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Don’t buy Jetblue points

Don’t buy any points?

Update 11/19: a friend told me they had received offers with linked accounts but was never able to get them to load. He delinked business and personal and they just loaded.

Three years (has it been that long?) ago the Travel Sisters posted about how “Just for You” credit card sign up offers in your Chase online account bypass the 5/24 rule. Since then, every once in awhile Doctor of Credit updates his post when new offers get sent out and since then Chase has even started offering “black star” offers for business accounts that also bypass 5/24. Well all this time I’ve been crying myself to sleep because I’ve never received one of these offers – but that’s because I never read the part where people apparently are getting this on personal account logins that aren’t linked to a business account.

I consolidated my Chase business and personal credit card logins years ago, so that’s one possible reason I’ve never seen one of these offers. Note that plenty of people with separate personal and business logins have not gotten offers either – but I haven’t found a datapoint of someone with linked accounts receiving an offer.

Anyway, I figured it couldn’t hurt to delink my business and personal accounts so I set about figuring out how to do it. Turns out it’s really simple!

You want to call the internet/online help desk. The department that handles this is open during the following times.

• 7-11 PM EST M-F
• 7-8 PM EST Sa
• 7-6 PM EST Su

The process is really straightforward.

1. Call 1-877-242-7372
2. Option 3 (Business card)
3. Option 2
4. Explain to the rep that you want to separate your personal and business logins

In my case I had an old personal login so all my personal cards went under that login and my business cards remained on my business login. All in all I was done in five minutes and so next time a new round of Just for You offers comes out hopefully I get one. But uh…I bet I won’t anyway.

But hey, hope this info helps someone. Happy card hunting!

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I love my Jetblue Mosaic status but this time every year I’m always trying to figure out whether I’ve spent the $50,000 on the Jetblue Plus card. As a reminder, spending that much gets you Jetblue Mosaic for the next loyalty year. I use my status to constantly tinker with both cash and award tickets without having to worry about change fees. Mosaics also get to upgrade to Even More Space seats by paying with points (at a very strong value) so I appreciate that as well.

Unfortunately Barclays doesn’t offer an “year to date” options that I could find and I don’t use Quicken or anything like that so I was looking for an easy way to check. I’ve always gone to “Rewards & Benefits” -> “Rewards Activity” but I thought something wasn’t adding up.

tl;dr – You DO want to check “Rewards & Benefits” -> “Rewards Activity”, my math was wrong and the computer was right. But it was good to confirm. Keep reading to see what I realized.

Anyway, if you’re still here, when you click “Rewards Activity” you’ll see a tracker towards the $50,000 in spend needed. This updates every time a statement closes, which I confirmed in the course of my poking around. So just take that number and add in any transactions you’ve made since your statement closed and you’ll know how much you’ve spent towards Mosaic status.

What confused me was the “Spend Analyzer” you can find under “Activity and Statements”. You can sort by payments over time which gives you a breakdown of how much you spent per month. When I added up all the months of 2019, my number came out to be a couple thousand dollars more than the Rewards Activity tracker.

So what’s happening here? Well, the Spend Analyzer apparently doesn’t account for returns and reimbursements. So ignore it for the purposes of tracking your Mosaic qualification and stick with the Rewards Activity tracker.

Which I should have figured in the first place…

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I thought it’d be fun to start a new short series called This or That?, where I just deliberate with myself (and hopefully the readers) about decisions I’m trying to make in my travel. I’m always so affected by analysis paralysis I think the process of writing it out can be helpful. Plus, hopefully it gives you all food for thought as well.

Anyway, I feel like awhile back I saw a tweet or post to the effect of “you should never use Jetblue points on Mint”. Since Jetblue points are only worth one cent per point on Mint flights, the theory is there isn’t value there. Well, I just so happened to be planning to book a Mint flight and so I decided to take a look at whether booking with cash or points would work better for my situation.

So this or that – cash or points?

Option 1 – Book Jetblue Mint with points

So, do you really get 1 cent per point when booking Jetblue Mint? For reference, the other day I booked a flight where I actually got almost 1.5 cents per point of value so 1 cent per point is a huge dropoff. So I checked out the Mint flight I wanted, and when you include taxes and fees, it does come out to about 1 cent per point.

So the pros of booking the flight with points are obviously not paying any cash out of pocket and being able to save my cash for other things. Still, 43,400 Jetblue points would put a serious dent into my Jetblue balance and I totally get what people are saying. I could use 43,400 points for the $450 flight or I could use it for $650 worth of Jetblue flights. 

Still, not paying cash is super tempting.

Option 2 – Book Jetblue Mint with cash and the US Bank Altitude Reserve credit

The “that” in this scenario is booking Jetblue Mint with cash. ThOne thing I needed to calculate was how many Jetblue points I’d get in return for booking the flight with cash. If I booked with cash, I’d book with my US Bank Altitude Reserve (more on that later) so I’d be earning 6 points per dollar booking at jetblue.com. So I’d get 2,700 points back which means my net cost if booking with points would be 46,100 points. If I booked using my Jetblue I’d double that return.

To be honest, the 2,700 points doesn’t mean too much to me, but I would book the flight with the US Bank Altitude Reserve. I took a retention offer around this time last year but forgot to use my $325 air travel statement credit so I need to use it before I call for retention again.

So, this or that?

So should I use the points or use the travel credit? I’m not sure there’s a “correct” answer here but I’m leaning towards using the travel credit because I don’t feel like gaming it I just want to get it over with and cancel the card (or get a reconsideration offer). That money is a sunk cost to me from a long time ago so it’ll feel like found money even though in reality it’s not.

I also am buying into the 1 cent per Jetblue point being not worth it. I mean, I can use Chase Ultimate Rewards or even the devalued CNB point and get more value.

What do you think?

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So I wrote a few weeks ago that I planned to tidy up my travel hacking stuff – I didn’t forget! I resolved to tackle one area at a time, Marie Kondo style, so I dedicated a few minutes a day to organizing my credit cards physically and virtually. I finished just before we left for Japan, which seemed timely given the inspiration. Anyway, here’s how I decided to organize everything – would love to hear other thoughts and ideas on how to organize your credit cards that those who are more organized might have!

Here are the steps that I took, although if I were to do it again I might have dealt with all the physical cards first and then deal with my spreadsheets.

Step 1: Clean up spreadsheet by moving all canceled cards out

So the first thing I decided to do was to clean up my virtual spreadsheet that I keep on Google Sheets. My sheet has multiple tabs but the main tabs I worked with here were my “active” and “cancelled” credit card tabs. Here’s the information I keep in both tabs:

I recognize that’s a little small, if you can’t read it, I record Bank, Card, Date Opened, Date to cancel, Autopay, Owner, Fee, Credit limit, Last 4 digits, and Notes. All of these are pretty self explanatory – I noted the last 4 so I can keep track of different cards, especially the ones I haven’t taken out in awhile. “+1” on owner means I added an authorized user, though I’ve stopped doing that (thanks for nothing, Chase). 

When I cancel a card I strikethrough the entire line and note the cancellation date, but I had to clean up by moving some cards over to my “cancelled” tab. I also did a look through and make sure that I recognized all the cards on my list, though more on that later.

The big thing I had to do here was add last 4 digits for a bunch of cards. Sometimes I sign up in bunches and get lazy, part of my tidying up resolution is to put all the right information in as soon as I receive the cards. 

Step 2: Remove all credit cards from my credit card holder, organize by bank

The next thing I decided to tackle was my super messy credit card holder. I use one of those folders with plastic sleeves, a gift from my wife a few years ago. When I first received the book to hold my cards, I decided to organize the cards by date opened. That turned out to be a mistake, cancelled cards would leave empty sleeves, which would require moving all my credit cards “up” a slot. Eventually, I stopped taking out my cancelled cards altogether, or when I received new cards (like when banks would replace cards that expired or what not) I would leave the old ones in. Needless to say, my credit card “organizer” was a hot mess.

So I decided to organize my credit cards by category. I took them all out of the sleeve and also grabbed all the cards that I left in my desk (the “sometimes I’ll use it” cards). I stacked them all by bank and got rid of any cancelled cards. This got me ready to re-organize my cards in the now empty credit card holder. I also took this opportunity to cancel a few credit cards that no longer sparked joy.

Step 3: Dispose of old cards

In the process of organizing my physical cards, I found a bunch of cards that had already expired but I hadn’t gotten rid of. I also cancelled a few credit cards whose annual fees I could no longer justify paying. (Those, frankly, should have been cancelled long ago). So I cut up all these cards which made for a great picture:

This probably doesn’t make a difference, but I always dispose of my cut credit cards over two trash cycles. Or, if I’m feeling extra paranoid, I dispose of one half of the cut card at home and one half at work. Seems silly, but I’m a silly guy.

Step 4: Organize credit card holder by bank

After I organized my credit cards by bank, I had stacks of credit cards like this:

That made it very simple to put cards back into my credit card holder. Of course, cards that I use regularly went back to my wallet. 

My theory is this will make it much easier to keep my credit cards organized. Now, when I cancel a card, like a Chase card for example, I just free up a slot in the “Chase” section of my holder. This should be way less annoying than when I had my credit cards organized by date.

Step 5: Reconcile my credit card holder with my spreadsheet

The last thing I did was to reconcile the newly organized cards in my credit card holder with my spreadsheet. That meant double checking that things like expiration dates made sense given the date I thought I had opened the card (they should normally be around the same month +/- 1). 

Embarrassingly, I found a credit card that I had never typed into my spreadsheet. So I’m glad I did this if for that reason alone! Once I was done, I had the last 4 digits for every single card which also should help quite a bit in the future.

At this point, I was done organizing my credit cards and it felt great.

Staying organized in the future

Like I said, organizing my credit cards by bank should help me keep organized in the future. I’ve also resolved to dedicate 15-20 minutes a week to making sure my credit card holder and spreadsheet are in order. Another thing I need to make sure to do is to be vigilant about updating my spreadsheet whenever I open/cancel a card. But I think now that I have things organized, these small maintenance tasks should be much more manageable.

Final Thoughts

Organizing my credit cards not only helped me to have a better track of where my credit cards were, it also helped me catch some mistakes that could have cost me money in the long run. I know I should have been better organized in the first place, but I wasn’t. Hopefully this will help me stay more organized in the future.

How do you all keep your credit cards organized, both physically and virtually? I’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions in the comments!

Never miss a post! Subscribe below and receive an e-mail once a day for new posts from asthejoeflies. Also, follow our family adventures on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Or, if you’re looking for a miles, points, and travel podcast, check out my podcast the Saverocity Observation Deck on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or this Patreon page! 

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