point fu

Just a quick note to confirm that I've been able to get the 5,000 point "AT&T Wireless For Business" Amex Offer bonus by making a $151 payment to my AT&T personal account. I've done the $151 charge twice now and got the 5,000 bonus both times. I think the offer expires at the end of November , but AT&T lets you overpay your cellular bill and the negative balance carries forward, so you should still be able to take advantage of it if you haven't already.

I just left the Apple Keynote in Brooklyn , where they just announced a major overhaul to the MacBook Air. The gamut of the screen they used in the theater made the new laptop look orange and I got super excited. Once I got to the press hands-on area though I realized that it was the same ambiguous “gold” color as the new Apple Watch. Girl look how orange you look! Just for fun and comparison (the lighting in there was crazy), I pulled out my new Rose Gold Amex to compare... and, well, one man’s "gold" is another man’s "rose gold", apparently. The card is just slightly lighter… (click for full resolution) If it had been bright metallic orange it would have been a no-brainer to get the new Air but now I'm kinda torn between this and the new iPad Pro with the keyboard case. Adobe now has a full version of Photoshop running on the iPad Pro and their demo blew everyone away when she moved from a flat Photoshop image seamlessly into an animated aug...

After upgrading my Gold card to Platinum at the beginning of this year, I was actually sorta bummed that I no longer had a card that got me a bonus on groceries. I did the math and we spend around $8,000 a year on groceries, and that's a decent amount of points to leave on the table by not earning some kind of multiplier. Then Amex rebooted the Gold card to help it compete with the Chase Sapphire line and they added a 4x bonus on "Supermarkets". Lots of the professional bloggers were sloppily reporting that this as a "groceries" category, even though the Terms and Conditions explicitly mention that there's no bonus at Costco or other warehouse clubs. I don't shop at those kinds of places, instead I try my hardest to buy everything at our local neighborhood gem, Essex Market . This place is the heart and soul of Manhattan's Lower East Side, and I love supporting the small Dominican and Chinese grocers under its roof. There's no way I would star...

While I do love me a good Amex Offer as much as the next person, I despise how they rely on "breakage" for so many of their card benefits – i.e., they intentionally erect flaming hoops customers have to jump through with the hope that most people won't be bothered. The Platinum card's Uber benefit is a prime example – a $15 credit (with a one-month expiration date) is added to your account at the beginning of each month. Since upgrading to the platinum six-ish months ago, I've had nothing but trouble trying to use this credit. Considering many people only use Uber for expensive rides to the airport, i'd vastly prefer a $90 credit every six months to this ridiculous setup. ( Sidenote: since you can only use this Uber credit for rides in the US, I'd prefer it be a Lyft credit ) UPDATE (25 Oct '18): Ugh, it's worse than I initially thought. Uber required me to "top off" my Uber Cash account with $25 because my estimated ride cost exc...

UPDATE AUG 2024: Their North America – Korea award availability is still bad. I poked at a bunch of dates and there's 1 or 2 Business Class seats available 330 days from now and that's it. I love Korean Air's Skypass mileage program, and let me tell you the top 3 reasons why: availability, availability, availability . Sadly, booking award travel with most airlines usually involves major compromises on dates. If you want that Saver reward seat on the cool new plane with the lie-flat seat and the fancy champagne and the amazing lounge, it means you're going to have to cut your trip short by several days, or waste a day and a half of your trip flying a 2-stop itinerary through cities you don't want to stop in. With Korean, there was always at least one flight every single day with open Business or First seats so you never had to compromise like that. Furthermore, Incheon airport's luggage storage service meant you could intentionally schedule yourself...

I needed to go from NYC to Louisville, KY and I couldn't find dates and times on the direct flight I wanted for less than $735 in Economy. I looked at other options, but even a 2 stop itinerary at crappy flight times was still well north of $500. Direct domestic flights to smaller airports are always ghastly expensive I poked around a bit on British Airways' website and found a great 15,000 point option for a direct American Airlines flight with exactly the dates and times I wanted. But there was one small problem: my BA and Amex point balances were both near zero . That's more like it! Looooove that transfer bonus I'd read recently that Amex started selling Membership Rewards points again (they'd stopped for a while) so I called in to inquire about buying some. The agent informed they're 2.5¢ each and there's an annual cap on how many you can buy. He also told me you can only do this by phone and only as part of an actual points transfer ...

Despite being active on Reddit's credit card churning forums , I don't actually churn very often. Our vacation time is throttled by work, and if I earn too many points beyond what I need, I get tempted to do stupid things with them. The other looming variable on the horizon is that JetBlue's Mint has become so wildly successful that United's competing P.S. service is now occasionally pricing out well below Mint in my husband's employer's travel portal, which might mean he'll have to start flying United again .  Right now I have: Platinum Amex Chase Sapphire Reserve JetBlue Plus Mastercard Authorized User card on my husband's account My husband has: an Authorized User card on my Amex Platinum his own Chase Sapphire Reserve JetBlue Plus card Starwood Luxury card    JetBlue, verdict: Keep The nice thing about the JetBlue card is that it's from Barclays, and it supports a mode called "Chip + Signature with PIN backup". In...

We're going to Japan to ride the Shiki Shima train and I've booked the long legs of the trip : New York to Hong Kong and then Taipei to New York (we're bookending the trip to Japan with long weekends in two of our favorite places). But now we need to book the short legs between those two places and Japan. One of my weak spots with booking award travel is doing crazy-but-legal routings and stopovers. I'd used British Airways points for the Hong Kong leg, and BA prices all award travel by leg so there were no points to be saved by spending an hour on the phone with a call center trying to get an agent to book me a single flight with a multi-day layover in Hong Kong en route to Japan. ( TIP: There's a great online Avios calculator here ). Hong Kong to Tokyo I priced out the flights and found a lot of Ultra Low Cost Carriers (ULCC) offering this flight for US$150-ish (a.k.a. $350 once you pay the surcharges for seats, bags, oxygen, and toilets ), but we wanted t...

Given that we paid for the only big international trip we've taken this year, our points balances have been growing. When we got the good news about the Shiki Shimi lottery , our point balances totaled 1.3 million across all programs. Since the mantra is "earn and burn", it was time to blow some of these before the next round of devaluations happens. Starting point   Buy My normal process is to hit up Google Flights to make sure we aren't missing a great deal. Long story short: there were no great deals , even with us being super flexible about how we got there – Manila, Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong, or Taipei all would have been great connection points. At this point I should mention a couple of general rules about purchasing flights to Asia: One ways cost as much as (or more) than round-trips , so make sure you have some kind of plan for how you're getting back if you decide to buy only one leg on points. Direct flights always cost more . Fly t...

Japan has a number of fun, tourist-oriented excursion trains – vintage steam locomotives, open-air summer trains, Sanrio and anime-themed trains, and high-end luxury "cruise" trains. Anpanman train! Vintage steam locomotive! A couple years ago, the latest and greatest version of the latter was announced – the four seasons Shiki Shima cruise train. Rather than relying on vintage looks, the Shiki Shima is boldly modern. There are two "cruises" you can take – a 2 day and a 4 day. There's a view car, a gorgeous restaurant, a bar, and the entire train only holds 34 passengers! UPDATE: our trip report from this amazing journey is here ! View car Given that Japan is a nation of train nerds, demand was insane despite the sky-high prices. They implemented a lottery system for people hoping to buy tickets. With both of our 50th birthdays coming up, I decided to enter for a shot at this amazing experience. I've been on pins and needles for the ...