Thanks to My Money Blog for bringing this to our attention. Here’s the app link. Offer expires Jan 28. This is a great deal for this card, so if you’re in the market for a business card, jump on it.
Free credit monitoring, plus the Delta credit card offer increases to 45,000 miles
FREE EXPERIAN CREDIT MONITORING: Thanks to My Money Blog for pointing out that Credit Sesame is now offering free credit monitoring of your Experian credit bureau data. This is a service that some people pay for, but now you can get it for free. Visit MMB for the details.
AMEX LIKES YOU A LITTLE MORE THAN THEY DID YESTERDAY: View From The Wing notifies us that the offer on the Delta Amex card was increasing to 45,000 miles. We just got this card a month or two ago and the bonus was only 35,000, so that’s a decent increase. Delta miles have a reputation for being not as valuable as miles from other programs, though they do have the pay with points option that lets you redeem points at one cent each when you pay for a ticket. The minimum spend requirement remains the same, $3,000 within 3 months.
THE TROUBLE WITH TRILLIONS: In economic news, a joke used to drive the plot on an episode of “The Simpsons” is being discussed as serious monetary policy. The reason is that apparently there is some loophole which allows the Treasury department to mint platinum coins of whatever value it sees fit, and so it would be perfectly legal for Treasury to produce a trillion-dollar coin. From the article:
What the platinum-coin option really shows is how odd the debt ceiling is. It’s an artificial obstacle to the government paying for spending it has already approved and for making interest payments on debt it has already issued. The debt ceiling isn’t an economic limit on spending; it’s a legal one. And maybe that, not the trillion-dollar coin, is the real joke.
Maybe…or maybe basing monetary policy on animated sitcom plot devices is the joke.
A MILLION MILES IN A YEAR: Courtesy of Point Me To The Plane, we get to meet United Airlines’s most frequent flyer of 2012, who somehow managed to fly one million miles spread over 400 flights as of early December. This is a mind-boggling number and frankly sounds hellish to us, but to each his own, and we always look on with fascination at extreme cases like this.
DEAL ALERT: Best Buy is feeling generous!
A WHIFF OF DESPERATION FROM BEST BUY HQ: Best Buy is now offering a $10 gift card when you buy a $50 gift card. This is only available online, it’s one $10/$50 per transaction, and the offer expires December 18. It is a very good deal, as evidenced by the degree to which it has blown up on Slickdeals, and if it is not obvious to you why this is a good deal, please let us explain why:
- Repeatability. “Rinse and repeat” is in effect here, as there does not seem to be a limit on the number of times you can do the deal.
- Fungibility. Some stores let you use gift cards to buy other gift cards, and Best Buy is one such store. Two gift cards to look for at best buy are Kindle gift cards, which can be used at Amazon, and Visa gift cards. Last time I checked–which was, admittedly, a year ago–Best Buy carried Visa gift cards and you could buy them with a BB gift card. The Visa GCs had a $200 max and a $6 activation fee. If that option is still available, you could do the deal three times, pay $150 out of pocket, and get $174 on your Visa GC. In other words, it’s cash (equivalent) for 14% off.
- Amex. If you sync your Amazon card on Twitter you can get $20 off a $200 purchase. So if you do the deal four times, then combine your gift cards into one transaction before Dec 31, you can get $260 worth of merchandise from Best Buy for $200. You can do this once per Amex card that you have.
Status: What is it good for?
SOMETHING, ABSOLUTELY: Hack My Trip recently compiled a vast amount of information into a reader-friendly side-by-side comparison of frequent-flyer benefits. We don’t fly enough to even think about trying to get status with an airline, but for those of you who do, this is worth a look. And now The Points Guy has done something similar with hotel status, though he only looks at top-tier status (i.e. Hilton Diamond is covered, but not Hilton Gold). Mommy Points details her mattress runs which helped her qualify for Hyatt diamond status.
For those of you not in the know, a mattress run is the act of purchasing nights at a hotel that you don’t really need or want in order to get or keep status and/or bonus points. Why, you ask, do people do these thing? Let’s quote Mommy Points:
In the end, $250 for four mattress runs netted me 3,000 points from Diamond amenity bonuses, an extra 10,000 points from the recent promo, approximately 1,625 points from regular points + 30% Diamond bonus, and roughly 535 Ultimate Reward points by paying with my Chase Sapphire Preferred. That comes to 15,160 points that I value at a minimum of 1.5 cents each – and usually redeem for about 2 cents each. That means about $227 in value was earned from the points. That makes the stays almost a wash if you look at it that way. Of course, most of all it also helped me re-qualify for Diamond for all of 2013.
If you look at TPG’s table, you’ll see that Hyatt diamond status gives you free internet, breakfast, suite upgrades, and bonus points. Not too shabby for a little extra planning!
GREAT BRIDGE GROUP UPDATE: Following up on yesterday’s item, we completed our registration and entered our Chase data. Result: ERROR! No rewards for us. Then it occured to us that Quicken was not enabled on our Chase account; once we did that, we were able to add the account. Next, we tried one of our Amex cards, and it worked on the first try.
When you add cards, greatbridgegroup.com downloads all your transactions from the past few months and calculates your cash back, so we’ve already got money waiting for us on the next payout date of March 7, 2013. GBG caps the quarterly payments at $75, which is smart on their part as it will reduce the impact of people who like to game the system (ahem). Will the company be around to make the first payment? Stay tuned! If GBG does manage to find a viable business model, we’re more than happy to fork over our credit card transactions for $300 per year.
ONE MORE THING ABOUT TARGET: We just stumbled upon the Totally Target website. We’re not into the coupon scene too much, being mostly concerned with the low-hanging fruit (ahem), but we have to say, we are impressed with Kerry’s post on the $10/$50 deal.
AND FINALLY: The Fark headline put it best: “$50 for a crappy cup of coffee“. Indeed.
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