Here’s your chance to catch up with Bluebird, REDcard, portals, and more

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The past few weeks here at the Frequent Miler blog have been a blur of activity including new blog features, breaking stories, and much more.  So, I’m trying something new today with a summary of the best of Frequent Miler from the past few weeks.  Here are the highlights…

Frequent Miler launches Portal Alerts

In collaboration with CashBackMonitor and with the help of Boarding Area staff, we launched a new section of this website titled “Portal Alerts”.  The idea is to give portal shoppers a way to find exciting new (or expired) portal offers each day.  Oh yeah, and we ported Frequent Miler’s Quick Deals to Boarding Area too.  We’ve run into a few hiccups along the way including accidentally spamming our subscribers, and frequently broken links.  But, hey, it mostly all works now:

New readers may also like to check out the long-existing Frequent Miler Laboratory.  Find out what works and what doesn’t, and contribute your own findings.

Redbird, Bluebird, Serve card

As of May 6, 2015, Target no longer accepts credit cards for in-store REDbird reloads. For more information, please see “REDbird Post Memo Answers“, and “REDbird grounded. Now what?

First, the Serve news:

Introducing Redbird / REDcard

The really exciting news was that Amex had come out with yet another variant of Serve/Bluebird.  Where Bluebird is in partnership with Walmart, this one is with Target.  The new card is awkwardly named the Target Prepaid REDcard.  Some are now referring to this card as Redbird (since it is similar to Bluebird).  I like that name!

Redbird

Bluebird

Of course, with all this talk about Serve and Redbird, I couldn’t leave Bluebird out in the cold.  So, I showed “How to cancel Bluebird online in case you want to switch to Serve or Redbird.

Spilling Ink over Ink

I didn’t post much news about Chase Ink cards but, I did post the basics of what’s going on.  It really comes down to three things:

  1. The Ink Plus 70K offer is now available online (previously it was in-branch or via targeted mail).
  2. The Ink Bold card is going away.  The last day it will be available to new applicants is November 16th.
  3. Chase offered many Ink Plus cardholders 10K bonuses for referring friends (offer expired October 10th).

About these topics, I posted:

If you’re curious about whether you can get a new signup bonus when you already have an Ink card, please read the section of this post titled “Multiple Ink cards”.

Manufactured Status

Last week I posted ways to earn top tier hotel elite status through spend.  Please see:

My intent is to follow up (probably next week) with similar posts about spending your way to airline elite status.  Coincidentally, the arrival of Redbird makes it all that much easier to manufacture status so I think this will prove to be a timely series.

Small Business Saturday

After a friend tipped me off that this year’s Small Business Saturday details were online, I read through the offer’s Terms & Conditions (I’ve been known to do that sort of thing). I was surprised by what I found: This year, you can use each Amex card three times for a total of $30 back.  And, Bluebird cards were included this year too!

Miscellaneous

Of course, there were a number of miscellaneous posts and Quick Deals as well.  Here are a few highlights:

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Carole

Discovered today that Redcard is not available in NJ or NY. I happen to be going to Memphis next week, where it is available. If I get one in Tennessee, can i reload it in NJ?
Thanks.

Carole

Thanks for the info.
Carole

dan ray

disappointed it’s not available in Oregon or Washington State.

pointsmachine

Which target store did FrquentMiler load in? I lived in Ann Arbor now.

Marianna

How will we sign up for the Amex Small Business Saturday promotion on our Bluebird cards?

Lena

Hi,
I live in NC. I went to the target this morning hoping to buy temp card for Redcard. The cashier tried to ring it up and it couldn’t get it to work. Manager said the system was down since yesterday. I called again at 4.19 pm EST, and the system still down .
Just in case, if anyone want to buy it, please call first. It seems like all stores that participate in North Carolina have the same issues.

bob

any data on mastercards coding as grocery at Target (citizens bank 5x)? I plan on stopping today and trying, but if you know already it’d save me a trip.

ali

I really appreciate all your posts regarding the best use of portals. I never get a chance to leave a comment or say thank you to the efforts that you have been putting up so that we can all benefit from them. I was hooked to your blog in early 2012 during staples FAR Antivirus bonanza (was become premier or whatever they called it) and met several thousand $$ in spending on Ink/bold cards.

I will be switching over one of “my” serve/BB to redbird to play with it, again thanks to your post.

@robert AMEX CC don’t code as grocery purchase, so far I have luck with visa cards (both WF and TD).

robert

Just to be perfectly clear before I dump Serve for Red-will an amex cc code as grocery purchase at my target? It does for Visa.

robert

Why dont you try it please?

Grant

Robert, I’ve tried it many times. I go to the same Target store to load my AMEX for Target. If I use my US Bank FlexPerks Visa, it counts as a grocery store. When I use my AMEX BCP, it does not code as a grocery store. Visa and AMEX have different MCC for the same business.

abby

i’ve liked your blog and even done what i don’t do- signed up for cards thru your links.

your latest trend of taking credit ‘breaking’ the news of things has you coming across a lot different than before. you didn’t break sbs (lol) or ‘introduce’ redcard. i’m sure you’d agree that essentially everything MS related on BA was somewhere else first.