Tag Archives: Gift Cards

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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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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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Redeem IHG, Hawaiian & Frontier Miles for Gift Cards with Points.com (Including Amazon, Walmart & More)

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Good morning everyone, I hope your weekend is going well.  A few days ago, I read that Best Western suspends use of points toward gift cards or merchandise and that Southwest Rapid Rewards Can Not Be Redeemed For Gift Cards Due To Covid-19.  I did some digging and found out that it is possible to redeem IHG Rewards Club Points, Hawaiian Airlines Miles, and Frontier Airlines Miles for gift cards (both physical and electronic) with Points.com.  In this post, I will show you how to redeem points from those 3 programs into gift cards and calculate the value from these redemptions (spoiler: the redemptions are not very good).  Here is the complete list of gift card options available as of today (I combined the list into 1 big image).

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Work from Home Diary 2: Afternoon Walks & Restaurant Gift Cards

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Good morning everyone, happy Friday.  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 will share what it’s been like to work from home this week.  As I mentioned yesterday, this is Laura’s spring break week.  Instead of spending time driving around Ireland or suntanning in Kauai, we are both spending most of our time inside our home.  My work from home set up is upstairs in our guest room / home office and Laura’s work from home set up is downstairs on our den table.  It’s nice that we have our own spaces to work (and listen to music or watch TV).

As an assistant principal, Laura is used to waking up early and leaving early for work.  Now that we are both working from home, we can sleep in a little later, eat breakfast together, and watch morning news before starting our work.  I’m used to eating lunch around 11:30-12pm, so we both take a break, make lunch (or reheat leftovers) and relax for a few minutes.  In the early afternoon, if the weather is nice/decent, we try to go for a 2-3 mile walk around our city to stretch our legs and talk about work and life.  There are not many people outside, but we do see a few others walking and riding bikes. Continue reading →

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My Travel Philosophy for Redeeming Miles vs. Paying Cash for Flights (w/ Account Balances as of March 2020)

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Good morning everyone, happy Friday!  I just finished listening to the Miles to Memories podcast (latest episode) and enjoyed listening to them talk about Disney when they redeem miles vs. pay cash for flights.  I don’t have a hard and fast rule that I live by, so I thought it would be fun to share my travel philosophy of when I redeem miles vs. pay cash for flights.  I specifically mention flights because I plan to write a similar article about hotels and didn’t want to make this article too long.  Lastly, when I use the word cash, that could mean paying for the flight with a credit card, or paying with an airline gift card, or using credit card rewards to pay for the flight – basically anything other than booking an award ticket with airline miles.

I also think it is important to share how many credit card reward points I have, since my thinking would be much different if I had 1,000 Chase Ultimate Reward Points vs. 1 million Chase Ultimate Reward Points.  With that said, here are my transferable points balances, as of March 2020, from smallest to largest:

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