Bonus Ep: Earn Points on Mortgage, 4x 100k+ Card Bonuses, New 4% Card, Devaluations and More
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All right, so today I wanted to release a really quick bonus episode that's not a full-length one because there's been a lot of news lately, both on card offers, some new cards launching, some changes to some programs, a couple offers and free activities that I just felt like I wanted to get in front of you, but there just hasn't been an episode to fit those in. So instead of waiting another month or two, because some of these things are timely, I thought I would just release this, putting it out the next day so that I can get it in front of you really quickly. So

And before we jump in, you should know that the kind of stuff I'm going to share today is the kind of stuff we send every single Saturday in the newsletter. Things like timely deals, latest news, cool, interesting things we're finding on the internet that just doesn't fit into a regular podcast. So if you want to get that every week, highly recommend our newsletter, allthehacks.com slash email. I basically designed the exact newsletter I would want to get because I couldn't find someone doing it that breaks everything down every week and isn't very long and just bullet points of all the best stuff. So go check that out and subscribe.

So the first card I want to talk about is one maybe you haven't heard of, and it's the Mesa homeowners card. And the reason I bring this up is because it is the first card that I'm aware of that lets you earn points on your mortgage payments on a credit card that has no annual fee, no foreign transaction fees, and you don't even have to make your mortgage payments through the card. They just want to validate that you have a mortgage. And there's multiple ways to do that. Whether you send in your mortgage statement, whether you link your bank account, I think they can sometimes pull it from your credit or

and they will just award you 1x transferable points for your mortgage. Now, the caveat is you do need to be spending at least $1,000 a month on the card to be eligible for those 1x points on mortgage payments, and the mortgage points cap at 100,000 points a year. However, that's not the only reason to love the card. The card earns 3x points on a bunch of categories that

other cards I'm aware of don't ever earn bonuses on. So you get 3X on home decor, home improvement, general contractors, cable and streaming, home insurance, property taxes, maintenance, telecom, utilities, and daycare.

Now, I can't think of another card that pays 3x points on property taxes or daycare. Those are two really big categories. If you have a big home improvement project or you're renovating and you can pay a general contractor with a credit card, I can see this being a huge win. So getting 3x points on all those different home and family expenses is awesome. And then also you get 2x points on gas, groceries, and EV charging. Now,

That's not the best earning rate for those categories, but it's pretty solid for a card that has all of those other perks, especially with no annual fee. And then you get 1x points on all your other purchases.

On top of that, one of the things that got me excited about this was the list of perks you get for just having the card. So first, you get a free big box membership, meaning if you pay for a Costco or Sam's Club membership, they'll reimburse you up to $65. You get a $120 annual Lowe's credit in the form of $30 a quarter. You get a $120 annual WAG credit for pet care and walking. That's $10 a month.

You get another $120 annual credit at the farmer's dog, which is a pet food company. It's another $10 a month. And then you get one off credits of a hundred dollars towards armadillo home warranties and a hundred dollars towards cozy earth. And then also, sorry, I forgot you get $200 annually on thumbtack and that's $25 a job. So I believe that's up to eight jobs and you can use them for home maintenance cleaning. I know people have used them to Mount a TV. We've used someone on thumbtack to bartend at a party we hosted once. So that's awesome. It

It doesn't have that I could find any travel or purchase protections, but for things like daycare and property taxes, I'm not looking for return protection or travel protection on those kinds of purchases. This isn't a travel card. This is a card for people who own homes. Honestly, I can make a case that this card is interesting for someone, even if you don't own a home, but you spend a ton of money on daycare, especially if you can pay that daycare with a credit card because you're earning three X points.

Now, how are those points used? Well, you can use them to book travel through their travel portal at one cent. You can use them to buy gift cards or get statement credits for 0.75, 0.5 cents. Neither of those are exciting. But the exciting thing is that they have a really interesting list of transfer partners. Now, when they started, it was just Air India, Hainan Airlines, Thai Airways, Vietnam Airlines, and Finnair.

And of those, I've never heard of any use cases for any of them except that recently Finnair joined the Avios program. And so you can use Finnair Avios with Finnair or you can transfer them to Qatar, British Airways, Aer Lingus, Iberia. And so that was a great addition. That was the thing that first drew me in was, okay, you have some transfer partners, but you have at least one that I know I can get value out of.

We've used our obvious points to book trips to Japan and other things. So that's awesome. But they recently added two amazing transfer partners. One, Air Canada, which is one of my favorite transfer partners. It's where we spend a ton of our miles and points transferring them from other credit card programs.

and SAS Eurobonus. Now SAS is an interesting program because no other credit card program transfers to them, but a lot of the online award search tools do show their results. And so over the past few months, I've been noticing that there are some awesome deals using SAS miles, but there's no way to get them. So I'd always just ignore them, put them out of a site, out of mind. But now there's actually a credit card I can get, the Mesa card, that will earn points that I can transfer to SAS, which has a bunch of interesting redemption options. So that's awesome.

I recently talked to the team and they said there are more interesting redemption options coming. I pointed out that if they are similar to gift cards and statement credits at less than one cent of value, I wouldn't be excited. And the feedback was, no, no, no. I think these are redemption options you will like. So I hope there are more transfer partners to more airlines. The fact that after launch, they've already added two and they haven't been out that long is a promising sign.

And then last on the hotel side, they do have a core. They transfer three to two. All the other transfers are one to one. A core is a fixed point program. So there's not a ton of outsized upside in value. So it's a solid transfer partner if you're looking for hotels in Europe and you want to use your points. But I'm way more excited about being able to go to Finnair, Avios, SAS Eurobonus and Air Canada Aeroplan.

Unfortunately, there is not a signup bonus on the Mesa card right now. In fact, the only bonus that's available that I'm aware of is a referral link. I'll share my referral link. It's 5,000 points. So if you want to check this card out, which if you have a mortgage, it seems to make a lot of sense because you're going to get up to 100,000 points a year. So however much your annual mortgage payments are, unless they are more than $100,000 a year, you're going to get points on all those mortgage payments as long as you spend $1,000 a month on the card.

My signup bonus, I put it at allthehacks.com slash MESA, M-E-S-A. Or if you sign up in the app, the code is F-C-R-G-N-B. I wish that was a little easier to remember. So I'll definitely put that in the show notes, but you can just go to allthehacks.com slash MESA, M-E-S-A. That'll redirect if you're interested in the card.

Next, the Amex Platinum and the Amex Gold card both have best ever offers right now. Now, there's an asterisk to what I'm saying because there's this new language with Amex offers where instead of saying 175,000 points, it says as high as 175,000 points. And then Amex asks you to basically apply for the card. And then before they do a heart inquiry or before you get approved for the card, you

they're going to go ahead and show you what your offer is. So I actually don't have a lot of data points as far as what the offers are and how many people are getting them at the as high as value. However, 175,000 points for a personal platinum card and a hundred thousand points for a personal gold card for the last five to 10 years is the best I've ever seen. I actually did some digging and I think it's the best there's ever been. And so if you had your eyes on either of those cards, now is certainly a time to see if you're qualified for those as high as offers.

Now we want to make it really easy for you to get those offers. And so it's actually surprising, but some of the best offers come from referral links. And so what we did was we asked all of our, all the hacks members to share their referral links for these offers and other Amex cards. We replaced all the links at all the hacks.com slash cards with referral links. So if you want to join our membership, you can add your referral links to the rotation and earn some bonus points. If anyone ends up using them, we cycle through different members links when you click those cards and

But on that site now are the as high as 100,000 points for gold, 175,000 points for platinum. And you'll be supporting a lot of members using those links as well. Though, if you find better offers elsewhere, obviously always use those. Or if you or someone in your household has one of these cards and can refer you so you can kind of double dip and get the referral bonus and the signup bonus, by all means, definitely do that.

However, there's one big asterisk here, which is note that the Amex Platinum card will be changing. So when the Chase Sapphire Reserve announced all their changes, Amex came out and said the Platinum and Business Platinum cards will change. They're going to have higher annual fees. I think Amex just wants to be the highest annual fee personal card out there right now. And so they've announced they're going to change them. They haven't said when or how or what's changing other than they will have a high annual fee.

And rumors right now are that it'll be around $895, but nothing is final yet. So note that that $175K Amex Platinum offer is for the current version of the card, which will change sometime before the end of the year. You won't have to pay that new annual fee until your card renews, so you don't have to worry about that. But some of the perks will hopefully actually get better when they upgrade that card. I assume that they're not going to charge a higher annual fee and offer a worse set of perks and benefits, but, you know, anything is possible.

I did mention the new Chase Sapphire Reserve, Chase Sapphire Reserve business cards. I went through all my thoughts on those cards in episode 232 a couple weeks ago in the What's in My Wallet at the end. So I don't want to run through them again right now. The only thing that I didn't know then that I know now is what those bonuses are. So on the personal card, there's a 100,000 point bonus. Plus you get a $500 Chase travel credit.

after spending $5,000 in three months. That's fantastic. An amazing bonus, $5,000 spend, getting 100,000 points plus $500 is about a 31% return on your spend. And that's valuing points at only one cent. We often get two or more cents of value out of our chase points, which would make this a 51% return on spend for that signup bonus.

Obviously, you have a high annual fee, but my takeaway, and I wrote a lot of my thoughts at allthehacks.com slash CSR, is that I think the perks make up for the annual fee on this card. I know it's a really high annual fee, and obviously, it's a personal decision, and you may be in a city where you can use those perks more easily than other people who might not be. But for me, I think I'm going to get more value out of the new annual fee than I will out of the old one.

On the business side, you've got a higher bonus at 200,000 points, but you've got a lot more spend at $30,000. You do have three more months to do it in six months. So that's a really big point bonus, but smaller in ROI, right? On the return on spend, it's probably going to be effectively about a 7% to 8% return if you're valuing points at 1 cent per point. If you value them at 2 cents, it's closer to 15%. It's comparable to the kind of bonuses they've had on the VentureX business and the MX business platinum.

However, chase points are amazing. Amex points and Capital One points don't transfer to Hyatt. They don't transfer to United.

I'm really looking at this business offer as an opportunity to rack up a lot of chase points. I'm not the kind of person who's opening up 15 cards a year. So yes, the return on spend is lower, but if I'm not earning opening up 20 cards a year, then some of my spend is not going to go towards a signup bonus. And that return on spend is way lower than seven or 8% that I'd get here. So this one I'm really excited for. I haven't done it yet. I'm not going to do it.

They have clarified a few of the rules. Just to be clear, when it comes to getting the personal Chase Sapphire Reserve card, you can also have the personal Chase Sapphire Preferred, but it looks like you can't get the bonus if you have the Chase Sapphire Preferred. And so the guidance I've gotten is you should downgrade your Chase Sapphire Preferred card before getting the Chase Sapphire Reserve if you want to get the bonus.

There is supposed to be a pop-up on the site that most people have been getting that will let you know if you're going to get the bonus to prevent you from getting a hard inquiry and applying for a card or even getting a card but not getting a bonus. So that should work to be able to make sure you're eligible for the bonus.

Obviously, all of these offers are only good as of the recording time, which is June 26, 2025. I don't know how long these deals will last, but I will clarify one thing. One of the biggest complaints about this change is that they've removed the ability to earn 1.5 cents in the travel portal. Now, if you already have points, you have a lot of time to take advantage of that.

But the Frequent Miler team did a deep dive on this new points boost feature. And it looks like if you fly United or book a lot of hotels, it's probably not going to be that hard to get as much or more value as you used to get from your chase points booking in the portal.

Now, if you transfer your points to airlines and hotels, none of that matters. So for me, none of that matters because that's how I use my points. But I just want to point out that it looks more promising than people thought it was, but it's not guaranteed. So while there might be the ability to get those points now, it might not last forever.

I love helping you answer all the toughest questions about life, money, and so much more. But sometimes it's helpful to talk to other people in your situation, which actually gets harder as you build your wealth. So I want to introduce you to today's sponsor, Long Angle. Long Angle is a community of high net worth individuals with backgrounds in everything from technology, finance, medicine, to real estate, law, manufacturing, and more.

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The last card I want to touch on is the Coinbase card. And there's not a lot of details about it, so this will be pretty short. But Coinbase has announced that in partnership with First Electronic Bank and Amex, they're going to issue a card that with some level of balance of crypto at Coinbase will be a 4% on everything card.

So for those that missed out on the smartly card earning an uncapped 4% on everything here is a chance for you, but we don't know how many assets you're going to have to hold that Coinbase to get that 4%. Only thing we know is that you're going to need to have Coinbase one, which is a $5 a month or $50 a year subscription.

In other news, two unfortunate things. One, the Capital One VentureX lounge access has gotten a lot less valuable because they've removed the ability to get guests into the lounges. Now, this takes effect next year, but it's not great news. So if you have a VentureX, a few things are changing. One, if you have authorized users, which used to be free, they lose their free access to lounges.

You're now going to have to pay $125 a year for authorized users to get access to lounges, and you can only have up to four of those. As for guests, in Capital One lounges, you are going to have no guest access unless you spend $75,000, in which case you will get access to have two guests in the Capital One lounges and one guest in the Capital One landings, which are a slightly different version of their lounges.

Otherwise, you're gonna have to pay the $45 for an adult and $25 for a child. So that's a huge bummer unless you're already spending $75,000 a year on the VentureX. Now VentureX also includes a Priority Pass membership. On the personal card and for authorized users, you're gonna have to pay for guests $35. So also a bummer. On the business card and for authorized users on the business card, you're gonna get two guests free. Then you'll have to pay $35 per. So slightly better for the business card

But for many of you, if you have other cards with access to Priority Pass, there are plenty of cards with better guesting privileges. So the biggest loss here is that if you're not spending $75,000 a year, you are not going to be able to bring guests in on your VentureX card.

So for someone without kids, it's possible to maybe add your spouse for $125 a year, or you could both get a VentureX card. I think between the annual points and the travel credit, it kind of makes up for the annual fee. So that's a pretty easy way to get two people into the Capital One lounges.

However, if you're traveling with a family as we are and you have kids, I don't really see a way around it without spending the $75,000. Now, the way the $75,000 works is when you spend it in one year, you get the guesting privileges for that year and the next year. And so this is something that if you're close, maybe you want to finish out this year and hit it. And if you're not close, you'd maybe want to wait until next year to do it if you want to do it at all in the first place. There aren't that many Capital One lounges. So I would say if you're regularly using Capital One lounges, then maybe consider whether this makes sense.

Unlike a card like the Amex Platinum or the Delta Reserve, where you can spend $75,000 a year to get guesting privileges, this is a 2x points card. So this is my everything card. So putting a large property tax or income tax payment on this card, where I might pay around 2% or less on fees to be able to make that transaction to get 2x points, makes it such that

It's a little easier to stomach putting $75,000 on this card and maybe paying a 1.85% fee to do it because I'm getting 2x points, whereas on a lot of those other cards, I don't want to do that for 1x points. It's just not worth it. Now, we don't go to Capital One lounges enough, but

But we did just open up a VentureX business card and the minimum spend on the business card is $30,000 to get the first 150,000 points. So I think if we're going to get there, we're probably going to get halfway there. And I'll try to decide whether we get the rest of the way there. It really depends on the kind of spending we have this year and whether it fits into our business. But the fact that it's a 2X card is better than a 1X card.

Another piece of bad news is that Hilton has increased the number of points it costs for a lot of their standard rooms. And this is mostly at the high end. It used to cap out at 120,000 points for a standard night reward. And now there are some properties around the world that are going from 120 to 140, 160, as high as 200,000 points a night. So if you were looking for some of those aspirational properties, you could need a lot more Hilton points to book those properties.

However, at least right now, free night certificates have not been affected at all. So in a way, if you have free night certificates from the Hilton Surpass or the Hilton Aspire cards, you're now getting more effective point value for those certificates. They're not actually getting anything different in terms of the types of stays you can have. But fortunately, a

A lot of our Hilton stays are through free night certificates and those are not affected. So the devaluation really only affects you if you're using points and it doesn't affect every property, but it is a bummer. And I always hate to see programs devalue their currency. On the plus side, if you hold any of the gold, platinum or reserve personal or business Delta cards, as of recording today, June 26th, you will get access to a free six or 12 months of Uber one.

which usually just brings the rates down on Uber's delivery fees down and whatnot. I've been a member because we have all these Uber credits on Amex. And if we're going to spend enough money on Uber to use all these credits, Uber One is usually paid off for itself for some of the perks we get. But now the fact that I can put my Amex...

Delta business platinum card as my Uber One payment method, I'm gonna get 12 months of free Uber One. That's awesome. It's 12 months on both the platinum and reserve cards, six months on the gold card, and you've gotta activate and start doing it sometime between now and June 25th, 2026. So awesome added value to your Delta card as long as you don't have the blue Delta card, which doesn't get this perk. Another cool promotion is that if you are staying at a Hyatt between now and August 5th,

many of those Hyatt gyms have Pelotons. And if you do a Peloton ride, you typically would get a hundred points per ride through August 5th, you will get 500 points per ride. You could do up to 10 per month. And so if you had a five night stay, you could do five rides, 20 minutes each, and you get an extra 2,500 points for that stay. I don't know if you've ever done a Peloton ride, but if you've ever done a Peloton ride,

I don't know if doing a 20 minute ride for 500 points is worth your time, but you're working out, you're getting exercise. Like that's awesome. So if you can get rewarded for doing that, all the better. If you want to make it a 40 minute workout, sign into your partner's Peloton account. That's linked to their Hyatt account. Now, all of a sudden you're doubling up. You're getting 5,000 points on a five night stay.

5,000 points is probably not worth much more than a hundred dollars in most redemptions. So this isn't going to be a lucrative moneymaker, but it's definitely something that when I was staying at a Hyatt in Boise last week, I definitely took advantage of this because I wanted to get a workout in and why not get some extra points? One quick correction actually from a few weeks ago, I talked about using Plastique, which is a bill payment platform that allows you to pay a ton of bills with your credit card for a fee.

And I was mistaken that it was mostly targeted towards business. And I was totally wrong. You can pay auto loans, home loans, student loans, tuition, rent, HOA fees, utilities, insurance bills, daycare, all on a credit card using their platform as an individual. So that's really cool. So obviously you have to pay a fee. I think it's about 2.9%.

and you're not getting a bonus on most spending categories. However, if you're trying to meet the minimum spend for a welcome bonus, this can be a fantastic way to do it on expenses you already have that maybe don't naturally take a credit card. A few other things. If you're not familiar, there are a couple programs, especially this summer, that might be some good activities for free. One, national parks have free admission days. So August 4th, September 27th, November 11th are all free days for national parks.

If you have kids, Kids Bowl Free is a website that you can activate free bowling during the summer. And then last, if you have a Bank of America card, including a debit card, they have free museum days one weekend every month. And the list of museums is really long and impressive. So definitely check that out if you're looking for something to do and it happens to be over one of those weekends that everything is free.

Last thing I want to share and shout out to Anche for sharing this with me is that if you have a subscription to an app on an iPhone and you made that subscription through Apple's subscription platform, you can actually go into your settings, look at your subscriptions, and you can click this button that says see all plans.

And what this person shared with me was that they were using this app called Better Me for health coaching. And they were originally on a plan that was $119.99 a year. And they just clicked this button to see all the other plans. And there was another option for an annual subscription at $59.99 a year. So they cut their annual subscription in half because I guess the way this works is that they have to publish all the possible plans to Apple.

And so you can go in and pick them. So that might've been some promotional plan that they don't surface in the app to everyone, but it is there for you to go switch. So if you're paying any regular subscriptions to apps through Apple's payment platform, go check your subscriptions and see if there's another plan and see if you can save any money.

So that's all I wanted to cover today in this little bonus episode. I hope it's helpful. A lot of this stuff doesn't always fit in the podcast. So like I said, if you want to get these deals, news, everything on a much more timely basis, go to allthehacks.com slash email. We send a newsletter every Saturday morning with the best things we're finding, the best deals out there, and things that are way too timely to fit into most episodes of the podcast. So that's it for this week. Go subscribe to the newsletter. I will see you next week.