Author Archives: Gomanson

Our Fall 2015 Credit Card Applications

In the past few months we’ve added more new babies to our household than credit cards. While babies are cute and cuddly, they tend to increase household costs. Credit cards, on the other hand, are hard and plastic, but they can be worth hundreds of dollars in value. A few days ago we got 4 new arrivals at the house and none of them was cuddly…but they were all valuable. Here’s a breakdown of our latest round of card apps:

Nicoleen:
Citi Hilton HHonors Reserve

$95 annual fee due up-front
Two free weekend night certificates for any Hilton property worldwide after spending $2.5k in the first 4 months
10x points earned on Hilton properties purchases, 5x on travel, 3x on all other purchases
HHonors gold status when card account is active

Ross:
Citi Thank-You Premier

$95 annual fee waived the first year
50,000 Thank-You points after spending $3k in the first 3 months (worth a minimum of $500)
3x points earned on travel and gas, 2x on dining and entertainment, 1x on all other purchases

And we each got:
Chase Hyatt Visa

$75 annual fee waived the first year
Two free night certificates for any Hyatt property worldwide after spending $1k in the first 3 months
5,000 Gold Passport points for adding an authorized user
3x points earned on Hyatt properties purchases, 2x on dining, airfare and car rental, 1x on all other purchases
Anniversary free night certificate good at any Hyatt property, category 1-4.

The Rationale:

The Chase Hyatt card was the driving force behind our choice of cards for this round of apps. The Hyatt card has been on my radar for a while because of the incredible value potential in the two free night certificates per card. A pair of these cards could potentially be worth almost $4,000 in lodging. Two nights at a fancy hotel hardly constitutes vacation though, so the obvious tactic to maximize this card is for both of us each get our own card; then we’d have 4 free nights.

We have always planned on both getting the Chase Hyatt card at the same time, but it’s still a stretch to call 4 free nights a vacation. The other major card offering free nights is the Citi Hilton Reserve, with its two free weekend night initial spend bonus. If we could find a vacation-worthy Hyatt property in close proximity to a vacation-worthy Hilton property, we could get a 6 night vacation split between two luxury properties, for the $95 annual fee paid one credit card! I earned the bonus on the Citi Hilton Reserve last year so I was ineligible for the bonus again. (Furthermore, the most I would have been able to add to the proposed vacation would be one free Hilton night, since the certificates are only good for Fri/Sat/Sun nights.)

I always try to apply for only one card per issuing bank per app-o-rama. We both had the Chase slot filled with the Hyatt card. Nicoleen filled the Citi slot with the Hilton Reserve. But I still needed a second application, and Citi had some good card options. I settled on the Thank-You Premier with it’s 50,000 point bonus.

It seems like a pretty good plan. We have a specific redemption idea in mind for the hotel free nights, all three hotel cards compliment each other, and the Citi Thank-You will add some points to the general pool for when it comes time to find airfare. So this was a hybrid of both basic strategies I wrote about in this post.

Application set-up and results

Chase has been getting stingy and seemingly capricious about approving credit card applications lately. This is concretely seen in their Ultimate Rewards earning cards, which they will now outright deny to anyone who has had 5+ new accounts with any issuer in the past 24 months. But there have also been an increasing number of denial reports with co-branded Chase cards. i didn’t want to take any chances because the Hyatt free night certificates are only good for a year, so it was crucial that Nicoleen and I have as much time overlap in certificates as possible.

To prepare for the Chase application I requested credit line decreases in two of my Chase cards: my Sapphire Preferred from $11.1k to $5k; and my IHG card from $9k to $4k. I made both requests via Secure Message a few days apart, and both credit lines were lowered within a day of the request. I had closed my United Mileage Plus Explorer account with a $9k credit limit back in April, so I figured between the 3 credit line decreases I would have plenty of overhead left with Chase. The thought was to remove “maxed out credit limit” as a possible reason for denial. It worked!

Nicoleen had also recently cancelled her United card and she has fewer Chase accounts than I, so we didn’t do anything in particular before her application. Our luck continued as she was instantly approved too!

In my experience applying for Citi cards is much more of a push-over. The only time I was not instantly approved for a Citi card was when I got “pending” with a business card. The call to the reconsideration line for that card was quick and painless.

So with nothing more than fingers crossed we applied for our respective Citi cards and experienced the always welcome instant approval notices!

Within a week we had all 4 cards in our possession:

Minimum Spend and Redemption Plans

With a specific goal to use 3 cards’ worth of hotel certificates on a single trip, some tactics need to be employed to maximize the probability of everything lining up correctly. Number one is to get all the hotel certificates ASAP. This means getting the spends on the Hyatt cards and Hilton card taken care of.

The Chase Hyatt cards’ spends are easy, with only $1000 per card to get the certificates issued. AND they are issued as soon as the minimum spend has been met; not after the statement closes like with the Hilton certificates. Furthermore, getting these done before the Hilton is tactically important because with 4 contiguous free nights we could still cobble together a vacation. But if we got the Hilton certificates and booked a room, only to have the nearby Hyatt property become booked while we were still working on the Hyatt card spends, we would have to regroup and make different plans. So . . . Hyatt cards first.

Since there are many airlines that fly to our destination (Maui) but only one Hilton property we have in mind, Nicoleen’s Hilton Reserve gets the next highest priority for our card usage. While the 50,000 bonus Thank-You points would be a nice help to our plans, they aren’t as critical as the Hilton free night certificates, so the Citi Thank-You Premier will be the last bonus spend we complete.

In my next post it’s on to the fun part: sign-up bonus bonus redemption plans!

[Bi]Weekly Update (November 11, 2015)

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It’s been a typical two weeks here, with a wondrous variety of free gasoline, new credit cards arriving in the mail, bonus points earned, and travel plans being made!

In the last two weeks:
– $14.12 in free gas
– Still abstaining from free Menards stuff
– Received a $25 Subway gift card in the mail which I got for $8.93 and some orphan Wells Fargo Rewards points from my soon-to-be cancelled Propel World card.

New Posts This Week
– $5,000 in Free Menards Merchandise is a visual journey through two years of every free after rebate item offered at Menards. It’s worth a gander!
– Which Card Should I Get? Ah…the age old question. This post will not give you one simple answer, but it will explain the two strategies we employ to make our decisions, and get you thinking about all the factors that contribute to that decision.

Credit Card News
Nothing earth shattering as far as bonus offers go, but on the personal front there is some news. Last week we got 4 new cards in the mail. A Chase Hyatt card for each of us, a Citi Hilton Reserve for Nicoleen, and a Citi Thank-You Premier for me. I’ll write a full run-down of the rationale for our card applications later this week.

Travel News
I booked a 24 hour get-away to the Embassy Suites in St. Paul to use up my remaining free weekend night certificate from my Citi Hilton Reserve card. For a while now it’s been on our bucket list to concurrently get the Hyatt free night certificates from the aforementioned Chase cards and use them for a vacation at a luxury resort. Phase I of that plan is now accomplished, as we were both approved for the cards and will soon have the required bonus spending taken care of.

Now you’re updated. Go employ some Value Tactics!

Which Card Should I Get?

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Around the time of Nicoleen’s and my anniversary trip to Europe this summer, valuetactics.com got quite a lot of attention from Nicoleen’s facebook crowd. Many friends and relatives asked Nicoleen or me how we landed such good deals on the flights, hotel, and other trip expenses. If you want more detailed on the trip itself, check out this post outlining our itinerary.

If you’re one of those who are just curious how we did it (and maybe are curious how you too can travel for free!) in this post I’ll briefly outline the strategy we use to accumulate points and plan trips.

If you’re just starting out it’s helpful to adopt one of two strategies, to avoid accumulating what may turn out to be less than useful points.

Points and miles strategy #1: Goal first, then reverse.

If you have enough lead time, you can start with your desired travel plans and then work backwards to figure out which points and miles programs would be most useful to you, and which cards/offers are best at earning you those points or miles.

Here’s a hypothetical example to illustrate the thought process:

You and your spouse want to go to Park City, Utah, for a weekend skiing get-away in March. Your travel budget only covers lift tickets, dining, and bar tabs; so your airfare and lodging need to be free. You’re also very demanding about accommodations so you need to stay in a luxury resort.
You regularly read valuetactics.com, so you know the best way to get free luxury hotel stays with a few month’s notice is with either the Hilton HHonors Reserve card from Citi or the Hyatt card from Chase. Both cards offer 2 free nights as the sign-up bonus, but the Hilton free nights are only good on weekends – not a problem for your plans. (Others, like Chase’s IHG card, only offer free nights as an account anniversary award). If you and your spouse each get approved for your own cards, you have 4 free nights to redeem…more than sufficient for your weekend ski trip.
You check availability for March 18-21 at Hilton’s luxury resort in Park City, the Waldorf Astoria, and Hyatt’s, The Escala Lodge at Park City. Unfortunately, (for the sake of the example) you find that the Hyatt has no rooms available for reward certificate redemption. You check the Hilton website…your heart is pounding…will there be free rooms available? …yes! The Waldorf Astoria has plenty of reward certificate availability for that weekend! Looks like you’ll be applying for that Citi Hilton HHonors Reserve card.
The nice round number for the room’s award points price tells you it’s Hilton’s “standard” rate, meaning it’s available for a free night certificate redemption. A $659/night room for free…not a bad deal for taking a few minutes to apply for a card and make sure you hit the bonus spending!

The Waldorf Astoria in Park City, Utah
Ok, you have lodging covered. Now on to the free airfare. One of the keys to redeeming miles for flights is to find the “saver” level award availability. This is the discounted rate and will allow you to maximize the value of your airline miles. You can safely assume that at a given moment you have at least 2-3 options for cards that will earn you 40-50k airline miles or points that can be transferred to airline miles. So for this example, we’re trying to get two flights on our desired dates (March 18-21, 2016) for under 50,000 miles.

Let’s start with Minneapolis’s home town hero, Delta:

72.5k miles each; 135k miles for both of you…unacceptable.

On to United:

No saver level seats available for your dates.

How about American?

No dice.

Southwest?

Now we’re talking!

Two round trip flights for under 50k miles.
So how do you get 48,284 Southwest miles? Chase routinely (2x per year on average) jacks the sign-up bonus on their Southwest card up to 50,000 points. For this example, let’s say the 50k promotion just ended and the card comes with the standard 30k bonus. If you think you can get the bonus and quickly put another $18,284 in spending on the card to get the remaining points needed for your flights, then get the card! But remember, seat availability for flights is constantly changing so you probably want to get your seats booked ASAP, so trying to earn the remainder of the points organically might take a few months and your seats may be gone by then. Alternatively, you could each get the card and you’d be set, but I personally would never apply for a card that regularly has a jacked up bonus unless that promotion is running.
Is there a more streamline way to get 50k Southwest points fast? Why yes there is! Southwest happens to be a transfer partner of Chase Ultimate Rewards, meaning you can transfer UR points to your Southwest Rapid Rewards account at a 1:1 ratio, for free, instantly. There are several cards that earn Chase Ultimate Rewards including Chase Freedom, Sapphire Preferred, and Ink Plus business. After looking at all the benefits of these cards, you decide on the Sapphire preferred because the annual fee is waived the first year and it will earn you 49,000 UR points after meeting the bonus spend of $4k in 3 months. How convenient…that’s just what you need to transfer to Southwest and get your flights for free!

Let’s recap this example:

For applying for 3 credit cards between the two of you, paying the $95 annual fee on the two Hilton cards, and paying the $22.40 in fees to the airline, you are getting:

$2,082 worth of lodging to stay at the Waldorf Astoria for three nights
$809.92 worth of airfare on Southwest for two round trip tickets to SLC
That’s a total of $2892 in travel expenses for paying $202, doing some research, and spending 15 minutes to apply for a couple cards. A pretty good value if you ask me!

Points and miles strategy #2: Go all in!

If you don’t have a specific goal in mind, or would like the most flexibility when planning free travel, you could go all in and start accumulating as many points and miles as you can. This also means diversifying. Concentrating on highly versatile points is one facet of this strategy. Earning points in several different competing programs is another.

This strategy can be as valuable as you want it to be. The more carefully you plan and the more variables you look at, the more you can maximize your card applications. It would take a whole book to look at every facet of this strategy, but I will try to get you to think about some things to consider when getting into this game for the long haul.

Which cards can you “churn,” getting the bonus multiple times?
What is each card/bank’s particular quirks when considering applications?
What is your current credit score?
Which cards earn what kind of points?
Which points can transfer to which other programs?
Are there currently any “jacked up bonus” promotions running?
Do you have any travel plans on the horizon, a la strategy #1?
How can you group applications to maximize all of the above?
Other than the points bonus, what other benefits does each card have?
Can you stretch the benefits of a card by staggering them with your spouse?
Are there any weak points in your points and miles portfolios?
Which cards will soon be phased out?

As you can see, there is a lot of thought that can go into this game if you really want to maximize the value. Use this site and others to learn all you can about the different programs. I promise you, the learning curve is steep but short, and 90% of the confusion will go away by the time you earn your first card bonus and book your first trip with miles and points. If you have already been taking advantage of frequent flyer programs or hotel loyalty programs, you already have an advantage.

I recommend liking the ValueTactics facebook page and following the twitter feed to stay updated on these tactics and strategies! I’m also always willing to help if you contact me privately.

A Hybrid Strategy

Of course you are not bound to one of these two strategies. Realistically everyone should incorporate elements of both into their planning, regardless of how much thought you put into that planning.

I hope this little primer helped some of you understand what to think about when deciding which card(s) to apply for. Now get out there and capture some value!

$5,000 in Free Menards Merchandise

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One of the funnest value tactics I have tried out and reported on is the Menards free stuff tactic. It’s hard to describe the amount of free-after-rebate (FAR) merchandise Menards puts in their ads each week. Instead of trying to describe it, I’ll present here a visual record of two year’s worth of FAR merchandise that I acquired during my Menards free stuff experiment. The total retail value of this collection is $4,946.46, but my total investment to acquire is was about $8 in postage stamps! As you’ll see, “fun” isn’t the only word you could use to describe what I did; maybe “extreme” or “blown out” could also work 🙂

Click here for a full description of the tactic.
Click here to see my final analysis of my two year experiment.

Photos start with the first haul I came home with on July 7th, 2013, and progress chronologically to the last one in my 2 year marathon on July 5th, 2015. Enjoy!

(No image for these items)

🙂 🙂 🙂

Weekly Update (October 26, 2015)

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I hit the credit card and point research hard this weekend in preparation for our next round of card apps. I also did my monthly card and point update. Here’s a summary of our points earned and used:

earned 2,321 airline miles
earned 1,209 Chase Ultimate Rewards
spent 1,277 Wells Fargo Rewards points towards $12.77 of a $25 Subway gift card

It’s been a slow week for free gas. We’re out of coupons for this month already and don’t have enough points to redeem for the big ($25) coupon yet. I managed to get $4.50 in free gas this week.

New Posts This Week
– 2015 AMEX Small Business Saturday Statement Credit contains an important lesson for anyone interested in value tactics. Read the post to gain the wisdom!

Credit Card News
The general consensus lately, especially for Chase, is that it’s better to have some credit limit overhead than to keep your limits high in order to raise your credit score via your credit utilization percentage. In preparation for a Chase application I sent private messages requesting decreases in credit limits for a couple of my Chase cards. By next week’s update I should have a report on whether or not it did any good.

UPDATE: Since starting to draft this post, I decided to apply for our next round of cards. I’ll report back next week, but here’s a preview….

Within our grasp…

Now you’re updated. Go employ some Value Tactics!

2015 AMEX Small Business Saturday Statement Credit

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In the past, we’ve seen statement credits ranging from $10 to $30 (3x $10) for purchases made with an American Express card at small businesses the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The purpose of Small Business Saturday is to promote smaller retailers in the community. American Express had previously offered the statement credits as a way to expose their card users to said small retailers by offering this nice little incentive.

My 2014 Small Business Saturday haul: 5 bottles of wine, 1 bottle of rum, 6-pack of beer, some jerky and meat sticks, frozen brats and burgers, $50 in movie theater gift cards, and a kid’s birthday gift (gift-wrapped, not pictured) … all for about $11 in odd store totals.

This year, however, the statement credit offered by Amex is NOTHING, $0.00, nada, zip, zilch, and zero. Here’s the excerpt from the Small Business Saturday faq page:

What gives, Amex?

As to why American Express turned the faucet off, the explanation seems simple: it was very expensive for them. Between Nicoleen’s and my Amex cards last year we got $150 in statement credits. But like many corporate cost-saving decisions, the long term effects may prove detrimental, at least with the cohort of card users who are the type to read this blog post. Insignificant as this Amex card perk seems, it could have been the benefit tipping the scales for many card holders to keep their Amex cards. I personally always factored it into assessments of Amex cards. In fact, my wife and I got Bluebird accounts last fall specifically to take advantage of the Small Business Saturday offer. Some of these thoughts are echoed in the comments of this blog post by the points blog behemoth, ThePointsGuy.

There’s a lesson here

To frequenters of travel, deals, and points blogs this revelation is not news. Similar blogs to mine all picked up on the story as soon as this year’s Small Business Saturday page went live a couple weeks ago. I wanted to chime in though, and point out what I think it the take-away: Good deals are never permanent, so take advantage of them when they’re around. Don’t wait!

I’ve made as many mistakes as smart moves in this game, but one accomplishment I am proud of is having a healthy dose of urgency when I recognize a valuable opportunity. Note: I said “healthy dose” which doesn’t mean being desperate or frenzied. It means prioritizing your efforts to favor exceptionally good deals or deals which are known to be temporary.

And most importantly, the elimination of the Small Business Saturday statement credits by American Express should serve as yet another reminder: don’t be surprised when a valuable situation goes away. They all eventually do. The key to capturing and creating value is to recognize and take advantage of good deals when they exist, and to move on and adapt when the current opportunities change or disappear.

Weekly Update (October 20, 2015)

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Just a quick update this week. Not a lot going on in our personal points and miles world, but I did get $32.96 in free gas this week! I’m still on my Menards-withdrawal rehab program, but in the next week or so I need to go through all my product stored in the garage and bring in all the non-freezables (winter is coming to MN). Maybe after some reorganization I’ll decide I have some space for a few small new purchases.

Website News
I published no new posts this week, but there are several in the hopper, including one on our credit card application strategy in light of recent developments with Chase’s approval process. Valuetactics.com might be moving servers again in the near future. I promise it will go smoothly this time 🙂

Around the Web
One of my favorite posts I read this week was Scott from Milevalue.com, reporting on the fun time he had in the first class bar on-board an Emirates flight. Looks like he had a great time! Yet another free travel feat to aspire to.

(Sorry about the date of this post, folks. Apparently you have to hit the “Publish” button to actually publish the post, and not just have a draft saved for a few days 🙂 )

Now you’re updated. Go employ some Value Tactics!

Weekly Update (October 13, 2015)

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I should really call these posts “Random Interval Updates” instead of Weekly Updates. This one covers almost two weeks and it gives and update on Nicoleen’s and my credit card situation, links to a couple new VT posts, and let’s you in on some pretty exciting credit card news for those who love free travel.

In the past random interval, I’ve pumped $10.15 in free gas. In this updates I only include gas pumped for commuting to and from work for myself. Personal miles for either of us and Nicoleen’s commute miles are not included in this figure.

New Posts this Week
– Free Menards Stuff – The Verdict is the long awaited analysis from my 2-year experiment for which I bought my limit of every free-after-rebate item in every sale ad at Menards. Check out the post to see if it was all worth it in the end, and how much money one could make with this tactic.
– Card Review – Wells Fargo Propel takes a look at the currently promoted premium points-earning credit card from Wells Fargo, the Propel World. You can easily get $650 value out of this card in the first year, with $450 of that being cold, hard cash! Read the review for the details and my assessment of the card.

Credit Card News
First some personal news:
Nicoleen recently had three cards due for their first annual fee. She cancelled her Chase United Mileage Explorer after no retention deals were offered. She cancelled her Wells Fargo Propel World after no retention deals were offered, BUT she could have waited a few days and charged a $100 airline gift card, which would have been reimbursed by Wells Fargo, before cancelling. This was 100% my fault, as I neglected to think it all through properly before instructing her to cancel it.

Her third upcoming annual fee was for her Barclay American Airlines Aviator Red. As I mentioned in the previous weekly update, Barclay seems to be working hard on customer loyalty with this card in the form of bonus offers and retention deals. Nicoleen was already 2 months into the “spend $500/month for three months and get 15,000 miles” bonus offer. Not only did they let her keep this offer going, they added the 3x miles offer I recently signed up for on my card, AND they waived her annual fee. After the short conversation the rep also apologized for it taking so long (which it didn’t at all, according to Nicoleen). Now that’s service!

Now some exciting general card news:

Southwest and Chase have bumped up the bonuses on the Rapid Rewards personal and business cards to 50,000 points each. This set-up enables one of the most coveted free travel bucket list items: getting a Southwest companion pass good for almost 2 years, and 110,000 points to use with it. The companion pass allows one guest to fly free with you on any flight you book, with cash or rapid rewards. Since Southwest is a discount airline, this means you could theoretically get 10 or more domestic round trip tickets with just two card sign-ups.

For an excellent and thorough explanation of how it all works, and why now is literally the perfect timing for this deal to come around, check out Milevalue’s post on the subject.

That’s all for now. It’s Tuesday, double coupon day at Super America. Time to go get $26.50 in free gas!

Now you’re updated. Go employ some Value Tactics!