Tag Archives: Gift Cards

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Need a Last Minute Gift? Earn Rewards for Buying Virtual Gift Cards from Slide, Fluz & MileagePlusX

Good afternoon everyone.  The holiday season is upon us and we are now in the home stretch.  If you still have a few more gifts to give this year, there is still time to send your friends, family members, neighbors and teammates a gift card.  Of course you can run out to your local grocery store, restaurant, pharmacy, or office supply store to pick up a physical gift card, but if you don’t want to leave your house, you can buy a virtual gift card from the convenience of your phone (and earn rewards).  Whenever I need to buy a gift card for myself or for someone else, there are 3 apps that I use: Slide, Fluz, and MileagePlusX.

I will go into more detail on how to use each app, but there are 3 important things to know about these apps: your virtual gift card is ready to use right away; you can usually purchase the virtual gift card in an exact dollar amount; and you earn rewards in the form of cash back or United Airlines Miles.  Without further ado, let’s go through these 3 apps.

Slide (Apple App Store / Google Play Store)

Slide offers 4% cash back on all virtual gift card purchases (which may be higher or lower than the other 2 apps, depending on the store).  If you are a new member, please use my Slide referral link and you will get a $5 credit towards your first 4 purchases ($20 off total).  For comparison purposes, I bought Panera Bread virtual gift cards from all 3 apps to compare the process and show the various rewards.  After you create your Slide account, type the store name into the search box.  If the store is offered on Slide, you will see it in the search results.  Click on the store name to purchase a virtual gift card.

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Reader Feedback: How Should I Spend 84K Citi ThankYou Points Before December 31?

Updated at 6pm PT on 1/2/21: Thanks to everyone who answered the poll question at the bottom of this post.  Even though “Do Nothing Until 2021” was the second most popular answer, that is what I decided to do.  Hopefully I will be able to make some Citi TYP redemptions in 2021.


Good evening everyone, I need some help.  First of all, this post could be classified as a “First World Problem” or a “Good Problem to Have”, but I would still like to get some help on making my decision.  Long story short, I have a Citi Rewards+ Credit Card and one of the benefits of the credit card is the ability to get 10% of your redeemed Citi ThankYou Points (TYPs) back, on the first 100,000 TYPs redeemed per calendar year (10K TYPs rebate max).  Since there are only a few weeks left in the year and I have only redeemed a few thousand TYPs this year, I need to spend 84K TYPs by December 31 in order to max out the 10K TYP rebate.  In this post, I will discuss how I calculated how many TYPs I need to spend and go through all the various redemption options and my thoughts on each option.

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Citi ThankYou Points Cyber Monday Gift Card Sale (Redeem 20% Fewer TYPs on Nov 30)

Updated on 11/29/20 at 11pm PT: According to the Citi ThankYou Gift Card page, it looks like this 20% discount only applies to Apple, Happy Dining, Fandango, Petsmart, and Top Golf gift cards.  All other gift cards are at the same price.


Good morning everyone, happy Friday!  I just received an email from Citi about their upcoming Cyber Monday Gift Card Sale.  If you redeem Citi ThankYou Points (TYPs) on November 30 between 12:00am ET and 11:59pm ET, you will be able to redeem 20% fewer TYPs.  For example, a $25 gift card normally costs 2,500 TYPs (1.0 cents per point), but during this promo, you will only need to redeem 2,000 TYPs (1.25 cents per point).  The 1.25 CPP rate is the same value you would get if you redeemed TYPs for travel.  You may be able to get more than 1.25 CPP if you transfer your TYPs to transfer partners, so keep that in mind.

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Redeem Radisson Rewards Points for Gift Cards ($100 Visa GC for 67K Points) + 15% Rebate [Rebate Posted & VGCs Received]

Updated 10:00am PT on 11/2/2020: I provided more information at the bottom of the post regarding when the rebated Radisson Rewards Points posted to my Radisson Rewards account and when the Visa Gift Cards arrived in the mail.


Good morning everyone, I hope you had an exciting Amazon Prime Day(s).  I was reading Doctor of Credit and saw a deal that didn’t get much attention: Radisson Rewards: 25% Back On Awards, 15% Back On Giftcard Purchases.  I have a stash of Radisson Rewards Point since I cancelled 5 nights at various Radisson Blu hotels in Ireland, so I was curious what kind of gift card deals were offered.  In this post, I will show you what kind of gift card deals are available and explain why I redeemed 268,000 Radisson Rewards Points for $400 in Visa Gift Cards.  To get started, sign into your Radisson Rewards account and click this link to enroll in the current promo.  For gift card redemptions, you can get a 15% rebate when you redeem points between now and October 25.  Redemptions start as low as 7,000 points for a $10 gift card.

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PSA: Check Amazon Gift Card Balance for Missed Allowance Reloads

Good afternoon everyone, I hope your week is going well.  Since I have several credit cards and only use a few on a daily basis, I put small recurring charges on some of my cards so that the credit card statements are generated every month.  I do this for a 3 main reasons:

  1. If you do not use no annual fee credit cards for several months, the bank may decide that you do not need that credit card and may close it automatically for you.
  2. I have 2 Bank of America Better Balance Rewards Credit Cards (no longer available) where I get a quarterly bonus of $30 per card (I have a linked BofA checking account) for making a purchase and paying my bill on time.  I don’t want to manually make a purchase or risk forgetting to make a monthly purchase on those cards.  It’s an easy $30 bonus x 4 quarters x 2 cards = $240 cash.
  3. I have credit card referral links on my blog and if a reader signs up for the card using my referral link, I get a referral bonus (airline miles or hotel points).  The bonus points do not automatically transfer to the airline or hotel account if a credit card statement is not generated.

For those reasons, I use Amazon Allowance to automatically charge $5 to several cards every month.  The funds are automatically added to my Amazon gift card balance and I usually receive several of the below emails on the 15th of the month.  But unfortunately, for some reason, I only received 2 emails, instead of the usual 8.  I did some digging and it looks like only 2 of my Amazon Allowances processed correctly and the 8 other allowances were skipped.  If you have allowances set up, I recommend checking your Amazon account to see if they processed correctly.

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