Tag Archives: Chase Ultimate Rewards Points

Refresh your Memory: Plink, Shopkick, Visa Savings Edge, Checkout51, and Chime Card (Plus Enter my Contest for 2 $10 Amazon eGift Cards)

2 Amazon Gift Cards

Refresh your Memory: Plink, Shopkick, Visa Savings Edge, Checkout51, and Chime Card (Plus Enter my Contest for 2 $10 Amazon eGift Cards)

If you are interested in winning one of the two $10 Amazon eGift Cards, just leave a comment below with your guess between 20,000 – 50,000.  Good luck.

Since there are so many rewards programs out there, it might be good to refresh your memory on them and point out some of the benefits of each program.  I will link to all relevant posts since I talked about all of these programs at least once my blog.

1 – Plink – Sort of like your best friend in high school.  You were really close for a long time, but then your friend changed and now you barely talk or think of the other person.  What I mean is, Plink used to partner with Staples and Office Depot and you used to earn oodles of Plink Points by buying gift cards in-store and online.  Unfortunately, Plink no longer partners with Staples or Office Depot.  Instead, they have the following partners:

Plink Merchants 7-10-14

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Where can you Buy “Gas” with a Chase Freedom or Discover It Credit Card?

Chase Freedom

Where can you Buy “Gas” with a Chase Freedom or Discover It Credit Card?

Warning, this is an untested experiment, so YMMV.  Proceed at your own risk.

I’m sure most of you already know that the Chase Freedom and the Discover It credit cards offer 5x or 5% cash back at gas stations this quarter (July 1 – September 30).  But do you know what Chase and Discover consider “gas stations”?  Let me explain…

Freedom 5 Q3 Gas Stations Kohls

Discover Q3 Categories Gas Stations

Credit card companies use Merchant Category Codes (MCC for short) to determine which merchant or merchant category you are shopping at.  For example, Office Supply Stores are one MCC, Marriott is another, and Gas Stations are another.  You can learn more about the MCC search tool here.  For this post, I will just share what I did and point you in the right direction.

To start my search, I searched for my local gas station chains (ARCO, Chevron, and Shell) near my zip code.

Visa Supplier Locator

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Random News: $50 for Serve Direct Deposit, Load Serve at Family Dollar, Targeted Citi AA Admirals Club Passes Spending Bonus, Targeted US Bank Club Carlson Spending Bonus, Club Carlson Business Credit Card Rejection, and Chase Southwest Airlines Credit Card Referrals

Which Credit Card

Random News: $50 for Serve Direct Deposit, Load Serve at Family Dollar, Targeted Citi AA Admirals Club Passes Spending Bonus, Targeted US Bank Club Carlson Spending Bonus, Club Carlson Business Credit Card Rejection, and Chase Southwest Airlines Credit Card Referrals

World’s longest blog post title. Check.

Greetings from California, I am back from my trip but still feeling the jet-lag.  I’ve been up since 3:30am PST this morning.  Let me get this post out before I fall asleep…

After returning home, I received a few targeted credit card offers worth mentioning.  The first doesn’t seem to be targeted as there is no sign up link, but if you have an AMEX Serve Card, you can get a $50 statement credit after having 2 direct deposits of $250 or more post to your AMEX Serve account by July 31.

Serve Direct Deposit Promo

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Trip Booking Report: LAX-DUS-BCN with AA Miles and MAD-MUC-LAX with UA Miles

Award Booking Logo

Trip Booking Report: LAX-DUS-BCN with AA Miles and MAD-MUC-LAX with UA Miles

(Thanks to Josh for the idea of talking about booking my award tickets).

I’m not a huge fan or reading (or writing) trip reports, so I thought I would do a trip booking report – a report on how I used frequent flyer miles to find and book my current trip to Spain.  If you guys like this post, I will cover my recent trips to Utah (Delta SkyMiles), Seattle (BA Avios), Hamburg and Copenhagen (Virgin Atlantic economy and Air Berlin business class), Amsterdam (US Airways) or any other award trips.  For my current trip, here are my award flights:

  • Los Angeles to Dusseldorf, Germany to Barcelona, Spain (LAX-DUS-BCN) on Air Berlin with American Airlines miles (30,000 miles one way)
  • Madrid, Spain to Munich, Germany to Los Angeles (MAD-MUC-LAX) on Lufthansa with United Airlines miles (30,000 miles one way)

Airline Credit Cards and Frequent Flyer Miles

For my current trip, I am traveling with my parents and my younger brother.  We used 120,000 American Airlines miles and 120,000 United Airlines miles for 4 round trip economy tickets (I am such a boring travel blogger, I know).  My parents used their United Airlines miles that they acquired from their Chase United Airlines MileagePlus Explorer Credit Cards (50,000 mile sign up bonus with a 5,000 mile bonus for adding an authorized user).  They both got a Chase Sapphire Preferred Credit Card and topped up their United Airlines account balances to book the award flights.  As for the American Airlines miles, my parents have been long time users of the Citi American Airlines Credit Cards, so we redeemed miles from my mom’s account.  She recently got her first Citi American Airlines Executive Credit Card to replenish her stash of American Airlines miles.

To find the award flights, my dad was looking 330 days before the start of the trip and booked 4 American Airlines award tickets the day the award seats were released.  Then after waiting 2 weeks, he booked 4 United Airlines award tickets as soon as those seats were released.  I used the following steps to find the award seats, but the dates below are for future (imaginary) travel and for simplicity, I only searched for 1 award seat.   Continue reading →

My Favorite Credit Cards for Manufactured Spend

Which Credit Card

My Favorite Credit Cards for Manufactured Spend

First off, I am not saying that these are the *best* credit cards for manufactured spend, these are just *my* favorite credit cards to use.  With that said, your travel patterns and preferences might be different than mine, so you might have different credit cards you like to use.  I guess I should also state what manufactured spend means to me:

  • Using your credit card for the sole purpose of earning miles, points, or cash back
  • Converting whatever you purchased back into “cash”
  • The amount of “cash” lost during the transactions should exceed the “value” of the miles, points, or cash back you received from using the credit card

Without further ado, here are my favorite credit cards…  Continue reading →