We cry all together over the apparent end of Redbird, checkout an awesome spending bonus list, learn of the Marriott Rewards changes, checkout Southwest Transfarency, visit some awesome tents & tree houses, ride with a Japan Rail Pass, shake our heads with some incredible beards & moustaches, enjoy the best beer bottles, and then I show how I burned over 1 Million miles & points again because I am an expert or whatever you call them bloggers in this space…
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Well ladies and gents of The Hobby. Look for another hobby I say. Every hack is being killed left and right. The mega “hack” so many bloggers kept raving about, the one resembling a communist bird, you know, the Redbird at Target, appears to be dead. First, Miles to Memories came out with a good post on what to do and leaving some hope. Then Frequent Miler called it dead, cash only going forward and all, omg! Who the phuck would use this to load cash? Oh wait, don’t answer that. It is like one of those historic days we lose one of our own. Just when we lost the Vanilla Reloads with CVS and I made THIS video in one take! I am way too busy to make another one so please amuse me if you dare! To feel better, just blame them asshole bloggers killing deals left and right, today and tomorrow blah blah blah. Update: We have a photo of the memo now! Please, please, compose yourselves. Life will go on. Trust me or just get a CSP with my links bwahahahaha! Update: Target memo story was broken at NoonRadar, for the record!
Complete list of spending bonuses for credit cards. Awesome find at reddit.
50k Delta Skymiles if you never had this card before. Gold. (HT: MileCards)
There are some changes in the sucky Marriott Rewards program which make it just a tiny bit less sucky.
Southwest introduces Transfarency and Crankly Flier pounces on it. Key takeway: “Because when it comes to fees, Southwest is always the lowest. When it comes to the total cost to fly? Not so much.”
Another set of awesome travel photographs from Matador Network. My favorite is the first one…from the Maldives…for obvious reasons, wow!
Another great list at AFAR, this one of tents and tree houses where you can spend the night. Some of them look so cool, you can have your Hyatt suite again #boring. Anyone been to any of these?
This is an incredible story of a young guy with a brain tumor that gave him amnesia and dementia. Then a surgery unlocked all his memories and they all came back.
My colleague takes down the pro active investment management arguments by a Goldman Sachs investment guy. It’s awesome!
Well, I have not seen many Japan Rail Pass, Shinkansen, & Narita Express train reviews!
10 incredible home theaters you can buy for millions. I swear when I become a Titan I will invite you all as a humble thank you for making me a Titan blogger. Bwahahahhaha
The 2015 World Beard and Moustache Championship. You won’t believe the pictures here, OMG! How do they come out? How many hours do they spend on this?
Ladies and gents, I present to you the ten most beautiful beers on the planet.
I went over 1 million miles & points burned this year, woohoo! To be more exact: 1,005, 704. And this is after burning more than one million in 2014. I went over the 1M mark after burning 15,160 Southwest points for a round trip between Detroit and Orlando for an early February conference. I then proceeded to burn 18,000 SPG for the Four Points by Sheraton Studio City where I usually stay every other year this conference is held in Orlando. For 5 nights. I made a rental car reservation on the Thrifty site after looking around a little bit (Orbitz, Hotwire, Carrentalsavers) and then fed the res # to Autoslash which already saved $7.03 less than a minute I fed the res # into it, wow! This hobby can get you some aspirational experiences but it can also save you some cold hard cash which…is addictive I must admit lol. To me it was and is about gaming it and see how much you can….win lol.
I am parking my cash from my rental property sale into Discover Bank for the 0.95% interest. They gave me a targeted promo for $50 if I open an account with more than $5k in it, I did not turn it down. I could have gotten some more miles with a brokerage company but then I would have to invest the dough but my primary goal is to keep it safe and liquid before I pay off the mortgage which was one of my main goals in life, be completely debt free by age 50 and focus on getting the kids a great education. I know it would hurt my credit score and my churning lol but I think I will eventually get over it 😉 Any ideas to whore that cash around please let me know. Please also be aware that Fidelity has banned me from getting any more miles with them because I overdid it years ago. And yes I ‘ve tried, bastards they remember me…and my wife 🙂
And I leave you with this…
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1st?
That whole transfarency campaign is a joke. Tell me, SW, if you’re so transfarent, why is it even you can’t explain how much your points are worth?
1st from mle!
Synchrony’s (spun-off from GE) High Yield savings is 1.05%, and works well after you get it set up. Full FDIC coverage. I think it is the highest yield for no limit accounts.
Unlike me who is second.
I would be curious to know what percentage of RedBird reloads at Target were from folks in the “Hobby.” Well, I guess am I going back to Serve. God I hate Walmart. I wonder when Walmart does the same.
Or something.
That’s a pretty sweet bike!
George, lend your countrymen a hand and buy Greek bonds! 7-8% yield? That should even pay for kids college! :p
That said, why not pay off you mortgage early? That Pfizer home shouldn’t have cost that much?
Thanks Buzz, will read later, just wanted to express appreciation !
😀
Redbird announcements on Miles to Memories, FM, and DoC… the three blogs I trust the most for good information. And mysteriously there is silence on all the big blogs that spend their energy spamming card links into every article. Whodathunkit?
Not that is that important, but I bet you wouldn’t know from reading about it thus far on popular and reputable blogs that I was in fact the one who broke the Target memo story yesterday, hours before the big bloggers posted about it (some linking to my breaking story, most not bothering at all to link or mention).
I saw the memo in person yesterday afternoon when I went looking for confirmation at a couple of Target stores, then posted about it on my site describing in detail what it looked like etc. Shortly after–and before the bloggers posted anything about the memo–a Target employee group-emailed me and a bunch of popular MS bloggers, he linked to my breaking news post confirming it was 100% accurate and that he too had seen the memo. Shortly after that pics of it were published on blogs.
Again, it doesn’t matter that much, but this is all verifiable by looking at the times of when each of us posted the breaking memo story on Twitter and elsewhere.
RIP Redbird! Let’s hope that if there’s no new birds, the current two ones will hold strong for a while.
is this GLEFF?
Noted. I updated the post with link back to your site. This happens to me all the time 🙂 What drives me up the wall is a Titan writes about something mentioned in my blog for the first time and then another Titan(s) HTs back to it. WTF!! I just move on. But this was important news of course and good to set the record straight.
Thanks, I appreciate it.
It would be justified one way or another, were it not or the fact that I linked my story to many of these bloggers’ threads as a comment, at least a couple of hours before any of them made any mention of the memo or otherwise affirming that Redbird was officially dead.
This is all verifiable by anyone that wants to look at the times of our posts yesterday on Twitter and elsewhere on third-party websites which neither of us owns. Here’s my Tweet about it yesterday: https://twitter.com/NoonRadar/status/654070358518140928
Further, someone who claimed to be a Target employee sent a group email to me and a bunch of popular MS bloggers last night, also BEFORE any of these bloggers posted about the memo or the official death of Redbird. That employee linked to my post saying among other things “I can unfortunately confirm that the memo NoonRader references here is 100% accurate”. He had seen the reports and had gone to the Target store where he works, probed around and saw the memo himself.
It baffles me more because some of these bloggers are very reputable, and also because I’m not really competition or them; I don’t even have a blog yet, my website as it is now–where I posted the breaking story–it was set up to sell temporary Redbirds online.
I don’t know which bloggers you are talking about, but I want to make sure my name is kept out of this. I’m glad you are getting credit and I never specifically wrote a post about the memo, but for the record that memo was mentioned dozens of times on Reddit and Flyertalk before you wrote about seeing it.
You are definitely the first one I saw who confirmed that they saw it personally and I do believe your link is in the comments on Miles to Memories. In other words, you were/are getting credit and remember this was a two day long story that I began covering early Monday morning. The memo is only the final part of it!
I hope your website and blog do well and wish you the best of luck. Like I said, I am not sure if I was someone you were referring to, but I just wanted to make the case clear. There is a lot of credit to go around, but the truth is it was a sad day for us all.
Shawn, first off let me start by saying that looking at it now, it wasn’t worth my time venting about it (or now having to discuss if further) or others reading my rant, so I apologize for having started this in the first place and having take space on others’ blogs about this.
Having said that, to your points…we were all making educated guesses about whether what was going on meant the death of Redbird or merely a temporary halt/issue, so the news about an internal Target memo confirming the death of Redbird was in my view of paramount importance. As helpful as our analyses might have been before the memo news broke out, I believe it was that news about that memo that confirmed it for everyone. I happen to see the memo in person at Target, but obviously not everyone would see it, in person or otherwise. So I just assumed that when bloggers would report to their readers the news about the now famous Redbird death-confirming memo, they would also mention in their reporting if someone else before them had publicly reported seeing it (assuming they were aware of such reports). More so if such prior reports were about seeing the memo in-person and at Target, which removes doubt about someone having doctored up a document. It would also point to more eyes/sources confirming its existence, therefore better contributing to the news being reported, whether on a dedicated post or otherwise.
Hence my rant earlier today when I kept coming up on post after post on different blogs about the memo, with no mention of how that story was publicly broken out. I’m less than a year into the MS hobby though so I don’t have much experience (reading or blogging about MS) on how such breaking stories are usually reported on these blogs in such respects.
As to the point of dozens of memo sighting being reported on Flyertalk or Reddit before my reporting, perhaps, but I didn’t see a single one yesterday, or now when I did a quick search on the Redbird thread on Flyertalk. I’d be curious to see someone pointing them out; they are big forums so it is very likely I missed them.
After I wrote the story on my site about the memo, I first linked to it on the Redbird thread on Flyertalk at 6:53 pm EST: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/25560284-post10835.html. I didn’t mention the word “memo” on my comment there, I just copy-pasted a message (there as in other blogs) affirming the death of Redbird, along with the link to my post which had all the memo details and how I got to see it. I was just trying to spread the news fast at that point and didn’t think that a day later I might need to show proof of me mentioning the word “memo” on external websites. Though I did mention on my first tweet about the story (Oct 13 at 7:05 pm EST) that I saw the Redbird memo confirming the death of Redbird: https://twitter.com/NoonRadar/status/654070358518140928
I thank you for your kind wishes, as well as for referencing my pre-memo analysis in yours about me saying that the October 12th events meant Redbird was dead.
On a non-memo related note (since I’m tired of saying “memo” so many times on this comment :D) I also want to kindly thank all the bloggers–you included–who mentioned and/or let me advertise my Redbird sale business on their blogs. I know it was also a service to your guys’ blog readers who couldn’t obtain it personally at their local Targets, as were some guides and other reporting via which I tried to be helpful on these blogs and keep the readers abreast of the Redbird state of play and answer some of their questions. My participation as such was obviously primarily for my own financial benefit and the MS blogs/forums were of great help to me, so thank you again to all who let me do that!
Good luck with your site in its next phase!
Screw blue and red, lets get a pinkbird next woohoo!
Martini Pinkbird or just straight up Pinkbird? 😛
Joking aside, I really hope there’s another bird in the near future easier to load than at Walmart and Family Dollar. It doesn’t have to be as easy as the Amazon Amex bird which you could load at your local bar or on Twitter!
This does happen a lot in this space. With so many blogs there is just no way to get it right each and every time.I could have stopped linking to all these blogs and instead HT to “Toto H.” all the time instead 🙂 After the first few times this happens…you just shrug your shoulders, you realize it does happen and we all…move on. Thanks for reaching it out as your case was really obvious and sorry I missed it!
I wish we all stopped blogging about this stuff though so The Hobby remained a true hobby #gasp
George, when no one blogs about a hobby, it’s a dead hobby. One day it might be, so be careful what you wish for.
I always give an HT, WHEN I remember where I read about it first. The problem is how the hell do you remember if you read about the same thing in 5 different blogs? And trying to get to the bottom of who said what first — I’d rather spend my time writing. Seriously!
Have no idea why I’m up so late. Emirates withdrawal? Will try a Singapore suite, one day, and then I’m done with F-class flying — unless they come up with some new gimmics, that is. 🙂
U make some very valid points.
Looking forward to the Emirates trip report. You did a selfie at the shower right like all Titans right?
@projectx: I agree. But when you book Southwest flights during these short lived sales you get some excellent fares. I looked around for RT DTW-MCO and they were the best. No luggage fees and could cancel anytime if something else comes along #winning
@ Sam: Thanks for the GE account info. I did not want to open another account in another institution. 0.95% plus $50 sounds good to me for now. Won’t keep it for too long.
@ Scott: THAT would be an awesome stat to learn but I doubt if we ever will! I predict less foot traffic at Target stores nationwide. I think Wal Mart’s turn is coming soon too…
@ pointsforlater: I think u referring to that mustache…If not, no idea what you are smoking lol.
@ Oliver2002: Hell no to Greek bonds! I am not there yet, very soon. Don’t want to touch emergency fund…aiming for payoff in January or April at the latest, I won’t even be 49 #highfive
@ Steve: Maybe it has to do with what they are allowed to write about more than anything 😉
To the rest, thanks for taking the time! Gotta run!
True, but the variable point value is still BS. Sure there are some great deals to be had. But for me our travel revolves around the school schedule. All peak. What I used to be able to redeem at 60 cents a mile turned into 70, and then suddenly 78+.
Yeah I hear ya! #slavestoschoolcalendar!
Why hasn’t anyone yet blamed this who Redbird tragedy on our favorite DEALKILLER……MMS?
Who? Never been back there. Does he still do those Friday “interviews”? Say hello to Emily for me, gracias!
@TBB, CitiBank has a promotion for earning a $400 Cash Bonus when you deposit 50K to open CitiGold checking account and maintain the balance for two months. Thanks.
Hmm…missed that one. Citibank has been a pain in general in the past to get these bonuses out of them and they are so happy with 1099s and so fee happy….May look into it more, $400 gets my attention! Thanks!