Update 2025-01-03. This worked again this year. I repeated the same thing again as I did below. Amex just emailed me and let me know I’ll be getting a $50 credit.

Originally posted 2024-12-14:

So yesterday I learned from a Profitable Content article that Amex is now giving Amex Business Platinum (ABP) credit card holders a lovely $50 quarterly statement credit on Hilton purchases. (This now makes the ABP truly a free card to have from a frugal minded non-traveler perspective.)

I immediately wondered if I could somehow buy a gift card with it the $50 credit and asked a friend about it on discord. He said he had already very recently done this, purchasing a $50 Hilton gift card with his ABP just the other day.

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Originally posted in The Wednesday Morning Weekly — August 7, 2024.
Updated December 27, 2024 for MEAB Guest Post :

Most of us agree how important it is to have an emergency fund — it’s often one of the first recommendations from financial planners along with tracking all of your spending each month. A three to six month emergency fund recommendation is common. Some of us, including myself prefer a one to two year emergency fund, or more. It depends on a lot of factors: risk level, type of employment, number of dependents, personal preference, etc.

In the recent past, many of us who prefer a larger emergency fund have been concerned because that money was not getting much interest — just sitting there eroding. Just a couple years ago it was hardly getting anything as interest rates were near zero. So many of us opted to just put all we had into the S&P 500.

Today, at this time of writing 4%+ APY is fairly common — around 5% just a few months back. So things have changed quite a bit.

Well even better, is that if you are in the bonus hunting game, that emergency fund can also serve as a bankroll for the bonus hunting. It then becomes dual purpose: both a bonus hunting bankroll as well as an emergency fund. I call this the BHEF — the Bonus Hunting / Emergency Fund.

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Below is my plan for Q1 2025 using my custom cashback strategy as described in my article: Introducing My 5%+ Custom Cashback Strategy. (Some has changed since I wrote the aforementioned article, like I product changed my Citi Custom Cash for Citi Double Cash recently, as I am getting a lot of use out of several 2% cashback cards lately; but the article should still be useful I think especially the phone wallpaper idea.)

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The Citi Shop Your Way (SYW) card along with Discover It Miles (DIM) are my top two favorite cards right now — go figure! Which I think is very cool since I am starting to become elderly and remember Sears ever since the late 1970’s. I have the classic Dawn of Discover design on the DIM card so both cards have yellows and reds in them which I think so cool — popular Earthy colors from the 70’s:

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As I mentioned the other day, the first card I applied for in my sixteen card App-O-Rama (AOR) was the Citi Shop Your Way (SYW) card. Again, it’s a card I have been wanting a while and figured then was the opportunity to finally get it.

I received this card just two months ago and was expecting at some point I’d eventually get some stacking offers via email. Well I just got my first offer today and it blew my socks off. First off, I wasn’t expecting an offer so soon and not as good as the following:

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So a couple months ago I sat at 6/24 Chase Status, having already acquired the four Ink cards I had wanted. I didn’t really need many more Chase cards but did need many 1.5% to 2% cashback cards for various reasons — IYKYK. Rather than wait over a year to start trickling them in, I just decided to go all out and apply for ALL of them in an AOR and revisit Chase cards in two years. Must have them all NOW! 😺

I share in this article which cards I applied for, my reasoning and which cards I actually got along with my future plans.

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