← All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
Bonus Ep: Earn Points on Mortgage, 4x 100k+ Card Bonuses, New 4% Card, Devaluations and More
00:24:59
Loading summary
Transcript6 lines
- [00:00]
Chris Hutchins
All right, so today I wanted to release a really quick bonus episode that's not a full length one because there's been a lot of news lately both on card offers, some new cards, launching some changes to some programs, a couple offers and free activities that I just felt like I wanted to get in front of you. But there just hasn't been an episode to fit those in. So instead of waiting another month or two because some of these things are timely, I thought I would just release this, putting it out the next day so that I can get it in front of you really quickly. And before we jump in, you should know that the kind of stuff I'm going to share today is the kind of stuff we send every single Saturday in the newsletter. Things like timely deals, latest news, cool, interesting things we're finding on the Internet that just doesn't fit into a regular podcast. So if you want to get that every week, highly recommend our newsletter. All the hacks.com email I basically designed the exact newsletter I would want to get because I couldn't find someone doing it that breaks everything down every week and isn't very long and just bullet points of all the best stuff. So go check that out and subscribe. So the first card I want to talk about is one maybe you haven't heard of, and it's the Mesa Homeowners card. And the reason I bring this up is because it is the first card that I'm aware of that lets you earn points on your mortgage payments on a credit card that has no annual fee, no foreign transaction fees, and you don't even have to make your mortgage payments through the card. They just want to validate that you have a mortgage. And there's multiple ways to do that. Whether you send in your mortgage statement, whether you link your bank account, I think they can sometimes pull it from your credit and they will just award you 1x transferable points for your mortgage. Now the caveat is you do need to be spending at least $1,000 a month on the card to be eligible for those 1x points on mortg payments, and the mortgage points cap at 100,000 points a year. However, that's not the only reason to love the card. The card earns 3x points on a bunch of categories that other cards I'm aware of don't ever earn bonuses on. So you get 3x on home decor, home improvement, general contractors, cable and streaming, home insurance, property taxes, maintenance, telecom, utilities, and daycare. Now I can't think of another card that pays 3x points on property taxes or daycare. Those are two really big categories. If you have a big home improvement project or you're renovating and you can pay a general contractor with a credit card, I could see this being a huge win. So getting 3x points on all those different home and family expenses is awesome. And then also you get 2x points on gas, groceries, and EV charging. Now, that's not the best earning rate for those categories, but it's pretty solid for a card that has all of those other perks, especially with no annual fee. And then you get 1x points on all your other purchases on top of that. One of the things that got me excited about this was the list of perks you get for just having the card. So first you get a free Big Box membership, meaning if you pay for a Costco or Sam's Club membership, they'll reimburse you up to $65. You get a $120 annual Lowe's credit in the form of $30 a quarter. You get $120 annual Wag credit for pet care and walking. That's $10 a month. You get another $120 annual credit at the Farmer's Dog, which is a pet food company. That's another $10 a month. And then you get one off credits of a hundred dollars towards Armadillo Home Warranties and a hundred dollars towards Cozy Earth. And then also, sorry, I forgot. You get $200 annually on thumbtack, and that's 25 a job. So I believe that's up to eight jobs. And you can use them for home maintenance, cleaning. I know people have used them to mount a tv. We've used someone on thumbtack to bartend at a party we hosted once. So that's awesome. Doesn't have that. I could find any travel or purchase protections, but for things like daycare and property taxes, I'm not looking for return protection or on those kind of purchases. This isn't a travel card. This is a card for people who own homes. Honestly, I could make a case that this card is interesting for someone even if you don't own a home, but you spend a ton of money on daycare, especially if you can pay that daycare with a credit card because you're earning 3x points now. How are those points used? Well, you can use them to book travel through their Travel portal at $0.01. You can use them to buy gift cards or get statement credits for 0.75 0.5 cents. Neither of those are exciting. But the exciting thing is that they have a really interesting list of transfer partners. Now, when they started, it was just Air India, Hainan Airlines, Thai Airways, Vietnam Airlines and Finnair. And of those, I've never heard of any use cases for any of them, except that recently Finnair joined the Avios program. And so you can use Finnair, Avios with Finnair or you can transfer them to Qatar, British Airways, Aer Lingus, Iberia. And so that was a great addition. That was the thing that first drew me in, was, okay, you have some transfer partners, but you have at least one that I know I can get value out of, right? We've used our obvious points to book trips to Japan and other things, so that's awesome. But they recently added two amazing transfer partners. One, Air Canada, which is one of my favorite transfer partners. It's where we spend a ton of our miles and points transferring them from other credit card programs and SaaS Euro bonus. Now, SaaS is an interesting program because no other credit card program transfers to them. But a lot of the online award search tools do show their results. And so over the past few months I've been noticing that there are some awesome deals using SaaS Miles, but there's no way to get them. So I'd always just ignore them, put them out of a site out of mind. But now there's actually a credit card I can get the MESA card that will earn points that I can transfer to SaaS, which has a bunch of interesting redemption options. So that's awesome. I recently talked to the team and they said there are more interesting redemption options coming. I pointed out that if they are similar to gift cards and statement credits at less than 1 cent of value, I wouldn't be excited. And the feedback was, no, no, I think these are redemption options you will like. So I hope there are more transfer partners to more airlines. The fact that after launch they've already added two and they haven't been out that long is a promising sign. And then last, on the hotel side, they do have Acccor. They transfer three to two. All the other transfers are one to one. Accor is a fixed point program, so there's not a ton of outsized upside in value. So it's a solid transfer partner. If you're looking for hotels in Europe and you want to use your points. But I'm way more excited about being able to go to Finair, Avios, SAS Euro Bonus and Air Canada aeroplan. Unfortunately, there is not a signup bonus on the MESA card right now. In fact, the only bonus that's available that I'm aware of is a referral link. I'll share my Referral link. It's 5,000 points. So if you want to check this card out, which if you have a mortgage, it seems to make a lot of sense because you're going to get up to 100,000 points a year. So however much your annual mortgage payments are, unless they are more than $100,000 a year, you're going to get points on all those mortgage payments as long as you spend $1,000 a month on the card. My sign up bonus, I put it at allthehacks.com Mesa M E S A or if you sign up in the app, the code is fcrgnb. I wish that was a little easier to remember. So I'll definitely put that in the show notes. But you just go to all thehacks.com Mesa M E S A that'll redirect if you're interested in the card. Next, the AMEX Platinum and the AMEX Gold card both have best ever offers right now. Now, there's an asterisk to what I'm saying because there's this new language with AMEX offers where Instead of saying 175,000 points, it says as high as 175 points. And then AMEX asks you to basically apply for the card and then before they do a hard inquiry or before you get approved for the card, they're going to go ahead and show you what your offer is. So I actually don't have a lot of data points as far as what the offers are and how many people are getting them at the as high as value. However, 175,000 points for a personal platinum card and 100,000 points for a personal gold card for the last five to 10 years is the best I've ever seen. I actually did some digging and I think it's the best there's ever been. And so if you had your eyes on either of those cards, now is certainly a time to see if you're qualified for those as high as offers. Now we want to make it really easy for you to get those offers and so it's actually surprising. But some of the best offers come from referral links. And so what we did was we asked all of our all the Hacks members to share their referral links for these offers and other AMEX cards. We replaced all the links at all the hacks.com cards with referral links. So if you want to join our membership, you can add your referral links to the rotation and earn some bonus points if anyone ends up using them. We cycle through different members links when you click those cards, but on that site now are the as high as 100,000 points for gold, 175,000 points for platinum and you'll be supporting a lot of members using those links as well though if you find better offers elsewhere, obviously always use those or if you or someone in your household has one of these cards and can refer you so you can kind of double dip and get the referral bonus and the signup bonus. By all means, definitely do that. However, there's one big asterisk here, which is Note that the amex Platinum card will be changing. So when the Chase Sapphire Reserve announced all their changes, Amex came out and said the Platinum and Business Platinum cards will change. They're going to have higher annual fees. I think amex just wants to be the highest annual fee personal card out there right now and so they've announced they're going to change them. They haven't said when or how or what's changing other than they will have a high annual fee. And rumors right now are that it'll be around $895. But nothing is final yet. So note that that 175k Amex Platinum offer is for the current version of the card, which will change sometime before the end of the year. You won't have to pay annual fee until your card renews, so you don't have to worry about that. But some of the perks will hopefully actually get better when they upgrade that card. I assume that they're not going to charge a higher annual fee and offer a worse set of perks and benefits, but you know, anything is possible. I did mention the new Chase Sapphire Reserve Chase Sapphire Reserve business cards. I went through all my thoughts on those cards in episode 232 a couple weeks ago in the what's in my wallet at the end, so I don't want to run through them again right now. The only thing that I didn't know then, that I know now is what those bonuses are. So on the personal card there's a hundred thousand point bonus plus you get a $500 Chase travel credit after spending $5,000 in three months. That's fantastic. An amazing bonus. $5,000 spend getting 100,000 points plus $500 is about a 31% return on your spend and that's valuing points at only one cent. We often get two or more cents of value out of our Chase points, which would make this a 51% return on spend for that signup bonus. Obviously you have a high annual fee, but my takeaway and I wrote a lot of my thoughts@AllTheHacks.com is that I think the perks make up for the annual fee on this card. I know it's a really high annual fee and obviously it's a personal decision. And you may be in a city where you can use those perks more easily than other people who might not be. But for me, I think I'm going to get more value out of the new annual fee than I will out of the old one. On the business side, you've got a higher bonus at 200,000 points, but you've got a lot more spend at $30,000. You do have three more months to do it in six months. So that's a really big point bonus, but smaller in roi. Right. On the return on spend, it's probably going to be effectively about a 7 to 8% return if you're valuing points at $0.01 per point. If you value them at $0.02, it's closer to 15%. It's comparable to the kind of bonuses they've had on the Venture X Business and the Amex Business Platinum. However, Chase points are amazing. Amex Points and Capital One points don't transfer to Hyatt, they don't transfer to United. I'm really looking at this business offer as an opportunity to rack up a lot of Chase points. I'm not the kind of person who's opening up 15 cards a year. So yes, the return on spend is lower, but if I'm not earning opening up 20 cards a year, then some of my spend is not going to go towards a sign up bonus. And that return on spend is way lower than 7 or 8% that I'd get here. So this one I'm really excited for. I haven't done it yet. They have clarified a few of the rules. Just to be clear, when it comes to getting the personal Chase Sapphire Reserve card, you can also have the personal Chase Sapphire Preferred, but it looks like you can't get the bonus bonus if you have the Chase Sapphire Preferred. And so the guidance I've gotten is you should downgrade your Chase Sapphire Preferred card before getting the Chase Sapphire Reserve. If you want to get the bonus, there is supposed to be a pop up on the site that most people have been getting that will let you know if you're going to get the bonus to prevent you from getting a hard inquiry and applying for a card or even getting a card but not getting a bonus. So that should work to be able to make sure you're eligible for the bonus. Obviously all of these offers are only good as of the recording time, which is June 26, 2025. I don't know how long these deals will last, but I will clarif clarify one thing. One of the biggest complaints about this change is that they've removed the ability to earn 1.5 cents in the travel portal. Now if you already have points, you have a lot of time to take advantage of that. But the Frequent Miler team did a deep dive on this new points boost feature and it looks like if you fly United or book a lot of hotels, it's probably not going to be that hard to get as much or more value as you used to get from your Chase points booking in the portal. Now if you transfer your points to airlines and hotels, none of that matters. So for me, none of that matters because that's how I use my points. But I just want to point out that it looks more promising than people thought it was, but it's not guaranteed. So while there might be the ability to get those points now, it might not last forever.
- [12:55]
Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Shopify When I decided to go full time on the podcast, the future was uncertain. But now we have a membership, we sell gift cards and we're even organizing trips around the world. So if you have business dreams in your future, you should definitely check out Shopify because Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Whether you're just getting started or you just hit your millionth order, Shopify is there to support your success every step of the way. From their all in one e commerce platform to their award winning support to their in person POS system. Wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify has got you covered and is there to help you grow. Oh, and to help you sell more with less effort, check out the AI powered Shopify Magic. It's no wonder that Shopify powers 10% of all e commerce in the US because they have the Internet's best converting checkout percent better on average compared to other leading platforms. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at allthehacks.com shopify go to allthehacks.com shopifY now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Allthehacks.com Shopify.
- [14:07]
I love helping you answer all the toughest questions about life, money and so much more. But sometimes it's Helpful to talk to other people in your situation, which actually gets harder as you build your wealth. So I want to introduce you to today's sponsor, longangle. Longangle is a community of high net worth individuals with backgrounds in everything from technology, finance, medicine to real estate, law, manufacturing and more. More I'm a member of Long Angle. I've loved being a part of the community and I've even had one of the founders, Tad Fallows, join me on all the hacks in episode 87 to talk about alternative investments. Now, the majority of Long Angle members are first generation wealth young, highly successful individuals who join the community to share knowledge and learn from each other in a confidential, unbiased setting.
- [14:53]
On top of that, members also get.
- [14:55]
Access to some unique private market investment opportunities. Like I said, I'm a member and I've gotten so much value from the community because you're getting advice and feedback from people in a similar situation to you on everything from your investment portfolio to your children's education to finding a concierge doctor. So many of these conversations aren't happening anywhere else online. So if you have more than 2.2 million in investable assets, which is their minimum for membership, I encourage you to check out Long Angle. And it's totally free to join. Just go to longangle.com to learn more. And if you choose to apply, be sure to let them know you heard about it. Here again, that's longangle A N G L e dot com the last card.
- [15:39]
Chris Hutchins
I want to touch on is the Coinbase card and there's not a lot of details about it, so this will be pretty short. But Coinbase has announced that in partnership with First Electronic bank and Amex, they're going to issue a card that with some level of balance of crypto at Coinbase, be a 4% on everything card. So for those that missed out on the Smartly card, earning an uncapped 4% on everything here is a chance for you. But we don't know how many assets you're going to have to hold at Coinbase to get that 4%. Only thing we know is that you're going to need to have Coinbase One, which is a $5 a month or $50 a year subscription. In other news, two unfortunate things. One, the Capital One Venture X Lounge access has gotten a lot less valuable because they've removed the ability to get guests guests into the lounges. Now this takes effect next year, but it's not great news. So if you have a Venture X, a few things are changing one. If you have authorized users which used to be free, they lose their free access to lounges. You're now going to have to pay $125 a year for authorized users to get access to lounges, and you can only have up to four of those. As for guests in Capital One lounges, you are going to have no guest access unless you spend $75,000, in which case you will get access to have two guests in the Capital One lounges and one guest, any Capital One landings, which are a slightly different version of their lounges. Otherwise, you're going to have to pay the $45 for an adult and $25 for a child. So that's a huge bummer unless you're already spending $75,000 a year on the Venture X. Now, Venture X also includes a Priority Pass membership on the personal card. And for authorized users, you're going to have to pay for guests $35. So also a bummer on the business card. And for authorized users on the business card, you're going to get two guests free. Then you'll have to pay $35 per for the business card. But for many of you, if you have other cards with access to Priority Pass, there are plenty of cards with better guesting privileges. So the biggest loss here is that if you're not spending $75,000 a year, you are not going to be able to bring guests in on your Venture X card. So for someone without kids, it's possible to maybe add your spouse for $125 a year. Or you could both get a Venture X card. I think between the annual points and the travel credit, it kind of makes up for the annual fee. So that's a pretty easy way to get two people into the Capital One loun. However, if you're traveling with a family as we are, and you have kids, I don't really see a way around it without spending the $75,000. Now, the way the $75,000 works is when you spend it in one year, you get the guesting privileges for that year and the next year. And so this is something that if you're close, maybe you want to finish out this year and hit it. And if you're not close, you'd maybe want to wait until next year to do it if you want to do it at all. In the first place, there aren't that many Capital One lounges. So I would say if you're regularly using Capital One Lounges, then maybe consider whether this makes sense. Unlike a card like the Amex Platinum or the Delta Reserve, where you can spend $75,000 a year to get guesting privileges. This is a 2x points card, so this is my everything card. So putting a large property tax or income tax payment on this card, where I might pay around 2% or less on fees to be able to make that transaction to get 2x points makes it such that it's a little easier to stomach putting $75,000 on this card and maybe paying a 1.85% fee to do it. Because I'm getting 2x points, whereas on a lot of those other cards I don't want to do that for 1x points. It's just not worth it. Now, we don't go to Capital One lounges enough, but we did just open up a Venture X business card, and the minimum spend on the business card is $30,000 to get the first 150,000 points. So I think if we're going to get there, we're probably going to get halfway there. And I'll try to decide whether we get the rest of the really depends on the kind of spending we have this year and whether it fits into our business. But the fact that it's a 2x card is better than a 1x card. Another piece of bad news is that Hilton has increased the number of points it costs for a lot of their standard rooms. And this is mostly at the high end. It used to cap out at 120,000 points for a standard night reward, and now there are some properties around the world that are going from 120 to 140, 160, as high as 200,000 points in night night. So if you were looking for some of those aspirational properties, you could need a lot more Hilton points to book those properties. However, at least right now, free night certificates have not been affected at all. So in a way, if you have free night certificates from the Hilton Surpass or the Hilton Aspire cards, you're now getting more effective point value for those certificates. Now you're not actually getting anything different in terms of the types of stays you can have. But fortunately a lot of our Hilton stays are through free night certificates and those are not affected. So the devaluation really only affects you if you're using points, and it doesn't affect every property. But it is a bummer and I always hate to see programs devalue their currency. On the plus side, if you hold any of the Gold, Platinum or Reserve personal or business Delta cards as of recording today, June 26th, you will get access to a free six or 12 months of Uber One, which usually just brings the rates down on Ubers, delivery fees down and whatnot. I've been a member because we have all these Uber credits on Amex, and if we're going to spend enough money on Uber to use all these credits, Uber 1 is usually paid off for itself for some of the perks we get. But now the fact that I can put my Amex Delta Business Platinum card as my Uber 1 payment method, I'm going to get 12 months of free Uber 1. That's awesome. It's 12 months on both the Platinum and Reserve cards, six months on the Gold card, and you've got to activate and start doing it sometime between now and June 25, 2026. So awesome. Added value to your Delta card as long as you don't have the blue Delta card, which doesn't get this perk. Another cool promotion is that if you are staying at a Hyatt between now and August 5th, many of those Hyatt gyms have pelotons. And if you do a peloton ride, you typically would get 100 points per ride. Through August 5th, you will get 500 points per ride. You can do up to 10 per month. And so if you had a five night stay, you could do five rides, 20 minutes each and you get an extra 2,500 points for that stay. I don't know if doing a 20 minute ride for 500 points is worth your time, but you're working out, you're getting exercise like that's awesome. So if you can get rewarded for doing that, all the better. If you want to make it a 40 minute workout, sign into your partner's peloton account that's linked to their Hyatt account. Now all of a sudden you're doubling up, you're getting 5,000 points on a five night stay. 5,000 points is probably not worth much more than $100 in most redemptions. So this isn't going to be a lucrative moneymaker. But it's definitely something that when I was staying at a Hyatt in Boise last week, I definitely took advantage of this because I wanted to get a workout in and why not get some extra points? One quick correction actually, from a few weeks ago, I talked about using Plastique, which is a bill payment platform that allows you to pay a ton of bills with your credit card for a fee. And I was mistaken that it was mostly targeted towards business and I was totally wrong. You can pay auto loans Home loans, student loans, tuition, rent, HOA fees, utilities, insurance, bills, daycare, all on a credit card using their platform as an individual. So that's really cool. So obviously you have to pay a fee. I think it's about 2.9% and you're not getting a bonus on most spending categories. However, if you're trying to meet the minimum spend for a welcome bonus, this can be a fantastic way to do it on expenses you already have that maybe don't naturally take a credit card. A few other things, if you're not familiar, there are a couple programs, especially this summer, that might be some good activities for free. One National Parks have free admission days. So August 4, September 27, November 11 are all free days for national parks. If you have kids, Kids Bowl Free is a website that you can activate free bowling during the summer and then last if you have a Bank of America card, including a debit card, they have free museum days one weekend every month. And the list of museums is really long and impressive. So definitely check that out if you're looking for something to do and it happens to be over one of those weekends that everything is free. Last thing I want to share and shout out to Anje for sharing this with me is that if you have a subscription to an app on an iPhone and you made that subscription through Apple's subscription platform, you can actually go into your settings, look at your subscriptions, and you can can click this button that says see all plans. And what this person shared with me was that they were using this app called Better Me for Health Coaching and they were originally on a plan that was 119.99 a year and they just clicked this button to see all the other plans. And there was another option for an annual subscription at 59.99 a year. So they cut their annual subscription in half. Because I guess the way this works is that they have to publish all the possible plans to Apple and so you could go in and pick them. So that might have been some promotional plan that they don't surface in the app, everyone but it is there for you to go switch. So if you're paying any regular subscriptions to apps through Apple's payment platform, go check your subscriptions and see if there's another plan and see if you can save any money. So that's all I wanted to cover today in this little bonus episode. I hope it's helpful. A lot of this stuff doesn't always fit in the podcast. So like I said, if you want to get these deals, news, everything on a much more timely basis. Go to allthehacks.com Email we send a newsletter every Saturday morning with the best things we're finding, the best deals out there, and things that are way too timely to fit into most episodes of the podcast. So that's it for this week. Go subscribe to the newsletter. I will see you next week.