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Bank of America Changes: Cryptocurrency is Cash Advance, Simplified Foreign Transactions & No Payment Return Envelope

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Good morning everyone.  I was reviewing my April Bank of America credit card statements and noticed a few changes to the Credit Card Agreement.  I believe these changes go into effect immediately for all Bank of America credit cards, but check your April credit card statement to be sure.  There are 3 main changes that I will cover in this post.  The first is that cryptocurrency purchases will be treated as a cash advance (like money orders, travelers checks, casino gaming chips, bail bonds, etc.).  I believe many other credit card companies have a similar policy regarding cryptocurrency.  When you make a cash advance transaction, you do not earn any rewards, but instead start accruing interest right away.  The next 2 changes involve foreign transactions and payments.

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PSA: Check Existing Southwest Airlines Reservations for Silent Schedule Changes & Cancellations

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Good morning everyone.  A few weeks ago, I made a speculative Southwest Airlines booking to Lihue, Kauai for the first week of Laura’s summer vacation.  I’ve seen the price of the flight drop a few times since I made the original reservation and checked for price drops every Tuesday morning (after SWA sends out their deals email).  Unfortunately, when I checked the prices for this trip, I could not see the non-stop flights from Oakland (OAK) to Lihue (LIH).  I started digging into the reservations and found out that the outbound flight was completely cancelled and the return flight was changed to the following day with 2 stops.  I understand that this is a very uncertain time, but the part that really bugs me is that SWA did not send me an email about the flight cancellation or schedule change.  I also needed to reach out to SWA to redeposit the SWA points back into my account.  I will share all the details below.

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Costco Gift Cards Trigger Discover It Credit Card Q2 5% Cash Back Bonus Categories

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Good afternoon everyone, I hope you had a great weekend.  We are now in Q2 so you can start earning cash back at new bonus categories with your Discover It Credit Card.  For Q2 (April 1 – June 30), you can earn 5% cash back at Gas Stations, Uber, Lyft, and at Wholesale Clubs.  I have 2 Discover It cards (since I converted my Discover It Miles to another Discover It), so I can earn 2 x $1,500 = $3,000 x 5% = $150 cash back total if I max out both cards this quarter.  Laura and I are members of Costco, so we decided to buy a $500 Costco gift card through the Costco website (only Visa credit cards are accepted in store).  We will use the gift card at Costco and at Costco gas stations for the next few weeks.  I am happy to report that the gift card purchase earned 5% cash back.

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Work from Home Diary 5: Quarantine Buddy, Work Space & Daily Routine

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Good afternoon everyone.  I started sharing my thoughts regarding working from home in a series of Work from Home Diary posts.  Feel free to share your work from home feelings in the comments section below.  For today’s update, I wanted to talk about my quarantine buddy (Laura), our combined work space, and our daily routine.

I’m on week 4 of working from home, so I seem to have a good system in place.  For the last few weeks, Laura has also been working from home.  When I was home by myself, I preferred working upstairs in our guest room / home office.  But now that Laura is home too, I decided to move down to the dining room table to work next to her.  It is nice to work face to face with someone (even though we are working on completely different things) and I think it keeps us both accountable.  I make sure she doesn’t spend all day on Facebook, Instagram or online shopping; she makes sure I don’t spend all day watching CNN (aka Coronavirus News Network) and reading travel blogs.

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Google Analytics: What Blog Posts Are People Reading? (Year to Date vs. Last 2 Weeks)

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Good morning everyone, I hope your week is going well.  I just read Frequent Miler’s post this morning (How Frequent Miler (the business) will survive COVID-19) and thought it would be interesting to see what Travel with Grant blog posts people read year to date (January 1 – March 31) vs. what blog posts people read during the last 2 weeks (March 18 – March 31).  I listed the top 10 posts for each period of time and their corresponding pageviews during that time.  Red text represents blog posts on both lists.  At the end of this post, I will also provide some analysis of the results below.

Posts for January 1 – March 31 (Year to Date)

Page Title Pageviews
How-To Guide: Activate a Gift Card and Create a PIN 8,377
Send Money to Friends (or Other Bank Accounts) Instantly with Zelle (Formerly Chase QuickPay / clearXchange) 5,374
If I Could Only Keep 5 Credit Cards with Annual Fees… 4,175
How to Cancel 1 Passenger on a Multi-Passenger Southwest Airlines Reservation 3,951
Chime Card Prepaid Reloadable Debit Card – Instant Cash Back Card 3,779
Print USPS and UPS Shipping Labels from your PayPal Account 3,479
Walmart.com Orders Instantly Cancelled? Try Walmart’s Online Chat 3,113
Trim Saved Me Another $15 on my Comcast Xfinity Cable Bill 3,033
Changes to $250 Resort Credit & Point Transfers for American Express Hilton Aspire Credit Card (Effective May 1, 2020) 2,589
How to Convert an Existing Discover Credit Card into a Different Discover Credit Card Online 2,503

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