Introduction
I have 2 Citi Dividend cards from former AA Exec cards. These cards have quarterly 5% bonuses. They collect dust until I see a good category to use them in. The good thing about these cards, unlike the Freedom and Discover is that you can bang out all $6,000 of spend in one quarter and hit your yearly limit in one quarter vs being limited to $1500 per quarter. Let’s look back on 2015:
2015 Quarter 1 – Macy’s
Giftcardwiki shows that Macy’s gift cards average 8%. Why would I go charge something for 5% when I can buy the gift card for 8%? Far as I know, there isn’t return protection or extended warranty on the Dividend cards, so there’s no reason to have used it in Q1.
2015 Quarter 2 – Home depot
Once again, Giftcardwiki shows an average discount of 5% and currently 9% off for Home Depot. Plus I was doing my Smart and Final gift card run in Q2 and was buying the GC’s for 20% off. Sure, HD sells VGC but they are costly!
2015 Quarter 3 – Hilton and airlines
I don’t pay for Hilton hotels and I can MS the points for cheaper. Plus, AMEX had a Hilton offer during that timeframe too that was $75 off $350. Odd how AMEX had a Hilton offer the same quarter that Citi had theirs. It just made no sense to save 5%. As for airlines, you can buy some of their gift cards (AA, Southwest) for 5%-10% off. I guess I could have bought Alaska Air gift cards at 5% off. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but I was holding out for Quarter 4…
2015 Quarter 4 – Best Buy and Department Stores
When the chart came out in early 2015, I figured I’d just go nuts at Best Buy. Department stores are intriguing but you can buy Sears, Kohl’s, Macy’s, etc gift cards for > 5%, so why waste it there. But then the AMEX Offer of $20 off $200 came out for Best Buy as well as the Apple Pay Discover thing that it rendered the 5% useless. Thus, I didn’t use the cards at all in 2015. Looking back, I SHOULD have bought Alaska GCs in Q3.
2016 Categories
Drugstores is back in Q2. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where I’ll be banging out my $6,000 x 2 in 2016. Let’s hope our favorite drugstore is still taking debit for Serve loads by April…
you jinxed it with the last sentence!!!
If only I had that much clout…
Love for you to share how you go about your Hilton MSing. I need to restock.
The usual Surpass 6X at grocery. Nothing new there.
I maxed out my 2015 dividend by calling retention and asking to see if there were any offers on the dividend card. Surprisingly they offered $2 extra dollars (3x total) for all spend up to the annual limit (and this does not allow you to go above $300). So I bought mall gift cards with my dividend card and earned a nice profit (300-48 in fees).
ah nice. I had heard others getting retention bonuses like that, but weren’t sure if it hit the $300 limit.