I’ve had the Starwood Card for five years. I’ve paid the annual fee each year. I even kept the card when the annual fee went from $45 to $65 due to promotions like Small Business Saturday where with all of our cards we got $125 in goodies for free each year. There are also promotions with Twitter and Facebook where you can get $10 off $10 from a small business or through Foursquare or $20 off $200 from Best Buy. So $125-$65 = $60 profit right + all these promotions? No brainer to keep it?

I’ve decided however to cancel it because $65 for an annual fee is money that I could be using elsewhere.

Lucky at One Mile at a Time writes about how he spends $1000 in annual fees for his credit cards and all the benefits he gains from those cards. I was in the same boat several years ago paying hundreds of dollars in annual fees for benefits. I had a Marriott card, several American Express cards, and other cards for the benefits. I don’t begrudge him at all.

I’m slowly heading the opposite direction. I just downgraded my American Express Hilton Surpass card to the free version of the card so that I can still participate in Small Business Saturday. I hit $40,000 in annual spend on the Surpass back in 2009 and it gave me Hilton Diamond status for several years which was very useful on our trip to the Maldives. This was in the glory days of dollar coins and it was easy to hit that annual spend.

I’ve had the Platinum Delta American Express card since 2001. Living in a Delta hub, I have been justifying that annual fee for the “free” companion ticket voucher and the ability to earn 20,000 MQMs on Delta each year for a $50,000 spend. I just hit the $50,000 spend a week ago and was able to keep my Gold status with Delta. But I’m frankly getting a little tired of $5000+ credit card bills in my mailbox each month. I put all of our day to day spending on there and pay it off in full each month and never carry a balance and am using Amazon Payments as much as possible as well. But I still feel like we’re overspending in pursuit of hitting a threshold to get some MQMs and not gaining any traction. I’m seriously contemplating ditching the American Express card as well to save on that annual fee and go to simply cash based.

I’m not ready to give up credit card churning overall. Last year I was able to pick up 80,000 Priority Club points for 1 transaction with no first year annual fee. The offers coming out are still pretty tempting. I was even able to refinance my house even with all the heavy churning.

But as I contemplated in the past, I don’t feel like putting all of my spending on my credit card is a good long term financial plan and that’s why I decided to cancel the Starwood American Express card. So take notice Platinum Delta American Express card – I’m putting you on notice with your $150 annual fee. I’m going to be carefully watching you and you may be getting the boot out of my wallet very soon, even if it means getting lower status with Delta.

One of the parts of collecting miles and points that appeals to me is the notion that by doing the extra work, you’re saving money. I would never pay to go to the Maldives, but by accumulating enough points and miles – I am willing to take this exotic trip.

The same philosophy rules the rest of my life in pretty much all facets. I’m always hunting for ways to save money and get value by paying less for items. Today I’m going to share with you how I personally shop on EBay that has been quite lucrative in the past. I’ve bought and sold on Ebay for 12 years. I’ve sold everything from car tires, telephone mainframes, to Ligretto card sets from Germany. I have also purchased a far amount of items as well and have found a method pick up great items at cheap prices.

Step 1: Determine what you want and what you’re willing to pay This may seem like common sense – but if you know what you want to buy and how much you’re willing to pay ahead of time, you won’t get caught in a last minute bidding war for something. Unless it’s a one of a kind unique item that you’ll never see again, chances are it’s going to pop up again.

Step 2: Get creative on how to find the item. Let’s take an example if you’re looking for a Dirk Nowitzki jersey. By doing a simple search on Ebay, we get 310 items with Dirk Nowitzki jersey in the auction.

Now normally you would just scroll through and find a particular item you like and start bidding on. But what about if instead you tried to find items that no one is going to find? In this example, do you know how many people can’t spell Nowitzki? By using the website fatfingers.com – we can find auctions from people that misspelled them and therefore there will be less people bidding on them.

At Fatfingers, you type in the item that you’re looking for it and it will search for spelling variations of that. In this case, we’re going to type in Dirk Nowitzki and hit enter. It searches for Dirk Mowitzki,Dirk Niwitzki,Dirk Nowitski, etc. and we find 70 auction from people that can’t spell Dirk Nowitzki.

The auctions that we want to concentrate on are “Auctions” and not “Buy it Now Auctions“. The reason is: people who are selling via buy it now auctions have already set a high price for what they think the item is worth and therefore there is no opportunity to get a cheap deal.

We can now save this search and have Ebay send us an automated email each hour, day, week – whatever we chose to send us auctions with these misspellings. To save a search, click on the “Save Search” hyperlink to the right of the search results. I have several daily searches running for specific items I’m looking to get a bargain on. As an example, people misspell the name of the most popular basketball player of all time: Michael Jordan. Here are 519 auctions for Micheal Jordan.

Let’s identify an auction that would be interesting – in our case, here’s an auction for a Dallas Mavericks Adidas jersey for Dirk Nowtiski.

This is a perfect candidate with an item we want, a misspelled name and a low starting bid. Traditional logic would be to place your bid now and come back right before the end of the auction to bid some more. This isn’t going to save us any money and certainly not any time.

Step 3: Use automated bidding
Let’s rely on some automation to help us grab this item at the last second. I’ve always used a pay service called “Esnipe“. The thought behind ESnipe is they wait until the last second and place your final bid.

Simply create an esnipe account which will require you to put in your ebay username and password since they are bidding on your behalf. Next, you’ll enter in the item number of the item you wish to bid on.

Esnipe will pull up the item information and here is where you will determine how much to bid for. What is the maximum you’re willing to pay for this item? I’m willing to pay $40. Therefore, I would put in a bid of $40.78 for this item. Why not an even number like $40? Most people place bids in even numbers so by adding a couple of extra random cents, you would beat someone else that bid $40 even. Enter in your maximum bid. The “checkup” box is how many minutes prior to the auction end would an automated email will be sent to you letting you know where the auctions stand. The buffer is how many seconds prior the auction end should esnipe place your bid. I always use the default 6 seconds so another bidder won’t have time to bid higher.

At this point, I’m unconcerned if this item sells for more than $40.78 as this is the highest I wanted to pay for this item. If I get outbid, I’ll just keep looking for another item that’s interesting and do the same method.

As mentioned above, Esnipe is a pay service, but the fees are nominal. I’ve only purchased bid points 3 times over 7 years.

Some other quick tips to remember:

1) always check a seller’s feedback prior to bidding to make sure they’re reputable
2) always pay with Paypal with a Visa / MC. This allows you to have some chargeback ability should things go south. The chargeback ability with American Express is pretty shaky with them (as least since the last time I checked).
3) always read all the way through the auction for descriptions about condition of the item.
4) avoid international sellers. Being US based, I personally only buy from US sellers.

I hope the above method will be helpful for you to save money shopping on Ebay. I’ve purchased hundreds of items using this method – there are some real bargains to be had out there.

The Wall Street Journal had an article this morning about replacing $1 bills with $1 coins. The Government Accountability Office (ironic name) is recommending that the $1 bill be phased out in favor of longer lasting $1 coins.

A quote from the article:

Last year, the U.S. Treasury curtailed production of dollar coins after finding that more than 40% had been returned to the government unwanted. At the time, government vaults held 1.4 billion such coins–enough to meet demand for a decade.

My personal experience with the dollar coins was a reluctance by merchants to take them. It is not surprising that 40% were returned especially considering how many people were taking them directly back to the bank for deposit.

Would the US Mint restart their campaign to reintroduce dollar coins into circulation? Probably not, especially with free shipping. But for frequent fliers, a return to the $1 coin wouldn’t be a bad thing as we have a financial motivation to introduce coins into circulation.

If you wish, you can vote in the Wall Street Journal’s poll for Yes you are in favor or No you are not. Currently 60% of people are in favor of $1 coins in their poll.

The headline is as bizarre as the headlines from the newspaper Weekly World News that used to be there as you check out of the grocery store. “60 year smoker dies choking on nicotine gum” or “Cannibal wins baby back rib contest by using real baby back ribs”

Luis Montano, who worked as a gate agent and baggage handler for thirteen years for American Airlines, suddenly found himself included on the do not fly list in August. His boss sent him home after the revelation.

Luis tried for weeks unsuccessfully to find out information from TSA and Homeland Security as to why his name was on the list. Only after being contacted by NBC6 in Miami did the Homeland Security clear him from the list.

A business colleague of mine always has trouble whenever he tries to fly. Someone with the exact same name as him is on the do not fly list. Every time he goes to check in for a flight, the agent gets an alarmed look on their face and excuses themselves to make a call away from my colleague. After 15-20 minutes they return and apologize for the delay and explain that his name appeared on the do not fly list.

Luis is still waiting to have his security clearance reinstated by American Airlines and has not been able to return to work.

I’ve always been amused by the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin’s public relations antics.

I wonder if everyday Russians actually believe some of these publicity stunts. In the past couple of weeks, he drove a plane to try and help some cranes migrate.

In honor of his awesome publicity stunts, here is a ranking of my top 10 of all time.

10. Driving a Formula 1 car

9. Scaling walls

8. Vladimir Putin “saves” a TV crew from an untimely death at the hands of a Siberian Tiger

7.Scuba diving in the Black Sea. Who would uncover ancient artifacts on a scuba diving trip? It’s Vladimir of course! He happened to find an urn from the 6th century!

6.Shooting a whale with a crossbow. Did they have a submarine fire a torpedo at it to help the stunt?

5. Putin helps out in a submarine. Look! It’s an oil deposit!

4. Swimming across a Siberian river then riding horseback without a shirt on

3.Judo – alright, who is my first opponent who is going down? You there? Come here!

2.Fighting forest fires!

1. Vladimir Putin and a band of amateur hockey players play professional Russian hockey players.
Who scored the winning goal you ask? Vladimir Putin of course!

UPDATE 1: Registration start tonight at 12 am MST / 2 am EST.

The American Express Small Business Saturday promotion has announced that registration will be on Sunday, November 18th. This is a great opportunity to get a $25 statement credit for each and every American Express card you have.

Make sure that you have all of your American Express cards and your authorized user cards ready for registration as there is only a limited amount of entries. I wrote my guide to preparing for Small Business Saturday as well as my experience from last year’s event.

This week I was able to have lunch with Rick Ingersoll, The Frugal Travel Guy thanks to reader Ivan who set it up for all three of us to meet in Park City, Utah.

I have always been a fan of Rick’s blog. He has always written in a down to earth tone as he has tried to help countless others join our hobby. In 2008, he helped patiently walk me through my first credit card churn by answering a myriad of questions for me and helped guide me through the best credit cards to apply for.

It was interesting to hear him recount how he first started blogging and how the field was a little less crowded then and some of the challenges and opportunities that he has now.

The most important thing I took away was the importance of person to person networking. I have never been to a Frequent Flyer University or the Chicago Seminars but after spending an hour and a half with Rick in which he shared a couple of great tips that I had not been aware of – I realized how important building a network of like minded frequent fliers is.

Thanks again Rick and Ivan for a great lunch and for great conversation about this great hobby that we’re all obsessed with!

Michael Pollara and his mother Margaret Pollara have spent the last ten years traveling around the United States shoplifting. The crooks would then use the money after selling the items to travel the world.

The enterprising crooks would go to Toys R Us, find a cheap toy in a big box, empty the contents, and put more expensive toys inside that box. They would then go to the checkout line where the cheap toy price would ring up.

Not satisfied with doing this only at Toys R US, they also went to CVS, Kmart, and other retailers to do the same.

Michael Pollara would then sell all the items on Ebay – clearing about $1,000,000 in sales from the stolen goods.

His use of a loyalty card program with Toys R Us finally did him in as the store was able to track the purchases in 30+ states after a theft was reported.

The best part of the story was Michael thanking CVS for sending him to Hawaii.

“He wanted to personally thank CVS for paying for his vacation to Hawaii in February,” Rossman said, reporting what Pollara said during questioning. “(Shoplifting) supports his travel around the world.”

In the end, his desire to shoplift and get credit with the Rewards R Us program was his undoing so let this be a lesson – crime doesn’t pay, even for Platinum status with Rewards R Us.

Thanks to Sice for the tip

There is an incredible story out of England about an 11 year old that ran away from his mom at the mall. He decided to head to the local airport and somehow was able to get past security without a passport or a ticket.

He was then able to board the flight and it was only half way to Rome before the passengers and flight crew became suspicious.

Once they landed in Rome, they contacted his mom and he was put on the next flight back to England.

It begs the question – did they let the 11 year old earn miles for the flights?

Before I start into my long overdue trip report on a recent trip to Africa – I need to get one thing off of my chest, or out from under my arms as it were.

Dear Tom’s of Maine,

You may be all natural and “aluminum-free and propylene glycol-free”. You probably have a lot of devoted followers. I made the unfortunate mistake of deciding to try your deodorant product for the first time on a trip to sub Saharan Africa. It was the worst decision of my life. The deodorant flat out doesn’t work and compounding the problem was the sweltering heat. It brought back memories of riding the tunnelbana (subways) in Stockholm in the summer. The stench was intense. You have been removed from my toiletry bag permanently.

That is all,
MilesQuest