Southwest 50k points back!

Deals We Like has posted that the Southwest 50k Rapid Reweards points after $2,000 spend in 3 months credit card is back. Remember if you applied to one already, you can still apply to the other 3 cards since they are considered different products. I will be applying to another one myself.

Check our more detailed info on the card below!

Southwest Rapid Rewards Card

Annual Fees: 3 Reasons Why They Don't Matter

One of first tips my dad has ever given me about credit cards was to watch out for annual fees. Stay away from them. That's how they get you. Why are their services so damn special? There are plenty of cards out there who won't charge you. Annual fees? Nice try, card company. Forget them. Move on.

Yeah... about that piece of advice...

I've applied to cards with annual fees of $69, $79 and $100 without batting an eye, and I have a three good reasons why I don't let annual fees scare or stop me.

Leveraging loyalty. It really works on me!

3500 delta points for 15 minutes of work? Use loyalty programs to your advantage!

As David mentions in his triple card churning post, I had an error on my planned ski trip back to Oregon. To make a long story short, I had to change dates on my trip, so I got credit on Delta (along with a $150 change fee—ouch) to reissue my next flight. When I tried to reissue my ticket the agent tried to charge me a $25 phone booking fee. She did not believe that the policy for reissuing tickets waives that fee, and told me to book it online.

So I proceeded to buy my ticket on Delta.com, and for some reason, my credit did not go through but my card got charged for the whole flight. I wrote an email complaint to Delta, and received their response just a week later.

As Good As Sherlock? Detective Work For More Points!

I recently watched this BBC series and I strongly suggest that you check it out. What does this series have to do with miles and points earning? If you have been keeping up with the blog, you would know from my Jump off it? post that the Vanilla Ink Bold strategy is dead. After some detective work of my own, I have found a possible way to collect Chase Ultimate Rewards points at almost the same cost as the Vanilla Ink bold strategy, with only a little more convenience. I'm not going to lie. I totally thought myself to be Sherlock when I was doing the research; albeit Asian, less smart, and less witty. But hey, who's judging?

Triple Card Churn Part 1: Signing Up (American Airlines and Southwest)

At the time of this writing, I am sitting at Gate 12 of LAX waiting for my (delayed) Southwest flight back to Portland for the weekend. This trip was purchased last minute partly because of Goober's terrible planning, but mostly because I didn't mind spending ten bucks for the roundtrip ticket.

And since this blog is about cheap travel and not fail travel, I guess I won't go into the details of why Goober won't be meeting up with me in Portland or on Mt. Hood for snowboarding. (To be fair, his schedule wasn't entirely within his control. Also, he has admin privileges on this blog, and I don't want him to delete this post.)

I've made a few of these $10 flights this winter, and I'm pretty sure I acquired the taste for inexpensive trips. Unfortunately, my miles are running low, and it's time to get more. I usually work on one card at a time, so I'm stepping out of my spending comfort zone for a triple helping of cards: two American Airline cards (Visa and American Express) and one Southwest card.

Since this blog started, you guys have been reading how we've done this or completed that. Now I'm inviting you to start at beginning of a churn period and see how I'm going to attempt it.

Jump off it?!

One of the major sources for information is http://www.flyertalk.com/, and in a forum post, someone has mentioned that Office Depot has started to remove all gift cards and prepaid cards with variable loads (i.e. the $500) ones. The max you can buy now is $200 with a $7 fee, effectively bringing the cost of Chase Ultimate Rewards points to $0.008 instead of $0.004 (an increase of double!) Taking the math out of it for you, if you were to redeem on United for trips, here are the following costs for a round trip fare in economy.

Destination	Mileage Plus Points	Cost in US Dollars
Continental US	25,000	$213
Caribbean	35,000	$298
Hawaii	40,000	$341
Europe	60,000	$511
Asia	65,000	$554
India	80,000	$682

As you can see, you still get a good deal out of it, but it's far from the deal we got earlier. With the prior deal, we were able to get a round trip to Asia in BUSINESS class for $360. Remember there would be taxes and surcharges so add maybe around $100-$200.

Just as my last post mentioned, these deals are dying out quickly. We continue our quest to find new means to get more points!