Last week, Doctor of Credit and I were in a Twitter chat about a special Discover offer.
@ChasingThePts Link for $150 offer? What did you search for?
— Doctor Of Credit (@Drofcredit) May 14, 2015
If you set up your GMail to use the tabs like below:
You may see this offer:
That particular offer had this promotion:
It doesn’t have a $150 bonus for $750 in spend, which is the graphic all the way on the top (it is below):
The Second Discover Card:
In case you didn’t know, I’m a huge fan of the 5% quarterly cards. I also didn’t see many good sign up offers for the Discover card until I saw the ad in my GMail account. When the buzz was all about the Discover Miles card, it set forth an idea about signing up for another Discover card. At the time, I also saw this post from Chuck on Doctor of Credit that I kept in the back of my head. Here’s a quote from the post:
- One Flyertalk member applied online and the system told him to call in. Seems that those who have an existing Discover account will automatically be prompted to call in and verify if they want to open a second account or if they want to close the old one and open the new one. We’ll have to wait and see more reports on whether everyone has this experience or if it was an isolated experience. (I’m putting my money on this being the case for everyone.)
This was absolutely my case. After applying, a prompt came up and said I needed to call Discover. After I called, a very very pleasant CSR asked if I really wanted a second card and that it wasn’t a mistake. I told her it was not a mistake and I was giving her my story where she cut me off and said “OK” and began to process the application. No story needed as to why I need the second card. The only thing needed from me was moving some credit to the new card.
Rotating Quarterly Cards:
For those keeping notes at home, I now have seven, yes 7 cards that have a rotating quarterly bonus. In the next couple of months, I anticipate to apply for a second US Bank Cash+ card. I have the following:
- Citi Dividend- 1
- Discover – 2
- Chase Freedom – 3
- US Bank Cash+ – 1
Not all of the cards have the same overlapping categories per quarter. This is great because I have more opportunity to leverage 5% multiple times in a year. I now have the ability to have $44,000 in 5% categories per year. I will never close any of the cards because they are all annual fee free and will contribute towards the Average Age of Accounts. I love the 5% cards because they all contribute significantly to the master plan for gift card churning. The Freedom cards more so than the other cards because when you do the math for average cost per point, it is $/points, and having a larger denominator (bottom value of the fraction) drives the cost basis lower faster. Here’s a simple math problem:
If you sell a $100 gift card at a rate of 86% and in the end you receive 500 points:
$9/500 = $.018/pt
$14/1000 = $.014/pt
As you can see if the 5% went to the bottom of the fraction it drops the cost per point.
I am so confused by your math at the bottom there:
“If you sell a $100 gift card at a rate of 86% and in the end you receive 500 points:
$9/500 = $.018/pt
$14/1000 = $.014/pt”
Your example should be $14/500=$0.028/pt right? You paid $100 with a 5x card to earn 500 points and sold the $100 card for $86. You spent $14 to get 500 points. I’m unsure how to came to $9/500 or $14/1000, what am I missing here?
@Noah: Your math seems correct. CTP could be using a different method to acquire those $100 GCs to bring it down to a $9 cost though
Wow, 7! I really have to step up my game.
When you have the Promotions tab enabled, they send you more ads than if you remove that tab?
@Noah & @Voyaging Doc – the example say is getting a 5x portal points from Sears buying $100 gift card which counts as a department store, so with the 5% cash back, I’d receive $5 and it goes into the numerator. On the flip side, if I used a Chase Freedom, get 5x for the category spend, I’d put it towards the denominator as I’d combine and use an Ink Plus/Sapphire Preferred combo to transfer as a loyalty program.
Hope that clears things up
@Chuck – you have to reload GMail to get new ads to display
@CtP, Yeah, I think I’m following now. I was confused where the extra 500 points came from, but if we assume a 5x portal it all adds up.
How do you go about getting multiple freedom cards?
First one, I signed up (Visa)
Second one, it was an old Washington Mutual Mastercard that they converted to some weird Chase card earning proprietary points. So I asked if it could be converted to a Freedom Mastercard, which they did and then it was changed into a Visa now.
Third one was a product change from Sapphire Preferred to Freedom
Very confused.
SO, you need a gmail account to somehow be targeted for a minimum spend promotion by DS on a card already had? Because I have a gmail account and if instructed, I will do whatever to have this promotion targeted to me. I have 0% with them through Sep/Oct or so. I would love to do this $750/$150 back deal with my present DS card.
Title was about a second DS card. Ok, after another review, found that commentary. I have a $15K CL with these DS folks. I guess I can expect to be instructed to call in to verify my application desire. One thing not mentioned (sorry, if I missed). Can I expect a hard pull with DS on this 2nd card adventure?
Been with them since 1996. They made boo-koo bucks on me for the first several years but been awhile since I handed over my wallet to them in interest. SO….I figure I might be a shoo-in. BUT, at what “pull” cost?
Merci Beaucoup for reply! 🙂
Hi Jan,
For this particular one, I found the offer in my GMail account, but there appears to be other random offers here and there. On my second Discover card, they also took some credit away from my first Discover card in order to approve me for the second. It was a hard pull, for me it was Equifax, but would depend on the state of residence.
Hi,
You talk about selling the girt card to maximize reward categories, In particular for the Freedom card. What is the best site to liquidate these purchased gift cards?
My preferred site to sell is Cardpool