$500 Gift Cards on Sale? I'll Take Six! 🤣

On Friday afternoon I saw an alert on a frequent flyer BBS I monitor. Costco was selling Southwest Airlines gift cards (GCs) for 10% below face value. I clicked through the link and found the sale page: a $500 value gift card for $449.99.

The amount gave me pause. Even though I travel on Southwest regularly, $450 is a fair bit of money to tie up in a GC usable only with them. As a point of comparison I did buy $2k of GCs for Marriott years ago, though I got those at a 20% discount. I considered 20% a fair spread for tying up cash in a much less flexible GC. Was 10% enough of a discount to make this GC worth it? I pinged Hawk for her opinion. I thought she might object but instead she responded, "Maybe buy two." 😂

Part of my thought process with buying any GC is, "What's my plan for spending it?" With airline and hotel GCs specifically that's, "Okay, what travel am I already planning where I can redeem these?" So before clicking "BUY" on those Southwest GCs I mentally added up the cost of flights I've already purchased for the next few months. It turns I'm already sitting on $2,000 of tickets! 😳

Those existing tickets are all refundable. I can refund them to the credit cards I used to purchase them and then rebuy them with the GCs. Doing that would use up 4 x $500 GCs. Thus if I bought six, I figured, I could rebook all my existing flights and still have about $1,000 of GCs left for travel I'm sure I'll book before mid 2022.

So that's how (and why) I spent $2,700 on airline gift cards Friday.

Summer's Last Hurrah

We've been enjoying a warm streak the past few days. High temperatures Friday and Saturday reached the mid to high 80s, and Sunday topped out at about 90°. It's only 84 right now but could get hotter mid-afternoon. For reference, the average high temperature here in early October is 75° (24° C).

I wish I could say we're really enjoying this warm weather but we're not. It's caught us sort of unprepared. We took a couple of trips in September, banking on warmer weather then, but we caught cold snaps both times. Many years September is our big summer travel month. Temps in hot places are cooler than in June/July/August, yet there's still warmth to go around; and with kids back in school popular destinations are less crowded. By October the weather becomes very hit-or-miss, with colder temperatures much more likely up in the mountains and rain starting to appear in West.

Well, hit-or-miss does mean sometimes hit. We spent a bit of time in our pool on Saturday to enjoy the warmth. We missed the opportunity yesterday; we had other plans already. I'll see if I can carve out a mid-afternoon "coffee break" for a dip in the pool today.

My Banks Evidently Don't Know Who I Am

"Know Your Customer". That's the name of a set of regulations in financial services industries around the world. In the US these requirements were mandated by the USA Patriot Act of 2001 to thwart money laundering used for, among other things, funding foreign terrorist organizations. Know Your Customer means understanding a client's financial situation— job, income, assets, financial habits— to spot unusual transactions. In that sense a few of my banks/brokers I've been with for years evidently don't know me.

"You're qualified to borrow up to $5,000!" screamed the headline in an email from a major bank I've had an account with for 10 years. "Interest rate only 5.98% APY," it added in smaller print.

WTF? If they looked at my financial information they'd see that offer is a joke. One, I don't need to borrow $5k. Two, 6% is a laughably bad rate. I have loans dwarfing that in size at rates from less than half to less than one-sixth that rate. I'm supposed to pay 6x t for a joke-sized loan when I could just write a check for 10x that amount from cash on hand?

It's not just that one bank. Another financial institution I've had an account with for 25 years keeps offering me joke-sized little loans with joke-sized high interest rates, too.

Update: a few days later the same bank increased the offer: $30,000... with a 10.99% interest rate!