Extra discounts. More points. Stacking coupons. Card-linked offers. Gift card promotions. The simultaneous convergence of everything we love about stacking deals and saving money while increasing rewards is enough to make your head nearly explode. On this week’s show, we talk about our approaches to the myriad of deals and how we keep our personal sanity during the busy shopping season. Spoiler alert: we obsess less about the finer details than you may imagine. We also discuss another craziness triple header, a doozy of a snoozer hotel promotion, and more. Watch or listen to Frequent Miler on the Air below and read on for the rest of this week in review.
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This week at Frequent Miler
Maximizing Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend:
2020 Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals
This post is our running list of deals that may be of interest: from gift card deals to start your extreme stacking to discounts on Apple Airpods, Amazon Echoes, and Kamado Joes, see this post for deals worth checking out.
Credit card spending bonuses to use for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals
One of the things that has made my head spin over the past few days is the plethora of spending bonuses available. Chase is offering 5x at Amazon on many cards, Citi is offering 5% back for online purchases on many cards, Amex has offers to save on Amazon while using one point and to earn 8 extra points per dollar on spend — the list goes on. This post lays out the various bonuses available so you can take stock of which are in your collection which will hopefully in return help you figure out which to focus on in order to stack the best possible deals.
Exclusive Bonus Offer: Earn $30 When Joining TopCashback
If you haven’t used TopCashBack before, you definitely shouldn’t ignore the chance to stack this new member bonus with cash back you’re earning on your Cyber Monday purchases as it could make for an excellent additional return. On the other hand, Stephen notes in the post that if you’re playing in 2-player mode and your partner has an account, you could end up with even more household cashback with a referral.
In credit cards:
Yes, your new Platinum card is earning 10x where appropriate
New Platinum cardholders who have opened under the incredible 100K + 10x offer (or the other +10x offers) have in many cases been frustrated that they aren’t seeing their 10x earnings. That’s because Amex has hidden the info away in a corner that’s tough to find – and they’re displaying it in a way that is not intuitive to understand. See this post for where to find your bonus points and see the comments for the math that you’ll need to make sense of it.
PayPal Key virtual “master” card: Unlock the power of all of your cards
Unfortunately, it seems like the power of this tool has been locked back up once again, with most people reporting failure on all Plastiq payments with PayPal Key over the past few days. Miles to Memories reported that it is still working for some people, though I haven’t had positive data points to add.
Unlock value in your own back yard with regional bank offers
We mostly focus on credit card opportunities that are available nationwide since those are the offers that will be available for all readers. However, there are some excellent cards at small regional banks — perhaps even some in your area. This post shows a few examples, but more importantly it is a reminder to keep your eye out for the offerings in your own back yard.
In Travel
Wentworth Mansion Charleston South Carolina (bookable via Hyatt SLH). Bottom line review.
I have noticed this place on Hyatt.com a few times and wondered whether or not it is worth 30K points per night. Greg’s review certainly makes it sound like it was. That said, I have trouble getting excited about a 30K property in the US and even less so in the current times. Despite Greg’s overwhelmingly positive review, I don’t think I’d spend 30K points per night to stay there. On the other hand, I would be happy to use a Category 1-7 free night certificate just like Greg did. Assuming I get one of those certs next year, I’d definitely consider using it here.
With our Thanks
Feeling thankful in 2020
I am very much thankful for Frequent Miler in so many ways. A major aspect of Frequent Miler is you! Thank you for your readership, your comments, your questions, and your challenges. And as I note in this post, thanks very much to Greg for making this a great place to work and so much more.
The Deal(s) of the Week
As we discussed this week on Frequent Miler on the Air, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the deals happening this week. It would be hard to pick a single deal as the best of the week. Instead, I encourage you to read the following three example deals. In the first example, I demonstrated how one could save 43.75% on top of Black Friday pricing. In the second, I showed how to get an Apple TV 4K 32GB and $111 in gift cards for less than the price of the Apple TV alone (and it may get even better than that). In the third deal, I show the type of deal I look for on Black Friday and Cyber Monday: a product that is rarely discounted with a special deal I can leverage to drop the price much further (in this case through a points promotion but in other cases it could be through a shopping portal or coupon). I think these are all worth a look:
Example deals we’ve posted that illustrate how to attack deals:
- Apple gift card with purchase: Stack for great deals
- Stacking big payouts: Rakuten + Dosh + Amex Offer edition
- Apple AirPods (latest models) from $55 with Amex point promo
That’s it for this week at Frequent Miler. Don’t forget to also check out this week’s last chance deals.
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On one of your recent podcasts, you discussed how you get a lot of questions like “what’s the best airline program to use to fly from point x to point y,” and how there was more you could do to address those general questions. I just wanted to throw my hat into the ring to say that I would find a series like this to be a tremendous benefit. Without being too onerous, you could probably put something together where you always start in the United States and then have the best options to fly to different regions. I know you have done this for some places (I remember Nick had an article about all the options to fly in coach to Europe…), but perhaps there could be a main catch-all page that people could go to with each general destination listed (continental U.S., Hawaii, Caribbean, Europe, etc), and from there your readers could find all the articles you’ve written about the best ways to fly to each general region. Forgive me if you already have a page like this and I need to search better, but if you don’t, I think this could be immensely useful to your readers.
Thanks for the great content!
Captain Greg, can you do me a favor and look at our Resource page to see if you can find this info that you asked for? I’m asking in this way because I want to learn what if anything we can/should do to make the info more obvious.
Hi Greg, thanks for the reply! I found the “best ways to get to” page using the method you mentioned (going to resources), and that does address my suggestion of creating a catch-all page. In the past when I would try to look for this, I almost always typed something like “frequent miler best way to fly to xxxxx” into google and have had mixed results. Granted, part of the reason for this is likely my fault due to being too specific about the destination (“Costa Rica” instead of “Central America”), but now that I’ve found this resource, it is a huge help. Still, if it seems like a lot of people ask this question, obviously there must be some way to make your readers more aware. Is it possible to schedule a communication (tweet, blog post, etc.) once every month or two that just says something like “trying to determine the best way to fly to any part of the world? Here’s your resource: https://frequentmiler.com/tag/best-ways-to-get-to/”
Thanks for all the hard work and great content!!
Just wanted to chime in on the question of the week – you don’t need to cancel the SNA to add a lower level suite. You can just edit your request by adding or removing options. I don’t know if this changes your slot when you initially applied the SNA, but I was successful last year with this very scenerio. Also, I have seen the inability to apply a SNA that was available weeks earlier, so that is another reason not to cancel!
Why are my certificates for Hyatt only 1-4?
The Hyatt 1-7 is only earned on reaching Globalist.
I think everything else is 1-4.
I’ve gone the anti-cc path lately. Today I canceled both the Amex Green card and the Citi AA Exec card. They offered me 7500 points on the green card but I only got it last year for the bonus.
The Citi card offered $200 off the $450 annual fee but I stopped flying AA before the virus hit due to all of their issues. It was better for me to do a 1 stop in MSP/DET/ATL with Delta than non-stop on AA with their problems.
Lounge access isn’t too useful when you don’t fly much or they are closed or in an inconvenient location. I’m going the reduce cc approach for now.
Why is half the podcast empty? 🙂
The funny thing is that not only is half the podcast empty, but it still has the outro music at the very end.
What this county is really crying out for is “Grocery Wednesday”!
Thx for this! I’m looking forward to Cyber Monday. Will admit I didn’t really buy that much yesterday.