Mine was on my hotel stay. I initially booked at $2045 for 7 nights, but a discount came out and it ended up at $1903…so that is actually $142. It was so easy for me to cancel an old reservation and book a new one, so that was very worth it to me.
Now 10% on merch/food is not something I would really go out of my way for, but if I remembered, I would ask - I didn’t use my Disney visa to charge merch while at the parks, as my MB made it more convenient.
Yeah so that would be worth it.
Maybe for me to feel like it’s worth it it needs to be… it feels like… more than $50? But again if I’m booking, say, a $5000 trip and saving $50? Not worth it.
There’s definitely a percentage point that’s my cutoff but maybe it’s on a sliding scale of some kind? LOL
And again it also depends on the savings I net.
Yeah, Chase has pretty good credit card bonus offers. 
This isn’t hard to do. You just go through PayPal, like you could for Rakuten or another shopping website, and/or use the PayPal option when you check out. This stacking offer usually coincides with my Christmas shopping so I get quite a few points back doing this! I forget to check most other times of the year though.
Here’s my rule on seeking savings: If I can make more money in the same time that it would take me to save money, I don’t spend the time running after a discount.
For example, if it will take me an hour to save $12, then I will choose to work an extra hour, which produces more income than the $12 savings. It’s all about opportunity cost.
I like this.
I only use PayPal when I have to pay someone something and there is no other way. So I am not sure how you use PayPal to buy something somewhere else. (And Rakutan is similar…ever since Rakutan took over buy.com, I stopped shopping there entirely.)
Regardless, it sounds like there is also the issue that you earn rewards that may (or may not!) show up until months later.
You just use their page to click through to the site you actually want to buy from. PayPal rewards did take a couple of months to show up. The stacked credit card rewards, however, were within a few days to a week at most, and that’s where the biggest return came from.
The rates were much higher at Christmas too. That was when I was stacking deals. Came out to a good amount of money!
But at the time I started doing things like Rakuten I also checked all my recurring payments to make sure I wasn’t wasting money anywhere else. So I guess I am going back to my 300 year old Scottish roots and agree with @Shmebulock - take care of the pence and the pounds will follow.
I don’t use Paypal much either but last year Chase Freedom had Paypal as one of their 5% bonus categories. So I ran $1500 through that.
That’s what I did, so the extra 5% on the $1500 is $75, just for choosing PayPal as the payment option at checkout/no extra work on my part!
Wondering if this does it for anybody.
Nope
I’m currently playing the credit card game so my perspective on this was a bit different. I used a lot of gift cards this time for my trip with my BFF. I haven’t bothered in the past with the 5% Target plan because it didn’t seem quite worth it even though it would add up to quite a chunk of change with a family of 4 with PH and four days in a deluxe hotel.
I bought GC this time at stores that have a high point multiplier on my credit card and used them to buy tickets, pay for the room, and pay for most of our food and drink onsite. Not exactly a discount but quite a haul of points for something I was buying anyway. If I had used those points along with my companion pass I would have gotten both of us round trip airfare for free with some points left to spare.
This is us too. We are a one-income homeschooling family working very hard to stay out of debt. But, also DD is in the prime family vacation age. So, we still want to make many happy memories. I love planning our vacations, and maximizing the vacation fun while minimizing the money is an essential part of planning fun. When you think about it, taking the time to create a personalized touring plan is a part of that same idea. I enjoyed buying a bunch of Disney gift cards. I think I used them to purchase Disney lodging and dining.
Because of the money savings, we been doing three vacations per year for the last few years. I know many of you guys go to Disney World three times a year, but I don’t know anyone else who does more than one, and I know several families who can’t vacation at all.
MSRP would actually be a good deal for some cars these days… some cars sell for more. My dealer explained it this way: “we order 100 cars, the mfr accepts 30, and they ship us 7. We have to sell for more than MSRP to cover our overhead.”
I paid a bit more than MSRP for my car for this reason. I had to wait 4-6 weeks for it and I didn’t want to press my luck.
“We sell at more than MSRP because that’s what the market will bear.”
The markup on new vehicles isn’t as much as you would think. Moving volume is what pays the bills for larger dealerships. There is a lot of overhead (including the sales person’s commission).
Yes and no. I believed my Subaru dealer when he said they weren’t receiving many cars, bc I’d read that in the paper, and bc he honored our agreement to sell me the Outback I’d ordered for MSRP, rather than stiffing me and selling it to someone else for MSRP+2k or MSRP+4k, which the market would bear, as you correctly point out.