AMAZON HAS $5 FOR YOU: Via Maximizing Money, here’s a nice little Amazon promotion: send a friend a gift card worth $1 or more and you’ll receive a $5 Amazon card. A couple of catches: you have to connect via Facebook, and your friend’s birthday has to occur on or before September 22.
MANUFACTURING SPEND PRIMER: If you’re still getting up the learning curve, or even if you just need a quick refresher, Frequent Miler has a good summary of the current state of things, though as one commenter pointed out some folks have had problems with Vanilla Visas.
ADIOS, BEST CREDIT CARD FOR GAS PURCHASES: A lot of people aren’t familiar with it, but the best card for gasoline purchases is relinquishing its title. The PenFed Platinum Cash Rewards Visa is now offering only 3% cash back on gas purchases as per the card’s website.
Commenters on this Fatwallet thread who have the card have reported receiving emails from PenFed stating that a $25 annual fee will be instituted, and the 5% bonus will only be available to customers who also have another PenFed account.
So what are the alternatives? The best one I know of is the Fort Knox Visa, which offers 5% back on gas purchases. The Sallie Mae credit card also offers 5% back, but that’s only on the first $250 each month. If there’s another credit card offering 5% back on gas purchases, I can’t think of it, though the AARP credit card offers an uncapped 3% back for gas and restaurants. Requiescat in pace, PenFed 5% gas bonus.
MODERATELY INTERESTING MATTRESS RUN OPPORTUNITY: The Intercontinental Hotels Group is offering a fall promotion, and Frugal Travel Guy points out that it’s maybe–maybe—worth a mattress run:
- You only need four nights to get the maximum 50,000 points.
- Book three of the nights separately and at different IHG brand properties (i.e. Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Candlewood Suites, Staybridge Suites, etc.).
- The fourth night can be booked consecutively with another stay.
- Weekend nights tend to be cheaper, especially in the following markets: Dallas, Orlando, Atlanta, and Virgin Beach. Booking all four stays on a weekend might make the most sense. I’ve found low rates of around $50 per night in the above markets throughout October.
With this in mind, it’s possible to complete this promotion and earn the maximum 50,000 points for just over $200. Considering you can use 50,000 points for ten nights at a PointBreaks hotel, or a night at properties like the Intercontinental Le Grand, which regularly goes for $700+ per night, this promotion can be mattress-run worthy if you play it right.
FOOT-WIDE BEACH PARCEL GOES FOR $120K: From the ever-fascinating New York real estate market:
The 1,885-foot-long strip of land, just 1 foot wide, runs through East Hampton Town from Montauk Highway to the Atlantic Ocean. Suffolk County had a modest goal: sell it for $10.
But a pair of Manhattan financiers had other ideas for the path that bordered their East End getaways. They launched a bidding war and the price soared — to $120,000.
Suffolk’s property manager said he’d never seen anything like it.
…When Marc Helie and Kyle N. Cruz showed up with checks for $1,500 and the title to their properties on May 30, they were escorted to a small conference room in the county’s Division of Real Property Acquisition and Management in Hauppauge, Thompson said.
And the bidding began. Back and forth they went, 34 times in all, he said. The price rose quickly from $1,500 to $2,000, to $5,000, then to $12,000 and $17,000 . . . until Cruz’s bid of $115,000 was topped one final time by Helie, who successfully bid $120,000.
Possible motivation:
Helie’s purchase effectively gives him narrow slivers of property on both the east and west sides of Cruz, who would have to walk on Helie’s property to reach the ocean beach a few hundred feet away.
Wow, even spite is expensive in New York!
Have a great weekend, folks. Hopefully any parties you might be attending will be as much fun as the one in this video seems to be.
Everyone’s IHG offer is different. My offer totals up to 157,000 points. I will be doing a mattress run this afternoon and will need to do 3 more including one near NYC which I will accomplish with visiting my roommate from college. So for around $350.00 plus travel to NJ I will have enough points for 4 nights at the Intercontinental in Bali or Saigon on a future trip to Asia.
Nicely done, Lynn! Hopefully the rest of you are taking notes? 🙂
After reading your post, I logged into my Penfed account and noticed that they devalued their rewards program as well. The Visa that I have was earning 5X on gas and that was equal to 5% in rewards (prepaid visa gift cards). Now the redemption rate is 5900 pts for $50 worth of gift cards. I am so mad that they did this without any warning!
Thanks Kirk… I assume you have the Platinum rewards card? That one says gas rewards are 3% and groceries are 2%, so in the future it’ll be a little less than 3% on gas. https://www.penfed.org/visasignaturepoints/
Yes, the Platinum Rewards card. Penfed also devalued the rewards for their Amex travel card (that gives 5x on airlines). Penfed is definitely on a roll… last month they started charging for receiving your credit card bill in paper form. It’s unbelievable to see a credit union behaving so badly. I think I’ll switch to my Amex Blue Cash Preferred for gas. Can you imagine the outrage from bloggers if this had been chase ultimate rewards or membership rewards that devalued?