United 50,000 Mile + $50 Offer

United Airlines 55,000 Mileage Plus Miles + $50 Statement Credit

I became a really big fan of United when we were easily able to redeem miles to take our entire family (and in-laws) to Hawaii last summer. The trip was funded in part to different credit card offers with United and Continental prior to the merge.

I have been sitting back and have not opened up the United Mileage Plus credit cards simply because we have had no need to at this point. We are sitting on enough miles and points in other programs to travel for free and simply do not have enough time to use them. With another baby due any day now, and being short on vacation time, there are no immediate plans to be using miles.

However, there is a great targeted offer for United customers right now.

In the past, as long as you signed into your United Mileage and had a couple miles in there, you could often see the best deals.

United 50,000 Mile Offer

For example, when I sign into my account, I see a 50,000 mile offer with no annual fee, which is still a pretty standout offer. Where else can you open up a credit card, pay for an auto repair, and receive enough miles to fly to Hawaii or Europe, or other places on your bucket list?

United 50,000 Mile + $50 Offer

However, a better targeted offer appears after you sign into your United account, and then search for a flight. Then you might find a nice little box showing 50,000 miles + $50 statement credit.

The 50,000 bonus miles is awarded after $1,000 in spend within 3 months.

The $50 statement credit is awarded after your first purchase.

Ready for the best part? Earn another 5,000 miles for adding an authorized user to the card. Making this version of the United Mileage Plus card valued at over 56,000 miles after spending $1,000 on the card. That is a great offer in my opinion!

Additional benefits of the card include free checked bags, priority boarding, two United lounge passes, double miles on United purchases, and your miles will never expire so long as you have the card. The $95 annual fee is waived the first year.

I am in the midst of possibly doing a refinance on our rental house. So I am a little skeptical of opening up another card right now. I just opened a second US Airways card a month ago, and while the impact to my credit scores has been minimal, I do not want to interfere with something as important as a mortgage refi.

We do have some major pending auto repairs coming on my older vehicle, so hopefully this offer may still be around in a couple months, as we will easily meet the minimum spend for this offer.

Remember, the game is all about properly managing your credit. Think you will be taking advantage of this promotion?

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Source: HansDKNY via FT

We have no affiliation with Chase or this United Mileage Plus card offer. The details are the best current promotion that we are aware of that can simply help fund your families next vacation.

Is Switching to Allstate Worth 4,500 United Miles?

Allstate United Offer

Last week I received a mailer about the partnership between United Airlines and Allstate Insurance. The little envelope promised up to 4,500 United Mileage Plus award miles, trying to encourage me to switch insurance providers.

The offer goes on to say we can earn 2,500 bonus miles if we switch auto insurance providers. Second, earn an additional 2,000 miles by switching your home insurance. Sounds fair enough, but is it worth it? This was not one of those offers to get free miles just for getting a quote. We actually have to make the switch of insurance providers to earn the miles.

I wondered if maybe I was targeted for this offer, but looking at the United website, they do list the Allstate offer as an option for everyone; however, the offer is only limited to those residing in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, Washington, Wyoming and Washington D.C.

I found a couple of things interesting about this promotion.

1) There is no way to request a quote online, as you must call your local agent or 1-866-705-4397. Make sure you tell the agent you are applying under the United Airlines promotion, and include your account number.

2) While the online details state nothing about when the promotion is scheduled to end, the mailer we received did say the partnership will end April 14, 2013.

So if you are in the market for a new insurance provider, you may want to consider how Allstate compares to others.

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Since I am not an insurance expert, I asked my lifelong agent for some commentary on how Allstate’s rates might generally compare to others. What I received back was a terrific commentary on the insurance industry that I feel really helps make a case for switching insurance providers.

As a customer, you may have noticed certain things are common and have always been throughout the insurance industry. For example, larger companies that spend huge amounts of money on brand building (such as Allstate) do a good deal of advertising, running promotions, and offering “innovative” coverages. Coverages such as vanishing deductibles, return bonus checks for safe driving, or United Airline miles did not exist 10 years ago. That is because the insurance industry is just as susceptible to trendy spending as any other industry and these companies spend billions figuring out the state of their customer base, the economy, and what appeals to them.

What does that amount to? Well, in a country where commercialism plays such a major role in spending, it is easy to make it look like you are getting more for your money when you throw out things that look like returns, or offer coverages that really do not mean much but sound fancy. You have to then ask, where does the money for all the very costly advertising, the guest spokesmen for the commercials, the airtime, the “bonus” coverages, the airline miles, come from? The answer without question is the consumer and always has been.

Brand building is a very expensive business, and traditionally the companies that are very vested in building their brand by commercialism will have gimmicky ways of attracting your attention away from the price of the premium for which you are actually paying for their product. It is a game of distraction and illusion. Magic always appears to be magic unless you know the trick. It is no coincidence then that traditionally those same companies have higher rates, or lower their rates for a time to move customers and then raise them again the next time they will be doing a major public relations spree.

Rolling the dice on insurance premiums

Meanwhile, the customers who keep jumping ship for the better rates do not know that in the insurance industry everything is based on risk, and if you continually move companies for a better rate you look flighty. Flighty equals more risk, and while they may have saved a few hundred dollars over a few years, should they make this their habit they will actually increase their rates because they have now increased their risk factor, which increases their premium. The magic here is knowing that most consumers do not look at their savings over ten years, but over one year so they will never do the math to know they are losing in the deal. There is actually a discount (and by the way discounts are not actually ever discounts they are just another illusion that make you think you are paying less by highlighting where you are of lower risk, safe driver, customer loyalty, low mileage, etc.) for having multiple terms with the same company as this phenomenon works in reverse.

Once you learn the trick to the insurance magic, the benefits all disappear. The trick to the magic is, how much risk do you, your family, and your belongings pose to the company in terms of them having to pay claims (and what size claims) on you? That is it; that is what all the commercials, coverages, and gimmicks boils down to and what your premium is based on. There are intensely complicated logarithms that I do not pretend to understand that each company uses to assess your risk to them and they charge you accordingly based on which risk factors they value most.

Do rates vary greatly from company to company? Absolutely. Do stores have sales to get you in? Of course. It is the same premise, like the insurance company is having a “sale” and getting you in, and once you are there, most people are too comfortable to leave, especially if the rate increases magically happen on a small scale over a long period of time.

Now say you file a $50,000 claim and have only been with a company for a year. Will the insurance company raise your rate to try and re-coupe some of that loss? You betcha; you have not paid, nor will ever pay enough, into their system to cover the loss they just took on you. There is no magic there that is just simply your risk factor affecting your rates.

The other factor to consider before switching insurance providers is the customer satisfaction rate. The bigger a company is the more claims they have serviced, the more claims they have serviced, the more diluted their customer service reports become. They would have to have a lot of positive or negative customer service ratings at a time to impact their overall service rating. So people looking at a large company are not seeing the real picture unless the large companies makes some very major mistakes all at once. Nationwide experienced this a few years ago when they raised the homeowners rates by near 20-50% in one term, and went through major customer service revamping and changed their brand from the eagle to that empty box symbol. It did not work out so well for Nationwide and they are trying to recover now. The industry is very fluid.

my neighborhood

One of the biggest and most difficult changes all the insurance companies, big and small, have had to face in recent years is the weather. The amount of claims based on weather is by far the biggest factor affecting rates in our area over the past 5 years, and it is a risk factor that is completely out of the industry’s control. So you will see a ton of industry shifting as the homeowner industry is now a negative profit proposition for the insurance companies, and they have to try and figure a way to suffer through this time. The insurance issuers will raise their homeowners rates without a doubt, but in different ways depending on what their sense of their industry is for their particular client base.

Some issuers will raise the auto rates to make it appear that the home rate did not increase as much if their auto rates were traditionally lower. Other companies will take small increases to home and auto yearly until they feel comfortable. Some will just take huge raises in the homeowners but keep the auto rates lower so people still feel like they are getting a deal if the auto rate is much higher somewhere else because of violations.

The major trick to the last model is that if you raise your rates up high at once, then people leave. When the next company raises their rates after the move, you can lower your rates back down, and boom you just got all those customers back plus probably more because now they are mad at the other company.

The major difference in those rate adjustment decisions is that homeowners rates are based partially on personal information and risk, but the other factors like weather and location play a major role in rates. On the contrary, auto policies are based on risk assessment that is based much more on the driver’s history with driving and paying. So the risk base between the two is vastly different and the companies have to do something to clot the bleeding wound that is now the homeowners insurance industry in this country.

Each company will address it differently but they will no doubt address it. They are losing money hand over fist and have been for several years so they have to stop the bleed or go broke. Whatever illusions they need to use to accomplish that will be up to the individual companies. Some companies have more money from previous rate increases to spend on creating these illusions than those that choose not to make major use of commercialism but rely more heavily on good service ratings.

So there you have it. Is it worth switching insurance companies for a couple of miles? If you are going to switch anyways, then you might as well sign up for this offer. However, it is not worth it to switch just for the sake of the miles.

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Source: InACents

Converting Best Buy Reward Zone Points Into Miles You Can Use

Best Buy Audience Rewards

Thanks to our readers, and all of your help, InACents is your reliable resource for earning free miles and points courtesy of the Audience Rewards program! The Points Play trivia program has changed quite extensively in 2012, and we were there for you to help you maximize your returns, with the ultimate goal of getting you to your final destination for free.

The major change that effected everyone in 2012 was that Audience Rewards (AR) changed how the trivia questions to earn free airline miles and points were structured with their partners. Early in 2012, and since the programs inception, AR issued unique questions for each of their partners (Delta, US Airways, SPG, and Best Buy). Therefore, you as the guest could earn free miles and points in EACH program on a pretty regular basis (approximately once every 10 days). Then like all good things, AR changed how questions were issued.

In July 2012, AR started issuing the same trivia questions for each partner program. This meant if you had multiple partners linked to the same AR account, you could no longer earn mile or points across all of your accounts. There are some tricks to be able to break apart your account affiliations, but the ultimate solution, especially for newbies, is to create a unique AR account for each partner.

After the change, our family was set up pretty nicely, because all our AR accounts were separated except for a Delta, SPG, and Best Buy account. The nice thing was, I had an easy decision to make. I could have easily broke them apart into new accounts, but I ultimately just abandoned earning points in that particular Delta and Best Buy account.

The only reason I had any interest in earning Best Buy Reward Zone (BBRZ) points was for the conversion of those points into miles or other point programs. Another major factor in collecting BBRZ points was to convert them into the US Airways Grand Slam promotion; however, in 2012 the program did not happen. FAIL!

So what should you do?

So now, here we are at the end of 2012, and I am sitting on 282 BBRZ points courtesy of Audience Rewards. How many do you have sitting idle?

Last year, we highlighted the process of converting Best Buy Reward Zone points, but this year I wanted to expound on that discussion.

First, for those that do collect Best Buy Reward Zone points, without any interest in collecting them, you need to set up your account properly. The BBRZ program is automatically set up to issue you a $5 gift card when reaching 250 points. If that is your thing, then fine; however, I changed my configuration so that I am not issued a voucher until reaching 1,000 points, therefore, effectively never issuing me a reward since I will not earn that many points in any given year.

Ok now what? The BBRZ program automatically expires your points as of the first of the year (unless you are their credit card holder or premium member). Therefore, if you have 282 points, like we do, then we will automatically be issued a $5 certificate (250 points) and forfeit 32 points as of January 1. Not a smart choice, at least for us, where we value each and every mile earned.

So what are your options?

That is where the site points.com comes into play. The Points site will allow you to convert points from one program into another. Under most circumstances, I would encourage not using points.com because of the horrible transfer ratios, but in this instance, it opens up the doors for liquidating pointless points.

After creating an account, and adding in your BBRZ info (see my post on converting Best Buy points from last year if you need help), we are ready to get to the good stuff.

From here, you can now determine which other programs to transfer your points. Lets take a quick look at our options we have set up in my wife’s account.

Best Buy Swap via Points

Now we can see how things convert, with the best values coming from moving the points into Hawaiian Airlines or US Airways miles. Note these are also the only other accounts we have linked into my wife’s points.com account, and you can add tons more if none of these interest you.

So we have two viable choices if we want to move all the points into one account. We need to think about if any of our accounts are near an expiration. If that was the case, I might consider moving a minimal amount of points over to it.

The second thought is are any our accounts capable of earning more points/miles by converting into another program. Let me elaborate. For example, if I was close to a 5,000 mile threshold with Hawaiian Airlines, I might consider moving miles into that program because they can be converted into 10,000 Hilton HHonors points, a 2:1 ratio. For us, transferring to Hilton is not viable since we are not anywhere near a 5,000 mile increment with Hawaiian.

So, in our circumstances, our best option is to liquidate to US Airways.

Note: I recommend performing your transfer as soon as possible, so that when 2013 rolls around, you do not lose what your “Audience Rewards gave you.”

So there you have it. Now you have evaporated those points BBRZ points, and at least garnered some miles that get you and your family one step closer to sitting on the beach.

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