I love credit cards so much!

[brownhaired_girl]

Be sure to go through your referral for 20k more for you!

I did try to do a referral, but no email from them at this time. I was going to ask if I needed to complete my spend and get my bonus before the "offer" would show up somewhere. Am I doing something wrong???

 

[CyndiLouWho]

Nah, just plan ahead to what you want to apply for. Call to lift, apply, re-freeze. It's no big for me because I obsess and plan out my apps anyway. I probably over analyze my rewards too much!

But at $10 every time I lift & refreeze, that gets expensive pretty quickly.

 

[Lain]

I'm disappointed b/c Amazon is where I spend the most during Q4. I got really spoiled with Amazon being a CF category for several years and then being 10x for 2015.

I've never done what you are suggesting and not even sure how to go about it. I will look into it though.

I don't usually shop at Walmart and it's quite a drive to the nearest one for us, so I'm not exactly enthusiastic about the category either. But Walmart does sell gift cards, Walmart gift cards that can be used at Sam's Club, and prepaid Visas. Even if you have no use for Walmart or third-party gift cards, you can buy prepaid Visas (I believe Walmart sells them up to $500 in store with a $5.95 fee), then liquidate them by using it like a debit card to buy a money order from the post office or just use the balance of the Visa to add to your Amazon account.

Buying a prepaid Visa to buy a money order is manufactured spending. And since we're talking about Chase, they don't care that you MS with their credit cards, but Chase is well known to be extremely sensitive to money order deposits to their accounts and may freeze or terminate these accounts. Don't deposit money orders into your primary bank accounts or any account you're not willing to have frozen or terminated.

 

[brownhaired_girl]

I have a question for the people who have an understanding of Hyatt points. I am planning a trip to Aruba this winter. I am beginning to think I want to just stay at the Hyatt there. My 80 yo mother travels with me and I want to be right on the beach so she can go up to the room easily if she needs or wants to. Mom will be getting the Hyatt card also and I understand we can combine the two cards. My question is, if my husband also gets the Hyatt card can we combine that card also?

 

[wendow]

I did try to do a referral, but no email from them at this time. I was going to ask if I needed to complete my spend and get my bonus before the "offer" would show up somewhere. Am I doing something wrong???

The emails from Chase take forever and sometimes never come. I do the Twitter option and just use that link. You do not need to complete your spend first.

 

[GPC0321]

My hay man just got the horses' hay baled so that will complete the Hyatt spend.

Awesome that your hay man takes credit cards! I'd have millions of points/miles by now if mine did! LOL!

 

[wendow]

Buying a prepaid Visa to buy a money order is manufactured spending. And since we're talking about Chase, they don't care that you MS with their credit cards, but Chase is well known to be extremely sensitive to money order deposits to their accounts and may freeze or terminate these accounts. Don't deposit money orders into your primary bank accounts or any account you're not willing to have frozen or terminated.

Thanks for explaining all that! So, if I want to deposit the MO into my bank account, it cannot be Chase. I have accounts at several banks but Chase is the only one with physical locations (at least in my state). I would probably just stick with loading my Amazon account. The other seems like more hassle than is worth it to me.

 

[DisneyMandC]

Awesome that your hay man takes credit cards! I'd have millions of points/miles by now if mine did! LOL!

For real! Can I put that under restaurants?!

 

[Albort]

I don't usually shop at Walmart and it's quite a drive to the nearest one for us, so I'm not exactly enthusiastic about the category either. But Walmart does sell gift cards, Walmart gift cards that can be used at Sam's Club, and prepaid Visas. Even if you have no use for Walmart or third-party gift cards, you can buy prepaid Visas (I believe Walmart sells them up to $500 in store with a $5.95 fee), then liquidate them by using it like a debit card to buy a money order from the post office or just use the balance of the Visa to add to your Amazon account.

Buying a prepaid Visa to buy a money order is manufactured spending. And since we're talking about Chase, they don't care that you MS with their credit cards, but Chase is well known to be extremely sensitive to money order deposits to their accounts and may freeze or terminate these accounts. Don't deposit money orders into your primary bank accounts or any account you're not willing to have frozen or terminated.

Its YMMV too. I got shot down big time yesterday... manager came by to lecture me about me buying MO with gift card was fraud... haha.
Currently doing around 3.5k per week...
Still need to play with the PO MO route. i heard its hard to buy them.

 

[TDSAXX]

Thanks for explaining all that! So, if I want to deposit the MO into my bank account, it cannot be Chase. I have accounts at several banks but Chase is the only one with physical locations (at least in my state). I would probably just stick with loading my Amazon account. The other seems like more hassle than is worth it to me.

Step #1 Purchase $500 Visa Gift Card ($4.94/Fee)

Step #2 Go to Service Desk at WalMart and purchase a money order for $499.30 (Total will be $500.00 with $0.70 Fee, use final 4 digits of card as PIN)

Step #3 Deposit money order into bank account and use proceeds to pay credit card (I see no reason you couldn't deposit into Chase)

 

[thevalley]

I only have to add that as you get closer to your trip, check the Ultimate Rewards site periodically as the points needed for some resorts can come down. I think @wendow and a few others here have noticed the points for some resorts at certain times of the year came down quite significantly a week or two out from their trips, and if your reservation is refundable it can make sense to cancel and rebook at a better value.

Wow, i didn't know that. Is that something that i would call chase upon the time of my trip or is it disney.

 

[GPC0321]

Chase Freedom Q4 5% Category confirmed: Walmart and Department Stores.

Dang, I do most of my grocery shopping (and other shopping) at Walmart. I could have maxed this quarter out if not for the Hyatt card I just got. Priorities though! Gotta get the sign-up bonus!

 

[Lain]

Wow, i didn't know that. Is that something that i would call chase upon the time of my trip or is it disney.

Make sure you're booking a refundable reservation on the Chase Ultimate Rewards travel portal, then check back periodically for the points price on your resort and others for your date. If you see a significant drop, cancel your existing reservation on the travel portal -- your points are returned to your account almost immediately -- and rebook. You can do this all online; no need to call Chase or Disney. You do have to call Disney to get a confirmation number that will work with MDE and to add guests (kids) to your room.

 

[thevalley]

Make sure you're booking a refundable reservation on the Chase Ultimate Rewards travel portal, then check back periodically for the points price on your resort and others for your date. If you see a significant drop, cancel your existing reservation on the travel portal -- your points are returned to your account almost immediately -- and rebook. You can do this all online; no need to call Chase or Disney. You do have to call Disney to get a confirmation number that will work with MDE and to add guests (kids) to your room.

Ok. Will do. Thank you!! i really appreciate all of this knowledgeable information.

 

[CyndiLouWho]

I was really excited to see we could book some onsite rooms thru the chase portal.... what's the wholesale number we have to call for that number for the mde?

Make sure you're booking a refundable reservation on the Chase Ultimate Rewards travel portal, then check back periodically for the points price on your resort and others for your date. If you see a significant drop, cancel your existing reservation on the travel portal -- your points are returned to your account almost immediately -- and rebook. You can do this all online; no need to call Chase or Disney. You do have to call Disney to get a confirmation number that will work with MDE and to add guests (kids) to your room.

@thevalley Disney Wholesale Direct is 407-939-7671. They can look up your reservation with your name and date of stay. They added my son to the reservation (because Chase website was charging more to add him) and gave me a confirmation number that will work for MDE and booking ADRs & FPs. Took me all of 5 minutes on the phone.
ETA: They did warn that if I changed anything on the reservation, it would revert to the original 2 people I booked and I'd have to call again.

 

[kmc8826]

I have a question for the people who have an understanding of Hyatt points. I am planning a trip to Aruba this winter. I am beginning to think I want to just stay at the Hyatt there. My 80 yo mother travels with me and I want to be right on the beach so she can go up to the room easily if she needs or wants to. Mom will be getting the Hyatt card also and I understand we can combine the two cards. My question is, if my husband also gets the Hyatt card can we combine that card also?

I am no doubt not the right person to answer as not that knowledgeable, but I don't think you can do that online but it might be possible to do it if you called. For the free room it needs to be a standard room that is available for the dates. I actually have to call tomorrow (wish me luck) because I want to use my 2 nights for the upcoming trip to Maui and the Regency Maui is not even coming up as an option for which to use the free nights. Other Hawaiian resorts that actually cost more points are listed as an option but not the one I want. So that might be something to keep in mind too.

 

[GlamMistress]

But at $10 every time I lift & refreeze, that gets expensive pretty quickly.

I spend $1,600 a year on annual fees. The freeze lifts don't scare me. Honestly I'm hoping we get some legislation going that allows us as consumers access to our information for free. That's the way it should be. We didn't authorize these crooks to have our info and here we are with them spilling it all over town. Egregious!

 

[GlamMistress]

I have a question for the people who have an understanding of Hyatt points. I am planning a trip to Aruba this winter. I am beginning to think I want to just stay at the Hyatt there. My 80 yo mother travels with me and I want to be right on the beach so she can go up to the room easily if she needs or wants to. Mom will be getting the Hyatt card also and I understand we can combine the two cards. My question is, if my husband also gets the Hyatt card can we combine that card also?

1. Are you staying in one room or multiple rooms?
2. If all three of you book your two nights each (or whatever) and are staying in one room, you can call World of Hyatt and have them make a note to fuse the reservations for the hotel to make the accounting easier.
3. I've had crazy reservations with free nights, jumped to full paid, next night points and cash and final night free again. Just walk the phone agent through exactly what you want - what nights for free, etc.
4. You can book your vacation now without having all your free nights and can call and change them out once you've earned the bonus, keeping in mind this is a risk because free nights could be blacked out when you want to use them.
5. If you signed up under the points bonus and not free nights, remember you can stretch your rewards much further with points and cash.
Hyatt Aruba is cat 6, 25,000 points per night. That's just 12,500 points and $150 per night. https://world.hyatt.com/content/gp/en/rewards/free-nights-upgrades.html

I always remind everyone of points and cash. One of the best sweet spots period in this hobby.

 

[Dugette]

I have a question for the people who have an understanding of Hyatt points. I am planning a trip to Aruba this winter. I am beginning to think I want to just stay at the Hyatt there. My 80 yo mother travels with me and I want to be right on the beach so she can go up to the room easily if she needs or wants to. Mom will be getting the Hyatt card also and I understand we can combine the two cards. My question is, if my husband also gets the Hyatt card can we combine that card also?

One note from our experience: if you need to combine your points with your DH or mom for a night, you will have to fill out and return a form to Hyatt that specifies exactly how many points you want to transfer. I mention this because it was obnoxious to find out while we were on the phone with Hyatt booking our stay - we had to put that night as a cash reservation (we had 4 free nights it was attached to) and then do their paperwork and hope we'd still be able to convert it to points when things went through (it worked - whew!) I guess I got spoiled because Hilton just lets you go online and pool points with others to your heart's content - so much better. In the end, though, we have 5 free nights in Paris at the Hyatt Regency, so I can't complain too much.

 

[mousehappync]

Hello gurus-- help,please! We just found out our planned spring break trip to Puerto Rico can't happen because of a school field trip our son REALLY wants to go on that overlaps the only dates where flights are a reasonable amount of points on SW (we were going to leave a couple days early to get better point prices). Since we will have AP's, have been wanting to visit my dad in Sarasota, and are moderately insane, we thought--why not go to Disney during peak crowds?! I can get magical pricing at the Pop (that is still INSANELY high for a value) but I'd much rather book on points. I have a ton of UR I can use, but the portal doesn't seem to show any Disney properties. Do they only show up at off times? Is there any other way to book on property with points? (I'm saving our starpoints for future stays, so want to stick with UR.). This is my first time using UR, so I'm not entirely sure how it works? I also have 90k Marriott points I could transfer to Starwood, but I was hoping to bank those for a trip to Hawaii in 2019.