@Anonymous wrote:
@xenon3030 wrote:
I moved all my groceries to Instacart to get 32% CB (20% Instacart GC from Costco, 5% cashback from a CC for shopping at Costco, 2% Costco executive discount, 5% discount for Instacart pickup).
Do the percentages really additively stack like that? For example, do you pay full price on the gift card, thus getting the full 5% on the credit card and the 20% discount comes later?
They stacked like that. Sometimes, Costco sells $100 Instacart GCs at the price of $80. The last time that I purchased was at the end of Q4 last year. I purchased some GCs using CFF (5% on wholesale club category in Q4). They may sell such GCs in-store but I did not check (for Costco in-store, US Bank AR gives 4.5%)
I do the majority of my groceries at Sprouts and Instacart offers in-store price with a pick-up option for it. It gives 5% credit after pick-up and the credit gets applied to my next purchase.
At Instacart, not all grociers have in-store prices and not all provide in-store pickup. The examples are Safeway and Target. For these two stores, I use one of my 5%-6% CB cards and I do either in-store shopping or I use their websites and do a pickup.
Rakuten regularly gives 1-5% CB on Instacart. Since last summer, it never tracked any purchases at Instacart. It did not make any difference if I use a credit card to do the transaction or use Instacart credit. Since there are several groceries per month, I cannot spend time to submit ticket for each.
To bypass fees, it is better to have Instacart+ (AF=$99). Costco members can get $20 discount on AF. Sometime ago, Paypal was running such a discount and the total price got dropped to $40. I do not know whether it was a public offer, but I received the offer by email from Paypal.
Fico8: EX~EQ~TU~840 (12 month goal~850).
@K-in-Boston wrote:
@Vash1 wrote:
@K-in-Boston wrote:
@xenon3030 wrote:Since last summer, Rakuten barely tracks/honors CB. There are lots of complaints by various users and at different forums. So, it might not be straightforward to count on it to accumulate more MR points.
I've not experienced that. I think there have been maybe 3 times the entire time I've used them that I needed to ask for credit, and I always got it. Most likely it's either user error (like using coupon codes that invalidate the earnings) or privacy settings are too high and they're unable to track through to the completion of the order. I have made "slight" use of Rakuten.
(I've seen some screenshots with much more than me.)
If you are up for business cards, Blue Business Plus is my default non-category card since it earns 2x on everything. EDP or ED as mentioned can be decent catch-all cards for everything else, although I'd certainly do the math to see if EDP made sense for you since you'd need to make a lot of purchases on the card to get the 50% bonus each month and with groceries you'd basically only earn 3,000 MR points a year more than Gold on groceries for the maximum $6k cap on EDP.
I was waiting on someone with a few Amex cards under their belt. That screenshot definitely showed what's possible. I just signed up for Rakuten after reading the responses. Definitely some opportunity their.
So the blue business plus earns uncapped MR on ALL spend? If so that may be a good option. I do have a small consulting business so I can get a business card if that is the case.
Unfortunately it's capped to $50,000 per calendar year, but it does earn 2x for everything and has a modest Welcome Offer. For household non-category expenses (Amex really doesn't seem to care; I only report $1500 in gross annual revenues selling on eBay when applying but have numerous business cards with them including one that had a $30k spend requirement for the Welcome Offer) that's fine for a lot of people.
Ok thanks for clarifying I can work with a 50k cap. My operating costs only consist of software and subscription purchases with occasional paid ads through facebook. But if Amex doesn't really discriminate against non business cost that's a plus any easy way to capitalize on all my spend.
You already had other business credit line with them but think I can still squeeze in with the data point you gave.