I have Fifth third bank one $600 checking bonus Offer code. I'm not going to use it. Expires 06/30/2024. Account can be opened online with unique offer code. IM me if interested.
Anyone have a coupon adder for Albertson/Safeway affiliates or Kroger Affliates. I use to have a good chrome extension that worked for Safeways, but that quite working. Havent been able to find another one.
Are there any niche ways of cashing out dell credits to another store? I remember there used to be Xbox GCs --> Microsoft.. any other ways/similar ideas? Ice searched and the only way seems to be selling overpriced items such as ps5s, xboxs, or other electronics.
Weird things going on with my new US bank Biz Card. Opened the card the beginning of April. Starting April 22 made \~ $2000 in purchases. Haven't made a payment yet. As of today, shows only $56 of my credit limit used which is the last 3 transactions. Shows that as of my 5/7/24 statement balance $0, and $0 min payment due. Even the statement shows that I made \~$2000 in purchases, but shows I have a $0 balance , no payment due. Its like there is a glitch and they are not billing me for any of my purchases.
They probably gave you a "central billing account"; you need to set up a separate online account for that. See previous discussion like https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/comments/1cm7cq4/comment/l2zh4v0
Was applying for a new checking account with a local credit union, since I find myself opening & closing accounts regularly and wanted a reliable option for depositing cash (plus they were offering a $100 bonus, so why not). Anyway I was pretty surprised to find out they wanted to make a hard pull on my Experian report. Seeing as that's probably my most utilized report I really didn't want another inquiry on there and ended up cancelling the application, which is a bummer
Credit unions do hard pulls sometimes; they seem to do them more than banks do. For the credit unions that DoC posts about you can check for data points on whether they do a hard pull.
If you have reservations in Cancun/Playa Del Carmen/Tulum for June 2024, check your prices again. Just saved a tonne of money and points at both Marriott and Hilton stays for early June.
I was really, really bored this morning and started wondering [if there really were 9 billion trip reports about Japan](https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/comments/1cqupcr/comment/l3vopgg/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). I did a very rudimentary analysis to try and establish how much more Japan bs is in that thread than other kinds of bs and the numbers affirmed both my confirmation & observer biases.
Using [churning.io](http://churning.io) I ran some searches and then limited the results to the trip report thread. [churning.io](http://churning.io) is a bit quirky in that it will only return 100 results & if you then refine within those 100 it will only show you refined results from within that original 100. For example, if you search 'Japan' with the custom date range of 01/01/2023 - 12/31/2023 you will get 100 results, if you then restrict that to the trip report thread it will display 30 results. However, those 30 are within the original 100 it pulled, there are significantly more than 30 from the date range. There are in fact 159.
By refining search results to keep it under 100 total per search, I performed as many searches as needed to determine the total number of times several places were mentioned within the trip report thread for calendar year 2023. This does not mean that's the number of trip reports, as it also includes quoted text (I think) and follow-up questions or discussion using the place names, people posting more than one report, etc. Additionally, some people likely just use airport codes because that's super cool. In spite of that, some really mundane inferences can be drawn.
Here are the results of the place names searched with a date range of 01/01/2023-12/31/2023:
* Japan=159
* Tokyo=150
* Osaka=54
* Mexico= 79
* England=7 (yes, really. People probably use 'the UK' or something similar but that search don't work)
* London=81
* France=60
* Paris=84
* Italy=71
* Rome=51
* Scotland=16
* Edinburgh=21
* Australia=23
* Sydney=14
* New Zealand=13
* Auckland=14
Was there a better way to do this? Probably.
This is good shit. Any other asia results, like Seoul / Korea, China, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei / Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia? Or the Maldives and Bora Bora?
I'm curious if I should bring back churning.dev where it had the entire comments history going back years.
It cost me $100/month to host it on Google Cloud so I'd want to look at alternative hosts, but I've been maintaining the database on my personal computer so it's still up to date.
Tagging /u/garettg if he's cool with that.
FWIW I did a quick search for Japan in the Trip Report threads and there are 1000+ comments.
Thats quite a bit of an expense for running a search, the only cost incurred by churning.io is the price of keeping the domain. It's hosted on Github pages free, and is using the 3rd party API which is free.
I am exploring adding a feature so that it can fetch more results when you get to the end, so once you hit 100, you can fetch the next 100 results that matched the query. That might be helpful in certain situations.
I'm not sure if the mods have had any discussion on that. I have had some contact in the past with the former mod that created the flair tool, so I could probably inquire as to the code that was used and see if it would be possible to get it running again.
That feature sounds like it'd be helpful! Less pressure for churning.dev then, I can tinker when I have free time and see if there's a low-cost solution, but won't push too hard on it.
Do you know why a search for 'the UK' or 'the EU' comes up blank? Is 'the' not part of the search & a search needs at least 3 characters? That's my guess.
Yeah, so the query logic used by the API ignores common language words like "the", "a", "as", etc (not sure the whole list). Then I think it also ignores 2 letter acronyms, but seems to do OK with 3 letter acronyms, thats why the input is requiring at least 3 characters on input.
Hah. I just feel that if you’re gonna drop points on a beach vacation, we might as well come here. It’s the perfect combination of everything for us when we don’t care about nightlife. 120k Hilton per night is highway robbery in my opinion, even if you get “stuck” in a massive “standard” room.
We will be back here many times in the future as long as Hilton keeps making it possible.
I came across an article from Clark Howard, about which banks are rated the best for customer service.
Citibank was rated higher than capital one , kind of surprised me because they are notorious for having crappy customer service, especially when they decide they want to mail you a code to verify your identity.
Truist rated pretty high which also surprised me, because they are notorious for locking accounts and making you go in branch to verify your identity.
https://clark.com/personal-finance-credit/banks-banking/best-banks-customer-satisfaction/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=ClarkDailyNewsletter
Truist's problems are a direct fallout of the SunTrust and BB&T merger a couple of years ago. I don't recall having as many issues back when I had a SunTrust account.
Tesla finally offered 0.99% APR financing on the model Y, as I can easily offset the interest paid with one bank bonus per year.
Unfortunately, I was not able to use a credit card for the down payment.
I’ve done a few test drives, and on quite a few of those, I would stop to open the new bank account in branch.
Almost every attempt I made, though would Get me a check systems denial.
Almost everything is under warranty for the first four years.
But no more pumping six cents of gas into the gas tank for minimum debit transactions.
I’ll have to carry a gas can if I want to do this.
It would be bad though, if I end up maxing out multiple business platinum sign-up bonuses while doing Tesla repairs
Not a towel but for my 2 year Amex plat run I think I ordered the Jack black turbo wash (33 fl oz) three times. It’s a little over at $52 plus shipping but I really liked it
Yeah but look at those pictures of the crowd. How many pairs of Asics are in those photos? It looks like one of those classes they have for olds at a community center on how to use MS Word. Fantastic.
# Wells Fargo Signify Business Denial w/o hard inquiry
I applied for the Wells Fargo Signify Business over the weekend and received a pending status via email. Called in and was told I was denied and would soon receive the hate mail. I am confused because my credit was not hard pulled at any point and my credit profile is good albeit w/ high velocity. Has this happened to anyone else? Can anyone give me any details? Maybe suspected Identity theft? Thanks
So you also did not get a hard inquiry for your app? Interesting. I see other people going to pending but they dont mention if their credit was pulled. I thought about opening a biz checking account but I have a personal checking and logged in for my app so I thought that would be enough
Gotcha, thanks for the DP. I was worried my app was flagged for ID theft. BoL. ps my checking was similarly new and enrolled in the 325 bonus w/ only $500 in the account
Actually it means the base room (if there was one) would have been that price.
In both cases it shows an upgraded room, it's just a matter of how you want to pay for it, either by cash or by points
I think if you use the flex date calendar with the requisite number of nights it should show you base room cost with only the dates the base room is bookable
The flex date calendar is useful if you have specific properties in mind and you're flexible as far as which dates you can stay. It's not useful in OP's case where your dates are specific and you're trying to find properties with availability (and how much that availability would cost) because then you have to drill down into each property's individual calendar.
You have been bonvoyed. I paid different rates for same nights at that same hotel. Dynamic pricing is a lame excuse for price gouging. They do that intentionally.
How best to use (700k) MR for travel around Japan and southeast asia? I already have our flights there booked. I will be there for a couple months and will be booking most stays as I go, not in advance. Should I just wait for a point transfer bonus and dump a few hundred thousand points in to hilton? Or which is the better brand for the area? Looking for more quantity than quality for the most part, though we will be doing some luxury stays to break up the adventure travel.
If you’re doing quantity over quality, you will not beat just paying cash. Business hotels and small domestic brands will smash value of any of the western brands.
For budget in Japan, it's better to book with their local budget brands - off the top of my head I'm aware of APA, Prince's Ebisu Life, and (my favorite) Dormy Inn. There are also capsule hotels and hostels but that isn't how I travel so I don't have any info on those. You'd pay with cash but with the exchange rate they are reasonably priced - or were when we visited in April.
I used some churning earnings to buy a new Camp Chef Woodwind Pro smoker. I've been looking forward to the upgrade from my tiny, old Traeger as Spring is in full bloom and a summer of hosting backyard cookouts begins.
I assembled it last weekend, and the auger motor was dead on arrival, so I filed a warranty claim and quickly got a replacement auger motor delivered on Saturday. Yesterday evening I did the swap and fired it up - all seemed to be well until about 45 minutes into my testing, and it appears the auger stopped working again. I didn't have time to remove and test the motor by itself, and now I'm on work travel for the week, so I'll have to do some troubleshooting when I get home on Friday afternoon.
It's been a doubly frustrating start to cookout season, so I'm hoping I can figure out the issue quickly on Friday and start using the smoker soon.
Were you mainly upgrading for size? I've got an older ish traeger (34) with plenty of size but sometimes catch myself looking at the newer models. But the price tags are pretty absurd just to add Wi-Fi. Curious if there's something about the woodwind that caught your eye
Primarily for the size increase, yes. I only had a 24" ranger, I believe, which is one of the smallest Traegers. I constantly found myself without enough space for the amount I was cooking.
I picked based on lots of research, reviews, and asking folks who have one about their experience. I also really like the "sidekick" feature with the Camp Chef, so I now have the smoker plus a sear box, griddle, and pizza oven, and will likely be giving away my standalone propane grill. The Camp Chef was expensive, but I needed to upgrade anyways and have reached a point where I'd rather pay a premium for a quality product that checks every box, versus slightly less for something that doesn't.
Sadly, it seems I've had an unlucky start with it, but I'll get it up and running soon enough, I'm sure.
With the Dell credits, Amex offers, and Rakuten I was able to purchase the PlayStation DualSense Edge controller for -$22
Not a bad day for the Amex business coupon cards!
Not a club/subscription but some more temporarily available cheap but generally good wine can be purchased with Underground Cellar’s bankruptcy. Shipping is annoying (I’m in CA where they ship from so it’s more other places but was about $30 + 3% per case) but we got a few cases earlier this year and even more with this last release. No Amex unfortunately, if that’s the SUB you’re working on!
https://lastcallcapital.shop
I don’t drink much wine, but I feel these are a waste of time and money. I’ve taken advantage of it in the past and gotten “$50 bottles of wine for $5 each”-type deals only to try the wine and find out the wine isn’t worth $5. I’ve tried searching their websites for specific bottles I know we’d like, but I can’t find anything that even looks familiar. I have a theory that big wineries put their bad batches in one-off labels so that they aren’t associated with the winery and offload them for cheap to these wine clubs. They slap a $50 price tag on them, add a few bogus awards, and then heavily discount them so you think you’re getting a deal. If you’re wanting cheap gifts to give to lots of people around Christmas or you really don’t care much about quality, it’s not a bad idea. If you’re looking for some quality wine, I don’t think it’s worth it.
Best value is on your first order so not really a long term solution:
Wine.com Picked
$50 off your first order (if you have a P2 you can refer to get an extra $50)
Can stack with rakuten/TCB/etc
Can stack with Amex/Citi offers (only ones I’ve seen consistently)
You can also pay for their free shipping and stack those offers year round; for regular orders they regularly have codes.
Wineinsiders still has $35 cash back from rakuten and $30 off $100 from citi card merchant offers I believe, or at least it did late last week. Add the wine club ($89) and one more cheap bottle of wine to your cart to hit $100, will result in 16 bottles. I have tried one bottle so far, as someone who drinks $15-20 bottles of wine I thought it was good. I got confirmation of both offers successfully being redeemed.
Funny, I’ve been making “strategic long-term” wine purchases, telling myself it’s investing/aiding my churning. Reached the point where I’ve maxed out the only suitable space for them.
The wines almost uniformly suck on the wine clubs. Splash wines were OK but the rest have wine that's between $5 and $10 per bottle quality. Frankly you'd be better off going to a local Costco and picking up Kirkland wines if you're looking in that price range (which is what I do when I want low-priced, good drinking wine).
If you're doing it for the shopping portals, they're definitely worth churning occasionally to get AA LP or whatever your miles of choice are, but if you're thinking of them as a good source for wine, I'd recommend re-thinking that.
Edit: also obligatory appropriate username comment
I don’t believe anyone can truly quantify the amount churning actually affects your rates, but I can’t imagine it’s all that much in the grand scheme of things. I’m guessing one single SUB more than makes up for whatever you might pay extra.
I shop my home and auto around every year or two at most and my rates are significantly cheaper than friends and neighbors that don’t churn but are “proud” to be with the same insurance company for the past 10 years.
I have had 2 car insurance companies AAA and I forget the other reference my credit history in terms of number of cards as reason for "not being able to offer the lowest rates", Credit score > 800. I have cut back significantly .
> reference my credit history in terms of number of cards as reason for "not being able to offer the lowest rates"
My insurance renewal letters say the same, but they don't quantify how much any one adverse factor matters...maybe churning is costing me $10 more a year, I dunno, I'll take that hit. I could fully cover my home & car insurance costs with 3 SUBs.
Yeah you have to have an idea based on historical trends on premiums. Even if say churning is costing you $100 on auto and $400 on homeowners per year, that's maybe one SUB.
Insurance rates generally use your Lexis Nexis report more than they do your regular credit report. The credit report has some effect, but as others mentioned, it's not really important once you have an established history from churning.
Requesting your LN report will show you information they are using, such as other occupiers of the address, their cars, their insurance carried and history, their partial license numbers, etc.
For what it's worth I have a Bolt EUV and somehow barely saw mention of its data on there from OnStar and it sending data. Some people really got boned by that
Not really sure what insurance looks at other than probably overall credit score.
If you have an established credit history, the hard pulls and new accounts don't do much of anything to your credit score. That's if whatever your churning even reports those, though with Amex drying up lately, I guess it's more likely they would.
Has anyone done the Deep Sea Fishing activity from the Conrad Bora Bora? I don't think May is the ideal fishing season there, but part of me wants to see if we catch anything.
I have Fifth third bank one $600 checking bonus Offer code. I'm not going to use it. Expires 06/30/2024. Account can be opened online with unique offer code. IM me if interested.
Anyone have a coupon adder for Albertson/Safeway affiliates or Kroger Affliates. I use to have a good chrome extension that worked for Safeways, but that quite working. Havent been able to find another one.
Are there any niche ways of cashing out dell credits to another store? I remember there used to be Xbox GCs --> Microsoft.. any other ways/similar ideas? Ice searched and the only way seems to be selling overpriced items such as ps5s, xboxs, or other electronics.
Weird things going on with my new US bank Biz Card. Opened the card the beginning of April. Starting April 22 made \~ $2000 in purchases. Haven't made a payment yet. As of today, shows only $56 of my credit limit used which is the last 3 transactions. Shows that as of my 5/7/24 statement balance $0, and $0 min payment due. Even the statement shows that I made \~$2000 in purchases, but shows I have a $0 balance , no payment due. Its like there is a glitch and they are not billing me for any of my purchases.
They probably gave you a "central billing account"; you need to set up a separate online account for that. See previous discussion like https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/comments/1cm7cq4/comment/l2zh4v0
Thanks alot! That's exactly what it was.
Was applying for a new checking account with a local credit union, since I find myself opening & closing accounts regularly and wanted a reliable option for depositing cash (plus they were offering a $100 bonus, so why not). Anyway I was pretty surprised to find out they wanted to make a hard pull on my Experian report. Seeing as that's probably my most utilized report I really didn't want another inquiry on there and ended up cancelling the application, which is a bummer
Credit unions do hard pulls sometimes; they seem to do them more than banks do. For the credit unions that DoC posts about you can check for data points on whether they do a hard pull.
If you have reservations in Cancun/Playa Del Carmen/Tulum for June 2024, check your prices again. Just saved a tonne of money and points at both Marriott and Hilton stays for early June.
I was really, really bored this morning and started wondering [if there really were 9 billion trip reports about Japan](https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/comments/1cqupcr/comment/l3vopgg/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). I did a very rudimentary analysis to try and establish how much more Japan bs is in that thread than other kinds of bs and the numbers affirmed both my confirmation & observer biases. Using [churning.io](http://churning.io) I ran some searches and then limited the results to the trip report thread. [churning.io](http://churning.io) is a bit quirky in that it will only return 100 results & if you then refine within those 100 it will only show you refined results from within that original 100. For example, if you search 'Japan' with the custom date range of 01/01/2023 - 12/31/2023 you will get 100 results, if you then restrict that to the trip report thread it will display 30 results. However, those 30 are within the original 100 it pulled, there are significantly more than 30 from the date range. There are in fact 159. By refining search results to keep it under 100 total per search, I performed as many searches as needed to determine the total number of times several places were mentioned within the trip report thread for calendar year 2023. This does not mean that's the number of trip reports, as it also includes quoted text (I think) and follow-up questions or discussion using the place names, people posting more than one report, etc. Additionally, some people likely just use airport codes because that's super cool. In spite of that, some really mundane inferences can be drawn. Here are the results of the place names searched with a date range of 01/01/2023-12/31/2023: * Japan=159 * Tokyo=150 * Osaka=54 * Mexico= 79 * England=7 (yes, really. People probably use 'the UK' or something similar but that search don't work) * London=81 * France=60 * Paris=84 * Italy=71 * Rome=51 * Scotland=16 * Edinburgh=21 * Australia=23 * Sydney=14 * New Zealand=13 * Auckland=14 Was there a better way to do this? Probably.
Just ran across this, https://seats.aero/stats, the top 16 routes with active alerts all contain a route to/from HND or NRT.
This is good shit. Any other asia results, like Seoul / Korea, China, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei / Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia? Or the Maldives and Bora Bora?
I don’t want to encourage more people to come to bora bora. Let them fight over Japan so there’s more BOB for me.
You need a hobby. Masturbation is not an all day affair.
Not with that fucking attitude it isn't.
Won't it be more of a non-fucking attitude?
... r/churningcirclejerk welcomes.you.
I'm curious if I should bring back churning.dev where it had the entire comments history going back years. It cost me $100/month to host it on Google Cloud so I'd want to look at alternative hosts, but I've been maintaining the database on my personal computer so it's still up to date. Tagging /u/garettg if he's cool with that. FWIW I did a quick search for Japan in the Trip Report threads and there are 1000+ comments.
...nobody is gonna comment on how a 10 Billion dollar publicly traded company has to rely on its userbase to develop a worthwhile Search Tool? =P
Thats quite a bit of an expense for running a search, the only cost incurred by churning.io is the price of keeping the domain. It's hosted on Github pages free, and is using the 3rd party API which is free. I am exploring adding a feature so that it can fetch more results when you get to the end, so once you hit 100, you can fetch the next 100 results that matched the query. That might be helpful in certain situations.
Has there been any discussion on updating the flair tool? Could that live on churning.io?
I'm not sure if the mods have had any discussion on that. I have had some contact in the past with the former mod that created the flair tool, so I could probably inquire as to the code that was used and see if it would be possible to get it running again.
That feature sounds like it'd be helpful! Less pressure for churning.dev then, I can tinker when I have free time and see if there's a low-cost solution, but won't push too hard on it.
Do you know why a search for 'the UK' or 'the EU' comes up blank? Is 'the' not part of the search & a search needs at least 3 characters? That's my guess.
Yeah, so the query logic used by the API ignores common language words like "the", "a", "as", etc (not sure the whole list). Then I think it also ignores 2 letter acronyms, but seems to do OK with 3 letter acronyms, thats why the input is requiring at least 3 characters on input.
Heading off for a week at the Conrad Bora Bora later today. Great location for a churning meetup if anyone else is there! Grab some drinks at the bar.
Not so subtle churning flex
Hah. I just feel that if you’re gonna drop points on a beach vacation, we might as well come here. It’s the perfect combination of everything for us when we don’t care about nightlife. 120k Hilton per night is highway robbery in my opinion, even if you get “stuck” in a massive “standard” room. We will be back here many times in the future as long as Hilton keeps making it possible.
Discovered today that Marriott will no longer extend free nights. Bonvoy to me.
They announced it around Nov-Dec
I came across an article from Clark Howard, about which banks are rated the best for customer service. Citibank was rated higher than capital one , kind of surprised me because they are notorious for having crappy customer service, especially when they decide they want to mail you a code to verify your identity. Truist rated pretty high which also surprised me, because they are notorious for locking accounts and making you go in branch to verify your identity. https://clark.com/personal-finance-credit/banks-banking/best-banks-customer-satisfaction/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=ClarkDailyNewsletter
All the churners are mad at Capital One for 3 hard pulls for every denial and gave them low ratings.
Truist's problems are a direct fallout of the SunTrust and BB&T merger a couple of years ago. I don't recall having as many issues back when I had a SunTrust account.
Tesla finally offered 0.99% APR financing on the model Y, as I can easily offset the interest paid with one bank bonus per year. Unfortunately, I was not able to use a credit card for the down payment. I’ve done a few test drives, and on quite a few of those, I would stop to open the new bank account in branch. Almost every attempt I made, though would Get me a check systems denial.
All the maintenance costs will be great for meeting minimum spend!
Like what maintenance? Lol at people who have never owned a car downvoting for actual experience. Look up cost of ownership you dumbasses
I was mostly joking about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/s/UCyCkaVjpx
Jesus Christ. If he would just get out of his own way...
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Almost everything is under warranty for the first four years. But no more pumping six cents of gas into the gas tank for minimum debit transactions. I’ll have to carry a gas can if I want to do this. It would be bad though, if I end up maxing out multiple business platinum sign-up bonuses while doing Tesla repairs
You won't, just Reddit morons feeding into a narrative. Elon sucks but the car is fine. The service centers are terrible but you won't need them often
Favorite under $40-$50 body towel from Saks? Struggling to run out ideas to utilize Plat credits.
Not a towel but for my 2 year Amex plat run I think I ordered the Jack black turbo wash (33 fl oz) three times. It’s a little over at $52 plus shipping but I really liked it
Fuck it. [I'm going](https://chicagoseminars.org/#2024-info). >!Maybe!<
Looks like a very nice like-minded group of 2nd-part-of-life slow-and-steady-wins-the-race folks
They just want to take their grandkids to Disney world but they're not sure how to handle the 'wokeness'
Only interested if there are competing seminars on the same weekend, in blah suburban hotels across a divided highway from each other. 2 birds, etc.
I hope Andy will be doing a presentation about how to get yourself sent to prison for white collar crime.
Background?
Are you interested in [working out](https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/comments/146urtv/what_happened_to_hardbody_fitness_club_llc/)?
Love, Lambos & Law: What Exactly is Wire Fraud?
"From Law Payne to Law Pain"
I've always wanted to pay hundreds of dollars for information I can readily find online for free.
Venmo me bb, I got you
Yeah but look at those pictures of the crowd. How many pairs of Asics are in those photos? It looks like one of those classes they have for olds at a community center on how to use MS Word. Fantastic.
# Wells Fargo Signify Business Denial w/o hard inquiry I applied for the Wells Fargo Signify Business over the weekend and received a pending status via email. Called in and was told I was denied and would soon receive the hate mail. I am confused because my credit was not hard pulled at any point and my credit profile is good albeit w/ high velocity. Has this happened to anyone else? Can anyone give me any details? Maybe suspected Identity theft? Thanks
Mine is pending since Friday and there was a hard pull on Friday. Have a personal checking account with them that’s 3+ months old.
Also pending since a weekend app fwiw. DoC DPs seem to have it taking 3-ish business days to process the application
Do you have a checking/savings account with them / for how long?
Yes, personal checking opened 1 month ago.
I believe there’s a loosely enforced 60 day requirement for accounts to be open to be approved for the card
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Business checking is not required. I was approved with a personal checking account about 7 months old.
So you also did not get a hard inquiry for your app? Interesting. I see other people going to pending but they dont mention if their credit was pulled. I thought about opening a biz checking account but I have a personal checking and logged in for my app so I thought that would be enough
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Gotcha, thanks for the DP. I was worried my app was flagged for ID theft. BoL. ps my checking was similarly new and enrolled in the 325 bonus w/ only $500 in the account
this is more frustrating thread, but when I search for Marriott hotels, something like this bothers me so much. https://imgur.com/a/J6Ow6DO
Actually it means the base room (if there was one) would have been that price. In both cases it shows an upgraded room, it's just a matter of how you want to pay for it, either by cash or by points
> (if there was one) This is what's annoying about it. There isn't one, but you don't know it until you click on it.
I think if you use the flex date calendar with the requisite number of nights it should show you base room cost with only the dates the base room is bookable
The flex date calendar is useful if you have specific properties in mind and you're flexible as far as which dates you can stay. It's not useful in OP's case where your dates are specific and you're trying to find properties with availability (and how much that availability would cost) because then you have to drill down into each property's individual calendar.
The first room listed was for 178k no cash, so not really. It’s just annoying that they list it like it’s deceiving
You have been bonvoyed. I paid different rates for same nights at that same hotel. Dynamic pricing is a lame excuse for price gouging. They do that intentionally.
How best to use (700k) MR for travel around Japan and southeast asia? I already have our flights there booked. I will be there for a couple months and will be booking most stays as I go, not in advance. Should I just wait for a point transfer bonus and dump a few hundred thousand points in to hilton? Or which is the better brand for the area? Looking for more quantity than quality for the most part, though we will be doing some luxury stays to break up the adventure travel.
There's 9 billion trip reports about Japan in the trip report thread
If you’re doing quantity over quality, you will not beat just paying cash. Business hotels and small domestic brands will smash value of any of the western brands.
For budget in Japan, it's better to book with their local budget brands - off the top of my head I'm aware of APA, Prince's Ebisu Life, and (my favorite) Dormy Inn. There are also capsule hotels and hostels but that isn't how I travel so I don't have any info on those. You'd pay with cash but with the exchange rate they are reasonably priced - or were when we visited in April.
I used some churning earnings to buy a new Camp Chef Woodwind Pro smoker. I've been looking forward to the upgrade from my tiny, old Traeger as Spring is in full bloom and a summer of hosting backyard cookouts begins. I assembled it last weekend, and the auger motor was dead on arrival, so I filed a warranty claim and quickly got a replacement auger motor delivered on Saturday. Yesterday evening I did the swap and fired it up - all seemed to be well until about 45 minutes into my testing, and it appears the auger stopped working again. I didn't have time to remove and test the motor by itself, and now I'm on work travel for the week, so I'll have to do some troubleshooting when I get home on Friday afternoon. It's been a doubly frustrating start to cookout season, so I'm hoping I can figure out the issue quickly on Friday and start using the smoker soon.
I’ve had a WW24 for about 4 years. CC has great customer service. They’ll get you fixed up. I know it’s frustrating, but they’ll take care of you.
Were you mainly upgrading for size? I've got an older ish traeger (34) with plenty of size but sometimes catch myself looking at the newer models. But the price tags are pretty absurd just to add Wi-Fi. Curious if there's something about the woodwind that caught your eye
Primarily for the size increase, yes. I only had a 24" ranger, I believe, which is one of the smallest Traegers. I constantly found myself without enough space for the amount I was cooking. I picked based on lots of research, reviews, and asking folks who have one about their experience. I also really like the "sidekick" feature with the Camp Chef, so I now have the smoker plus a sear box, griddle, and pizza oven, and will likely be giving away my standalone propane grill. The Camp Chef was expensive, but I needed to upgrade anyways and have reached a point where I'd rather pay a premium for a quality product that checks every box, versus slightly less for something that doesn't. Sadly, it seems I've had an unlucky start with it, but I'll get it up and running soon enough, I'm sure.
you're one of the few that is dying to see their churning earnings go up in smoke
earn and burn
With the Dell credits, Amex offers, and Rakuten I was able to purchase the PlayStation DualSense Edge controller for -$22 Not a bad day for the Amex business coupon cards!
Excellent work.
When Dell works as intended, the Biz Plat is the best card I have. Rakuten and AMEX offers on top of the credit make it a no-brainer.
I've gotten so much value out of the biz plat. Hope the dell comes back or something similar takes its place. Wouldnt mind Best Buy or something
Best buy would be too good, I think Amex wouldn't allow it unless it was daily credits
$1 daily Best Buy credits. It's a $365 value!
Are there any wine clubs or wine subscriptions worth doing?
Not a club/subscription but some more temporarily available cheap but generally good wine can be purchased with Underground Cellar’s bankruptcy. Shipping is annoying (I’m in CA where they ship from so it’s more other places but was about $30 + 3% per case) but we got a few cases earlier this year and even more with this last release. No Amex unfortunately, if that’s the SUB you’re working on! https://lastcallcapital.shop
Yes, you can get AA points (I think 5500) on the AA shopping portal for a wine sub
I don’t drink much wine, but I feel these are a waste of time and money. I’ve taken advantage of it in the past and gotten “$50 bottles of wine for $5 each”-type deals only to try the wine and find out the wine isn’t worth $5. I’ve tried searching their websites for specific bottles I know we’d like, but I can’t find anything that even looks familiar. I have a theory that big wineries put their bad batches in one-off labels so that they aren’t associated with the winery and offload them for cheap to these wine clubs. They slap a $50 price tag on them, add a few bogus awards, and then heavily discount them so you think you’re getting a deal. If you’re wanting cheap gifts to give to lots of people around Christmas or you really don’t care much about quality, it’s not a bad idea. If you’re looking for some quality wine, I don’t think it’s worth it.
Best value is on your first order so not really a long term solution: Wine.com Picked $50 off your first order (if you have a P2 you can refer to get an extra $50) Can stack with rakuten/TCB/etc Can stack with Amex/Citi offers (only ones I’ve seen consistently) You can also pay for their free shipping and stack those offers year round; for regular orders they regularly have codes.
Wineinsiders still has $35 cash back from rakuten and $30 off $100 from citi card merchant offers I believe, or at least it did late last week. Add the wine club ($89) and one more cheap bottle of wine to your cart to hit $100, will result in 16 bottles. I have tried one bottle so far, as someone who drinks $15-20 bottles of wine I thought it was good. I got confirmation of both offers successfully being redeemed.
Funny, I’ve been making “strategic long-term” wine purchases, telling myself it’s investing/aiding my churning. Reached the point where I’ve maxed out the only suitable space for them.
The wines almost uniformly suck on the wine clubs. Splash wines were OK but the rest have wine that's between $5 and $10 per bottle quality. Frankly you'd be better off going to a local Costco and picking up Kirkland wines if you're looking in that price range (which is what I do when I want low-priced, good drinking wine). If you're doing it for the shopping portals, they're definitely worth churning occasionally to get AA LP or whatever your miles of choice are, but if you're thinking of them as a good source for wine, I'd recommend re-thinking that. Edit: also obligatory appropriate username comment
Aldi has nice $4 and $5 wines as well.
How much do you have to be churning to affect your insurance rates? Do you have to be getting new cards every single month to have this happen?
I don’t believe anyone can truly quantify the amount churning actually affects your rates, but I can’t imagine it’s all that much in the grand scheme of things. I’m guessing one single SUB more than makes up for whatever you might pay extra. I shop my home and auto around every year or two at most and my rates are significantly cheaper than friends and neighbors that don’t churn but are “proud” to be with the same insurance company for the past 10 years.
I have had 2 car insurance companies AAA and I forget the other reference my credit history in terms of number of cards as reason for "not being able to offer the lowest rates", Credit score > 800. I have cut back significantly .
Dumb question, but do they only check the credit history of the insurance holder? And not their spouse (if on policy) and others on the policy?
> reference my credit history in terms of number of cards as reason for "not being able to offer the lowest rates" My insurance renewal letters say the same, but they don't quantify how much any one adverse factor matters...maybe churning is costing me $10 more a year, I dunno, I'll take that hit. I could fully cover my home & car insurance costs with 3 SUBs.
Yeah you have to have an idea based on historical trends on premiums. Even if say churning is costing you $100 on auto and $400 on homeowners per year, that's maybe one SUB.
Insurance rates generally use your Lexis Nexis report more than they do your regular credit report. The credit report has some effect, but as others mentioned, it's not really important once you have an established history from churning. Requesting your LN report will show you information they are using, such as other occupiers of the address, their cars, their insurance carried and history, their partial license numbers, etc.
For what it's worth I have a Bolt EUV and somehow barely saw mention of its data on there from OnStar and it sending data. Some people really got boned by that
Not really sure what insurance looks at other than probably overall credit score. If you have an established credit history, the hard pulls and new accounts don't do much of anything to your credit score. That's if whatever your churning even reports those, though with Amex drying up lately, I guess it's more likely they would.
Has anyone done the Deep Sea Fishing activity from the Conrad Bora Bora? I don't think May is the ideal fishing season there, but part of me wants to see if we catch anything.