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AMEX Offer Best Practices for Adding Offers to Multiple Cards & My Offer Tracking Spreadsheet

Good morning everyone, happy Friday.  I am heading down to San Diego this weekend, but before I go, I wanted to talk about AMEX Offers and how I handle them.  For starters, I have 4 personal American Express credit cards in one account and 4 business American Express credit/charge cards in another account.  For the business cards, I have a primary business card and an employee card (both the business and employee cards are in my name).  All in all, I can add AMEX Offers to 8 cards: Old Blue Cash, Blue Cash Everyday, AMEX Everyday, AMEX Everyday (Dad’s card – I am an authorized user), Platinum Business, Green Business (no annual fee employee card for Platinum Business), SPG Business, and SPG Business (employee card).

AMEX Offers are great, but they become even better if you can leverage/multiply that great deal across all your American Express cards.  In this post, I will show you how I add the same AMEX Offer to multiple American Express cards and how I track all the AMEX Offers in my AMEX Offer Tracking Spreadsheet (download link included below).  If you follow this guide, you will be an AMEX Offer expert in no time.

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It’s Not Me, It’s You – My Breakup Story with Hertz

I see myself as a glass half full kinda girl. I don’t enjoy ranting, but today I just have to rant. So be forewarned, I’m DONE with Hertz. I am so done and fed up, and breaking up ain’t hard to do.

Here’s the story. I rent cars A LOT. Back in 2013, a Hertz satellite office opened up in a Chevrolet dealership in my neighborhood. Sweet! And for a while, it indeed was sweet. The two guys who worked there, Travis and Chris, were great. Good with customers, fun senses of humor, they knew never to give me a Nissan Versa (the seats are hard as rocks), and it was actually a pleasure to rent from them. So Hertz got all my business.

Hertz let Travis go, I think because he was the manager and the more expensive employee. For a while, Chris held down the fort by himself. But the car dealership hired Chris away from Hertz. I still see him, and he’s treated better and making way more money than when he was with Hertz.

That’s when the troubles started. Continue reading

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PSA: Stuck in PayPal Verification Loop? Try Several Small Orders

Good morning everyone, I hope your week is going well.  There have been a ton of eBay gift card deals from PayPal Digital Gifts (PPDG) and SVM from the last few days and I have purchased $2,700+ worth of gift cards in the last 3 days.  Inevitably, I get stuck in the infamous “PayPal Verification Loop” where you need to verify/confirm your identity before you can pay with your PayPal account.  If you are not buying thousands of gift cards per day, you should not see the “Verify Your Account” message.

PayPal Verification Loop Payment Option Unavailable (2)Unfortunately, if you do see the message, you will need to verify your identity before you can pay with PayPal.  The easiest option is to confirm via text message where PayPal sends you a text asking if you are trying to complete a purchase of $XXX.XX and you respond with “1”, which means yes.  Yes, yes, yes, a million times yes!!

PayPal Verifcation Loop Text Messages

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An Introduction to Hotel Hustle (My Favorite Hotel Award Search Tool)

It seems to me in the travel world of my dreams, the best possible world would be the one where we make a choice, set an alert either for availability or price, and then technology kicks in and does the rest. I don’t have coding or software design skills, so for me, it’s still like living in the world of the Jetsons that my travel dream world has been here for some time already. But in my dream world, of course, this all goes off without a hitch :)

I’ve found that Hotel Hustle is the best and easiest hitch-less hotel tool to use, and I was reminded of this just yesterday. Grant hasn’t written about Hotel Hustle, so I wanted to make sure that the TWG posse is aware of just how great Hotel Hustle is. Hotel Hustle is the brainchild of Seth Miller, The Wandering Aramean. Seth writes code to relax, and I’m sure glad he does! The basic idea is that it’s a hotel award search tool.

Hotel Hustle Searching for Hotels

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Someone Tried to Hack my Citi AT&T Access More Credit Card

Buenos dias everyone. I got a voicemail last Sunday afternoon from a Citi fraud prevention representative in Jacksonville, Florida asking me to call in to verify some recent charges. In retrospect, the fact that they were calling on Easter Sunday might have been a red flag, but at the time I didn’t think anything of it, and actually forgot about the call until I tried to place an order with PayPal Digital Gifts using my Citi AT&T Access More Credit Card and got an error message. When I logged into my Citi account, I got a popup message informing me that my charging ability may be limited, and found the following message attached to my Citi AT&T Access More Credit Card:

A screenshot from citi.com showing a message advising that there may have been unauthorized charges on the card and asking the recipient to call a phone number to verify them.

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