Categorymath

The Next Level of Manufactured Spending

I’m back! Well, sort of. Like Michael, I have a little more time around the holidays to write, so I’ll been getting my pen out and cranking out some posts. It’s also a welcome distraction from all the news that routinely induces aneurysms, although I don’t have much choice but to keep on keepin’ on and fighting the good fight.

Over this year, my involvement in travel hacking transitioned from raw churning (credit card sign-ups to receive the bonuses) to generating large stashes of miles and points by manufactured spending (buying cash equivalents like gift cards and selling them or otherwise converting them to cash). This was rooted largely in pragmatism. Going into this year, I had exhausted a lot of the low-hanging fruit in terms of credit card signups, and moreover, banks weren’t taking too kindly to all my new accounts and credit inquiries (I wouldn’t if I were them, either). Continue reading →

Airline Miles are Stock Options in Disguise

I’ve been spending the last few weeks reading about financial independence and early retirement (colloquially known as FIRE; there’s a good subreddit for it) because of their natural intersection with travel hacking. Roughly, if the goal of financial independence is to save more, then travel hacking is an incredibly useful tool for those who travel a lot or have large families because of the way it can minimize expenses and free up money to save or invest. Continue reading →

Demystifying Fixed Value Points

I’ve been having a (private) love affair with fixed-value airline miles over the past few months, and I even went so far as to sign up for the JetBlue credit card in wake of the ridiculous promotion they were offering (from which I netted 75,000 JetBlue miles for a round trip flight that cost me $75). Doctor of Credit explains it well, but the appeal for getting the card was the combination of an (unlimited) 10% points rebate as well as the opportunity to earn Mosaic status after spending $50,000 on the card in a single year. Mosaic status offers unlimited free cancellations of both cash (refund to voucher) and award flights, which is amazing for planning domestic travel since I can speculatively book flights without fear of either not being able to take the flight or finding cheaper flights later on. Continue reading →

Confirmed: Fidelity Visa is a Flexperks card…with a catch

A lot of hoopla has been made over the fate of the Fidelity Amex card, whose portfolio was bought by Elan Financial Services (a US Bank subsidiary), with the cards being reissued as Visas. In particular, many wondered and speculated that the card would earn (or be convertible to) Flexpoints, US Bank’s pseudo-fixed value rewards currency. Doctor of Credit has a great explanation of them here, but I’ve included the award chart for reference: Continue reading →

Should you purchase money orders with the fees included or excluded?

TL;DR: the marginal difference is so small that it doesn’t matter. Do whatever you feel is more convenient for yourself / the cashier. If you can lump together multiple MOs in one transaction, or have some small value debit gift cards to get rid of, get the maximum value of the MO.

Given the TL;DR, why am I writing this post? For the math of course!

Say you have 2 $500 Visa gift cards that you have acquired through mysterious means, and you are at your favorite place to get money orders. The fee for a money order of value between $500.01-1000 is $1.60. The question is, should you purchase a $998.40 money order with total value of $1000, or a $1000 money order for a total cost of $1001.60. Continue reading →

Honesty, Revisited

A few weeks ago I wrote a post that looked at my travel spending in 2015 with the goal of “keeping myself honest,” and see if I could notice any patterns of spending that I could reduce or eliminate as I progress into the year.

In it, I remarked that, unlike most people, I don’t actually net out my cash back rewards (or equivalents like Capital One Venture ‘Miles’) against my travel expenses, because cash is fungible with all other cash and doesn’t change the fact that I spent the money in the first place. Continue reading →

About that 250,000 point sign-up bonus…

For those of you that have been following the blogosphere lately, you may have seen headlines like “Highest Offer I’ve Ever Seen” or “Best Amex Platinum Offer Ever.” When you click through, you are presented with the following (highly highly highly highly) targeted offer, first reported on r/churning on Reddit:

250,000 Points!!! That’s a lot of Points!!

Yes, it is. But how does it actually work? There are two parts: Continue reading →

The Most You Should Pay for a Hotel: Choice Hotels

This is the sixth in a series of posts on how to save money on hotel bookings by purchasing rewards points. For a more detailed explanation and walk-through of the theory, see the first post on Hyatt hotels.

Choice Hotels wasn’t in my initial list of chains to review because of how weird and restrictive their loyalty program is, but given their large footprint and a few requests for a writeup, I realized it would probably be useful to look at. So, without further ado… Continue reading →

The Most You Should Pay for a Hotel: Starwood

This is the last in a series of posts on how to save money on hotel bookings by purchasing rewards points. For a more detailed explanation and walk-through of the theory, see the first post on Hyatt hotels.

Today we will be looking at the last major hotel rewards program, Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG), which will hopefully remain in tact through the end of 2016 but may not be long for this world due to the merger finalized earlier this year. Continue reading →

The Most You Should Pay for a Hotel: IHG

This is the second in a series of posts on how to save money on hotel bookings by purchasing rewards points. For a more detailed explanation and walk-through of the theory, see the first post on Hyatt hotels.

The Nuts and Bolts

IHG Rewards Club is a slightly special snowflake since they offer two ways of buy points from them. Since there have been plenty of posts giving detailed explanations (see here for a good one), I won’t go into detail on how to purchase the points, other than to say that that the second method utilizes the points and cash option on bookings and IHG’s unique mechanism of refunding the total points cost if you cancel your booking. In practice, the purchase costs are: Continue reading →

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