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AARP has launched a new membership promotion for Labor Day which is offering the opportunity to pay only $9 per year when signing up for a five year term.
The Deal
- Pay $45 for a five year AARP membership.
- Direct link to offer.
Key Terms
- $9 per year pricing valid on five year term only.
Quick Thoughts
AARP offer all kinds of membership pricing options. A year’s membership is usually $16, although they tend to offer it discounted to $12 for your first year when signing up for automatic renewal. Their ordinary pricing for a five year term is $63 (i.e. $12.60 per year) which is still a decent price, but paying $45 for that same five year term is the lowest that I remember ever seeing it.
In case you weren’t aware, you don’t have to be 50+ in order to join AARP. Although their mission is to serve people of that age, you can join at any age – I’ve been a member since my 30s due to the discounts that are available to AARP members. Here’s a complete list of AARP benefits and discounts available.
For starters, some hotel chains offer discounts to AARP members. It’s not often where I find the AARP rate being cheaper than other rates like AAA or a member-only rate, but I’d guess that once per year the AARP rate has been our lowest option which has saved us more than the cost of our membership by itself. Be careful when selecting that rate though because sometimes the fine print of the AARP rate on a hotel’s website states that you have to be 50+ or 60+ to use it.
It’s not only hotels where AARP can save you money on travel. You can potentially save on cruises, tours, rail tickets, flights and more. For example, British Airways offers the following savings for AARP members:
$65 off World Traveller (economy) and World Traveller Plus (premium economy) or $200 off Club World (business class) fares when you purchase round-trip transatlantic tickets online to over 130 destinations, including Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
They have a partnership with several restaurant chains to save 10-15% including Outback Steakhouse, Denny’s, Landry’s, Carrabba’s and more. There’s also a partnership with Walgreens that offers 10% in Walgreens Cash rewards when buying Walgreens-branded health & wellness products, 7% on Walgreens-branded beauty products and 3% on other eligible beauty purchases. That partnership also sometimes results in Walgreens offering a free one year AARP membership, but I don’t remember seeing that in the last year or two.
Discounted gift cards can be another way that an AARP membership can pay for itself. Every weekday they run Daily Deals from 12pm-2pm which tend to offer 30% off a specific brand. Here are the deals for yesterday, today and the next couple of days to give you an idea.
Somewhat surprisingly, you don’t actually have to have an AARP membership in order to take advantage of these Daily Deals, but they usually sell out very quickly due to the savings on offer. Where the membership comes in handy is for their other gift card deals which are only available to AARP members. These offer savings of up to 20%, with the selection changing each month. If you’re into gift card reselling, some of these deals can be profitable, but otherwise they represent decent savings for personal use. Here are just a few examples of what’s currently available:
One slight downside is that you’re limited to buying five discounted gift cards per month, but that’s still 60 discounted gift cards per year if you max it out each month.
Another benefit of AARP membership is that it comes with a free second membership, so you can share the savings with someone else. That includes another allowance of five discounted gift cards per month for that person, enabling you to double up on the opportunities for no additional membership cost if you add Player 2.
There could be a couple of other stacking opportunities to save on an AARP membership. MyPoints is currently offering 2,800 points (worth ~$20) when becoming an AARP member. I’m not sure if that’ll track with this Labor Day promotion, but it’s worth a try. To have a chance of it working, click through to AARP from MyPoints, then before buying the membership copy and paste the promotion link above (under ‘The Deal’) and complete the transaction for $45 for five years. Then again, perhaps it would just be better going the MyPoints route regardless seeing as the ~$20 you’d earn would more than offset the $18 additional cost of a five year membership. If the stacking did work though, $20 back on $45 spend is clearly better, although with MyPoints deal presumably works on one year memberships too.
The other stacking opportunity is that there’s currently a targeted AARP Chase Offer giving $8 back when spending $12 or more. If you’re targeted for that, it would reduce the net cost to $37 or only $7.40 per year.
h/t Brant in Frequent Miler Insiders
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okay, I did the mypoints so I will see if it tracks. Anyway, my initial impression is that their web site is difficult to navigate. I am still looking for the gift cards.
You can find it at https://www.mypoints.com/reward
I followed the directions above and pasted the 5 year subscription link after clinking thru MyPoints but nothing tracked. But, it was certainly worth a shot!
There often is a Simply Miles deal, usually 1000 miles. I do not see it currently, but that essentially takes care of the first year cost. I have received that bonus more than once. Citi also sometimes has Merchant Offers for AARP (again, do not see one on my account currently). I renewed the last time this deal came around, got 20% off ($9), so paid $36 for 5 years and received 1000 AA miles.
My AARP membership is good through next year. If I purchase this $45 deal, will it extend me to 2027?
I’d also like to know if this is good for renewals or if you’d have to create a new account with a separate email.
Sorry, I think I just answered my own question. There are both “Join” and “Renew” buttons on the page linked above so it appears to apply to renewals too.
Another tangible benefit is the 20bp boost you earn on the interest rate at GS Marcus. 20bp boost on $250k = $500/year.
I think the boost lasts 2 years, IIRC.
Yep, I forgot about that. I should check to see if I’m still getting my boost.
I signed up for AARP with Simply Miles (got 1K AA miles for a one year membership). But the amount of spam emails and junk mail for insurance, etc., is fairly excessive. So, I won’t be renewing in December. Did save 5% off of my Consumer Cellular phone, so that’s great – and I’m sure there are other deals like you listed. But, again, the amount of junk mail is crazy…..
You need to get a “burner” email address for these offers.
You can customize your mailing preferences – I used to get emails from them all the time, but I unchecked a bunch of boxes so I only get the occasional email now.