MOGL - Maximizing your credit swipes with dining rewards!

If you are one of the few people who reads our experiment of a blog, you are:
1: Poor like me and David.
2: One of our friends.
3: Both of the above, which means you probably like eating for cheap like us.

One of the most simplest ways to earn extra miles or cash is to sign up for a "Dining rewards program" in which you earn miles at participating restaurants on top of the normal miles you earn for the credit card charge.

For example, Rewards Network is partnered with multiple airlines. So that if you register your Chase Sapphire Preferred card and use it at a participating restaurant, you earn the normal 2 points per dollar spent, plus whatever bonus points per dollar the Rewards Network gives. This allows you to earn extra miles that you would spend anyways. A card can only be registered once on Rewards Network.

A newer type of dining rewards program I have ran across is called MOGL. Instead of points they offer a straight 10% back onto your card at participating restaurants.

I have already linked all of my cards to various Rewards Network partners such as American Airlines and Southwest, but since this is not part of that network you can double dip!

Three main features of MOGL are:

1. 10% paid back to your card monthly when dining at participating restaurants.
2. Spend over $20 at participating restaurants and they will donate a meal to someone in need. (I have no idea how this work, but you get a good feeling out of it?)
3. You can win a jackpot if you spend the most at one restaurant. (These can possibly negate your spend that month.)

With 650+ locations in the San Diego area and 300+ in Los Angeles, I'm sure many of you can benefit from this!

Sign up through this link and earn $10 dollars for yourself (and me!) after your first dine at a participating restaurant!

MOGL Sign up

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.

500 Free AA Miles for Completing Facebook Survey

American Airlines is offering 500 free AAdvantage miles for liking them and completing a survey on Facebook. Promotion valid till Dec. 17th 2012 or the first 200k entrants. Miles post in 6-8 weeks. It is so easy, David might just even do this promo.

This is a great way to pad your account or keep activity up.  Every mile counts. You don't want to be the person booking an award ticket to find they're 2000 miles short and end up paying $50 to get enough miles for that ticket. Its happened to yours truly.

Get the miles here.