If you're looking to maximize your points, this episode is packed with so much you want to know about a ton of changes to credit cards the past few weeks. We've got seven new cards, two major changes to cards, eight elevated offers, and then I'm going to do a deep dive into some of the wild points challenges that could net you hundreds of thousands of points of miles or even a decade of elite status.

I'll break down what's worth your attention, what's a hard pass, and what might be a surprising win for your points game. Whether you're considering a new premium card navigating the negative changes to existing cards evaluating some new crypto cards, wanting to earn points on your mortgage, looking to fly free with a companion through 2027, or trying to rack up millions of points, we have so much to cover today.

But first, I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, please share with a friend or leave a comment or review. And if you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe. Okay, so first I want to talk about Citibank because there's a lot of changes going on.

And the first one is the launch of the new Citi Strata Elite card. It's their premium travel card. A long time ago, they used to have the Citi Prestige card. In fact, everyone thought this card would replace it. But thankfully, if you still have that old card, it doesn't look like it's getting changed.

But let's break it down. So it's a $595 annual fee. Though if you have assets at Citi, whether you're Citi Gold or Citi Private Client, that annual fee might be discounted or even completely waived the first year. And as for earnings, gets 12x on hotel and car rental bookings through Citi Travel.

Get 6x on flights booked through Citi Travel. And then the most confusing one, you get 6x on dining, but only Friday and Saturday from 6pm to 6am Eastern. Otherwise, it's just 3x on dining. Now, they say it's going to be based on the time that the transaction gets originally authorized because sometimes restaurants will authorize a transaction and then wait to see what the gratuity you put on there might be before they finalize it.

But given that this card can be used all around the world, I think it's going to be really difficult for most people to keep track of time zones when they're outside of the country. And then it gets 1.5x points on everything else. As for the benefits or perks of this card, you get $300 a year in hotel booking credit through Citi Travel.

You get $200 in a splurge credit, which they say every calendar year, earn up to $200 in statement credits on your choice of up to two of the following brands. First Dibs, American Airlines Exclusions Apply, Best Buy, Future Personal Training, and Live Nation Exclusions Apply. So this one, interesting.

You get $200 annually for Black Lane, which is a premium car chauffeur service. You get $100 January to June, and then another $100 July to December. You get a priority pass select membership, which is pretty common among premium cards. This one does not include restaurant access. It does include guest access.

You get four passes to the Admirals Club, which is the American Lounge, and you get your TSA pre or global entry fee reimbursed every probably four years, just like almost every other card. And that's up to $120. So the website says that this is up to $1,500 in value.

Let me break it down. And then I'll talk about my thoughts on the earnings. Now, the $300 hotel credit seems pretty easy to use. The only requirement is that it has to be a two or more night stay. But unlike the Amex or Chase credits, you can book it at any hotel, it doesn't have to be just an ultra luxury premium hotel.

So this could be great for short stays at less expensive properties that you could knock out all the credit in one go. The splurge credit is a little confusing. I don't even know what First Dibs is. I probably should have looked that up before recording. But assuming there aren't too many exclusions, using this at American could probably be pretty easy.

There's no exclusions for Best Buy. So at a minimum, you could buy stuff at Best Buy, potentially even resell it. It seems pretty easy to capture this credit. Right now, I'm particularly interested in the Live Nation credit because I am a huge fan of Weird Al Yankovic. He's doing a tour right now.

We're going to go see the show in August. And so I'm actually looking at buying tickets and one of the platforms to buy them on is Live Nation. So I would actually use this credit potentially right now if I had this card and get the full value. So that's awesome.

I'm a huge Weird Al fan. So I'm really excited to see him live. The Black Lane credit from everything I've read, it looks like even after this discount, it's still as expensive as Uber, if not a little bit more. So I'd value this at pretty much zero. I'd probably never use it.

It seems like a lot more hassle to use. Priority Pass Select, I already have plenty of these memberships from other premium cards. So for me, that's not valuable. The Admirals Club passes, I don't actually fly American that often. And I believe you have to be flying American to use them.

So pretty low value. The only perk I will say is that these passes can be used by other people. So if you're traveling with a partner, you could each use a pass twice, instead of you use it four times. Kids are free, I think under 13. And the pass is good for 24 hours.

And I say kids are free, meaning they can be your guests. You don't get any adult guests, you'd have to use an extra pass for them. But it is good for 24 hours. So if you had a multi layover trip on American, you could use it for multiple stops.

The TSA Global Entry Credit, again, like Priority Pass, I have a bunch of those. They go to waste every year, because we just don't have enough people to use them all. So for me, I think the credits are probably worth somewhere around that five $600 mark, which effectively negate the annual fee, but certainly not the $1,500 that they're advertising.

As for the welcome bonus, it's an 80,000 point welcome bonus to the public. If you are able to get a branch or a city banker to give you a link, it sounds like through the end of August, there are links for up to 100,000. There's a podcast I'll put a link in the show notes to that discusses that 100,000 point offer.

There are also some links floating around the internet for 100,000 point offer. I can't speak to the legitimacy of them, but it sounds like some people have used them successfully. So if it were me, I would be trying to get a 100,000 point offer for this card if I sign up.

Now, does it make sense to sign up? That's a really tough question. I think only for the bonus is my take on this card. I guess if you want to spend a lot of money booking travel with city travel, you could use this card. Though cards like the Venture X and the Chase Sapphire Reserve, they also have heavy multipliers on points for booking in their travel portal.

So I'm not sure I would get a card just to book in the city travel portal. Some people have said that the city travel portal doesn't have terrible rates. So at least you're not going to get hosed there, but I'm not going to get a card for that. Six X on dining for a very specific window of time, two days a week.

For me, that's just not worth having a card for. And then the rest, three X points on dining, one and a half X everywhere else. I have cards that match or beat that easily. So I really don't think that this is an ongoing spend card for anyone other than someone who loves to book travel and city travel or spends a really, really large amount of money dining out Friday and Saturday nights from 6 PM to 6 AM Eastern time.

So other than that, not a great card on an ongoing basis, but is it worth a bonus? I do think that if you apply now, you'd get a lot of those calendar year credits in 2025 and 2026. So you could potentially get, if you value them at $500, $1,000 of credit for a $600 annual fee and earn a hundred thousand points.

City points are pretty hard to come by. So for me, I'm thinking about this purely for the bonus. However, I'm also really interested in adding the city double cash card to my lineup. So either I add the double cash or I add the strata elite, and then maybe a year from now downgrade it to the double cash.

So I'm trying to figure out what to do here. It is a good bonus, but it's not a crazy bonus. And there are a lot of bonuses going on right now, but definitely not a card that I'm excited to keep in my wallet on a long ongoing basis at all.

In fact, just for spending, I think the city strata premier card, which I also have is so much better. You get 3x on air travel, hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, gas and EV charging, and then 1x on everything else. So definitely love the strata premier. I'm really excited about that card.

I think it's a great card at a much lower $95 annual fee, but the strata elite is definitely missing something. But as part of the strata elite launch, city did add American Airlines as a transfer partner, which was an awesome addition because American points are very difficult to come by and have a ton of great use cases and value.

If you have the strata elite or the strata premier or the legacy city prestige card, you can now transfer points to American at a one-to-one transfer ratio. So really excited about that feature. If you want to know more about city points or city cards, not including the strata elite because it wasn't out, go back and check out episode 228.

I did a full breakdown of every single city card, made a tier list of them all, broke down the thank you points, rewards program, all the rules and everything. The last card they had announced back when I recorded that episode, that the city strata card was coming out to replace the city rewards plus card.

And you can now get that card on your own. It's now open for applications and has a 30,000 point signup bonus after spending a thousand dollars in three months. It has no annual fee. So it's a pretty good starter card, primarily because it does have some decent earning. Three points per dollar at supermarkets, three points per dollar on gas and EV charging, three points per dollar on a category of your choice, and then 2x on restaurants.

For those categories of your choice, it could be fitness clubs, streaming services, live entertainment, cosmetic and barber shops and hair salons or pet supply stores. So not a terrible no annual fee card. I tend to think that most cards with $100 annual fee beat this card and pay for their annual fee.

But if you're looking at someone who's maybe just graduating college, not ready for annual fees, not a bad card. In fact, city has also decided that now you can transfer points from a lot of their no annual fee cards like the strata card. And unfortunately, it's at a reduced rate.

So I would say if you have a ton of city points from the double cash, you start earning them with a strata card or the city custom cash card, I think definitely you're going to want to get the strata premier, the strata elite as a way to really maximize the value of those points if you want to transfer them to airline and hotel programs.

So a lot of stuff going on with city. And just a reminder, if you're looking for all the links to all these cards, or really any cards, if you go to our site, all the hacks.com/cards, you'll see a link to all the best cards. We do our best to put the best links on these pages.

Sometimes those might be affiliate links, which are a great way to support the show. Sometimes they're referral links from our members, great way to support members. And sometimes they're just direct links to the issuer's website. We just want to make it easy for you to find the links to the best offers for cards.

So thank you in advance for using that site to support us or find those links. But as always, if you find a better link anywhere else, definitely use that and get the most points you can. So that's the changes going on at Citi. Let's jump over and talk a little bit about U.S.

Bank. This episode is brought to you by Copilot Money. I love knowing how much I'm spending and in what categories, not because I necessarily want to budget every dollar, but because it helps me be confident about planning our financial future. And if you want to do the same, you have to check out Copilot Money.

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This episode is brought to you by Delete Me. And if you prefer not to have your identity stolen or your phone number, home address, or email showing up all over the internet, you really need to check out Delete Me this year. Unfortunately, there's hundreds of data brokers online that are constantly selling and sharing your personal info and keeping track of all of them is like a game of whack-a-mole.

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Well, earlier this year, they announced that they were going to change that for new card members. And it was only going to be up to $10,000 every billing cycle for the 4%. Anything over 2% was going to be capped at $10,000 per billing cycle. There were a bunch of categories that were getting excluded.

So tax payments, gift cards, education, tuition, B2B payments, third party bill payments, insurance payments. So all those would be excluded for earning anything over 2%. And then on top of that, new cardholders had to leave that $100,000 in a checking account, not a savings or investment account. So lots of people heard about that announcement, went out and applied for the card before it kicked in.

Thankfully, at least at the time, US Bank grandfathered everyone who'd had it before then into these old rules, which were much better. Well, now they're un-grandfathering everyone into those rules and applying all those rules to existing cardholders as well starting in September. The only one that is potentially interesting is some people got a letter saying that they now need to keep that $100,000 in checking accounts.

Other people were told that they can still keep it in savings or investment accounts. So obviously, if you have to leave $100,000 in a checking account earning almost no interest, I think this card is not interesting at all. But if you are a legacy cardholder, and you can leave that money still in a savings or investment account, and you don't spend more than $10,000 per billing cycle on your card, and you don't have a lot of expenses in those categories that are now excluded, not a bad card to keep.

My only gripe against it is still don't forget that it has foreign transaction fees. So it's not a great card for overseas. But otherwise, not a bad card to keep using. That said, for people who got this, because they spend a ton of money, and we're looking at that uncapped 4% on everything, really, really negative change to this card.

And I know a lot of people that are pretty disappointed and trying to figure out what's next. Now, the reason I never got this card was actually that I had another card that US Bank issued called the Altitude Reserve, which you can't get any more, which at the time offered 3x on travel and mobile wallet.

So Apple Pay, Google Pay. But the really cool thing was that you could use all the points you earned and redeem them at one and a half cents towards travel. And you didn't even have to book the travel in their portal, you could just book it on the card, you'd get a text message and say, "Hey, do you want to redeem your points to pay for this flight that you booked on the United website?" So effectively, it was a 4.5% card on all Apple Pay and all travel purchases, which is pretty awesome.

Well, they are also making negative changes to that card starting on December 15th. They're capping that 3x on mobile wallet to $5,000 per billing cycle. That card did have a high annual fee, but also offered $325 in travel credits, which are now required to be booked through the US Bank travel portal, which is also a bummer.

But the biggest bummer is that they're reducing that one and a half cent value of each point to one cent. So it kind of goes from a four and a half percent on travel and Apple Pay card to a 3% on travel and Apple Pay card where the Apple Pay or whatever you're using is now capped at $5,000 a month.

The only potential thing that could make this better is that they have announced that they will be having airline and hotel transfer partners. Now, we have no idea who they are. We have no idea if it's a one to one ratio. So really a big TBD for this card.

But as a card that earns four and a half percent on travel and mobile wallet, that's no more. Jury's out on whether this card is one that anyone would want to still keep. We will see. And I'll let you know when those changes actually happen when they talk about transfer partners.

So that's US Bank. Let's talk about Southwest. Lots of changes going on at Southwest. We all know that bags no longer fly free. We're not going to line up and board in order. We're going to have to select seats. Along with those changes, they did a total revamp to all of the Southwest cards.

Now, I wrote a blog post that I'll link to in the show notes where I talked about all the different changes. Annual fees went up on all the cards around 30 to 50 percent, depending on the card. And the main benefit that a lot of people are going to be getting from these cards now is that you will get free checked bags.

And most of the time, some version of preferred seat selection that might be within 48 hours on a more premium card. It might be at booking. It might even be some of the preferred seats, some of the less expensive cards. You only get to pick standard seats. So those are the two main perks, which don't really feel like perks because anyone that's flown Southwest for a while has never had to deal with checking bags and paint for it or selecting seats in advance.

But it does make sense in a future world that those things which will cost money are now free for cardholders. There's also a benefit that on some of the more premium cards, you can now earn Southwest tier qualifying points for status at a faster pace. But the really big exciting thing here is that the welcome bonus on the consumer cards is now 100,000 points for each of those cards.

So if you want more details on the card refreshes, I'll put a link in the show notes to all the details. As for the 100,000 point welcome bonus, it's 100,000 rapid rewards points after spending $4,000 in the first five months. That's at least what it is as of recording, which is August 2nd.

With Southwest points worth about 1.3 cents right now, that's already about a $1,300 signup bonus. So that's pretty cool. But the fact that you can use this bonus, which is eligible spend towards companion pass, along with the 10,000 point bonus that cardholders get towards companion pass, it means that you're already, after spending the 4,000, you should be at at least 114,000 points towards the 135,000 points you need to earn companion pass.

Now, if you're not familiar, companion pass lets you nominate someone, which you can actually change three times a year, who gets to fly free with you all year long for just the cost of taxes and fees, even if you book your flight with miles. And you not only get it the year you earn it, but you get it the following year as well.

It is a fantastic benefit. We've had it a few different times, mostly from opening New Southwest cards. And if you get it earlier in the year, it's even better, right? You get it all the year you earn it and the next year. Now, there is a way to play this.

So this bonus expires on September 17th. But you have five months to meet the minimum spend. So it is possible that you could apply for it before the end, wait to meet that minimum spend in January 2026. And then obviously, you'll need another 21,000 points. So you could do that from credit card spend, you could do that from Southwest spend or other partners.

But once you get to that 135,000 points, you'd now have companion pass for 2026 and 2027, which is really great. And it's very possible for a family of four to have two adults apply for this, make two kids, their companions, and now you've got 50% off travel for the whole family for two years.

Now, the only caveat here is with this new management that took away free bags, made the signed seating, we don't know what the future of companion pass holds. I would be wildly surprised if they got rid of companion pass for people who'd already earned it. So at a minimum, if you earn it this year, I think it's almost zero chance that they would take it away next year.

But it is possible that before the end of this year, they announced that starting next year, you can no longer earn companion pass. And what I would do in that case is if I got this card hoping to get it starting 2026, and they announced, nope, not happening anymore, I would just hit that minimum spend before the end of 2025, and at least have companion pass for 2026, and just not have it for 2027.

No one knows what the future holds. Keep an eye out if this is a thing you're tracking. Obviously, you don't need to apply for the card before the offer expires in September, you know, you can wait and see, maybe they'll make announcements before that, maybe they won't. But I can tell you that as someone with a family, having one or even two companion passes can really cut down the cost of travel if a lot of the places you want to go this year, next year, maybe even the following year are in the Southwest network.

So I'm really excited about these welcome bonuses and how much travel it might unlock for people, but don't love a lot of the changes coming to Southwest in general. Similarly, large welcome bonuses are actually happening right now to the Marriott Bonvoy cards, and I say similar because it's more of the value.

The consumer cards are now at all-time highs. So you've got the Bonvoy Brilliant, which is a $650 annual fee card, but comes with a 185,000-point welcome bonus after you spend $6,000 in six months. The Bevy card, which is their $250 annual fee version, is a 155,000 points after spending 5,000 in six months.

And then the business card technically has a new bonus at 125,000 points after spending 8K and six months. But it has been better in the past, so this is not as exciting. If you want to understand the nuance of these cards, go back to episode 236 where I did a deep dive on all Amex cards.

You can look at the timestamps in the show notes and jump ahead to the part just about Marriott cards if you want to know. But I actually think the Bronvoy Brilliant card is a great keeper card. I do have this card. I'll probably have it for a while. It comes with an annual free night certificate.

It comes with $25 a month, really easy to use restaurant credit. So if you've been considering it, now could be a really great time to get it. I value Marriott points around 0.7 cents. So 185,000-point welcome bonus is about $1,300, which is why I said it's similar to the Southwest cards because it's a similar value welcome bonus, both of which is over $1,000, which is pretty great.

Anytime I see a bonus worth over $1,000, I think that's a great bonus. Obviously, if it's $2,000 or $3,000, even better, but at least $1,000 is really excellent. And speaking of large Amex bonuses, the elevated offers on the personal gold and the personal platinum cards are still around. The current referral links are stated as as high as 100,000 points for gold and as high as 175,000 points for the platinum.

And when I think about the value of these two bonuses, if you can get the 100,000 gold or the 175,000 platinum bonuses, typically Amex points for me are worth over two cents. But even if you value them at one cent, this is a thousand or a $1,750 bonus. If you value it at two cents, then we're talking a $2,000 signup bonus on the gold card and a $3,500 signup bonus on the platinum card.

So huge value here. Keep in mind, they do have family rules. So once you've got the platinum bonus, you're no longer eligible for the gold bonus. And so if you've had neither of these cards, I would go for the gold first before you go for the platinum. So then you're eligible for two bonuses in the lifetime of these cards.

Normally these offers are lower. Normally you need the business gold and the business platinum to get really outsized offers. But right now, if you qualify for the large offers, obviously you have to go through this kind of annoying process where you go to the Amex site, you fill out some information, and then they tell you before you apply and confirm getting the card that you are going to get a hundred thousand points, or maybe they'll tell you less.

And they'll actually tell you whether you're pre-approved or not. So you don't have to apply if you're not going to get the card. So the referral links for those cards are all at all the hacks.com/cards. But I want to share a little bit of interesting things because both those Amex Bonvoy cards and those Amex gold and platinum cards, those links are all coming from members from all the hacks.

And as crazy as it sounds, I just pulled the stats and we've already driven almost three or 4,000 clicks to referral links of our members, which has generated I think 130 or 140 referrals worth well over 2 million points for members. So we've only been doing this for a little more than a month and we've already had one in four members who've shared links earn more points than the cost of the membership with at least a couple members earning over a thousand dollars.

So I need to work on the balancing that out a little bit, but if you're interested and you want to share your links or you want to join our community, you can go to allthehacks.com/join and learn more. Obviously no guarantee that just by joining your referral links will get clicked.

Though we do have a system built that tries to evenly distribute links to people so that it's not all going to one person. So next I want to talk about Built. There's been a lot of rumors about Built's relationship with their issuer Wells Fargo. So it wasn't surprising to see news that Built is moving their credit card portfolio over to Cardless next year, which is another issuer.

And with that announcement, they also shared that they're expanding from one card to three cards. They're going to have a no annual fee card, a $95 a year card, and a $495 fee card. They haven't announced much more than that. They did say that they'll share more about those three cards before the end of the year, even though the changes will happen next year.

They said that there will be a seamless migration for existing cardholders over to the new version of the card. They didn't say whether you're going to be able to pick which one you migrate to, but they will transfer you over to a new card. And they did say that before the end of the year, they're going to launch a way for you to earn points on your mortgage in addition to your rent.

So given how much I love Built Points, they have probably the best lineup of transfer partners because they still have Alaska, which no one else has. They've got Hyatt and a bunch of other airlines and hotel groups. I'm excited for this. Like I would love to have more ways to earn Built Points, ways to earn higher multiples on purchases to start racking up even more Built Points.

And even if you don't have or want a Built Card, you should at least check out Built Rewards because you can earn Built Points for free with their dining, retail, fitness, and travel partners. I think they might be the only rewards platform with transferable points that you don't even have to have one of their credit cards to start earning their points.

So big fan of Built, excited to see what they launch here, especially as someone with a mortgage, excited to start paying my mortgage with Built and earning points there. If you want to use my link to go check out Built Rewards, you can go to allthehacks.com/built, B-I-L-T. And if you want to start earning points on mortgage already, then I want to refer back to the Mesa Homeowners card.

I broke it down in episode 234, but now that I've had that card for over a month, I thought I'd share just a few updates from having it that I learned. This episode is brought to you by GELT. When it comes to building wealth, taxes are such a big part of the strategy.

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Price is subject to underwriting and health questions. So first off, I still think it's crazy that you get to earn up to 100,000 points a year on your mortgage payments without actually having to use the card to pay your mortgage. You just tell Mesa, my mortgage costs this much.

And sometimes I've heard they'll verify it. Sometimes they don't. They haven't verified mine yet. And the only caveat is you do need to spend $1,000 a month on the card. But some of the bonus categories are even better than I thought. So actually spending $1,000 a month on the card isn't as hard or doesn't require putting it on non-category spend.

For example, they say you get 3x on home insurance and property tax. But if you read the notes, it's actually 3x on all insurance premiums and 3x on all tax payments. So I've already earned 3x on auto insurance, health insurance, of which unfortunately I have to spend more than $1,000 a month on.

So that makes it pretty easy to hit that requirement. There are a bunch of other unique categories that most cards don't have, which is something that I really like seeing from a new card, not just another card like the City Strata Elite, which is focused on dining spend. But here it's 3x on home decor, home improvement, general contractors, daycare.

I haven't had expenses in those categories in the last month, but it's cool to have a card that earns 3x on them. And as I'm searching for different ways to maximize my points for travel, I've been seeing SAS Airlines pop up a lot more on award search tools when I'm looking at flights.

So I'm really excited that Mesa is one of the only places you can transfer to SAS, actually might be the only one. That's really exciting that I'll finally be able to take advantage of those because I've seen a lot of those flights and then I just always have to ignore it because I don't have any way to get SAS points.

There's still no signup bonus on the card, unfortunately, but you do get 5,000 points after signing up if you use a referral code. Mine is at allthehacks.com/mesa, or if you need to enter it, it's F-C-R-G-N-B. I'll put it in the show notes. It's not that easy to remember. And if you've already applied and forgot to put in a referral code, whether it's mine or someone else's, they're pretty good about letting you add it after the fact if you email support.

And if you tried to apply for this card in the past month and you realized they had a waitlist, it was annoying, I know, but I've been told that that waitlist is gone and you don't have to do it anymore, so you can just apply directly. And then separate from that card, if you are in the market for a mortgage, I definitely encourage you to at least look at two programs for that.

So one, Mesa has a network of mortgage brokers, and if you use their network and you end up getting a mortgage through their network, you will get 1x points on the entire value of your loan. So if you have a million dollar mortgage, that's a million points. Now, it's not available in all states, and I definitely wouldn't just get a mortgage for the points if the rate wasn't competitive.

Now, maybe it's slightly higher, but the points are worth it. Maybe it's not, but absolutely, I'd be looking at that as an option. And if you're not eligible for that, or it's not in your state, also take a look at Alaska Airlines, who has a partnership with rate.com. And if you open a mortgage through that partnership, you get 50,000 Alaska points.

Now, I'm guessing most people listening aren't going to have a mortgage that is $50,000 or less. So the Mesa program is going to be a much better deal. But also, it's important to find the best rate. And if they don't have the best rates, then that doesn't make sense.

And if anyone listening has gone through this process with Mesa or Alaska, please let me know, I'd love to know if their mortgage rates are competitive. And I would gladly share that out in the future. Also, I wrote a full blog post about the Mesa card and all the benefits on the website.

So I'll link to that in the show notes. Okay, the next card is an interesting one that I'm guessing most of you haven't heard of, unless you've already subscribed to the newsletter, because I briefly mentioned it. And that is the Nibbles card. So I recently came across the Nibbles credit card, which is focused on pet owners.

And the core benefit is that they offer free pet insurance for one dog or cat. They also offer 3x points on pet and vet purchases. But I imagine most people aren't spending enough in either of those categories to warrant getting a new credit card for it. And the card didn't seem that exciting.

So I looked at it, and I immediately was like, nope, not that interesting. Even though they try to pitch on the website, hey, pet insurance can be as high as $749. So this could be interesting. I actually looked it up. We don't have pet insurance on our dog. It's a 10 year old Vishala.

I looked it up. And comparable pet insurance to the policy you get with Nibbles, which I believe you can actually upgrade if you're eligible, was about $137 a month. So look at that and say, wow, that's like $1,500 a year. So all of a sudden, I was like, hmm, if I want pet insurance, maybe I should go get the Nibbles card and get the pet insurance for free.

If you have a dog for, let's say, 10, 12, 15 years, that card will pay for itself way, way more than a lot of other cards. It's like getting a signup bonus every single year. Unfortunately, I went through the process, and they said my dog wasn't eligible. They didn't give me any reason.

Maybe it was his age. So not so much to get excited for. But if the reason really was the age, maybe if I'd gotten an insurance policy back when the dog was younger, they wouldn't have canceled me because he got older. So if you're going to get pet insurance regularly, this could be actually a really interesting card for you if you're eligible.

Fortunately, they let you know if you're eligible before you apply. So definitely worth looking into if you're in that narrow market of pet owner who has expensive pet insurance that is eligible for pet insurance and wants it. Next card is the Rakuten card. You can see there's a lot of cards came out this summer, and it's crazy.

But unfortunately, there's not as many exciting ones as I would have wished. The Rakuten card is a great example of that. So this card is powered by American Express. And I love Rakuten, by the way, as a shopping portal where you can go to earn cash back on so many purchases online.

Rakuten is my primary portal, primarily because you can earn Rakuten cash back, which normally is marketed as earn 3% back or 4% back. But you can take that link it to your Amex account and earn membership rewards points. And if you're able to make your membership rewards points worth one and a half or two cents each, then all of a sudden you're looking at not earning 4x on a purchase, but maybe 6x or 8x in terms of value you can get from your Amex points.

So I love Rakuten. This card couldn't be less exciting. So let's look first, the welcome bonus. Get a $25 welcome bonus when you spend $500 in the first 90 days on your card. I don't think I've ever seen a welcome bonus as low as $25 other than zero. $25, probably the worst welcome bonus.

It might be better to just not have one. As for the earnings, the primary marketing benefit is earn an extra 4% cashback. Now, if you use Rakuten a lot and you spend a lot of money online, you might think, this is a really interesting benefit, 4% cashback on everything.

And if you scroll down the website, you don't really see anything mentioned of the exclusions until you really get down and you notice that it is 4% back up to $7,000 in a calendar year. Now, that's 4% total. If you were using, let's call it the venture card, the double cash card, any card that would get you 2x, you're really only getting an extra 2x.

So what is 2% or 2x on $7,000? It's about $140 a year, depending on how you value your points. If it's cashback, it just is $140 a year. And that is if you max out the benefit. It also earns 2% on groceries and restaurants, which is not anything special to write home about.

So I would say the primary benefit of this card is capped at $140 a year. And the welcome bonus is $25 one time. So I'm not going to turn down $140 if someone walking down the street wants to hand it to me. But there are so many cards that should offer more than $140 in value, especially when you look at the welcome bonus, that this one is a huge pass.

Both the Southwest and the Bonvoy cards should earn you $1,300 of value in the first year. This card would take nine years to match that at $140 a year. So this card is absolutely a pass for me. Definitely not something I'm that excited about at all. Okay, now the last two cards I want to touch on are crypto related cards.

And I've gotten so many requests to talk about them, including one about five minutes before I hit record. So this is very timely, they might be getting the fastest request to turn around in history. And so the first one I want to talk about is the Gemini card. I'm not sure why I've gotten so many requests to talk about this card, people seem to be really excited.

And I have a theory that I'll share at the end. But let's just review the card really quick. So Gemini card $200 in Bitcoin when you spend $3,000 in your first 90 days. So $200 signup bonus, nothing that exciting. As for spending, you get 4% back on gas, EV charging, transit, taxis and rideshare, 3% on dining, 2% on groceries and 1% on everything else.

So is that exciting in terms of earning? Well, I went through my card optimizer tool to try to get a good sense of this. 4% on gas can be beaten by 15 different cards and matched by another three. So 4% on gas, not that exciting. Now keep in mind, I was taking into account the value of points that I give points.

So you know, if something earned 3x points, but those points are worth one and a half cents, I would call that a four and a half percent on gas. So these numbers might be smaller if you're focused only on cashback cards. But 4% transit can be beaten by 13 cards matched by another two.

3% on dining can be beaten by 34 cards and matched by another 10. And 2% grocery can be beaten by 48 cards and matched by another 11. So the actual earnings on these cards, maybe you could argue that if your spending exactly matches these patterns and you only want one card, you don't want two, then maybe you could say that the cashback on this card is interesting.

But I think where most of the people that have written to me asking about this card are getting, I won't say mixed up, but are getting excited is that all of the cashback comes in the form of crypto. You can choose your crypto and it will automatically invest that.

And I think that because some of these emails have said things like, "What do you think about the possibility of earning outsized value through crypto?" And to me, that's kind of conflating two totally different things. You don't need a credit card that earns crypto to have the possibility of earning outsized value in crypto.

You just buy crypto. If you have another cashback card, you could take all the cashback you get and use it to buy crypto. Or if it's a point card, you could use all the money you saved on travel and buy crypto. It's that easy. So I don't like tying my investing decisions to other things in my life.

I like to be very intentional and say, "Oh, I've decided I want to invest $100 a month in Bitcoin. Great. I'll do that." I don't need to tie it to, "Well, I'm going to get a card that will pay me out in crypto." And the upside of crypto shouldn't be attributed to the earnings in the card.

So that for me is where I kind of get lost. With this card, if I had it and I thought the earnings was the best, even if I wanted to invest in crypto, I would still just pick to earn all my cashback in the form of USD stablecoin because I don't want to tie those decisions together.

I could take that stablecoin and at whatever interval I want decide to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever I want. That's not something I'm saying you shouldn't do. I just don't like tying them together because I just feel like I want to separate my investing from how much money I'm earning back.

For example, if one month I was going on a 50-state road trip, I would earn a lot more cashback than normal on gas or EV charging. But that doesn't mean that I want to increase my exposure to crypto that month. So that's where I get lost with these cards is the idea of earning crypto crypto as a perk because I could just invest in crypto.

So to me, evaluate this card as a cashback card only and then understand that it could automate your crypto investing if you wanted to invest as much or more than your cashback. But at its face value, I would probably focus just on investing in crypto separately from what this card earns.

So for me, not excited. There are a lot of other cards that can reward me as much or more on these categories. So I'm going to pass. That said, I have slightly different opinions on the Coinbase One card, which has not come out, just to be clear. Now the announcement has said that you will get up to 4% back on this card on everything.

Now it hasn't come out and there have been cards in the past, like the Smartly card that said they earned 4% on everything and then didn't. I have to imagine Coinbase knows that before they launch this. So it wouldn't surprise me if earning that 4% required a much larger number of assets held at Coinbase than the $100,000 that the US bank card offered.

But before they launch, maybe they'll lower the earnings rate. Maybe they'll exclude a bunch of spend categories. Maybe they'll have other kinds of restrictions. We don't know. If it's true that this card will get a uncapped 4% back and only require a similar number of assets to the Smartly card or the Bank of America preferred rewards cards, where it's about $100,000, I'm way more interested.

Now, I would much prefer to earn USD stable coin than Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency and separate my investing in crypto from any cash back. Because honestly, crypto is not a huge part of my investing strategy. We don't have the details on this card. It says it's coming out in the fall.

I'm keeping an eye on it. I know a lot of people who are looking at their Smartly card thinking, what do I do next, are hoping that this card will be the saving grace and will replace that card. But time will tell. We don't know. But I do have a Coinbase one membership just because I think it's going to be necessary to get the card.

And we'll see what happens as this card comes out. Stay tuned. This episode is brought to you by Masterclass. You know that feeling when you're endlessly scrolling and suddenly you've wasted an entire hour. Lately, I've been swapping that time for something that actually improves my life, like watching classes on Masterclass.

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They're all brands I love and use, so please consider supporting those who support us. That's a lot of card news. Normally, I would try to fit in one or two pieces of card news to an episode, but there was just so much that I thought breaking down all these cards would make an entire episode.

However, there's also a fun thing that I haven't found a way to talk about in an episode yet that I thought would fit in well with the concept of earning a lot more points, and that's talking about some of these crazy challenges that different airlines have been offering and now hotel groups.

And one of the first ones that everyone was talking about was last year, SAS joined SkyTeam. They did this big promotion and said, "Anyone who flies with 15 different SkyTeam airlines will earn a million points." And it was super interesting because, like I mentioned earlier, SAS miles are impossible to earn.

Obviously, now you can get them through Mesa, but otherwise it's very hard to get them. And they're super valuable. And this is one of those things that when I saw it, I was like, "Gosh, if I didn't have commitments, kids, I would absolutely have done this." In fact, the team over at Frequent Miler, and I'll put a link in the show notes to their summary, three different people ended up competing and doing this challenge.

And it took them about $5,000 to $8,000 each to buy enough flights to be able to hit all the requirements, which meant that they were effectively buying SAS points for about half to 0.8 cents. But of course, that's ignoring the fact that they each got to visit over a dozen different countries.

Now, at the end of the promotion, SAS shared that around 900 people completed the challenge with the youngest person being four years old. That's really cool. Awesome to start someone out with a million miles that early. And it sounds like this kicked off a real trend. So for anyone who heard this last year and thought, "Oh, I regret this." There have now been four big promotions at that large value that have come out.

And I'm going to run through them really quickly because most of them are not that interesting or there's not much to do. So one of the first ones was the Etihad promo. And they came out and said from May 26th this year to May 25th next year, the first person to fly to the 15 new destinations they had would win 5 million miles.

And the second person would get 3 million and the third person would get 1 million. And then people were kind of a little bit cold on it, because who knows if you're the first person? Can you imagine flying to 14 of these destinations, boarding the plane for the 15th, and then finding out that, "Oh, three people have just completed this challenge and now you will earn nothing." That would be a huge letdown.

So they added that the first 100 people to get to five destinations would get 25,000 points, and the first 100 people to get to 10 would get another 100,000 points. So it's interesting, but there was no guarantee. With SAS, everyone who completed the challenge got the points. Here, that's not the case.

And so I haven't seen anyone trying to do this challenge. Also, Etihad miles expire. They have really punitive cancellation policies. And one of the biggest challenges is that one of the countries on this list is Russia. And I know there are a lot of Americans who are not too excited about going to Russia right now.

So it kind of makes it difficult. So it was cool to see a five million point challenge. But given that there was no guarantee you would get anything for competing and there are a lot of other things, it wasn't that exciting. Then Turkish launched a challenge the next month in June, and people were a lot more excited because all you had to do was fly to six continents.

You did have to connect through Istanbul, but Turkey didn't count as a country. So you needed to hit one country and each of six continents. Only the destinations counted. So if you flew from San Francisco to Turkey, that wouldn't count as North America, but if you flew back home, it would.

And one of the only things that people didn't love was that only paid tickets counted. But it looks like you could have done this challenge for three to $5,000. And that's not bad for earning a million Turkish miles. I think I forgot to say that it was a million mile challenge.

The challenge was that 11 days after launching this promo, they canceled it. So they launched it on June 27th. And then on July 8th, they said, "Nope, sorry. Anyone who has flown one leg is still eligible, but no one else is eligible." So this is another one where I looked at it and I thought, "Wow, $3,000 to $5,000 for all the flights, but you'd actually get to visit you'd end up with a million miles." So that one was really cool, but you can't do it anymore.

So the one that actually came out that I really thought long and hard about and is still out there for anyone listening to participate in is the JetBlue 25 challenge. So it's not a million miles on face value, but it's pretty close if you break it down. If you fly to 15 different JetBlue destinations, you get 150,000 points.

You fly to 20, you get another 200,000 points. And then if you fly to 25, you get 25 years of Mosaic one status. Now, the notable perk is that when you have Mosaic one status, you get to pick one thing. It's like a pick your choice. One of those things is 15,000 miles.

So if JetBlue lasted 25 years and you picked 15,000 miles a year, that's another 375,000 miles, bringing the total to 725,000 points. So just shy of a million. Now revenue and award tickets count. So you don't even have to pay for the fares. You could use points if you had some JetBlue points.

The only catch was you couldn't book basic economy, and you couldn't book flights with a promo code. Now, a bunch of people, as they do on Reddit, started posting their itineraries. And if you were flexible, you could do this for about $2,000. Now, it's still valid. And so if you want to do this, go look at those Reddit threads.

And honestly, the biggest reason we didn't consider this is that we don't live on the East Coast. JetBlue's route network from San Francisco is like three cities, and they only count the destination. So if you fly from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale, you'd get Fort Lauderdale. So you really need to piece together an itinerary that works really well.

And for someone who lives on the East Coast, especially if you could drive to three or four airports that have JetBlue flights, there is a way to do this that actually looked pretty interesting. For me, it was just fun to try to look at the JetBlue route map and think about how to do this, even though I had no intention of doing it.

But because it's still open, because you can still do it. And because there are a lot of people doing it with their whole family, which means not just earning 350,000 points, but earning it for four people, and then getting not just 15,000 miles a year, but 60,000 miles a year, if you do it with a family of four, it can be pretty lucrative.

And so I'll just share that Nick Race from Frequent Miler is doing this with his family of four. He's got a lot of blog posts, but I'll just break down some of the high level. He shared his plan to hit 20 airports, because he'd already actually had trips planned for five other destinations.

So 20 airports for about $2,300. He was actually going to use his Amex points to book these. And so if you have an Amex business platinum card, and you select JetBlue as your airline, you end up getting your Amex points to be worth about 1.54 cents towards flights that you book on that airline.

So it was going to cost him about 145,000 points per person. And those flights were going to earn him another 10,000 JetBlue points per person. And each person would get 350,000 points. So it was spend 145,000 Amex points, zero dollars cash out of pocket, and get 360,000 points. I do think there was maybe one or two positioning flights he had to take.

So I won't say zero out of pocket. But it was like spend 145, get 360. And if you factor in the 15,000 points a year, and let's just say we assume JetBlue's around for 25 years, then it would be spend 145,000 get 735,000. Because you also get that 10,000 points that you earn from all the flights.

So for him, he had four people, he'd either be spending 9,000 or spending 580,000 Amex points. But he would end up for his family with 1.44 million JetBlue points, or about 2.9 million JetBlue points if you factor in those 15,000 points a year per person from Mosaic One status.

So pretty cool promo to be able to rack up a ton of points. Even cooler that he's making family trips all summer long about this. You have until the end of 2025 to do it. And so if you have flexibility, and you want to try this out, especially if you're on the East Coast, I think it's a pretty cool challenge.

I kind of wanted to do it. I spent about five seconds bringing it up to Amy before I was wildly shut down as something we are not going to do in August as the way our family spends the month. I don't blame her, it probably would have been a mess to try to fit into a month of August.

But I'm hoping that one of these days, there is a challenge that I could participate in. Maybe we can even do it as an all the hacks community and kind of compete or something. I don't know. I'm excited for it. But definitely something to take a look at. If you are doing it, or even if you're not, two things about JetBlue that are interesting.

One, you can do a status match to JetBlue. So if you're going to do this promo, or if you're just flying a lot of JetBlue in the future, you can take status from pretty much any US airline and match it over to JetBlue. And then if you get enough tiles, which is their currency for earning status, you get to keep that status for that year and the next year.

And so you can earn tiles by spending $100 on JetBlue. We'll get you a tile or $1,000 on one of their credit cards. And if you get all the way up to JetBlue Mosaic 3 status, you actually get these certificates for moving up to mint. And if anyone's ever walked on a JetBlue plane that had mint business class, it's one of the best domestic business classes.

Lie flat seats, little nice suites. I really enjoyed the one time I got to fly it. So I actually status matched over to JetBlue. TBD, whether I'm going to be able to find a way to meet the spend and the tiles to actually get what I want. But it was kind of a promo that was running until the end of June for the ability to actually match up to Mosaic 4.

So I went for it. Haven't actually done anything with it. Almost never fly JetBlue. That's probably one of the, I should stop optimizing for things that don't matter. But I just ran the quick numbers on Nick's trip. And so given how much he's spending on JetBlue, which is about $2,300, he'd get 23 tiles.

If he wasn't doing the Amex rebate option, and he put that $9,000 of JetBlue spend all on a JetBlue card, he would earn another nine tiles, which would get him almost all the way there. He would just need to spend an extra $8,000 on a JetBlue card to get to Mosaic 3 for this and next year.

So love their status match. Love that they make it super easy to understand how it works. And it's not too crazy to earn status this and next year if you're doing this challenge. The other thing, this is available for anyone, is that JetBlue currently has this challenge called the Passport Challenge.

It's through October 28th. It's pretty easy to earn bonus points with one caveat. If you have a rental car that you could do through Avis and Budget, you can earn a lot more points. At a minimum, if you just get emails from Dunkin' Donuts from JetBlue, from JetBlue, you get 500 points.

If you link and use their dining program and spend $25 at a restaurant, you get 500 points. If you use their shopping portable to spend $50 or more, you get 500 points. If you use this thing that I've never heard of until today called Airport Rewards, which rewards you for spending money at airport restaurants and shops.

If you spend $5 at the airport, any airport, there's 100 airports to choose from. Almost every restaurant at SFO is on the list. You get another 500 points. And then the hardest one, for me at least, is if you rent any rental car from Avis or Budget and you credit those points to JetBlue, you get another 500 points.

And if you do all five, you get another 5,000 points. So you can get 7,500 points, which at JetBlue point value is probably around $100. I wouldn't jump out of bed to go try to do this promo, but if you had an Avis or Budget rental that you could easily do, then I feel like the other four things would be pretty simple ways to earn a free 7,500 points from JetBlue.

The last one I'm going to mention is the easiest. Choice Hotels has a one million point sweepstakes right now. You can enter it until October 7th and all you have to do is give them an email address. Maybe you have to give them your choice number because I just tried to go re-enter and they said I've already entered.

But maybe there's a couple other things that you add once you put your email in. But that's all. No purchase necessary, no stay necessary. One winner is going to get a million points. One winner is going to get a VIP NASCAR experience in St. Louis. And 11 other people, one drawn each week from July 22nd to October 7th, are going to get 100,000 choice points.

So there is a reason to go enroll yourself earlier rather than later if you want a chance at those 100,000 points. Obviously only one person is going to win a million, but it also only takes a couple seconds, so no reason not to do it. Those are all these big challenges.

I'm excited to see more of them. I'd really love to do one someday. Normally in an episode like this, I talk about some timely promos that are coming out like I do in the newsletter. But honestly, there are not that many right now that I think will still be around by the time this publishes.

And we're actually recording a little early because we're in the middle of transitioning to a new podcast editor and production company. So if you want all the latest promos, the best deals, card launches, news, I don't do an episode like this every week. So definitely go check out the newsletter, allthehacks.com/email.

I send it every Saturday morning. I think you'll really enjoy it. And also back to the point about production, the one impact it'll have on you is that we're trying to align our audio and video edits of the podcast to come out at the same time. That means we might be able to start pushing out video on Spotify and maybe even on other platforms that allow it.

And we'll be able to put the YouTube up the same day the audio comes out. So stay tuned. If you see that and you notice any issues, obviously, let me know. Finally, to wrap, I just want to share both my wife, Amy, and I have summer birthdays, and I usually use my birthday to do a little reflecting on life.

And one of my takeaways this year is just how lucky I am to be able to make this show for all of you listening. I love this job. I feel so grateful that I get to spend my time doing research into points and miles and deals, and that I get to share it all on this podcast with you.

Thank you so much for all the support you give by listening to this podcast, subscribing to the newsletter. If I were going to make one birthday request, it'd probably just be that if you enjoy this, go share it with someone that you think would also enjoy it. Unlike most of the internet, there is no viral growth mechanism for podcasts.

So our way to grow is your word of mouth. Thank you in advance for spreading the word. I think that's it. Actually, I just thought of something. I mentioned the Weird Al tour earlier as a way that I would use my Live Nation credit if I had the City Strata Elite.

I'm a huge Weird Al fan. I missed out on the VIP tickets for the show we're going to. I've been a huge fan for decades. I thought it'd be really cool to meet him in person. If someone listening happens to have a connection there and you want to make something happen, please send me an email.

It would be an incredible birthday. I will find some way to return the favor. That would be amazing. As for my wife's birthday, Amy, since I know you'll probably listen to this after it's out, I just want to publicly say, you are amazing. None of this show would be possible without your support.

To everyone listening, you might only hear my voice most of the time, but Amy is full-time at all the hacks. She's involved in almost every single episode, every newsletter. She's a thought partner for everything. She makes so much happen behind the scenes. This whole show wouldn't be possible without her.

Thank you so much for everything you do with all the hacks for me, for our family, our girls. Happy birthday, Amy. I love you so much. Okay. That's it for this episode. If you want to get in touch, podcast@allthehacks.com. I will see you next week.