Hey everyone, it has been a minute since I've been having regular podcast episodes, and so I wanted to get back in to your ear, especially since it's November, which means Black Friday is coming. But also, can we just pause for a second and like, how did this happen? How is it already November? I feel like we just started the new year and and so much has happened this year in my personal life, in my business, et cetera.

And so again, I don't know how it's already November, but today I want to talk about how to be smart about Black Friday and also a bit about credit card updates. So if you're into credit card points like I am, then you probably have heard that 2 of the premium cards dramatically increase their annual fee, specifically the Chase Sapphire Reserve and the American Express Platinum, both personal and business.

Now I have all three cards and I have decided for now that I'm going to keep them. I'm thinking of getting rid of one of my American Express Platinum cards because I don't know if I really need both. And frankly, the personal Amex has much better, in my opinion, perks than the business one. And so I guess the only sort of thing I need to think about is whether I really want to have access to having a guest for the Centurion Lounge.

Now, I actually have not even used the Centurion Lounge this year. My current home airport, Tampa Airport, does not have one. I do not know if they plan to get one anytime soon. I do know that last year I tried to get into a few and they were always waitlisted. So that was a huge bummer. And for such a high annual fee, I'm hoping that the annual fee means there might be less people.

And also I don't know if them making it harder to bring a guest has decreased the wait times. So if you know, I would love to just hear your anecdotal experiences. So I mentioned that because it's with the business spend that I'm able to qualify for that, which it used to be $75,000 spend in order to get that extra guest slot. Otherwise you can't bring a guest, you have to pay for them.

But again, I haven't even used it personally, let alone with a guest, which I guess would be my son. So I'm still basically TBD whether I'm going to keep the business Platinum, the Chase Sapphire Reserve. Now, I have had that card for well over a decade, maybe even two decades, and I really did pause because the annual fee went up significantly and I really had to look at whether I would be, you know, really using all the benefits that it provides.

And I didn't really feel like the increased value was that compelling. But after doing a bit of math and just sitting down, I have decided that I'm going to keep it. I'm also in a position where I actually don't have to pay the increased annual fee until next year just because of when my annual fee renews. And so it was, I guess later enough that they're giving me a sort of not free year.

I'm still paying the annual fee. I'm just not paying the new annual fee. So. But if you don't have a Sapphire card or you've been eyeing the reserve, this is a good time to get one because they are offering some really high sign up bosses. They are offering really high sign up bonuses right now to the tune of a hundred thousand points. I actually think it might be more.

There's also a new Sapphire business card that I have not looked into. I'll be honest, I'm not going to get any new cards for a long while. I personally think I have too many. It gets a little unwieldy for, for my purposes. So I'm very content with the cars that I have now. I have the Sapphire card, I have the Chase Freedom Unlimited. These are my personal cards.

I have the American Express Platinum and the Gold. For personal, I have the built MasterCard which I love and I've actually been preferentially spending on that because the points are so valuable in my opinion. And I also have the Hyatt on the business side, I have the American Express Platinum and Gold, the Chase Inc. Unlimited, the Chase Ink Preferred and the Business Hyatt card. So again, plenty of cards.

And it makes bookkeeping more complicated for my bookkeeper and they actually charge me when I have over a certain number of credit cards. So at this point I'm good. Okay, so let's talk about Black Friday. Now I love Black Friday for mainly the reason because you can get good deals. And when I say deals, I don't just mean to discounts. Although that is obviously you know, what all of us are looking forward to.

So actually what I do around end of August or even September, I start making a list of things that I know I'm going to use and might as well stock up during Black Friday. And so I just open a notes file in my iPhone and do this. And also if there's anything that I'm sort of eyeing to buy but it's not urgent, meaning like I can Wait until Black Friday deal.

But I'll also add it to the list. And for those of you who buy lots of presents and gifts for the holiday season, obviously you want to start thinking about that too. I personally am not a huge gift giver. I don't know, it's just, I guess it's not my love language. I mean, I love receiving gifts, but it doesn't really occur to me to give gifts. It's not because I don't care, it's just not not my thing.

Although I do buy a few for select people. But otherwise it's not really a big deal in my household. So that's the first thing right, is getting really good deals and you know, being able to buy things in bulk. Let me just give you some random examples from my life. So my favorite mascara right now is the Thrive Cosmetics one, the Liquid Lash Extensions. And so I always look to see if they have a deal.

They never have great sales in my opinion. And if you do like that mascara, I always buy the travel size ones because I feel like if I buy the large one, it just kind of dries out quicker. And so I prefer having the smaller sizes. That way, you know, I'm able to use it before it dries up. And so that's something I look out for. And then things like, you know, clothes for my son, he's always growing, so basically there's always a need to buy him clothes.

And so that's an example. Okay, so great deals. Now the other way Black Friday is amazing is when it comes to amassing credit card points. Now if you're new to credit card points, we have a few episodes where we talk about it, talk about the, you know, the, the use case, why you should get into it, especially as a high income earner. And you know, I think of it in three parts.

Number one is picking the right card. Number two is amassing as many points as possible, earning points. And step three is redeeming points. So first you need to get a card and we talk about sort of like what is the algorithm. But most people generally choose Chase or American Express. And then there's also Capital One. Now I don't actually know Capital One very well because I don't personally own one of the cards, but Chase and American Express are probably the most popular points currencies.

And then people always ask, well, how do I know which one that I want? And I think you have to think a little bit about sort of how you travel. And I honestly, you can't go wrong with either. But you probably want to choose one of the those major players. American Express Gold, the personal one is a fantastic workhorse card because it gives you 4x on groceries and 4x on dining.

And, and that's huge because everyone spends a lot of money on food like everyone. Whereas the Chase cards will give you 3x on dining. You don't get any bonus points for groceries unless you have the Chase Sapphire preferred, which is not the same as the reserve. The more expensive one you can get 3x on online groceries. So things like Instacart or when you order from Whole Foods Delivery.

I actually don't have that card since I have the reserve. So Black Friday, or rather right now when you're listening to this episode, this is a really good time to apply and get a new card because they, you know, to get the juicy sign up bonuses you need to have a certain amount of spend and so you're going to spend money during the Black Friday holiday season. So it's a great time to get a new card now and it's a great way to earn even more points than just the signup bonus.

And here is why so many of you know that. I've talked about a website called Rakuten R A K U T E N Now it is a shopping portal and if you go there right now you don't have an account. It'll be advertised as a cash back platform. Basically if you shop through their portal you will get a certain amount cash back and it's always changing, you know what the the number is.

In fact, let me go to their website right now. And right now they're having a big deal for Gap. I buy a lot of clothes for Jack at gap or Old Navy. 18x until he cares more about what he's wearing. And, and so sorry, I meant 18% cash back. So how does this relate to points? If you link a qualifying American Express card again maybe another reason to get that as your first card, it becomes points.

So instead of 18% cash back for shopping at the Gap, I get 18x points. Okay, so let's say I spend $100 at the Gap. I will not get 100 points. I'm going to get 1800 points, but I can get even more points because I don't have to use my American Express card to actually buy to make my purchase. Okay. So I can basically what I call, we call stacking.

So for example, I could use my Chase Freedom Unlimited card which gives me 1.5x on non bonus categories. So I will get 1800American Express points. And on the $100 I spent, I'll get 150 Chase points. So do you see how those. This One purchase of $100 got me a total of 1,950 points. Now, this is the type of thing that can really dramatically accelerate your points earning. And so in order to take advantage of this, obviously you have to sign up for an account.

And I do have an affiliate link. It's wealthymom md.com Rakuten R A K U T E N Now, there are other shopping portals, so if you have a Chase card, you can shop through the Chase portal. Cause maybe, you know, maybe you're like, oh, I really need to amass Chase points. And so maybe you'll shop through the Chase portal. They have different deals. Sometimes they're similar, but, you know, you could look at both.

Now, usually when I start talking about this, people tell me, wow, Bonnie, that sounds really cool. But who has time to figure out, you know, who has which deal? And besides that, American Express cards also have their own, what they call Amex offers, where it can either be bonus points, but often cash back. You know, for some, for example, Kiwi company, they make these little art or science project boxes that I order for Jack, and we have a lot of fun with them.

For example, they have a deal if I. I don't remember what it was, but maybe it's something like if you spend at least $30, you'll get 5% cash back. Now, I can use that offer with Rakuten if it's on Rakuten. I'm pretty sure it is. So actually, let me look it up right now. Let me just walk you through an example so I don't lose. You lose all of you.

Okay, so right now on Rakuten kiwi company is 8x points. So let's just use the theoretical $100 just to make the numbers. Really? Even if I buy spend a hundred dollars with the Kiwi company to buy some crates, I mean, a crate's not a hundred bucks, but maybe you'll buy an annual membership. Okay, and it's 8x with Rakuten, which means I'll get 8x American Express points regardless of which credit card I actually use.

So that means I get 800American Express points right there. But because I'm going to use my American Express card that offers the cash back offer with Kiwi company, I'm still going to get the cash back. Okay, because they're almost like two unrelated transactions. Remember, I could use a different card, like a Chase Card. And I'll still get Chase points for the purchase, but through Rakuten, I will get even more points specifically for American Express.

So it is possible to amass an insane amount of points during these Black Friday deals. Now, a lot of us are, you know, waiting. I mean, it's early November at the time of this recording. And the Black Friday deals sometimes start early the week of and sometimes later because of Cyber Monday. And so every year it's different. I feel like people have been a bit disappointed the last two Black Fridays, like, the deals weren't as good.

They're still pretty good. We're still talking 5.10x, sometimes even 20x, sometimes even more, depending on the product. And so it is worth sort of looking out for these deals. And it's kind of fun to like, you know, spend $200 and get like a thousand or even 2,000 points right now. Just to pull back a little bit. I told you sort of how I think about Black Friday shopping in terms of making a list of things that I do want to take advantage for the sales, but.

Or rather, and I'm also thinking about, well, how much money do I actually want to spend? Like making a rough budget. Now, I say a rough budget because there are things I know that I'm going to buy. So maybe it's gifts, for example. And I have the, like I said, the American Express Personal Platinum card. And they have a few perks that are very useful for gift giving.

Number one, they have the $50 Saks Fifth Avenue credit that you get twice a year. And with the new membership upgrade, there's now a 75 per quarter Lululemon credit. Now, I don't particularly shop there. I mean, I do, but the great thing about Lululemon is, like, their stuff lasts forever. So I have Lululemon clothes from like 10 years ago. And it is still fine. Not as good as it was on day one, but totally still usable.

But I am not going to miss out on a $75 credit. And so I actually just took a look to see, like, what are the price ranges of things. I mean, everything at Lululemon is kind of more than $75, but it just depends on what you buy. So if I'm budgeting for gifts, I usually budget sort of an amount, a range and, you know, any household or personal use items that, again, I want to take advantage of.

And I also recommend that you also have a budget for impulse spending because, let's be real, there's going to be deals that you weren't even thinking of and you're like, I have to get that this is such a great deal. And I don't want you to feel guilty. Just have an impulse budget, impulse spending budget. Okay, Build it in. Because you know you're going to shop, you know, we're going to get inundated with all the ads and people are going to be talking about all the deals and you're going to probably want something that you weren't planning on having.

So back to what I was saying before now. Rakuten sounds awesome. You can do the chase. Shopping portals. A lot of the airlines have their own like United Airlines, American Airlines. Again, you know, you want to think about that. If you're specifically trying to rack up a specific points currency right now, there used to be. Actually there still is a site called cashbackmonitor.com where you can kind of like enter in a store that you like.

So let's say Sephora or Lululemon. And it'll tell you what cards are offering what deals. But it was a pretty manual search. Now I just heard of this company and they're pretty new. They're called Savewise and S A V E W I S E. And basically you could say it's an aggregator where you tell them which cards you have and it'll show you the deals that will apply to your cards and you can create personalized alerts for certain brands.

So let's say you're like, you know, I need to drop a few hundred dollars at the gap and I want to maximize the, you know, the points multiples, the deals, whatever, and you can set an alert for that. You probably need to have the paid version or. But honestly, it's such a good deal, the Pro. In fact, you can get lifetime membership for the Pro at the time of this recording for around $120.

And I believe that the price will actually be going up within a week of when this recording drops. And so I recommend you do that. I do have an affiliate link for them and that's wealthymomd.com savewise all one word. And we'll link that and the Rakuten link in the show notes. And when you use my link with Rakuten, you will get either a $50 bonus or you get 500 points.

So that's pretty fun. And so I think of it as a almost like, I don't know, kayak or Google Flights, but specifically for points deals where they. You can curate all the cashback offers, the deals, the point stacking opportunities so that you're not searching on multiple websites as to, you know, who's offering what. Deal. Okay. All right, so let's sort of summarize what we just talked about today.

So basically, Black Friday, great time to take advantage of discounts and points stacking to really accelerate your points earning so that you can redeem them for amazing trips. Now remember again, if you're new to credit card points, we have a few episodes already with the amazing Dr. Devin Gimbel, good friend of mine. And this is what she does. We call her, or rather I call her the points Magician.

And she is such a fantastic resource for all things points. So we'll link those episodes in the show notes in case you are brand new to all of this. So the first thing is to have the right credit card. This is a fantastic time to apply for a new card with a great juicy signup bonus. I'd mentioned that the Chase Sapphire Reserve has a very high signup bonus.

Now, since they increased your annual fee, you're going to have to see if the annual fee makes sense for you. Okay, so just do some quick math like are you going to use enough of the benefits now? I don't think the goal is to get to zero. What I mean by that is that you'll use so many of the benefits that the annual fee is basically zero. I wouldn't look at it that way because you also get the value by having those Chase points and transferring them to a partner like a hotel or an airline and being able to redeem it that way.

And that is worth money, you know. And so I have these annual fees and probably all of them combined is going to be a few thousand dollars, at least 3 to 4k, which might sound nuts, but the value I get from redeeming the points way, way more than the annual fee, way more. Plus the annual fee. Even though it's a few thousand dollars, I actually get some, a lot of that back, I would say at least half back, if not more, through some of the inherent perks.

For example, Global Entry or the Chase Sapphire Reserve has a $300 travel credit that's super easy to use. The American Express Platinums, both business and personal, have a $200 airline credit. The personal Amex Platinum also just added a quarterly $100 credit with Resy R E S Y. It's a dining, a restaurant reservation app and they tend to have sort of higher quality restaurants. And so that is something I am definitely going to use.

I love to eat. I love to eat great food. I'm still figuring out where all the good food spots are in Tampa, but there are resi restaurants. And so I recently took advantage of of that, had dinner with a friend who also had the card. I made sure you have to activate these offers. And basically dinner was virtually free because I think it was just over a hundred dollars each.

And so basically the credit popped up. And the great thing about Amex is the credits, they come pretty quickly. You're not waiting like a month or two. Like it's within a day, definitely within a week. Okay, so make you want to make your Black Friday strategy. So again, making a list, keeping it in your note, your notes file on your iPhone or your Android. And you want to sort of like ballpark how much you want to spend during Black Friday.

So you're going to know some of the stuff, you know, if you plan ahead, like gifts for people, you know, hopefully you set an approximate budget for each of those household items. And then I do highly, highly recommend having a pot of money set aside for impulse spending. Unless you really don't want to and you really want to stick to your plan. That's awesome too. And if you know you're going to buy stuff that was on the list, just plan for it, okay?

It's not a big deal. That way you'll feel less guilty about, you know, spending. You definitely want to sign up for Rakuten and I do recommend save wise. You can start with the free version if you don't want to do the pro quite yet. Um, you just will have some limited features but you'll still be able to sort of like link the cards that you have. So it can give you sort of the customized curated list of cash back deals or you know, bonus point stacking that's going to be available to you based on the cards that you have.

And it just makes it so much easier because we're busy people. You do not have time to go to all the websites to see who's giving me the best deal to shop at Sephora for. Right. Like who has time for that? So again, their lifetime fee, their lifetime membership right now is only 120and so that is a no brainer. And I've been told by the owner of the company that they are going to increase that fee really, really soon.

So this is a great time to lock it in. Again, you want to go to wealthymondy.com forward/savewise to sign up for your free account. Okay. I hope this was super helpful. I wish you tons of fun shopping for Black Friday. I know, I always do. I, you know, I, I nerd out a bit. And I like to actually write down, like, how much did I spend versus how many points did I accumulate?

And maybe you're into that kind of stuff, too. Okay, I will talk to you next week. And speaking of Black Friday, we are having a huge Black Friday event here at Wealthy Mommy D specifically for my program, Money for Women Physicians. We have never done something like this, and so you're going to want to keep your ears and your eyes peeled. Hopefully you are on my email list, so you'll be the first to know.

And if you're not, why aren't you on it? If you're a podcast listener, I guess the best way to join my list is go to my website, wealthymomd.com forward slash, or rather just wealthymomd.com and you'll just probably sign up for my free copy of my book Defining wealth for Women. Again, if you don't have that, I will send you the PDF or Kindle version for free, so you might as well have it.

And that way you'll definitely be on my email list and get emails about this Black Friday deal that we're going to have coming up starting on November 18th. Okay, I will talk to you next week.