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Earn $15,000 in bonuses with Ebates! Plus other odds and ends

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THANKS FREQUENT MILER!: Some kind words and free PR for PFD! Inside Flyer recently interviewed several boardingarea.com bloggers, and Greg, aka Frequent Miler, was kind enough to mention your humble blogger:

Greg says he reads a great many travel blogs but a new blog called Personal Finance Digest has caught his attention. It isn’t a travel blog, but it covers travel deals as well as many non-travel financial opportunities.

Thanks to Frequent Miler for the shout-out, and thanks to Travel Blogger Buzz for letting me know about it!

And while we’re talking about FM, he scientifically proved after exhaustive research that CashBackMonitor is the best rebate portal finder.

HOW A MISTAKE LED TO FREE $2,000 LIFETIME FAIRMONT PLATINUM STATUS: And speaking of TravelBloggerBuzz, a recent post made passing reference to a story I hadn’t heard about, the story of how TBB earned lifetime platinum status with Fairmont Hotels:

On the coupon website Living Social last week, Fairmont’s landmark San Francisco hotel on Nob Hill offered a package that included a stay in a luxurious suite and an extraordinarily attractive bonus: perk-rich lifetime VIP status with the entire Fairmont chain. The cost: Either $2,000 or $10,000.

People who understood the significance of the bonus started snapping up the deal, salivating at the chance to be treated like royalty every time they step into a Fairmont hotel for the rest of their life for as little as $2,000.

But within hours after approximately 117 people bought the Living Social package, Fairmont mysteriously pulled the deal even though it was supposed to have been sold through next Tuesday, March 1.

The lifetime platinum part of the deal was a mistake, but to Fairmont’s credit they honored it. Perks include an annual free night, several free upgrades each year, and an annual $100 dining/spa certificate. Well done! It’s good to know what the heck you’re doing so that you can pounce on deals like this when they present themselves.

(EDIT: An earlier version of this article used the word “free” in the intro headline. A subsequent investigation confirmed that $2,000 is not, in fact, free. We regret the error.)

VIRGIN ATLANTIC 65,000 FOLLOW-UP: Thanks to commenters rick b and Paul  for doing some legwork on my Virgin Atlantic 65000-mile credit card offer post. Paul dug up this One Mile at a Time post on redeeming Virgin Atlantic points on Virgin America flights and pointed out that you can also parlay the miles via Hilton into a free night at a $1,000-per-night resort. Rick noted that the miles can also go for cross-country flights on Virgin Australia and for Air New Zealand as well. Thanks guys!

EARN $15,000 VIA EBATES REFERRALS: If you don’t already have an ebates account, you can get a free $10 gift card to the retailer of your choice by signing up here. Note that this is a referral link for me, but this is open to the public so you can set up your own referral link if you want to. In either case, once you’re signed up–or if you already are signed up–there’s some potentially lucrative referral action you can get in on.

ebates referral

As per their referral chart, you get $5 per referral (but only if that referral makes a $25 purchase via ebates within one year of being referred) AND you also get some lucrative bonuses. If you can refer just two people who purchase $50 worth of stuff, that’s a $50 bonus, so your $50 worth of stuff is effectively free. The same free stuff ratio scales all the way up through the first 100 people.

Two thoughts on this: first, I hope somebody reading this is in college so he can sign up his entire dorm and earn $2,500 (or whatever) for a kick-ass party. Second, while looking at the T&C’s for loopholes, I saw this: “The following activities are not permitted and will disqualify you from earning a referral bonus: (i) self-referral…” In other words, you can’t keep referring yourself. But what if Person A refers Person B, and then Person B refers Person A, and so forth–does that count as self-referral? I have no idea. Anyone?

NETSPEND IS HIRING: Can one of my readers please take this job and carve out a friendly space at NetSpend for points & miles aficionados?

The Manager, Predictive Analytics and Modeling designs, develops, and executes key quantitative / modeling projects within Marketing Analytics team to drive decisions, maximize contribution margin, and continuously increase acquisition, retention, and winback efficiency & effectiveness. This position is located in San Mateo, CA.

It’s in Marketing, and not Risk/Fraud, so you wouldn’t actually be setting policy for churners, but you might at least be able to talk some sense into those who are.  I’d do it myself for the good of my readers, but as you may or may not recall I have a strict policy against living in high-cost areas. Anyone willing to step up?

Free hotel rooms, free stuff from Lowe’s and Amazon, and expensive healthcare

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40% OFF ANYTHING AT LOWE’S: There are a couple of stackable Lowe’s deals you may be interested in:

  • $10 off $50 via an Amex Twitter Sync promotion
  • $10 off $50 via online coupons. There are other coupons as well: 10% off, $20 off $100, and $30 off $150. Go to Slickdeals for the links to all these.

FREE $5 FROM AMEX: Get a $5 credit from Amazon when you buy $45 of Amazon gift cards.

HOW TO GET FREE HOTEL ROOMS: Travel Is Free has a very helpful amalgamation of hotel Best Rate Guarantee resources.

OBAMACARE NUMBER-CRUNCHING: In John Mauldin’s weekly bulletin, he’s got a lot of interesting macro-type stuff on healthcare economics. For example:

A hospital system like the Cleveland Clinic currently bills about $18 billion for medical services and collect around $6 billion. (We do not know the exact numbers for the Clinic.) It costs such a system around $5.5 billion to provide all the services, and thus they are able to invest $500 million in plant, equipment maintenance, and new equipment at the Clinic. An institution like the Clinic gets this revenue by collecting from Medicare about $0.23 on the dollar billed, from Medicaid about $0.18 on the dollar billed, and about $0.38 on the dollar billed for the aggregate of commercially insured patients. We are sure this seems bizarre to someone from outside the US, and actually it does to us, too, but it is the way the system has evolved.

Very bizarre! I can’t think of any other industry outside of debt collection where you can only expect a third of what you’re owed.

Here’s a cost-cutting measure currently being put into place:

An article in Health Affairs indicates that in California the CALPERS system, the largest state-run health insurance provider, has gone to reference pricing in some areas – CALPERS gives employees $30,000 for a total hip or total knee replacement and lists the hospitals that charge less than that. Virtually all academic medical centers (those that provide care for the sickest, and those that train our future doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dieticians, etc.) fall into the high-cost group, and their share of the CALPERS patient population that has hip or knee replacements has gone from 54% to 35%, while the share for low-cost hospitals has climbed from 46% to 65%. (Only one high-priced group hospital in California converted to a low-cost group hospital in the past three years.)

The bottom line:

The prediction is these hospitals will be paid approximately 5% fewer total dollars next year and 25–35% fewer dollars in 2018, while treating a growing number of patients. Since more than 60% of their costs (in many institutes the figure is more than 80%) are for personnel, we either have to find ways to do things more efficiently, that is with fewer personnel to do the same amount of work (for example, as the Center for Integrative Medicine has done with the shared medical appointments for acupuncture or with the shared TrimLife Program); or to do things in new ways (to re-engineer care), as in the Lifestyle Medicine Program; or to do things with less-expensive personnel, for example, by substituting a medical assistant for a physician or nurse in some processes where a physician assistant is equally capable of doing those things.

There’s much, much more–please take a look if you’re at all interested in the current healthcare debate.

40,000 miles from an unusual source, and 3 million miles from an even more unusual source

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40K MILES FROM AN UNUSUAL SOURCE: Courtesy of Flyertalk, here’s rare offer: 40,000 LAN miles through October 15 when you sign up for the LAN visa. The downside: it’s issued by US Bank, which is known for being finicky about approving credit card a. Here’s the LAN awards table: coming from the U.S., it’s 48,000 milesfor a roundtrip to Brazil, 70,000 to Argentina, and 100,000 to Easter Island.

I had hoped there’d be some discussion on boardingarea.com about how to use these miles, but no such luck, alas…

[Read more…]

Apple FCU credit card: a good deal for travelers?

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Every now and then I like to explore the vast, uncharted regions of the internet to see what kinds of cool stuff I might find. It was on just such a journey that I found the Apple Federal Credit Union Platinum Visa, which may or may not be a good deal for some of you.

Apple FCU is one of the nation’s 100 biggest credit unions and primarily serves people in Northern Virginia, with membership being limited to residents and employees in the area, or to members of the Northern Virginia Athletic Directors Administrators & Coaches Association, which costs $20 to join.

The thing that caught my eye is that the card gives 3X rewards on gas, which is uncommon for credit unions. The rewards come in the form of points administered by CURewards.com, a company which manages rewards programs for a lot of credit unions. [Read more…]

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