Some excellent credit card bonus offers available right now in time for the holiday season. First off, AMEX:
If you have any American Express cards, like the AMEX Ameriprise Platinum, the AMEX Business Gold, and the AMEX EveryDay cards, you’re likely to have these offers: $15 off a $60 Amazon.com purchase, $10 off a $20 Uber ride, and $50 off a $100 Airbnb purchase.
Just login to your account, scroll down to the AMEX Offers & Benefits section, and you should see them.
Important note: If you have multiple AMEX cards linked to the same login, do not save these offers just yet. Instead, you’ll want to login to your account from two different browsers, or one in an incognito window, etc (and more browsers/etc respectively depending on how many cards you have linked to your account), before saving any of these offers on any of these cards.
This is because if you save them on one card, they’re automatically removed from your other cards. I made this mistake, which kind of sucked. To not make the same mistake, have at least one browser window open for each card that you have (make sure you change your card screen over to be on the correct card, and not all on the same card), and then scroll down to the AMEX Offers section on all your cards on all the windows at the same time. Then, without exiting any of your tabs (if you exit, it’s gone forever), save all the offers on your first card, change tabs, save them on the second, and so forth until you’ve gotten it on all your cards.
If you have a different login for all your cards, this doesn’t apply – you’ll see all the offers on each card just fine. Only if you have multiple cards linked to one login. In fact, if you fuck up, like I did, you can actually remove the card that doesn’t have the offers from your main account, and create a new username and login for it, and you should see the offers again and can add them. Just did this now and confirmed it works.
The offers are also valid for additional cardmembers, so in reality you can add as many additional cardmembers as you want and get as many multiples of this as you need. It’s effectively 25% off all purchases at Amazon and 50% off Airbnb and up to 50% off Uber. Doesn’t get much better than that. I’m literally going to be doing this on 7 cards, for a free $350 at Airbnb and a free $105 at Amazon.
The great thing about these offers is you can just use them to buy gift cards now, and spend the money later – so no need to actually figure out a use for $60 on Amazon or $100 on Airbnb. Just take the 25% cashback on Amazon and 50% cashback on Airbnb in the form of a gift card for now, and spend it later. For Uber, just keep in mind it can’t be a cumulative $20 – it needs to be all in one purchase of at least $20 or more on your card to get the $10 statement credit.
Great. On to the next amazing offer: 10% cashback + 5% cashback, up to $1500, on your Chase Freedom card: https://creditcards.chase.com/freedom/faq
According to that FAQ, you can earn 5% cashback on all purchases at Amazon.com, Zappos.com, Audible.com, and Diapers.com from now until November 23rd, up to $1500 in spend, and then 10% cashback at the same places from November 23rd to December 31st, 2015, up to $1500 in spend, which is pretty wild.
Why is this wild? It’s wild because these are Ultimate Reward miles you earn on your Chase Freedom card, meaning you can earn up to 15000 UR miles for $1500 in Amazon gift cards bought between November 23rd to December 31st, which can then be transferred, if you have a premium UR card like the Chase Ink Plus or Chase Sapphire Preferred, to airline and hotel partners like United and Southwest, meaning you can get around 2 cents of value per point –> meaning that you can effectively get 20% cashback on Amazon through this channel (on top of the cashback from AMEX). If you want to go even further, you can buy $1500 in Amazon gift cards now and earn 7,500 miles, then after November 23rd, buy another $1500 in gift cards to earn another 15,000, for a total of 22,500 miles. I don’t personally spend that much on Amazon, so I’ll just hit up the 15,000 for $1500 myself – but if you do, you might as well do both – it really is just free money.
To get this offer, you need to make sure to login to your Chase account and click to ‘activate’ the cashback bonus categories for October->December.
Okay – on to the next thing. If you have a Chase Freedom card, you can also get just a straight up $15 free back, if you link your card to VISA Checkout and spend $15 or more at a place that accepts VISA Checkout. Details here: https://checkout.visa.com/campaign/us/en/chase/freedom-statement-credit/index.jsp
Some places that accept VISA Checkout include Fandango, Newegg, and Best Buy, so plenty of good options. Will be using this to see a nice holiday movie with the family for free.
And if you don’t already have a Chase Freedom card? Well, you’re in luck. They just increased the signup bonus from the standard 10,000 points to 15,000 points + 2,500 points for adding an authorized user. This is indeed significantly less than most ‘reward credit cards’, but this is one of the best offers for a no annual fee credit card period. I highly recommend this card to anyone who’s looking to get some no annual fee cards to hold and keep forever to build their long term credit score, as it’s unequivocally one of the best for its ability to earn Ultimate Reward miles, which can be transferred to many airline partners at a 1:1 ratio so long as you have a premium annual fee card open at the time of transfer as well (e.g. Chase Ink Plus, Chase Sapphire Preferred, etc.)
So if you’d like to open it, just go here: https://creditcards.chase.com/freedom/learnmore. Spend $500 in 3 months, and add an authorized user and make one purchase on the authorized user card and you’ll get 17,500 points scot-free. And then signup for these amazing offers on the Chase Freedom card. You’ll need to activate the 10% cashback by December 14th, and spend the amount you want to get cashback on by December 31st, so keep that in mind.
Finally, if that wasn’t enough, you can get another $30 off at Amazon too, just because.
If you’ve never redeemed Ultimate Rewards (Chase) points Amazon before (and you never should have, because you always get a better deal transferring instead to airline partners), with your Ultimate Rewards earning Chase card, you can get $15 off a purchase of $15 or more using promo code SWP15CH15D and following the terms and conditions here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?&docId=1002999541, and spending at least 1 Ultimate Reward point on your purchase.
One notable thing about this promo is that it can only be used on real purchases of products shipped by Amazon, and not gift cards or third party merchants. It can be used to buy something that’s $15 for literally 100% off, though.
You could even just resell these gift cards and arbitrage for real cash if you so desire. I know I’ll eventually use up all the money at Amazon though, so I’m fine with just keeping the gift cards. Enjoy!