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Is Vanilla Reload Finally Dead?

December 17, 2014 By Joe Cortez Leave a Comment





Fly away, Bluebird. Fly until you get to the other side of the Rainbow Bridge. :-(

Many of you may have received an e-mail from American Express about your Bluebird accounts this afternoon. If you have not yet, it is probably coming. Brace yourselves: it’s not good.

In some way, shape, or form, I have been anticipating the death of the Vanilla Reload. It started when CVS stopped allowing credit cards for Vanilla Reload purchases this summer. But now, we may finally see the end of the road for the Vanilla Reload – if this semi-cryptic e-mail from American Express is true. Please note that the text is from the e-mail, but emphasis is mine:

InComm Vanilla Reload PIN Package is one of the many ways to add money to your Bluebird account. Starting April 1, 2015, the Incomm Vanilla Reload PIN Package will no longer be available for purchase. Any previously purchased Vanilla Reload can still be added to any Bluebird account.

So what does this mean? From my personal interpretation (which reserves the right to be wrong), this forewarns one of two things. Either American Express will no longer honor Vanilla Reloads as a way to reload your Bluebird Card after April 1, or the Vanilla Reload that we have loved so dearly is completely going away next spring.

Currently, the Vanilla Reload website still has the American Express Serve logo on the front page. Yet, I am choosing to interpret it as the latter. The sky could be, in fact, falling.

Is this a big deal? Or with many other ways to spend, is this one door closing before another window opens? Let me know your thoughts, while I mourn the loss of our dear friend: the Vanilla Reload.

Ed. Note: No compensation nor incentive was given to mention or link to any product or service in this article. This content is not provided or commissioned by American Express. Opinions expressed here are author’s alone, not those of American Express, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by American Express.

Filed Under: Credit Cards, Dollars and Sense, Manufactured Spending Tagged With: Manufactured Spending, Miles and Points, vanilla reload

How much detail of a manufactured spend deal should we offer?

June 22, 2014 By Trevor 18 Comments

SAMSUNG CSC

Value: noun \ˈval-(ˌ)yü\

  1. : the amount of money that something is worth : the price or cost of something
  2. : something that can be bought for a low or fair price
  3. : usefulness or importance

—The Merriam Webster Dictionary

I offer this question; with the “we” as loosely defined as possible. In this case, I really mean, “we” as – the most public part of the community – also known as bloggers. Primarily because, as MileNerd states, there was A Big Death this week.

Many people complain about the “circles and arrows” bloggers, because they “kill deals.” But to that same point, if we are to spur innovation to find “the next big thing,” then the information needs to be shared. This discussion reminds me of Marathon Man’s discussion at the CharlotteDO back in May. He has a great post on this as well.

Research!

Sitting in the audience when I heard this woman ask a question as Marathon Man notes – asking a Walmart employee if she could use a gift card. How would she have known that this was a huge mistake? My first thought was: Research! You need to research before you dive into potentially significant financial transactions. Countless folks have pointed out that Manufactured Spenders buy $500 gift cards as if they are $0.25 packs of Doublemint Gum – double the fun (or if you have a 5x – quintuple the fun!). For many, a $500 transaction is a huge deal. It should be – it is a lot of money!  If you are new to Manufactured Spend (MS), you should research. Heck, you should research your research. Your credit score is the biggest asset you have in this economy. Would you put that at risk just for a hundred thousand miles? I hope not.

Stewardship:

Marathon Man, and others (a few others), make the great point that this hobby requires stewardship. I like to think of if this way: I’m a mariner, and I love spending time on the water. So when I go out, I don’t throw trash in the water. In fact, if I see trash, I try to pick it up! It’s just a small piece of doing our part. With manufactured spending, it’s not a question of keeping your trash to yourself (but you should anyway – it’s the polite thing to do after all). Rather, you need to be careful with this great hobby. Sharing “secrets” in confidence, perhaps even explaining them in greater detail, is encouraged – but in a face to face experience, with individuals that you know. Putting such things on the “internet” makes them public, for stores to find and ultimately shut down.

TaggingMiles is a new blog. Joe and I have been around for a while though. We’re not going to share deals for clicks. It’s not our style. We would rather help you — the reader — to figure out what the next deal is. If we’ve done it right, hopefully you’ll share it with us.

What’s next?

I’ll be candid. I don’t have the answer. If anything, the answer I have, is to learn, and use the scientific method in everything you do. For your reference, I’ve adapted the Scientific Method for you in this easy to follow process diagram:

scienceprocess

In closing: I’ll offer that we all have a lot to learn. We, that play the MS game, have an amazing talent — to see not just the big picture, but to also see the intricacies of the deal. So I would encourage you to test new things, especially in light of the death of Vanilla Reloads, and the most recent death of the Vanilla Network at Walmart.

I don’t know what the next big deal is. Even if I did, I can say for sure, that I wouldn’t share it on TaggingMiles, however, if you reach out to me so that we can develop a rapport, via twitter, e-mail, or the Saverocity Forums, I’d be happy to share it with you, when I do find it.

Filed Under: Editorial, Manufactured Spending Tagged With: Manufactured Spend, one vanilla, stewardship, vanilla reload

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