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Why Choice Hotel points are actually useful, and how to mix credit cards with gift cards
TESTING SOMETHING OUT HERE: Yesterday, as a joke, I tossed in an affiliate link along with some obviously false miraculous claims about credit cards healing the ill, and to my surprise it generated some clicks. So today I would like to remind you that GoFreeCredit.com masterminded the Carolina Panthers’ evisceration of the New York Giants on Sunday, plus they can also give you a free credit score.
APPARENTLY CHOICE HOTEL POINTS ARE USEFUL FOR SOMETHING: Thanks to Loyalty Traveler for teaching me something new! Today’s lesson learned is that Choice Hotel points are actually useful for something, namely European travel:
Thinking beyond the high end hotels in Starwood, Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and InterContinental opens up the opportunity to book comfortable hotels at bargain rates if you expand your outlook to midscale chain hotels available for points in programs like Choice Privileges, Best Western Rewards and Wyndham Rewards. These are global hotel chains where the best values are often found outside the USA.
This was news to me as I’m much more familiar with the other big chains (and their credit cards, of course). During a recent promotion it was possible to buy 56,000 points for a couple hundred dollars, and those points can you get you a full 7 days in a number of hotels, such as the one immediately below (though 7 nights is too many to spend in Venice in one trip, but still) so you’re essentially getting a hotel room for 90% off.
THE INS AND OUTS OF CREDIT CARD GUARANTEES: Thanks also to Frequent Miler for doing some legwork in figuring out whether standard credit card protections apply when you partially pay with gift cards. Bottom line: it depends. For example:
I checked the benefits guides of a few American Express cards and found mixed results. Purchase Protection applies when any portion of the purchase is made with your card. Return protection, though, only applies when the purchase is made entirely with your card. The extended warranty is less clear about whether it applies to partial purchases, but I think it does.
Most of the cards FM looked at require the entire purchase to be made on the card in order for the protections to apply, so caveat emptor and give the article a look.
ANATOMY OF AN INVESTMENT DISASTER: Over at Oddball Stocks, Nate reviews what happened with First Bank of Delaware, one of his investments gone bad. Here’s the setup:
The bank was digging itself into a hole that seemed hard to recover from, that was until I found a news release on the bank’s website that explained they were looking into the possibility of winding down operations and liquidating. Suddenly I was interested, here was a bank trading for $22m with a book value of $44m. The trade seemed attractive, especially with such a large discount to book value, if the company’s book value was anywhere close to reality I had the chance to double my money.
The downside seemed somewhat limited as well, at 50% of book value what could possibly go wrong? What sort of event could destroy this investment?
Here’s what:
The First Bank of Delaware’s troubled past had finally caught up with them. In their recent history they had been known as a subprime enabler, they were a clearing bank for subprime credit cards. They were also involved in a supposed security incident where the bank processed a large number of fraudulent Visa and Mastercard transactions. The bank was also involved in a check cashing company from California that was accused of lending at usurious rates. And lastly the bank was involved in an online check cashing and payment system that was allegedly used to send fraudulent payments that they bank was aware of.
Read the gory details here.
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Crack is not an acceptable form of payment at your local government offices. Besides, it doesn’t even earn you points.
A new way to manufacture points!
CTP FTW: Chasing The Points has discovered that you can use a certain type of ATM found at numerically named convenience stores to generate points and miles to your heart’s content. Some essential details:
- Despite an option to reload a prepaid card, our experience is that you can not load a Bluebird or Serve account
- Bill Pays cost $2
- Nationwide Visa Buxx can’t be used at all
- Gift cards with PIN can’t be used at all
- Paypal debit card works
- Max amount may be $1000/transaction
Go read the whole thing at CTP’s site, of course.
AN INTERESTING FACT ABOUT TRAVELOCITY AND EXPEDIA: Courtesy of Quora, I found this interesting tidbit:
The loading screens you see primarily on travel websites are artificial. Finding the cheapest flights, the best hotels, and whatever else you may be looking for takes less than a second. In fact, a lot of hard work goes into making all that information very easily accessible for the web app.
The loading screen exists because when the information is returned to the user as quickly as possible, he or she will often perceive it to be less valuable. It’s as if the server didn’t put much effort into really finding a great deal. No customer ever actually articulates that; but surveys, customer testing sessions, and most importantly conversion rates support the notion that when a seven or eight second loading screen tells the user that the numbers are being crunched just for this one query, the result is perceived to be more valuable.
CREDIT CARD FRAUD NO LONGER AS LUCRATIVE: Apparently social network fraud is more lucrative than credit card fraud. Who knew? Reuters reports:
In the latest twist, a computer virus widely used to steal credit card data, known as Zeus, has been modified to create bogus Instagram “likes” that can be used to generate buzz for a company or individual, according to cyber experts at RSA, the security division of EMC Corp.
These fake “likes” are sold in batches of 1,000 on Internet hacker forums, where cyber criminals also flog credit card numbers and other information stolen from PCs. According to RSA, 1,000 Instagram “followers” can be bought for $15 and 1,000 Instagram “likes” go for $30, whereas 1,000 credit card numbers cost as little as $6.
1,000 credit card numbers for $6? Even crime’s not personal anymore. You’re just a number to those crooks. Now criminals in my day, they cared about you as a person…
ANNUAL RETURNS ON LUXURY GOODS: From The Economist via The Big Picture… don’t you feel foolish for not going all in on luxury cars a few years ago?
$15 off $75 at Walmart, miles for taxes, and how to get a coronary bypass for $1,600
$15 OFF A $75 WALMART PURCHASE: Amex has another nice Twitter Sync promotion, so have at it! The limit is one $15 credit per Amex card. Along similar lines, if you shop at Gap or Old Navy, you can get a $15 CVS gift card when you buy a $100 gift card to one of those stores.
EARN POINTS AND MILES BY PAYING TAXES: Frequent Miler has a good introduction to paying taxes with miles-earning debit cards.
THE GOLDMAN SACHS ELEVATOR: The NYT has an interview with the man behind the Goldman Sachs Elevator Twitter account, with which I was previously unfamiliar. Here’s a sampling of Goldman Sach’s elevator conversations:
- “If you love something, break its spirit so it never has the courage to leave you.”
- “If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying… Because if you’re good at lying, you’re good at everything.”
- “Too many people are smart enough to be angry, but not smart enough to be successful.”
- “I don’t read fiction. Unless you count an Indonesian bond offering memorandum.”
- “Starbucks needs a separate line for people who have their shit together.”
- #1: “The Cheesecake Factory looks like a restaurant poor people think rich people might eat at.” #2: “Same with anything Trump.”
- “From my experience, most people really should have lower self-esteem.”
- “I already know I’m going to Hell. So, at this point, it’s go big or go home.”
CHEAP SURGERY: Remember the recent story about the hospital in Oklahoma with a transparent pricing policy? If domestic medical tourism still isn’t cheap enough for you then perhaps you’d like to consider India. Bloomberg reports:
Devi Shetty is obsessed with making heart surgery affordable for millions of Indians. On his office desk are photographs of two of his heroes: Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi.
Shetty is not a public health official motivated by charity. He’s a heart surgeon turned businessman who has started a chain of 21 medical centers around India. By trimming costs with such measures as buying cheaper scrubs and spurning air-conditioning, he has cut the price of artery-clearing coronary bypass surgery to 95,000 rupees ($1,583), half of what it was 20 years ago, and wants to get the price down to $800 within a decade. The same procedure costs $106,385 at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
How do they get the prices so low?
One of the ways in which Shetty is able to keep his prices low is by cutting out unnecessary pre-op testing, he said.
Urine samples that were once routine before surgery were eliminated when it was found that only a handful of cases tested positive for harmful bacteria. The chain uses web-based computer software to run logistics, rather than licensing or building expensive new systems for each hospital.
When Shetty couldn’t convince a European manufacturer to bring down the price of its disposable surgical gowns and drapes to a level affordable for his hospitals, he convinced a group of young entrepreneurs in Bangalore to make them so he could buy them 60 percent cheaper.
In the future, Shetty sees costs coming down further as more Asian electronics companies enter the market for CT scanners, MRIs and catheterization labs — bringing down prices. As India trains more diploma holders in specialties such as anesthesiology, gynecology, ophthalmology and radiology, Narayana will be able to hire from a larger, less expensive talent pool.
One positive unforeseen outcome may be that many of the cost-saving approaches could be duplicated in developed economies, especially in the U.S. under health reform.
John Mauldin is fond of saying that anything that can’t continue, won’t. Ever-increasing medical expenses are the sort of thing this truism applies to. I have no idea how or when we’re going to reign in prices, but there certainly seems to be plenty of opportunity to do so.
“SIMPLE, BORING AND CHEAP”: That’s how Nate Tobik describes REO Plastics, his latest find over at Oddball Stocks:
What’s so great about REO Plastics?
- Trades at $15, although it hung around $12 for the past year.
- Earned $3.07 p/s last year, and $.79 p/s the prior year.
- NCAV is $15.39
- Book value $27.66, grew 12% from the previous year.
- EV/EBIT 2.12
- P/E 4.88
- ROE ex-excess cash 12.86%
There’s more about the stock here.
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