Author: Cashback Cowgirl

Update March 16, 2025. Thanks to TJ in the comments below I now know how to redeem these cards. TJ said:

So the email you got from has a string of number and letters after the word PIN. That’s your activation code. Activate the card at https://www.myprepaidcenter.com. Why SYW doesn’t include these instructions is a mystery to me.

Update March 17, 2025. I got the card with the above process. I found out it only lasts 6 months as well. So in the future I’ll just continue to get the Visa eGift cards since they are easier to acquire. I used up this $200 Mastercard gift card on Pepper buying $200 Sam’s Club gift card at 10x discount.

Originally posted March 13, 2025:

Today I received an email from Citi regarding my Shop Your Way (SYW) card. They announced that SYW points can now be redeemed for a Prepaid Mastercard.

To test this new feature, I redeemed 200,000 SYW points for a $200 Mastercard Gift Card. Unlike the Virtual Gift Card (VGC) eGift cards, which have a six-month expiration date, I noticed no such expiration mentioned during the purchase process, which I found encouraging.

However, the email I received for the card appears to be defective. It lacks both the card number and a redemption link. While the $200 Mastercard Gift Card is visible in my ShopYourWay.com account, clicking on it and then selecting “redeem” redirects me to the gift card purchase page.

Read More

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau gets shut down — sources below. If you try to click the CFPB link under Favorites page of Cashback Cow, you will be presented with the following 404 message.

Russell Vought, Trump’s director of Office of Management & Budget and now acting director of the CFPB shuts it down. Vought sent an email Saturday night ordering all employees at the consumer watchdog to stop virtually all work, including fighting financial abuse.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More