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How to earn air miles without an annual fee. And free apps from Apple!

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HOW TO EARN AIR MILES WITHOUT AN ANNUAL FEE: This Flyertalk thread alerted me to something interesting: it’s actually possible to earn miles from several different airlines at a respectable rate without paying an annual fee. The key is the no-fee Wyndham Rewards card, which earns two points per dollar spent.

For most airlines, you get 1 mile for every 2.5 Wyndham points. So if you’re earning 2 points per dollar spent, you’re effectively getting 0.8 miles per dollar. That’s not too far below the 1 mile per dollar a lot of cards give, and you’re not paying an annual fee.

Wyndham’s domestic partners include AeroMexico, Air Canada, American Airlines, Delta, Frontier, Southwest, USAir, and United. Moving abroad, you have Air Berlin, Czech Airlines, Saudia Airlines, Air China, and a few others I’ve never heard of.

Obviously, most readers of this blog (to say nothing of the author) are more inclined to sign up for an airline card, get the bonus, enjoy the first year with the annual fee waived, and then hope for a nice retention offer. But if you know somebody who steadfastly refuses to pay an annual fee but wants to earn miles–or who maybe just needs to top off an account–you could do worse than to recommend this card.

CAPITAL ONE QUICKSILVER: Speaking of cards you can do worse than, Capital One has a new card out, the Quicksilver. It offers a simple, non-gimmicky 1.5% cash back, and good for them for doing that. If it weren’t for the 2% Fidelity Amex card, plus the fact that Capital One is known for pulling from all three bureaus for a single credit card application, I could totally recommend this card.

FREE APPS FROM APPLE: Apple has several quality apps for free this week as part of the iOS 5th anniversary celebration. Slickdeals has a  good list of the free apps.

BEST APPS FOR RICH FOLK: Of course, if you’re one of those snooty upper crust types, you probably turn your nose up at free apps since they do nothing to signal the status you hold so dear. Fortunately for you, TechCrunch lists the top apps for the 1%. The most interesting one to me was OneFineStay, which lets you stay in rich folks’ houses. Kind of like Airbnb but, you know, rich. And if you’re really rich, you’d obviously think nothing of dropping a grand on an app.

Rich.

NOT A BAD IDEA: If you’re going to drink your way through college, you may as well figure out how to get paid for it. That’s apparently the reasoning at Blue Ridge Community College in Hendersonville, NC, which will offer an Associate in Applied Science Degree in Brewing, Distillation and Fermentation.

The spirit of $76 lives, but some good credit card offers have died… Plus free stamps from Office Depot.

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SPIRIT OF  $76: Capital One 360 is offering some very good account opening bonuses as part of its Independence Day promotion. Through July 3 only, you can get:

  • $76 for opening a savings account
  • $100 for opening a checking account
  • $176 for opening a Sharebuilder account with $5,000 or more
  • $576 for opening a Sharebuilder IRA account with $100,000 ($376 for $50K, $276 for $25K)

You can also get up to $76 for referring two friends as well, and according to CapOne your friends will get the bonus too. If anybody would like to be my friend and support your favorite website, you can use my referral link to open your account.

RIP, LUCRATIVE CREDIT CARD OFFERS: The bonus gods giveth, and they taketh away, as some quality financial products are no longer with us, at least for the time being. As mentioned last week, the Lufthansa offer has been nerfed from 50,000 to 35000 miles. If you did get in on the action, Million Mile Secrets has 18 ways you can use those miles.

What’s worse, the B of A Hawaiian Airlines cards–previously the best way to amass several hundred thousand HHonors points in a hurry, as my wife and I did last fall in preparation for our family vacation–are gone as well. Presumably there will be a HA re-launch at some point, but for now you’re out of luck.  And the B of A Alaska Airlines debit card, one of the few remaining miles-earning debit cards? Gone.

The lesson, as always, is to get while the getting’s good.

OFFICE DEPOT UPDATE: Two Office Depot items of note. First, via Slickdeals, you can get a free book of stamps with a $75 purchase with this coupon. I checked the fine print and didn’t see any verbiage saying gift card purchases don’t count, but who knows. (UPDATE: Frequent Miler reports success with gift cards, AND there’s an additional $20 off $200 for Discover card holders, see the link for more.) Second, Office Depot has a new rewards program, and from what I can tell you get 10% back on your purchases… assuming you were going to puchase ink, toner, or paper.

If you spend more than $200 in a quarter, you get elevated to “Choice Member Status”, which means you get to pick 5 categories of your choice in which to get 10% rewards. Unfortunately, you need to be a Choice Member to see what categories you can pick, so that’s all the information I can give you right now.

There are often great deals when a loyalty program is launched, on account of promotions as well as unanticipated loopholes, so if you have an Office Depot near you, you might want to sign up.

Another UPDATE: Reader Chris kindly posted the categories in the comments. Here they are:

Bags & Travel
Binders & Laminating Items
Breakroom
Business Machines
Calculators
Calendars & Forms
Cameras & Camcorders
Chairs & Chair Mats
Cleaning & Personal Care
Computer Accessories
Digital Storage
Filing & Accessories
Furniture
Labels
Mailing & Shipping
Mobile Accessories
Office Accessories
Office Essentials
Plastic/Corrugate Storage
Portable Audio & Video
Presentation Materials
Printers, Copiers & Fax
School Supplies
Security & Cash Handling
Software & Books
Stationery & Gifts
Teaching Supplies
Tech Depot Services
Wall Boards
Writing & Drafting

What are the worst credit cards and the worst issuers?

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Commenter sjepps left the following comment:

I will strongly disagree with you and insist that Capital One is the worst. The fact that no one talks about or uses them confirms. They just don’t have anything at all to offer. At least Citi has the AA card and this (If you get to keep your points). I’ve been with Capital One for 10 years, I had to send a letter to the CEO to get my card upgraded from $500 to $5000.

I can’t disagree with badmouthing Capital One from a consumer standpoint–my wife and I have about 30 credit cards between us and only one is a Capital One card. We got it to take advantage of a balance transfer offer a while back and we haven’t used it in years. Capital One doesn’t have much to offer to those who seek the best deals in credit cards.

Whether that qualifies them as the “worst”, is, of course, highly subjective, as is any other definition of worst. You could mean worst deal for consumers, worst for people who frequent Flyertalk, Fatwallet, and Dansdeals, worst from a shareholder perspective, worst customer service, or something else.

By contrast, American Express’s Blue Cash Preferred offered unlimited 6% cash back on groceries, until Amex found out that too many people were getting too much unlimited cash back. And what did Amex do? They put a $6,000 cap on the 6% cash back.

What did Amex not do? They did not take money back from consumers, and they did not continue to offer the unlimited 6% cash back. This is one example of why I (and probably a lot of others) respect Amex’s management.

But I’d definitely rate Capital One as the worst from a standpoint of a credit card aficionado like myself. They have absolutely nothing remarkable about either their sign-up bonuses, their spending bonuses, or their partners (aside from the Best Buy card, which they’re selling to Citibank). I think their management is certainly better than Citi’s, and I would guess that the fact that they don’t have any great deals is a deliberate strategy on their part.

Of course, if you want to wade into the subprime world, things can get much worse. Consider, for example, the Continental Finance MasterCard:

This might be the worst credit card, ever. First, the $200 account processing fee, which is classified as a finance fee, should immediately scare you off. However, if you’re OK with that atrocity, note that you will be paying a 19.9% interest rate, which starts to immediately accrue on your finance charges. You do have a 25-day grace period on purchases, as long as the balance was paid in full the previous month. However, that’s about where the positives end with this horrible credit card. You’ll see a $12-per-month account maintenance fee, a $50 annual fee and a $25 credit increase fee each time your limit is raised; even if you didn’t ask for the increase.

A $25 credit increase fee! Talk about chutapah…

Best Buy credit card rewards now up to 6%:

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We recently reported the news that the Best Buy credit card will be giving 5% back to its users. At the time we figured that Silver members (those who spend more than $2,500 per year) would continue getting an additional half percent, for a total of 5%.

We were wrong, but in a good way:

Best Buy credit card 6

So yes: Best Buy will now give you 6% in rewards if you have their credit card and you’ve spent over $2,500 either this year or last year. And on a related note, you can buy Metabank Visa gift cards there–the maximum amount is $200 with a fee of $6, so a 3% loss. And 6% – 3% = 3%, if you catch our drift.

And yes, you can obtain Silver status by buying Visa gift cards. And yes, it’s easy to get PINs for these gift cards. And yes, you can use them to load your Bluebird card.

If you merely want to buy electronics, you can use a cash portal for a few extra percentage points on top of the 6%. Apple manages its pricing pretty well, so 10% off an Ipad would be a good deal. Check Cashbackaholic for a listing of Best Buy rebate portals.

Now then: if you’re inclined to buy Visa gift cards, this is not the best possible deal, but it’s still very good. Why do we keep bringing up this card? Despite our goal of cashing in on lucrative credit card subsidies, we get no compensation whatsoever for pushing this product, so that’s not why. A few reasons why we keep harping on this card:

  • If you’re going to have high credit card spending, it’s good to spread the love around to multiple issuers so that one issuer doesn’t freak out over your high spending on one card and decide you’re a credit risk.
  • The Best Buy issuer is Capital One (for now–ownership passes to Citi at some unknown point in the future), which does not issue any cards popular among the manufactured spending crowd. Spread the love!
  • Unlike other stores which may be available only regionally, Best Buy has pretty good national coverage.
  • Nobody else has covered this, so we may as well do it.
  • And the fact that nobody else is talking about this deal (aside from PFD’s very well-informed readership, of course) means that it’s likely to last longer.

That’s all for today. Happy Friday and have a great weekend!

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Saverocity is Journalistic in Nature, please obtain Professional Representation prior to attempting anything discussed herein. Opinions expressed here are author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, airlines or hotel chain, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities.