Re: Article: super sweet credit card deal with southwest, especially if you fly with
Cliffs:
Sign up for 2 Southwest cards. Two options:
- "Spend" a total of $4,000 in three months and earn 104,000 miles.
- "Spend" a total of approximately $10,000. Earn a total of 110,000 miles on Southwest and a free companion ticket where ever you go for 2013 and 2014. Totaling up to $3674 worth of free travel.
Long Story:
Chase is running a couple of new promotions. Earn 50,000 miles after spending $2,000 in three months. They will allow you to own a personal and business credit card from them (likely more than that, but whatever). Both cards have an annual fee of $99. I'm not certain if it's waived the first year or not. Even if it isn't, $198 for over $3600 in free travel is a pretty good deal.
So here's a link to the two cards:
Once you meet the spending requirements for both cards, you'll likely have ~104,000 miles in your account. To get a free companion pass for the remainder of the year and the next full year, you'll have to reach 110,000 miles. That means about another $6k in spending.
If you need a way to generate $10,000 in spending, there are plenty of ways. Certainly you should start putting all your expenses on a credit card. Additionally, if you need more to get you over the hump, don't forget my article about
the bluebird. With it, I was successfully able to put my mortgage on a credit card and make a credit card payment this month. Assuming I can still find the Vanilla reload cards at my CVS, I should be able to do the same for December.
Also note, the Southwest miles need to be earned in a single calendar year. So sign up for them now, but do not start using the cards until January! That way all the miles will count towards the 110,000 mile minimum to be awarded a free companion pass.
Finally, a lesson for myself. I've been grinding on a British Airways card to get two free first class flights to Switzerland next year. Like Southwest, BA also has a companion deal. It's only for one ticket though and is awarded after spending $30k in a calendar year. When signing up for the card, I missed the "in a calendar year" part. This means its likely that I'm going to fall about $5k short of the $30k spending requirement. Lesson learned: pay attention! Thankfully, I'll still have enough miles for the two tickets, but the free one would have been nice. I could have probably gotten some free coach tickets for friends of ours that may be travelling with us. Oops. On the plus side, I can now start using this Southwest deal to get us cheap domestic flights. Look for fly and April coming to a city near you in 2013 or 2014!
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