United

December 30, 2014

Fidelity 50,000 Delta SkyMiles Offer Extended + Earn 50,000 American or United Miles with Fidelity

One way to earn miles that isn’t discussed too frequently is opening a Fidelity brokerage account and funding it with a set amount of money. Currently, you could earn miles in one of three programs – United, American and Delta. All of these programs have existed for several years now and while the Delta offer was set to expire on 12/31/14, it has recently been renewed until December 31, 2015 while the offers for American and United are valid until March 31, 2015 and April 30, 2015 respectively. Based on the amount you deposit, you could earn 15,000, 25,000 or 50,000 miles in those programs (the offers are the same for each program).

Fidelity

For those who aren’t aware of the history of these offers, it used to be very easy to hit the minimum deposit amount needed for the miles as you could cycle money in and out until you hit the $100,000 deposit figure for the maximum miles. I used to do this in $10k increments years ago but unfortunately Fidelity got smart and cracked down on that practice.

This program is now slightly less useful for some of you as you need a large amount of funds to move into Fidelity. If you have investments with other banks or investment firms, you could consider moving them to Fidelity to take advantage of the current offers. As always, evaluate the fees, the type of investments and all other trading related or investment related items Fidelity offers compared to your existing bank or investment firm before deciding about switching – those matter much more then 25,000 or 50,000 miles.

If you are interested in taking advantage of one of the three offers (I would choose the United or American offer before Delta personally), here is a good summary of what you need to know.

  • Must open a new non-retirement brokerage account OR fund an existing one with new money. Per the terms & conditions “Net new assets means external new money in minus money out, including distributions and transfers, during the qualification period.”
  • Account must be funded within 60 days of registering for this offer
  • You are allowed to take advantage of this offer once every 12 months
  • Funds must remain the account for at least 9 months
  • There is no language stating you actually have to make any sort of trades or transactions. You could just park the money here but instead you should buy an FDIC insured certificate of deposit (CD) for no fees to earn a little interest.
  • You can only register for one of these three offers at a time (no double or triple dipping)
  • I have never been issued a 1099 for the value of the miles

Links to Register:

Delta Airlines Offer

American Airlines Offer

United Airlines Offer

Due to the deposit requirements, these offers aren’t for everyone. But if you can meet the requirements are you taking advantage of these offers? If so, which one?

November 23, 2014

Point & Center: Chase UR loses Korean Air, A Bad Way to Use United Miles & Amex Small Business Saturday Signup Reminder

Here is a quick recap of what’s going on in the points & world.

1) Chase loses Korean Air as a Ultimate Rewards Transfer Partner – On Friday night, news broke across several blogs and forums that Korean Air was no longer listed as a transfer partner of Chase Ultimate Rewards. I believe for the majority of people, this isn’t huge news as I imagine the most common transfers from Chase go to United, Southwest, Hyatt and British Airways. However, the bigger problem with this news was there no advance notice. There has to be several people who were planning a trip using Korean Air miles and a trip that could have booked yesterday, can no longer be booked today. This stings as I’m sure no one saw this news coming.

In fact, this presents a problem for one of my clients who was working with me to plan a trip to Bora Bora. Since Korean Air only charges 60k miles roundtrip for LA to Tahiti (flown by Air France), our plan was to stockpile Chase UR points and transfer them over to Korean to book the Air France flight when my client was ready to book. Unfortunately, we need to scrap that plan and save those Chase UR points for something else. The beauty of flexible points is that you can hold them and transfer them out when needed as you assume airline and hotel transfer partners don’t suddenly change overnight. I am hopeful Chase works something out with Korean or at least allows a small window of time for all remaining transfers to be made.

2) A Bad Way to Use United Miles at Newark – United announced a major renovation at Newark (long overdue) and one of the new features is the ability to pay for food in the terminal with your United miles. With several nice eateries opening up in the renovated terminal, this sounds exciting and all until you realize it is a very poor use of miles. Will Run for Miles posted some screenshots of the prices of food with miles and it is not pretty. For example:

  • $8.00 Mashed Potatoes = 1,150 United Miles
  • $29.00 Duck Leg Confit = 4,150 United Miles
  • $14.00 Cheese Plate = 2,000 United Miles

In these cases, you would only be getting 7/10th of a penny in value per mile. That is awful. Unless you have some orphan miles in your account (under 5,000), I would advise to pay for your meal and earn miles.

3) Reminder to Signup for American Express Small Business Saturday – Every year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, American Express runs a promotion encouraging customer to shop at small businesses by givine customers a statement credit for purchases at these small businesses. This year American Express is offering $30 in statement credits per American Express card. In order to achieve the full $30 credit, you must make 3 separate transaction of at least $10 at a qualifying small business (check to see what businesses qualifies here).

Free Money!

Free Money!

My plan is to buy gift cards to a bunch of local grocery and liquor stores that qualify as small businesses per Amex. I will have the gift cards rung up in $10 increments and swipe after every $10. I have 5 American Express cards + American Express Serve which qualifies. If I max out this promotion, that is $180 FREE (6 cards x $30 statement credit per card)! And that doesn’t include my wife’s American Express Card nor authorized users cards, which qualify as well.  Make sure you register for American Express Small Business Saturday here – this can be a very lucrative promotion.

 

 

September 18, 2014

Point & Center: Bonus Miles for Flying to London, Activate Chase Freedom 5% Bonus for 4th Quarter & More…

Let’s take a quick look at some of the bigger promotions and deals in the points & miles world.

1) Activate Chase Freedom for the 4th Quarter – It is now time to activate the 5% cash back (or 5x miles if you have a Chase Sapphire Preferred or Ink Bold and transfer Freedom points to those cards) feature of the Chase Freedom for the 4th quarter categories. This quarter it should be very easy to earn the full 5% cash back on the maximum $1,500 in spending, as the categories are Amazon.com and Department stores. Amazon sells literally almost anything and you could always buy gift cards for future Amazon purchases. For others, department stores will be huge once the holiday season comes rolling around. Click here to activate the 5% cash back. 

ChaseFreedom4Q

2) Fly United or Air Canada to London and Earn Up to 35,000 Bonus Miles – This tidbit will be helpful for some of my co-workers (well at least the one person in my department who gets to fly to London) as you can earn up to 35,000 bonus miles by choosing to fly United or Air Canada to London. You must register for the promotion first here, and travel by December 12th.  The only downside to this promotion is you must book a certain fare class to qualify for the promotion (see terms & conditions), which won’t be the cheapest fare. However, if you are a business traveler, you most likely are booking a qualifying fare so this promotion could be quite valuable.

United35k

3) Combine 3 Offers From TravelPony to Save Big on Hotels – A relative new player to the field of online travel agencies, TravelPony is an online hotel reservation site with over 20,000 hotels worldwide, usually at prices cheaper then Orbitz, Expedia and the actual hotel’s website. This week they are celebrating their one year anniversary by promotion a different discount code each day. For example, some of the daily deals have been 8% off hotels and save $25 on a $250+ hotel reservation. You can check back daily for the latest deal on their website and if you signup via a friend referral you get $35 off your first reservation while the person that referred you gets $35 credit as well. If you want to signup and save $35, here is my referral link. Lastly, the third offer is to use code TPSAVINGS for an additional 10-45% off (varies by hotel). You can combine all 3 offers (new member, daily deal and TPSAVINGS code) for an awesome deal on a hotel room.

travelpony

 

September 6, 2014

Point & Center: 50k United Credit Card Still Available, New IHG Promo and No More Cashback on Amex Gift Cards

Let’s take a quick look at the some of the big things going on in the points & miles world this week.

1) New IHG Promotion And Why You Should Care – Every quarter or so, most hotel chains release a new promotion which generally range from sucky to OK but the recently announced “Into The Nights” by IHG has potential to be one of the best hotel promotions in recent memory. The offer is slightly different for each member but generally others have indicated that 2-3 nights stayed at IHG hotels from now to December 31st could result in 2 Free nights anywhere in the world with IHG. The obvious hack here is to stay at two really cheap hotels and redeem them at high end hotels.

My Offer

My Offer

The above is my offer for the promo. I only need to complete 4 of the 5 offers for 2 Free Nights anywhere. Looking closely at it, if I can simply stay at 2 different Holiday Inns, I can complete this promo by staying only 2 nights. Holiday Inns are everywhere and can be cheap, so if I could find 2 Holiday Inns at $100/night, I could get 2 Free Nights certificates for $100 each and then I could redeem them at InterContinental Hotels that range from $300-$700 a night! Check out this post from Travel Summary for more analysis.

2) American Express Gift Cards No Longer Eligible for Cash Back via Shopping Portals – I haven’t written about this yet on the blog but a popular way to meet the minimum spending requirement on a credit card to unlock a large signup bonus is to purchase American Express Gift Cards via shopping portals. You would actually earn a small profit while meeting the spend requirement but recently all the portals stopped paying any cashback for these gift cards.

In the past, if a portal paid 2% back you would earn $20 cashback but pay $12.90 in fees for a $1,000 Amex gift card. Then you simply use that card to pay for your normal expenses (or liquidate it if you are more advanced) going forward. In a pinch, if I had no other way to meet the minimum spend on a card, I would consider still buying a gift card but I’d hold off until the portals start paying again for the gift cards.

3) 50,000 Mile Chase United Explore Credit Card is Still Available – The popular 50,000 mile signup bonus offer expired on September 2nd online but there are reports you can still signup for it…if you visit an airport. It seems in some of the United hubs, they are still promoting the 50k United Credit card offer in the terminals. Most of the time any credit card you see promoted in an airport is typically inferior but its nice to see one time where that isn’t the case. (H/T Milecards)