Earning over 12% cashback on amazon this quarter.

Yes, that is right - i am earning over 12% back via a combination of points that can be eventually used as cash.

Let me explain. I have both, the Chase Freedom Card as well as the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card (this one has a $95 annual fee, but it is totally worth it as can be seen here). The Freedom card gives out 5% cashback - as chase ultimate reward (UR) points on rotating categories every quarter up to $1500 spent, this quarter the categories are grocery and drugstores. These UR points can then be converted to cash, used for booking travel directly on the chase website, or if you have the sapphire preferred card - transferred to an airline partner by converting to miles.

Credit card rewards are for real

I have been through different phases as a online blog consumer. Personal finance to credit card hacking to investing to dividend related investing. I can say that now i am in a place where i have a good balance of all of these.

In my credit card hack phase (i still do a fair amount, though not as active as before) i used to hit up over 10 credit card blogs regularly, including The Points Guy, Mommy Points among others and ended up selectively applying for credit cards and getting valuable points.

Consolidate your United and Continental miles.

Good news. Even though the united and continental merger happened well over a year ago, they hadn't provided the ability to combine miles from the two different programs,untill now.

Take the following steps to log in and get to the transfer miles page -

Go to this continental.com page (or united), and enter your united Mileage number and password, as well as your Continental Mileage number and PIN(note that you need your pin and not the password).

Once you log in,you will see both your united miles as well as the continental miles on one page. I transfered over 100 miles from continental to united just to see if it works fine, and also for it to count as a transaction, so that this could reduce my inactivity period at continental.

This is really useful for me because i had about 20k miles on both, and now by combining these , i am eligible for a round trip ticket starting at 25k miles, and am already at 15k for the second one.