By now, you may notice that one thing that I am constantly stressing is ‘make your money work for you’. It’s one of the reasons why I am a huge proponent of responsible credit card use in that you are being rewarded (and in the US, handsomely) for things that you were spending money on anyways. I previously wrote about how to leverage spending by signing up for special promos and airline/hotel dining reward programs and double/triple/quadruple dips with shopping portals + activating offers + earning elite status. Here are a couple more ways to not only earn more points but also to save you money. This post has some things that are applicable to debit and credit cards!

^{Reminder: credit cards are ONLY worth it if you can pay off the balance each month! Need to brush up on credit including basics, cards and myths?}

How to TRIPLE or QUADRUPLE Dip Using Shopping Portals + Offsetting Annual Fees + Activating Card Offers!

One of the biggest mental hurdles/questions from people is around paying annual fees (AF) on cards. I hear constantly: how I can do this without paying an annual fee or it’s not worth XX amount to do this. As I have mentioned before, I think that it’s useful to reframe your thinking. This isn’t a fee along the lines of a bank overdraft fee or Ticketmaster “insert ridiculous/outrageous” fee – it is more similar to a subscription service. Are you paying to stream music or movies? Your AF is access to the points game. Another way to think about them is looking how the first year’s AF price is always easy to justify with the sign up bonuses (SUB) you earn: take for example, the Chase Sapphire Preferred card with its $95 AF and current SUB of 60,000 Ultimate Reward points. Chase values these points at $750 and while you will NOT be redeeming the points through the travel portal, this gives a valuation for your SUB: are you willing to spend $95 to earn $750?

Here’s the craziest/coolest thing with travel reward cards: they come with other perks and are ways to offset the annual fee. This is a big part of travel hacking that people miss – in the same way that it is important to know thyself – know thy cards. Case in point, Chase has a partnership with GoPuff that gives eligible credit card members a $10 statement credit for a GoPuff order. This gives you $10/month PER eligible card so if you’re someone that has been playing the game for nearly two decades….you may have a healthy stash of Chase credit cards as the eligible card list is very extensive. But let’s take again the example of Chase Sapphire Preferred, the $95 AF can be offset by the $120 ($10/mo X 12 mos) GoPuff credits alone!

Yes GoPuff is expensive comparatively to the grocery store or even a convenience store but you can make it a bargain in a few ways. First, this referral to open an account will give you $100 credits redeemable as $10 off plus free delivery on the first 10 orders within 30 days. (FYI I will also receive a bonus for referring you.) Then you take into account your $10 Chase credits. Note: $10 GoPuff credit will be deducted from your order but the $10 from Chase you will see as a credit on your credit card account (which is actual preferred since you will earn miles/points on the GoPuff total and still get $10 back!). In the above photo, the total for everything was $212.89 but then I had $80 in GoPuff credits from a referral bonus and then will have an additional $80 credited from Chase to my various cards so the total I spent was $52.89 which included $15 in tips. This haul replenished car snacks, ice cream stash (normally this is the majority of my GoPuff orders but my freezer is currently full of ice for my cold therapy machine for post op rehab), pizzas for post-op meals, and the ultimate find of Lavazza pods. These fit my Nespresso machine and were also on sale (there’s ten in total!) so this was actually a killer deal. Costco stopped carrying the Peet’s Nespresso pods so I have been paying $7-$8 for a 10-pack so ten 10-packs in addition to everything else is significantly less than the $70-$80 for the only ten 10-packs of Peet’s pods!

Beautiful Tips:

• I pay for a monthly fam membership ($7.99) that includes free delivery and additional discounts.
• Because I want the aggregate of the tips to be $15 and to hopefully go to one person, I always schedule the orders for at least six hours in advance or next day and write a note asking them to combine the orders (in Denver, they have always been combined).
• The minimum for an order is $12.95 pretax and tip so I aim to be as near that amount as possible.
• Possible quadruple hack: check your credit cards for offers – Chase had an offer for 15% back on orders earlier this summer!
• Certain places like NYC have pick up locations so it’s possible for you to save even more money since tipping (and delivery fees) aren’t applicable!
• If you don’t have a GoPuff locale near you, you could send to kids/nieces/nephews/cousins in college or far away as “thinking of you” gifts. They actually are the ideal GoPuff demographic!

The Double Dip By Using Shopping Portals*

While I normally use the AA shopping portal, they recently changed special terms that only one order per loyalty program earns miles/LP. So I turned to my other preferred shopping portal:Rakuten. I love that the account can be set up to earn Amex MR points instead of cashback. The multiplier was 15x when I ordered so my $16.68 in cashback is converted to 1669 MR points! FYI: While I love that Rakuten has an app that is easy to use (and sometimes the earnings through the app are significantly higher), I have found that I need to use the website to complete GoPuff orders.

If you haven’t signed up, this is a referral link that will put $30 in your account once you spend $30 in 90 days (I also will receive a bonus!)

Beautiful Tips:

• The Rakuten App is incredibly slow when placing GoPuff orders so I delete the app to place my orders.
• You will not get credit for orders placed on a merchant’s app – they must be placed on the website!
• Besides GoPuff orders, it’s best to use the Rakuten app since multiplier rates are often higher on it.

Recap on shopping portals:

*While this next hack can be used with either a credit or debit card, it is only a double dip with the rewards that you earn using credit cards.

If you shop online at all, not using a shopping portal is likely causing you to lose out on easy money. Simplified version of why it works is that it’s a form of affiliate marketing – companies pay the shopping portal for generating business. In turn, you are rewarded with bonus miles/points/cashback when you start on the shopping portal (or thru the app or having the browser extension activated)! You will then click through to the merchant’s own webpage to complete the transaction. This is a “double dip” because you will earn miles and points twice: once from using a rewards credit card for the purchase AND secondly by making your online purchases through the shopping portal AND could be a triple dip if the merchant has its own loyalty/rewards program!

^{Want to learn the basics of travel hacking: primer on travel hacking}

Cashback Monitor: A cashback comparison tool for miles, points and cashback – rates can vary dramatically from shopping portals so it’s a good idea to check if you want to get the most bang for your buck. It’s a best practice to check this prior to

Also I learned that Safari (and Firefox) while great for more secure browsing are not ideal for using the portals as cookies are necessary to track your purchases. So I would clear my Chrome browser history and only have this site up and click to the best rate. If you are going to do any comparison shopping, do it beforehand (I would save an excursion as a favorite to Viator once I found one I liked whilst researching). This way I could sign into the chosen portal which would direct me to the vendor and I would sign into Viator and be able to select and book the excursions.

If you’re already going to spend the money, there’s often times ways that you can be rewarded for it!

Which shopping portal(s) do you use?