Tag Archives: Free Stuff

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US Bank Smartly Checking Monthly Fee Increasing from $6.95 to $12 & Credit Card Waiver Eliminated (Effective May 19)

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Good afternoon everyone.  Hot off the heals of the massive Southwest Airlines devaluation this morning, I found another devaluation on my recent US Bank Smartly Checking account statement.  The main dagger is how to waive the monthly maintenance fee: “Having an eligible personal U.S. Bank credit card no longer waives the Monthly Maintenance Fee”.  Here are the full details:

Changes to the U.S. Bank Smartly Checking account

    • The Bank Smartly Checking account Monthly Maintenance Fee will change to $12
    • You can avoid the Monthly Maintenance Fee by meeting one of the waiver criteria:
      • Combined monthly direct deposit totaling $1,500 or more
      • An account owner on an eligible small business checking account
      • Maintain an average account balance of $1,500 or greater
      • Be a member of a Customer Group that waives the Monthly Maintenance Fee
      • Qualify for the Smart Rewards Gold Tier or above
    • Having an eligible personal U.S. Bank credit card no longer waives the Monthly Maintenance Fee
    • A Bank Smartly Checking account will automatically come with the Smart Rewards Bronze Tier benefits, at a minimum
    • The interest tiers for the Bank Smartly Checking account are updated

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I Earned 15,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards by Paying Allstate Insurance with 2 Chase Freedom Credit Cards

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Good afternoon everyone, happy Friday!  I have 2 Chase Freedom Flex Credit Cards (the second was a downgrade from a Chase Sapphire Preferred Credit Card) and Laura has an older Chase Freedom Credit Card (Visa version). In case you missed the announcement, Chase Freedom celebrated it’s 15th birthday this year and to mark this special occasion, Chase added 2 more bonus categories in March: Tax Preparation and Insurance.  Tax prep and insurance are not the most exciting categories, but the timing couldn’t be better for us since we had $3,000 of car and home insurance payments to make this month.  Before I made the insurance payments, I made sure that our Chase Freedom cards were registered and that we still had $1,500 in spend to do on our cards.

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After 12 Years, I Finally Earned My First Hyatt Brand Explorer Award!

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Good afternoon everyone, it’s time to pop the champagne bottles!  After 12 years, I finally earned my first Hyatt Brand Explorer Award! If you are not familiar with the Hyatt Brand Explorer, you earn a category 1-4 free night certificate after every 5 different Hyatt brands that you stay at.  As of now, Hyatt has 32 different brands, so you could earn up to 6 Brand Explorer Awards.  Scroll down to see the current list of brands.

On Friday, February 21, I went to a Warriors @ Kings NBA game in Sacramento and stayed at the nearby Hyatt Centric Downtown Sacramento.  Fast forward to today (Monday, February 24), I received an email from Hyatt congratulating me earning a Brand Explorer Award.

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Access Your Chase Credit Card Referral Links in One Convenient “Combined Referral Page” (Desktop & App)

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Good afternoon everyone.  Between my wife and I, we have 12 Chase credit cards. Previously, I would need to go to the Chase Refer-A-Friend website (https://www.chase.com/referafriend/catch-all), and then type in my last name, zip code, and last 4 digits of the card number.  If I only had 1 or 2 Chase credit cards, it wouldn’t be that bad, but looking up 12 different referral link one at a time is very tedious and time consuming.  Thankfully, Chase has a better way…

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Keep, Cancel or Convert? Laura’s American Express Gold Card ($325 Annual Fee)

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Good afternoon everyone, I hope your week is going well.  A few days ago, I was reviewing our recent credit card statements and saw that the $325 annual fee posted to Laura’s American Express Gold Card.  We discussed the card benefits and decided it wasn’t worth prepaying $325 in order to jump through all of these hoops to earn back the $325 annual fee.  As a reminder, here are the coupons statement credits on this card:

  • $10 Uber / Uber Eats credit each month ($120 total)
  • $10 Grubhub credit each month ($120 total)
  • $7 Dunkin credit each month ($84 total)
  • $50 Resy credit every 6 months (launched in July 2024, so only $50 total in 2024)

Even though we did receive all of these credits in 2024, I would not value them close to $374.  In order to receive all of those credits, we had to jump through 37 hoops throughout the year.  We are still sitting on $28 of Dunkin credit (the nearest Dunkin in about 40 miles away) and we have a $50 restaurant gift card for a nearby Resy restaurant that we bought at the end of December.

Also, we were not using the card for 4x at restaurants and 4x on groceries.  I have plenty of AMEX MR Points, so we were using 2 Citi Custom Cash Credit Cards for 5x at restaurants and 5x on groceries.  Then in 2025, we switched to using the Chase Freedom Flex Credit Card for 5x on groceries ($1,500 quarterly max) and the Discover It Credit Card for 5x at restaurants ($1,500 quarterly max).

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In addition, we decided to transfer all 150,000 of Laura’s AMEX MR Points to her Hawaiian Airlines account, then she transferred them to my Hawaiian Airlines account and then I moved them to my Alaska Airlines account (read more about that process here).  The next step was to contact AMEX via Online Chat to close the card…

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