What are the best US Bank Cash+ categories?

As a reminder, if you carry the US Bank Cash+ Visa Signature, which has no annual fee, you can select one 2% cash back category (out of gas stations, drug stores, or grocery stores) and two 5% cash back categories each quarter. 2% cash back is unlimited, while 5% cash back is earned on up to $2,000 in combined category purchases each quarter. You'll earn 1% cash back on all non-bonused purchases and those above the $2,000 5% limit.

Here are this quarter's 5% cash back category options (remember, you can pick two):

• Sporting Good Stores
• Cell Phone
• Bookstores
• Department Stores
• Restaurants
• Electronics Stores
• Hotels
• Fast Food
• Furniture Stores
• Car Rental
• Charity
• Movie Theaters

So, which categories should you choose?

Charity: Earn 5%+ Interest on $8,000 in Savings

I'm not going to relitigate the morality of microlending every time I post about US Bank, but suffice it to say that loans made through the Kiva microlending website earn "charity" bonuses on US Bank credit cards. Since many Kiva loans are repaid in less than 12 months, the effective Annual Percentage Yield achieved by using a US Bank Cash+ (or Flexperks Travel) card is somewhat higher than 5% (since you can reloan the same money more than once in the same 12 month period).

Bookstores: Load American Express Campus Edition Prepaid Cards

If you live nearby a Barnes and Noble Campus Bookstore, you may be able to order and load an American Express Campus Edition Prepaid Card there. You'll have to check whether your local campus bookstore participates, but if so, you can pay $3.95 to load up to $500 to your prepaid card, earning $25.20. You can then liquidate the prepaid card's balance for free through Amazon Payments or by buying a PIN-enabled Visa Debit card anywhere those are sold.

Interestingly, I'm no longer able to find the language in the Cardmember Agreement limiting loads to $6,000 per 12-month rolling period, which had previously been a pretty serious throttle on this technique. Does anyone know if that limit has been lifted, or if I'm just getting worse at reading legalese?

Finally, the last time I looked into it, purchases made at Amazon.com also count as "bookstore" purchases and earn 5% cash back. This could be great if you do a lot of shopping at Amazon.

Electronics Stores: Great Discounts on Electronics

If you're actually interested in buying something, you can get great discounts on electronics purchased at (for example) both the online Apple Store and Best Buy by first clicking through a shopping portal (like the ShopDiscover mall, which gives 5% cash back at both), then get an additional 5% cash back by using your Cash+ card on purchases up to $2,000. I sometimes do this to give friends discounts on purchases they were going to make anyway, when they don't have access to (or can't be bothered to sign up for) the most lucrative shopping portals. Bringing the cost of a $2,000 laptop down to $1,800 is a pretty big deal in my neck of the woods.

Cell Phone: Cash Back on Phone Upgrades

Personally, I went to a contract-free cell phone plan a long time ago, and only pay $180 per quarter in cell phone expenses. If you're still on the contract treadmill, however, you may plan to purchase a new cell phone directly from your wireless carrier. In that case, you can earn 5% cash back on the phone (and plan) when you make the purchase with your Cash+ card.

Department Stores: Take Advantage of Periodic Promotions

There's a whole microindustry of blogging about how to take advantage of periodic spikes in shopping portal payouts at various popular department stores. If that's your thing, the Cash+ card lets you earn an extra $100 cash back on your department store purchases each quarter. Check out these posts for more information (personally I don't have the time, patience, or interest to get in on most of these offers):

• Frequent Miler: Sears 25X via an interesting confluence of events
• Mommy Points: Earn Tons of Miles and Points for Holiday Shopping

Am I Missing Anything?

I know I can count on my readers to let me know if there are any big opportunities I haven't covered here.

Omnibus post: Do This Now

[edit 12/28/13: forgot about Marriott!]

There are a few not-particularly-urgent posts I've been letting pile up, so I thought I'd take advantage of the end of the year to do a little winter cleaning.

Do this now: IHG Rewards "Big Win" Promotion

Between January 1 and April 30, 2014, IHG Rewards (formerly Priority Club) is running another version of their "Big Win" promotion, which gives customized promotional offers depending on your history with the program. Login to your IHG Rewards account on this site to see your version of the promotion. Here are the promotions I was given:

• Stay at any IHG® hotel and earn 1,000 points;
• Stay a total of 3 nights and earn 3,000 points;
• Stay at 3 different IHG brands and earn 7,000 points;
• Book 2 separate stays through an IHG® hotel website or mobile device to get our Best Price Guarantee and earn 2,000 points;
• Stay 3 Saturday nights and earn 8,000 points;
• Stay at 2 Holiday Inn® hotels and earn 3,000 points;
• Complete 5 of your offers and earn 10,000 points.

There is an exactly 0% chance I will earn any points through this promotion. Check out the offers that some other bloggers received. 

Do this now: Starwood Preferred Guest "Bring on the Nights" Promotion

As I noted on my Hotel Promotions page, Starwood Preferred Guest is running a promotion between January 5 and April 30, 2014, giving 2,500 bonus Starpoints after every 5th eligible night and 5,000 bonus Starpoints after you stay 25 eligible nights. Register for the promotion here.

Do this now: Quarter 1 Cash Back Bonus Categories

Finally, since the first quarter of 2014 is just around the corner, if you carry one of the cash back cards that offers 5% cash back bonus categories, be sure to register for the quarterly bonus categories.

• Chase Freedom: Gas Stations, movie theaters, Starbucks;
• Discover More/it: Restaurants and movie theaters;
• Citi Dividend Platinum Select: Macy's, drugstores, and fitness clubs.

Of these, the Citi Dividend Platinum Select categories are the most obviously lucrative, since you can earn all $300 in cash back during this one quarter by spending $6,000 at drug stores. The second best are the Chase Freedom bonus categories, as long as you can find 7-11 store locations that are both coded as gas stations and are willing to sell PayPal My Cash cards using your Chase Freedom card.

Personally, I'll be converting my Citi ThankYou Preferred card to a Dividend Platinum Select card once I've liquidated my ThankYou points in January, as well as converting my Chase Sapphire Preferred card to a second Chase Freedom card in order to take advantage of the Gas Station bonus category in the first and third quarters of 2014.

It's going to be a good year!

Do this now: Marriott Rewards Spring MegaBonus Promotion

Registration is also open for Marriott's Spring MegaBonus promotion, whereby you can earn up to 2 certificates, each good for 1 free night at a Category 1-4 Marriott property. You'll earn 1 certificate after you complete 2 paid stays between February 1 and April 30, 2014, and another certificate after you complete another 2 paid stays in the same period.

Register now, before you forget.

3 cards you might not know about (but should)

Every once in a while I come across a credit card product that I haven't heard of, but which seems to offer some kind of disproportionately high earning potential. Typically these cards fly under the radar either because they're new, they earn miles in a less-familiar rewards program, and/or they don't offer referral credit to bloggers. Here are a few such cards:

Barclaycard Travelocity Rewards American Express – 2%-6% cash back

When I wrote about this card all the way back in June, there were 2 versions of the card, one which earned 5 points per dollar spent at Travelocity and one which earned 3. I can no longer find a working link to the 5 point card, so it seems they've discontinued it for new applications. The 3 point per dollar, no-annual-fee card is still available though, offering 10,000 points after $1,000 in purchases within 90 days, worth up to $200 in statement credits against Travelocity purchases (see my June post for more information about redemptions).

You should be booking your paid airline tickets through Travelocity anyway, since they offer 2 Chase Ultimate Rewards points per dollar through the Ultimate Rewards shopping portal.

The Barclaycard Arrival World MasterCard is strictly superior for manufactured spend, since it earns a flat 2.22% cash back on all purchases after the 10% redemption rebate, while the Travelocity American Express earns 6% only on Travelocity reservations, and 2% on all other purchases (which is still a decent return for a no-annual-fee card). And of course if you make a travel purchase with the Arrival card in order to make a redemption against it, you can't make the same purchase with the Travelocity card!

On the other hand, the Arrival MasterCard has an $89 annual fee, and earns less value on the travel purchases themselves.

That's a problem with no one right answer, but I would use the Travelocity card if I booked a lot of reimbursable business flights, and earn a $400 rebate for every $6,667 I spent on airfare.

For hotel stays, you are still be better off using a hotel co-branded card and booking through your hotel's website, since $6,667 spent on a co-branded card is enough to earn 1 or more (in some cases many more) free nights at any hotel chain property except a Category 7 Starwood property, which would require $8,750 or $7,000 on the co-branded American Express, depending on your elite status.

Quicken Rewards Visa – up to 2.86% cash back

Like the US Bank FlexPerks Visa, this card offers travel redemptions in fixed tiers, so the amount of value of your points will depend entirely on the cost of the flights you redeem them for. Here's are the available redemption tiers:

View fullsize

You can also redeem your points for a $100 check for 10,000 points. So, assuming you're not some kind of sociopath, you'll get a minimum of 1 cent and a maximum of 1.43 cents in value per point (for a flight costing exactly $500).

Crucially, the card earns 2 points per dollar spent at restaurants, gas stations, pharmacies, and office supply stores. If those sound like 3 of the most popular and lucrative venues for manufactured spend, it's because they are.

Interestingly, the slightly random redemption thresholds make this card a good complement to the US Bank Flexperks Visa. For example, a $400 ticket would cost 20,000 FlexPoints, giving you 2 cents per FlexPoint (100% of the maximum value), but 35,000 Quicken points, giving you 1.14 cents per point (80% of the maximum value).

Huntington Voice - 3% cash back on $2,000 in spend per quarter

While you won't get rich using this card, you can still earn $240 per year manufacturing spend in the bonus category of your choice (including gas stations, pharmacies, grocery stores, and office supply stores). Together with some of my other favorite cash back cards, like the US Bank Cash+, Discover More, and Chase Freedom, this is the kind of card you can take out once a quarter, max out your bonus category, and forget about it for 3 more months.

What else?

Which are your favorite "sleeper" cards, the ones that don't get the attention you think they deserve?

Perfect storm of signup bonuses

I was writing this post yesterday but my blogging software wasn't behaving, and Mommy Points beat me to the punch! Go read that post, but here's the quick and dirty: there are a number of too-good-to-miss signup bonuses available right now, so if you've been waiting for the right moment for a credit card application cycle, this is the right moment. Here are the cards I would apply for today (no affiliate links here, obviously):

• Bank of America Alaska Airlines Visa Signature, 50,000 miles after $1,000 in spending. Arguably the most valuable traditional airline miles, and inarguably the highest offer ever made for this credit card. This is the time to get it.
• Barclaycard Lufthansa Miles & More World MasterCard, 50,000 miles after $5,000 in spending.
• Chase British Airways Visa Signature, 100,000 miles after $20,000 in spending within the first year. A high spending requirement, but also the highest this offer has ever been. After spending $20,000 on the card, you'll have earned 125,000 Avios, or 6.25 Avios per dollar (the card earns 1.25 Avios per dollar on non-bonused spending).
• Citi Platinum Select / (American Airlines) AAdvantage World MasterCard, 50,000 miles after $3,000 in spending.

These are all best-in-class offers, and it's vanishingly unlikely that they'll all be simultaneously available again in the near future. If you wanted to add an American Express card into the mix I'd probably go for a Starwood Preferred Guest personal or business card, unless you're in the hunt for Delta Platinum or Diamond status, in which case you could apply for a personal or business Delta Platinum American Express. I'm not thrilled with any of the Membership Rewards signup bonuses currently available, unless one of my readers can point to something better than the 25,000 point signup bonus for the Premier Rewards Gold card.

Do this now: Amazon.com credit from American Express

Hot on the heels of Small Business Saturday, American Express is offering another deal that you'd be crazy not to take advantage of: a $25 statement credit when you spend $75 or more by December 31, 2013, at Amazon.com on each American Express card you carry.

There are lots of ways to enroll in the promotion, including "syncing" your cards through Twitter or "adding the offer" to your card through your online banking account. The easiest, however, is to go to this page and enter your information for each unique American Express number you have.

Unfortunately it isn't possible to register for the promotion through multiple channels and earn more than 1 $25 statement credit: after "adding the offer" to my account online I wasn't able to then register through the promotion site.

On the plus side, while most of American Express's prepaid cards (like Bluebird) are not eligible for the promotion, Serve (the Bluebird-lite prepaid card product) is eligible. So if you or someone you know still has a Serve account, be sure to register that as well.

Hey look, an affiliate link!

[update 12/11/14: I do not, in fact, have any affiliate links on this stie, but I'm leaving this post up purely for historical reasons. None of the links in this post pay me in any way.]

As I've mentioned a few times here on the blog and in the comments section, in general I don't have any credit card affiliate links on this site (some of the signup links to services like TopCashBack do give me some kind of referral credit, although I haven't received any in the 5 months I've been running this website) . I always link to the best offers I know of, and update the links in the main body of the website as soon as I learn of a better offer or that an offer has been discontinued.

This isn't because of any burning hatred of affiliate links or disrespect for bloggers who use them (although bloggers who repeatedly write about the same 2 or 3 cards - Chase's Sapphire Preferred and Ink Bold/Plus cards are frequent examples - certainly aren't doing anything to enhance their credibility).

The reason I haven't had affiliate links is that it's pretty hard to get approved for affiliate links for the principal credit card issuers, and I would never link to credit cards that I wouldn't apply for myself.

All this brings me to the point of this post, which is that today I got an e-mail saying I'd been approved for affiliate links to cards issued by Barclaycard.

I think I'm supposed to copy and paste a bunch of advertising material, which I'm obviously not going to do. But if you are already going to apply for the 40,000 point Arrival World Mastercard signup bonus and 2.22% cash back earning rate, and want to support the work I do here on the blog and in my book, The Free-quent Flyer's Manifesto, one way to do so is to apply through my affiliate link. I'll also update the link you'll find in the section of the site dedicated to Chapter 2 of the book.

You can read all about the Arrival World MasterCard in the series of posts I wrote on earning and redeeming that card's rewards currency. 

(In case you're wondering, my affiliate link is worse than the publicly available offer for the Barclaycard US Airways Premier World MasterCard and Lufthansa Premier Miles & More World MasterCard, so I'm not giving it out, although if any readers are interested I can post those links in the comments).

Excellent offer for two American Express cards [now one]

This post serves as a heads up that creditscards.com is offering an excellent signup bonus that appears to be publicly available or two credit cards: the American Express Premier Rewards Gold card and the Gold Delta Skymiles card.  

[Expired] The American Express Premier Rewards Gold card, described in Chapter 3 of the book, earns flexible Membership Rewards points that can be transferred to their airline and hotel partners or used to purchase flights at a value of 1 cent each (although they cannot be redeemed for cash, unlike the more valuable Chase Ultimate Rewards points). [Expired]

The American Express Gold Delta Skymiles card earns Delta miles, which can be redeemed for flights on Delta or on their Skyteam partner airlines.

To find the two offers, click through to creditcards.com, find "Offers Matched for You" in the top left panel, and enter your name and address (social security number is not required).

The Premier Rewards Gold card offers a signup bonus of 50,000 Membership Rewards points after $1000 in spending within 3 months.

The Gold Delta Skymiles card offers 45,000 Skymiles, 25,000 after your first purchase and an additional 20,000 after $5,000 in spending within 6 months.

Happy hacking!

Current Hotel Promotions

One secret to maximizing your points and nights earning at hotels is to make sure you register for the promotions hotel loyalty programs periodically offer.  Take a few minutes now to register for the following hotel promotions:

Hilton (register for Hilton HHonors here)

• Earn double Hilton points or double miles for paid stays between January 16 and March 31, 2013.  Register for the promotion here.

Marriott (register for Marriott Rewards here)

• Marriott Megabonus promotion vary slightly depending on factors know only to Marriott.  Sign in here and register for the promotion to see which version you're targeted for.

Hyatt (register for Hyatt Gold Passport here)

• Hyatt's spring promotion is for 3,000 Gold Passport points after every third stay, up to a maximum of 45,000 points (15 stays) between March 1 and May 31.  Holders of the Hyatt Visa will receive a 20% bonus on their promotional points (600 extra points after every third stay).  Register for the promotion here.

Starwood (register for Starwood Preferred Guest here)

• Starwood's spring promotion gives 2,000 bonus Starpoints for every 4 paid nights between January 15 and April 15, 2013, and an additional 10,000 Starpoints when you stay a total of 20 or more paid nights.  Register for the promotion here.

Club Carlson (register for Club Carlson here)

• Earn triple Club Carlson points for paid stays between January 8 and March 31, 2013.  Register for triple points here.

Priority Club

• Priority Club has a promotion for new members whereby you can earn double points or double miles, or a $50 gift certificate, on your second paid stay at all Priority Club properties except Staybridge Suites and Candlewood Suites, where you earn the bonus on your first paid stay.  Register for Priority Club and this promotion here.
• The second current promotion offers bonus points after a certain number of paid nights between January 7 and April 30, 2013.  There are several versions of this promotion, and you can choose the promotion that works best for you.  Read about each version of the promotion over at Priority Club Insider, and register here.

Best Western (register for Best Western Rewards here)

• There are two Best Western promotions currently, but you can only register for one.  The first, targeted offer is for one free night after one paid stay.  You can attempt to register for that promotion here.
• If you're unable to register for that promotion, they have another publicly available promotion for one free night after three paid stays.  If you couldn't register for the better promotion, register for this one here.

Do this now!

So you've just finished the book and you're feeling a little overwhelmed by the world of points and miles hacking.  That's perfectly understandable!  Before you do anything else, sign up for the following free products, and you'll be well on your way to printing miles and points along with the best of us!  This will take about 30 minutes, so get a cup of coffee and dig in.

• Credit Karma
• Credit Sesame
• Bluebird
• Kiva.org
• PayPal.com
• Venmo.com
• Amazon Payments
• TopCashBack
• Fat Wallet
• Big Crumbs

Believe it or not, you're already hacking!