Stepping Up the Game, My Next Churn!

What's better than going to the airplane bathroom to change into PJs provided by the airline and coming back to your seat that has magically transformed into a bed?

PJ's received from my Cathay Pacific First class

Seat turned into a bed with down comforter!      

Sending your parents on that trip instead! As you can guess, it will cost me a good portion of my accrued miles, but hopefully it will be enough for them to finally stop bringing up the time I tried changing the grades on my report card in high school.

To keep my points balance at a reasonable level, I will need to do another round of applications. These are the ones I've signed up for and where I'd like to eventually spend them:

Blue What? Meet Huge Spend Requirements With this Trick

**UPDATE**: This method has been ended due to some hard coding policies from Bluebird. There are however current similar ways that we will eventually write about. Google Redbird if you don't want to wait.

With my recent post on 100k AA bonus miles with $10,000 minimum spend within 3 months, many people have asked me how to meet an absurd amount in such a short time. David wrote a good summary on ways to meet spend, but since then, the bulk of our required spend is done with American Express Bluebird. This card allows us to "Manufacture Spend" meaning I can spend $10,000 on my card without really spending it. Confused? Read on!

Bluebird is a like a pseudo-checkings account brought to us by Walmart and American Express. You can sign up HERE, and your card will arrive in 5-7 days. There are a bunch of features that really don't matter to us, so I'll only go over the pertinent ones.

• No fees in the way we use it.
• Low fee ATM withdrawals for foreign transactions.
• Bill Pay feature: Send checks to whoever you want, including yourself, landlords(apartment rent), student loan agencies, and credit card companies. Yes the very same companies that you pay your credit card bill.
• Load up to a max of $1000 a day and $5000 a month

Unfortunately you cannot put money into your Bluebird account via your credit card directly, but you can load your Bluebird account with prepaid cards that you CAN buy with your credit card at certain stores. See the trick yet?

1. Buy prepaid cards at stores with your points earning credit card. 
2. Load those prepaid cards into your Bluebird
3. Use Bluebird to pay off that SAME credit card you used to purchase the prepaid cards

That way we can spend $10,000 in 2 months without really spending it! You didn't really think I spent 20% of my annual income in 2 months did you?

How to Load Your Bluebird

By far the easiest method is buying Vanilla Reload cards

They cost $3.95 and you can load up to $500 to each one. Once bought you turn it over, scratch off the label and follow the directions to load it onto your Bluebird card via their Website. To meet the $10,000 requirement, it would take you 2 months and $80 out of pocket. You can find a list of retailers that sell these HERE. The problem with many of the retailers are they will not accept credit card for these purchases. CVS used to be the go to spot, but they have recently stopped accepting credit cards for the purchase of these cards.

Other retailers that have been reported with intermittent success are Cumberland Farms gas stations, 7-11, shell and Valero. These are very much "Your Miles May Very" YMMV.

The other option is to buy VISA or Mastercard debit gift cards. These may include brands such as "One Vanilla", "My Vanilla" or variable load VISA/Mastercard Giftcards. Each one has their own fees ranging from $3.95-$6.95. You can then add a personal identification number (PIN) onto it and it acts like a debit card. With that, you can then go to a Walmart with a Money Center Kiosk to physically load each card onto your Bluebird Account. Bluebird allows you to load $1000 a day and up to $5000 a month via debit, hence why we buy these gift cards to act like a debit card. This does require you to go to a physical Walmart, and who really wants to do that with people like this there. Since the demise of CVS, these may become my main source of loading Bluebird.

Travel with Grant has a good summary on which cards can be loaded at Walmart.

You can locate a "Moneypass ATM" with this link: Walmart ATM locator. Type in walmart as the bank, then your zip code, to see if there are any around you.

As you can see, Bluebird is an essential tool in our hobby. It has drastically made it easier to hit spend limits and also a great tool for manufacturing spend. It sounds like a lot of work, but when your laying down in your flat bed full off of lobster and Dom Perignon, it will all be worth it.

100k AA miles sign up bonus!

David's last post described the thought process in choosing the right card(s) to get you that trip you've always wanted. It was thorough, detailed—and let's face it—didn't answer the question you asked in the first place: Which card should you get?

I'll cut to the chase I am telling you exactly which card to sign up for.

Want free easy travel? Southwest 50k offers are back

These cards are great to dip your toes into the points game. Spend $2,000 in the first 3 months and get 50k points. Although it says 2 free round trips, the points are directly converted into dollars so you are getting a value of around $900 worth of points.

For instance if I wanted to travel from LAX to PDX on Jan 24th to Jan. 27th, it would cost as low as $173 round trip. That is a great price already, but with one sign up bonus worth of points, I could make six round trip flights!

There are two brands of cards available: Premier and Plus. Both brands are available for both the personal and business card types. The big difference is the annual fee of $69 (for personal) and $99 (for business). Another difference is that the Premier will give you 6k points annual bonus for keeping the card a year (which is about $99 anyway) and the Plus gives you 3k (so it basically evens out).

Doing the final math after annual fee, you get about $800 worth of fares for free.

I have signed up for the Plus card because I already had the Premier and you can only get the bonus once.

Getting 2 versions is also a very good idea because of the companion pass that you can easily obtain. If you earn 110k points (including sign up bonus's) in one year, you can bring a companion with you at no extra cost each time you get a ticket. EVEN WITH THE POINTS YOU EARNED

Worried about being able to spend the minimum requirements? Look here for ideas to meet minimum spend. We will also be writing about the easiest method, using the blue bird card.

What are you waiting for, sign up for at least one of them!

Link to all 4 cards here

Step 1: Profit. Step 2: Profit. Step 3: Profit.

Title says it all!

If you follow our blog or listen to us preach, you'll know that a lot of our strategies have a step where we actually lose some money (most often in the form of negligible activation fees).

That won't happen this time around. Instead, it's net gain all the way. Here's what I earned today:

• 1,770 points
• $20 Staples gift card
• $11 credit for my American Express credit card

Unfortunately, this is a targeted promotion, but read on to find out how you can check to see if you're one of the lucky few!

Money, Money, Money! Getting Cash Abroad

During my travels around the world, I learned that all the spending I did didn't earn me any points. Most merchants either preferred cash and some didn't even accept credit cards at all. (If you've been reading this blog, you know not earning points while spending really breaks my heart.)

XE app for phones

So what are my strategies for access to cash while traveling? Read on to find how I prepare for my travels.

"The Great Game" The search for Vanilla retailers

In the Prior post As good as Sherlock I had outlined my cousin and I's detective work which would potentially lead to almost as cheap Ultimate Rewards points as Vanilla Ink Bold strategy. The next step after solving the puzzle was to try and implement it. Below is the journey I mapped out. Read on to find out how I planned this!

Where can you go with 3 people for $778?

Try Australia, with a 3 day stop over in Hawaii, airfare AND hotel included. The flights are in economy, but the hotels are not in your cheap hostels or economy hotel (nothing wrong with these) but Hyatts and Marriotts. Sometimes we get so caught up in collecting miles, we forget the big picture: spending them!

I got my cousin seriously into the miles game back in July when he applied for the Ink card and Sapphire card in November, and it paid off—big time.

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

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?

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!

Chase Ink Bold

The Chase Ink Bold is a business charge card that is the keystone card in the Vanilla Ink Bold strategy. The benefits for this card are:

• The current promotion is 50k Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR) points after you spend $5,000 in the first 3 months. 
• Normally, the promo is a spend of $10,000 in three months, so get it now!
• 50k UR points are basically worth ~$500, but you can always find more efficient ways of spending the points.
• 5x points per dollar spent at office stores or on utilities like cell phone/landlines, internet and cable.
• 2x points for dining and gas. 1 point per dollar for everything else.

If used correctly, you can earn a crazy amount of UR points that can be used on various airlines and hotels.