A View To A Kill When talking to people about bad news, the phrase “well it could be worse” often arises.  Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it and this Penfed news adds to the increasingly long list of bad manufactured spend (MS) mojo.  A few days ago I started reading reports of Penfed not paying

No Soup For You With the covid situation looming, the promotions that big banks have offered to try and increase spend from their consumers have been very generous and also tempting.  I only have limited access to all of the deals offered because I don’t have relationships with Citi anymore, and also don’t have some

Extravagant If you haven’t read this piece in Business Insider about Brian Kelly, aka “The Points Guy” or “TPG” as many call him, you may want to check it out.  It’s been out for awhile, but many in the points, miles and travel space haven’t read it yet.  If you don’t have access to Business

Possibilities This might be an manufactured spend (MS) bone, but that bone also may not have any meat on it, not quite sure.  So I was listening to a podcast about a month ago and a commercial came on that talked about a new “cash back debit card”.  I had to rewind the commercial because

On Fire As the stock market started tumbling in the past couple of weeks, I thought more about my long term goals both in terms of points and in dollars.  As a step toward saving money, I redeemed 1 million Chase Ultimate Rewards for cash.  That cash-out was about the same time that I was

Fake News? It almost seems like fake news to me.  In 2019 I started becoming interested in the FIRE (financial independence retire early) movement.  The great thing about concepts in FIRE, like high net percent paycheck savings and consistent investing, are wonderful attributes for anyone to implement.  They teach people discipline, how to conserve...

Bye Bye Today I received an email from Rakuten stating that starting on February 15th, Rakuten would no longer payout an extra 3% cash back on purchases from GiftCardMall.com, GiftCards.com, and Raise.com.  Instead, Rakuten will be offering just 1% cash back for those sites and purchases.  The email states: and the bad news detail: For