidelity Amex and the Priceline card are better.

We’re not done yet: there is a PNC points business card (but no cashback business card, alas) which offers 5 points per dollar spent. The obvious question is, can you get the 75% boost by having the Performance Select account open? The website doesn’t answer this clearly, but it does have this marketing blurb: “Combine your personal and business points to get even greater rewards.” This leads us to think that the 75% may indeed be in effect for the business card, though that’s not a given.

So let’s do the math: 5 points per dollar increased by 75 percent equals 8.75 points per dollar, and if those points are worth a quarter cent each your return is… 2.1875%! And if you’re going to Bloomingdale’s? Now we’re up to a 2.7% rewards card.

That’s as far as we’ve gone with this. We don’t have a lot of business expenses so we’re not going to bite, but others of you may find this worth consideration if you like their rewards options and enjoy using spreadsheets to figure out how to redeem your credit card points.

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