I had to make a fairly large purchase at Macy’s. I was thinking it would come in around $1,500, so I began to search around for the best portals to earn miles. Historically I have always used EVReward.Com to find the best deals. I had just received an email from U.S. Airways telling me that Macy’s had bonus miles that week, but when I checked EVReward, the bonus miles weren’t showing up. I then checked CashBackMonitor.Com which I heard was a little more reliable. And in fact, the bonus miles for that week from U.S. Airways were listed – maybe time for a default portal search engine change.
While shopping portals might seem like a pain and not worth the hassle, literally four clicks and 90 seconds is all it takes to shop through a portal. A great fact about portals, and little known, is that you don’t necessarily need to use a credit card from the bank portal you are going through if you choose to go through a bank portal. We’ll come back to that in a minute.
I went to Raise.Com, which is a great web site to buy discounted gift cards (i.e. you can routinely buy Starbucks gift cards for ~14% off and them load them right to your existing card – I’m sure you use the app to pay through your phone). After checking Macy’s weekly, they finally put the items I was looking for on sale for a pretty good discount. I also signed up for Macy’s emails, which gave me an instant 15% coupon to stack with any other offer. That took my total to $1,020 for the items I needed. I wound up purchasing $1,022 worth of Macy’s e-gift cards from Raise.Com for $937 – a quick and easy savings of $85.
That might be good enough for most people, but I also purchased the gift cards at Raise.Com through another portal, Mr. Rebates, which gives 1% back on all gift cards purchased at Raise.Com. So with the $85 savings from Raise and ~$9 from Mr. Rebates, that saved roughly $94.
I then went through Chase Bank’s Ultimate Rewards portal and paid with the gift cards. While there’s a chance the portal won’t pay out, a few days after the purchase I received the following email:
Valid for $47.60 of cash back, I value these closer to $90 since I plan to use these on a business or first class seat for a trip I’m planning in the spring.
That works out to be just over 18% off the purchase for very little work.
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