Are You Missing Out?

So you may wonder: ‘how do Donnie and I afford to travel as much as we do?’…. And the answer is that it is a combination of efforts. Our most used strategies are:

Planning ahead
Researching travel deals and patterns
Saving money using portals and earmarking it specifically for travel
Using credit card points/miles

In this article I am going to focus on portals and mainly Rakuten. Portals are websites that allow you to earn points or cashback on purchases that you are going to make anyway. My favorite and most used portal is Rakuten, but there are many portals out there. If you have a credit card or belong to any airline or hotel clubs, they almost assuredly have a shopping portal you can earn through.

Take a peek at cashbackmonitor so you can see just some of the portals there are:

When you look at the screenshot of Cashback Monitor you can see that I searched for SurfShark. I am going to use SurfShark as my example of ways to save money to fund your travel. Recently, I was notified that my VPN was expiring so I went on Rakuten and searched for VPNs.

While I was happy with my previous VPN, my promotional pricing had run out so I went looking for a new VPN where I could once again take advantage of promotional pricing. Most stores that focus on service offer promotional pricing. For example: SurfShark offers a VPN service and they gave me a promotional offer of $2 a month for 2 years rather than $5/month regular pricing.

With a quick search in the Rakuten search bar, I found SurfShark was offering 90% cashback! With another quick search I found SurfShark is a reliable VPN service and I decided to go for it. After researching SurfShark, I went to Cashback Monitor to see which portal I wanted to buy through. I almost always use Rakuten as a portal because it gives me points that I use flexibly on hotels, airline tickets, rental cars etc.. You can see that I paid $115.83 for SurfShark and that I got 10,425 points ($104.25). Rakuten is usually a cashback portal but since I have a Membership Rewards-earning credit card, I have mine set to give me cashback in the form of MR. I’ll touch on MR in a bit….

So basically, I paid $11.58 for 2 years of VPN and personal web security from Surfshark. Since the $104.25 (90% of $115.83) that I got back was money that was spent for the VPN service it goes into a bucket of money that I earmark for travel.

You can see in the screenshot above that I also got points back on American Eagle($1.30), Aerie(.31), the Google Store($8.98) and TurboTax($10.41). By purchasing things that I was already going to buy through a portal, I have saved $125.25 which I can put towards travel. That is enough for a night stay at a hotel or possibly a fun excursion.

When you look at the screenshot of my account, you see that instead of cashback which most users get I have mine set to give me AMEX Membership Rewards (MR). If you have an AMEX card that earns MR, you can set your Rakuten account to do this as well. MR are transferrable points that can be used to book travel at many airlines and hotel as well as rental cars, excursions, etc. Transferrable points are the most valuable type of points when using points to travel. If I get paid in cash back, that $125.25 will always be $125.25 but by getting that cashback in 12,525 MR instead, I can possibly turn that into travel worth 2 or 3 times that amount. Here is an example:

The two screenshots above are of the same flight. The flight costs $390 on American Airlines website or I can book through their partner British Airways with 8,250 Avios and $5.60. So here is how it goes….. I have MR that I earned from regular shopping through my Rakuten portal and I transfer to British Airways. Now I have 8,250 Avios with which I can book my flight. If that were cashback, it would only be worth $82.50 but I am converting $82.50 worth of MR and purchasing a $390 flight with it which makes each point worth 4.7 cents each as opposed to 1 cent each!!!! That is almost 5 times the amount of the original value.

So to wrap things up: using a shopping portal is useful to saving money for travel. It is even more useful to leverage the Rakuten portal if you have an MR earning AMEX card. If you plan ahead, know where you want to go and what airline is best to get you there, you can shop through their portal and earn their points.

I have not been sponsored by any of the companies I mentioned on this page but I am going to pitch ‘signing up for Rakuten’ under my referral code. Right now if you sign up and make a purchase, I will get 4,000 points and you will get $40 in your Rakuten account. After May 13th I think it goes down to $30 but hey that’s $30 you didn’t have, right?

Also, if you are interested in a credit card that earns MR, I will put my referral code below. I have the AMEX Gold card which also has other perks and good earning categories. Please do your research before-hand and make sure that if you take out a credit card, spend responsibly and always pay your statement balance in full every month.

Apply for an American Express Card with this link. With your new card, you could earn a welcome bonus of 60,000 MR and I could earn a referral bonus of 10,000 MR. Terms Apply. https://americanexpress.com/en-us/referral/gold-card?ref=MELISC5vEZ&XL=MNANS Copy paste the link into your browser or click my picture or name to be take to the page.