Category: Frugality

Update 12/14/2024. Amex is now offering $200 in Hilton statement credits, at $50 per quarter. This credit currently can be used to buy Hilton gift cards which I am now doing. I value this $200 in credits at 65% making the total value to me $130. This makes having the ABP effectively free to own indefinitely — assuming Dell credits remain but I imagine they likely will not (we’ll see).

The Wednesday Morning Weekly — September 4, 2024

I am frugal and I don’t travel much. The last time I flew in a plane was in 1992 for a work related convention — a round trip between Los Angeles and Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It was also the first time I had ever flown in a plane. Of all my credit cards, the primary travel benefit I make use of is the World of Hyatt transfer partner with Chase allowing us to get $150 rooms w/ free breakfast for effectively $50 per night. We do also make use of the Amex Business Platinum (ABP) $200 annual credit to fly my boyfriend’s mother out to visit every year or so, via a Southwest flight.

Many people believe the only reason to retain any Amex metal card, is primarily for the travel benefits. Now I perhaps agree with this with respect to the personal metal cards, but not so much with respect to the business metal cards. The effective annual fee for me on both the Amex Business Gold (ABG) and Amex Business Platinum (ABP) are around $100 each. Even with this one might ask me, “Why are they worth even that if you are not a traveler?”

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Update 10/26/2024. The 1.5x UR CSR discount on Apple products is back and will available through the end of November.

The Wednesday Morning Weekly — September 11, 2024

This one will be short and sweet!

A brand new iPhone Pro costs $999 before taxes. After say 7% sales tax it’s $1068 out the door. This is quite pricey!

But for those who have a Chase Sapphire Reserve (CSR), Chase often runs specials where you can buy Apple products with Ultimate Rewards points at 1.5x, which provides a 33.3% discount on the iPhone — if you value Chase UR at 1 CPP as I do. This brings the $1068 out the door price down to $712.

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The Wednesday Morning Weekly — October 9, 2024

So I noticed we were low on pork butt the other day after examining the contents of the chest freezer. Pork butt is a great affordable solution to beef roasts for stews, as well as for ground pork. Pulled barbecue pork butt is absolutely delicious as well — we are into BBQ here at home and have a Weber Smokey Mountain barbecue pit. Additionally with the ground pork, we can make various sausages including hot Italian sausage as well as chorizo.

We usually buy our pork butt in bulk at Sam’s Club because they usually have decent prices. However lately I notice they are quite a bit expensive at $2.28/lb:

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The Wednesday Morning Weekly — September 25, 2024

I don’t personally own a Keurig but I do occasionally get free cups of coffee made by them when I visit my local credit union. I do appreciate the convenience of them for a quick cup of coffee. Discard the old K cup, pop in the new K cup, put the cup under and press start — done!

The K cups are quite pricey though and really adds up to a lot over the year. Also I personally find that the K cup coffee doesn’t taste any better than the instant coffee we buy at Walmart.

So I had this idea I shared with a good friend of mine who owns a Keurig, who buys K cups. In this article I share what he thought of it and some photos he snapped for this article. This perhaps saves one over $500 per year and doesn’t sacrifice any quality of life / convenience.

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I have a US Bank Cash+ credit card as part of my 5%+ Customized Cashback Strategy. I use it primarily for Utilities but don’t get even close to the $2k quarterly spending cap — not even half that.

I learned from an acquaintance on RJ’s Profitable Content Pro discord channel that Ebay purchases code as MCC 5311 — Department Stores on the US Bank Cash+ card.

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The Wednesday Morning Weekly

Our city water is very bad and we used to buy bottled drinking water from Walmart at $1 per gallon — now more recently $1.35 per gallon. It was a lot of work transporting the water and carrying them from the car each trip, not to mention quite costly over the year. Assuming a conservative 1 gallon per day, this results in $493 per year! Very pricey! We also didn’t care for the flavor as we could taste the plastic odor in it. 1 gallon per day wasn’t ever really enough for the both of us for drinking, coffee/tea & cooking. 3 gallons per day is more reasonable. This means if we consumed 3 gallons of this Walmart bottled water per day, over the year it would cost us $1479. This article shares an alternative at 2.5 cents per gallon or $27 per year for three gallons per day.

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