Category: Credit Cards

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.

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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.

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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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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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