Hybrid Points Programs Archives

Make money AND UR miles with OfficeMax and Chase Ink

Through Saturday, August 29, Officemax is having an unadvertised special where you get a $15 rebate when you buy $300 worth of Visa gift cards. I made a whopping 24,000 miles during a promotion just like this one around Christmas by driving around to different OM stores. By buying 3X$200 gift cards you will get an instant $30 discount off the total automatically. The gift cards each have a $6.95 fee so your total for all $600 in gift cards will just be $590.85 [(3X$206.95) – $30]! This means you are getting $10 for free!

Hello, free lunch!

But wait… There’s more! If you use a normal miles earning credit card you will score 591 miles or points, but if you use the Chase Ink Plus card (which gives you 5X points on Office Supply stores like OM) you will take home almost 3,000 of the ultra valuable Ultimate Rewards points.

You can usually do this once per day at every OfficeMax in your local area (if they aren’t sold out of course). Note this works for the $200 and $100 gift cards but the $200 are a better value since the fee is approximately the same. Keep in mind that even though they are merged, this promotion is only at OfficeMax stores not Office Depots. You can also call before you go to make sure they have the $200 Visa’s in stock so you don’t waste a trip.

Make money and miles… Does it get any better?

Membership Rewards 40% British Airways transfer bonus!

American Express Membership rewards has announced a 40% transfer bonus to British Airways Avios through January 31, 2014! This means if you transfer 100,000 Membership Rewards points you will receive 140,000 British Airways Avios. This is one of the best transfer bonuses for BA Avios I have seen. I jumped on a 30% transfer bonus to BA right before I cancelled my Amex Gold card and netted a cool 122,000 Avios which I then used for my trip to Mexico and many more trips as well. If you have read our article on When to use American AAdvantage Miles vs British Airways Avios then you know how valuable BA Avios can be! I use them all the time for domestic and Central American travel and you should too! Continue reading “Membership Rewards 40% British Airways transfer bonus!”

Get 24,000 Free Ultimate Rewards Points from OfficeMax!

Edit: This deal actually goes until December 27th so you can get 50,000 miles or more!

Edit 2: I found out today you can do 3X$200 to maximize the discount with $40 off. I have updated the review to reflect this.

I love OfficeMax! They give me free money and miles all the time like when they gave me 1000 points a day and when they gave me 43,000 Ultimate Rewards points in just one week! This time it is 24,000 free points but it is possible to get even more!

What you need?

A miles or points earning credit or debit card. Any card will work for this deal but the Ink Plus, Ink Cash or Amex Simplycash cards are ideal with their 5X points on Office Supply stores
A Bluebird card (you can get for free at Walmart)
A little free time to stop by OfficeMax every day and then Walmart at the end of the week.

Continue reading “Get 24,000 Free Ultimate Rewards Points from OfficeMax!”

Amex Sync Offer: Free $150 for your AT&T Wireless Bill

Whenever the annual fees come due on my cards (such as the $65 annual fee for my Starwood Preferred Guest Business American Express), I look and see what value I have gotten for the card throughout the membership year and compare it to the fee. I love Amex Sync offers and have written about them many times in the past. The latest Amex offer though is a doozy! This one offer will pay almost 3 years worth of annual fees on this card! To take advantage of this offer you will obviously need an American Express card that has this offer available in your online account (my SPG Business Amex did). Continue reading “Amex Sync Offer: Free $150 for your AT&T Wireless Bill”

Should I get a cashback or a miles card?

Reader Javier asked recently in the comments on this article: “Keith turned me on to your site on Facebook. I wanted a little direction. I have the Capital one Venture card with 2x per dollar spent. I crunched the numbers for last month and if I switched to the Chase card I would be down about 3200 points/miles. Capital One doesn’t necessarily use the miles redeem system, they just reimburse you for the travel based on the amount of the ticket. How would I be able to utilize your system with Capital One?”

I started writing a quick reply but it quickly got more involved with examples so I wanted to make this into a more comprehensive post that I could refer people to in the future since this is a common question. This is a long post, but read and digest it slowly because it is an important one. If you don’t want all the details, skip to the bottom to the Conclusion TLDR section.

What is the difference between a cashback card and a miles card? Continue reading “Should I get a cashback or a miles card?”

Chase Ink Plus bumps bonus to 70,000 points!

Update 10/23/14: The bonus has gone back to the normal amount of 50,000.

The Chase Ink Bold card has long been one of my favorite cards that has made me hundreds of thousands of Ultimate Rewards points. The Chase Ink Plus is its cousin that is a credit card (that allows you to pay over time) instead of a charge card like the Ink Bold (that requires you to pay in full each month). Although you should be paying in full each month with either card to be a responsible cardholder! If you are paying interest you are doing the miles game all wrong! This is a business card so you will need some sort of a small business to apply such as buying and selling things on ebay or a consulting business or anything you do on the side to earn extra money!
The normal bonus for this card is 50,000 and while there has been a 70,000 in branch offer for a while, the online offer has remained at 50K. Until now! Now using our Chase Ink Plus link you can get 70,000 Ultimate Rewards points after spending $5,000 in the first 3 months. Continue reading “Chase Ink Plus bumps bonus to 70,000 points!”

Changes coming to the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card.

One of my favorite cards, the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card has announced some coming changes, most of which are bad, but a few improvements. Here is the skinny: Continue reading “Changes coming to the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card.”

Book Fast! 8 Amazing Pointbreaks Hotels for 5,000 Points til 9/30!

IHG Pointbreaks are a list of 5000 point per night hotel awards that they release every other month. There are 167 hotels on the list this time. They are normally much more per night, sometimes as much as 50,000 points, so 5000 is a steal! I love IHG Pointbreaks Hotels! In my eyes this is the best value in hotel award stays. I stayed 11 nights for free (55,000 points total!) during my April trip to China at incredible hotels like the Intercontinental Hangzhou. Continue reading “Book Fast! 8 Amazing Pointbreaks Hotels for 5,000 Points til 9/30!”

Chase Ink Plus 70,000 Point offer available in Branch

Chase has made a 70,000 point offer for the Chase Ink Plus business card available in their branches. As of right now this isn’t available online. You have to spend $5K in the first 3 months to get the bonus. This is the credit version of the Chase Ink Bold charge card. I have made hundreds of thousands of miles from my Chase Ink Bold card with the 5X points bonus it gives you for Office Supply stores.

This is the best offer I have seen for these cards since they originally came out, so if you were thinking about getting one, then now would be a good time. Note that you will have to pay the annual fee on this one, but the $95 is worth it for the extra 20K Points over the standard 50K offer.

As always, reply with any questions and follow me on Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to make sure you don’t miss any great info! And don’t forget to share this article with anyone who might be interested using the handy social share buttons right below this post!

Get paid $13 for earning 400 miles with Amex and Best Buy!

Don’t forget to enter our TravelWithMiles Guru contest that ends Friday. A free plane ticket to Cancun is guaranteed but maybe even more!

I’ve talked about Amex Sync offers in the past and have made money and miles with them several times. I even recently gave away one of the CPK gift cards that I received with a Sync offer to a lucky Facebook reader.

Best Buy has a current Amex Sync offer for $25 back with a $250 purchase. It is super easy to get.

Register for the Promotion
Buy $250 worth of anything at Best Buy (including gift cards)
$25 credit will automatically post to your Amex account

1. Register for the Promotion

You can register for the promotions within Amex online account (where you pay your bill online), or via Facebook, or via FourSquare, or Via Twitter. I prefer using Twitter because it is fast and I get an instant tweet back confirming my sign up. I don’t really use Twitter but set up an account just for promotions like this. If you haven’t linked your Amex Card to the Sync Program yet then Click on this link and then Click on Sign in with Twitter.It will then pop up an authorization screen where it lets you connect your twitter account to your Amex Sync account. Just put in your Twitter login information here (notice the site is on Twitter.com so you aren’t giving your login info away to some third party site). Don’t worry if this sounds complicated. It’s not! Amex Sync Auth Once you get logged in you link your Amex card to your twitter account.

Once all that is done, you just Tweet #AmexBestBuy and you should get a tweet back as well as an email confirming your signup (or letting you know if there is a problem like they have reached capacity, which happens sometimes). If you want to use Facebook or Foursquare then follow the directions at this page, but I find Twitter to be the quickest. Keep in mind if you have multiple Amex cards, you can sync each one with a different method and get multiple sync bonuses. At that point you are ready for Step 2.

2. Buy $250 worth of anything at Best Buy (including gift cards)

I didn’t need any electronics right now so I decided to go with my favorite thing to buy, gift cards! They mainly have Best Buy gift cards, but if you look carefully in the same section, they also have Best Buy branded VISA gift cards. Score! They look like this. I bought two of them for $205.95 each for a total of $411.90. At the cashier I had the cashier put $250 on my Starwood Preferred Guest® Business Credit Card from American Express, and then the balance on my US Airways® Premier World MasterCard® (I am trying to build up my US Airways miles so I have enough for a fun trip). So total I will receive 250 SPG points and 162 US Airways miles. I will have paid $411.90 and receive a $25 credit back, for a net profit of $13.10. Which brings us to the easy part, step 3.

3. $25 credit will automatically post to your Amex account

This part happens really quickly. More or less immediately after you make the charge, you should get an email thanking you for using your synced card at Best Buy. Amex Email The credit should post to your account within one or two days even though it says it can take up to 90.

What now?

Now that you have $400 in Visa gift cards, what to do with them? You have several different options. Of course you can just spend them for day to day expenses. Or you can load them onto your Bluebird card and use them to Pay your rent or Mortgage. Or you can even get money orders for them from Walmart or Kroger! So many options and all of them are great! You will need to set the PIN on these Metabank VISA cards before you can use them for this by calling 1-888-524-1283.

I know it doesn’t seem like this is a huge deal. And it isn’t. But if you look back at all of the Manufactured Spend posts we have made over the last few weeks, you will see that they really add up over time to a decent chunk of miles!