Instacart Benefits and Membership Perks

Over the years, I've gotten thousands of dollars of value for my credit cards, but not just from welcome bonuses, points, cashback, or even those big monthly credits. Sure, I've earned thousands of dollars there as well, but I'm talking about the benefits you get that no one talks about. Things like getting your broken iPhone or your MacBook replaced or repaired for free, getting a car rental claim without having to run it through your own car insurance, hundreds of dollars of cash back from card linked offers and a lot more. So I wanted to find all the benefits, not just for one card but for every major issuer and network. And as I did this, I found out a lot has changed, some benefits disappeared, some improved, and there were quite a few new ones that I didn't even know existed. For example, I bet most people listening to this have access to free international data no matter what carrier they're on. I also think that most people are probably able to get some of their public transit costs partially refunded if they have the right card. So today I'm going to walk through all this and make sure you are not leaving any money on the table and that you always know which cards to use so you're protected with every purchase. I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a comment, share it with a friend, and if you want to keep upgrading your money, points in life, click follow or subscribe. Okay, coming off the heels of last week where we went deep on travel insurance and some of those benefits on your card, I wanted to cover all of the ben otherefits of all our credit cards because I did this three years ago and did an episode and a lot has changed. This also took a lot of research, reading a lot of guide to benefits, especially Cap one, which is super complicated because they actually don't publish which card is in which platform. It's kind of crazy if you go to their website, you will see a credit card and you'll realize it doesn't actually even say if it's a visa or a master card. And who knows if in the future, it'll be a discover card. Other than the VentureX, that is very clearly labeled a visa card. So there's a lot here. And for most of these benefits the only requirements to get them is to hold the card or to use the card. And so if you want to know the specifics for your own card . You just search card and guide to benefits, whatever the name of the card is. And sometimes those are easier to find, sometimes they're harder, sometimes they're just linked on the website. But go pull that up if you want to know the nuance of them, but I'll run through most of the things that you need to know and give you an idea of what to look for, what matters, and where you can get value. Now, the first bucket I'm going to talk about are purchase benefits . And for many of these benefits, the only requirement is you put the cost of your purchase on your card , and filing claims is super easy. I've probably done four or five of these over the years. I've been reimbursed well over a thousand dollars , very hassle free. Definitely worth understanding this because that's a thousand dollars I wouldn't have had if I didn't do this. And so the first one I'm going to talk about is purchase protection. This is one of my favorites because you get reimbursed for repairing or replacing items that you buy on your card that gets stolen, damaged, or sometimes lost within ninety to one hundred and twenty days of purchase. So this is a very common benefit. Almost every card has it. Premium cards usually have better versions of it. It's usually limited to a high number, ten thousand dollars an item, fifty thousand dollars a year on the high end. And while there are exclusions, things like animals, software, perishables, vehicles , most common purchases like electronics or home goods are covered. So a couple examples of this, one time I ran an SD card through the washing machine and it actually didn't get ruined but I didn't trust it. So it was within the first ninety days so I replaced it. And then I bought an iPhone once and dropped it and cracked the screen and was able to get the cost of repairing the screen covered because it happened within ninety days. Now, most issuers have seemed to converge on a ninety day window, but Chase , excluding residents of New York, have one hundred twenty day window. And only Amex and Chase mi Pumre card s cover loss, meaning not that it's stolen, but it actually you just lost it. So that's one thing that is unique. Most cards are not going to cover this if it's just lost, but some do. And that's super valuable if you're in that circumstance . And so when I say premium cards, I mean the gold platinum Centurion on Amx, Delta Reserve, Hilton Aspire , Bonvoy Brilliant, on the chase side, chase half higher reserve, reserve business, the R its card, sometimes the premium co brand cards. On Capital One, that's AventureX, Adventurex business, on City, that's the Strata Elite, and sometimes the American kind of exec globe cards. On Built, it's the palladium . On Bank of America, it's the premium rewards elite in the Atmos summit. On US bank, it's the altitude reserve. It's usually when the annual fee is over five hundred dollars. It's kind of a good proxy, though the venture X is below that. Now you only get reimbursed up to the amount you actually char ged on the card. So that's important if you were to buy something and pay for it ninety percent with gift cards, it doesn't help you for this benefit because you've only put ten percent of the charge on the card. Now it depends on the price. You know, if you bought an iPhone and it only costs one hundred and fifty bucks to repair the screen, but you know, paid for it half with gift cards, that would be okay. If you run through the issuers, there's not that much difference. It's kind of all converged around ten thousand dollars for these claims on premium cards. For non premium cards, it's usually between five hundred and a thousand dollars. Wells Fargo notably has none of this coverage. So that is one reason not to put any purchases like this on a Wells Fargo card. Though in general, putting these purchases on AmX and Chase is great because you get that lost coverage in case you lose something. Next is extended warranty . And so most cards have this, city and built have the best. So this is going to be coverage that extends your manufact urer's warranty, usually by an additional year, but in some cases two years . And similar to purchase protection, it's usually limited to ten thousand dollars an item, fifty thousand dollars a year and also usually is capped at the amount you put on the card. The best ones here are city and many high end mastercards because you get two extra years. Also the built cards fall into that under the kind of I assume mastercard kind of world legend world elite land, but not every mastercard world legend, world elite card has this. It's a little confusing. So I'd say if you're buying something and you care more about the warranty than losing it , then city and built would be the right cards to put this on because you get an extra twenty four months, whereas if you're more worried about losing it because there's no loss coverage on those two issuers, then I'd probably put on a chase cynamics. Now the built blue card does not have this benefit. Everyone else is usually twelve months or sometimes worded as double the coverage. And so that's just something to keep in mind. If you have bought something that doesn't have a warranty, there are some cards that say, well, we'll just double the warranty. And of course, doubling nothing doesn't do you much. Wells Fargo, also no extended warranty coverage, discover also not. So in general , not a lot of purchase protection from those issuers. Next one is return protection. And this is not most cards. This is usually just premium cardss and it' actually completely absent from city, Wells Fargo and Built. But what return protection does is extend the return window of an item . So it lets you create a return policy where one didn't exist, for example, if you buy something that's final sale and you want to return it and they won't take it back, you have protection there. Now, keep in mind this protection is pretty low. It's usually in the fifty to five hundred dollars range, and it's very limited since V isa and Mastercard pretty much killed the network level return protection in the past. And so you get this on like a chase halfire reserve or a RIT card, an Amex premium card, and you've got ninety days to return something and get back three to five hundred dollars. You also get this on Aventure X personal card, but not the business and most of the premium cards from Bank of America. But again, no Citibank, no Wells Fargo, no built, no coverage here, no discover . And so this is great. I haven't actually had to use it, but I do think it can give you a little bit of confidence if you're buying something that you can't return and you won't like it. You know, this can take care of it as long as it's not that expensive if you bought something that's five thousand dollars , you might get three hundred dollars back. And usually you have to, depending on the price of the item, you might have to forfeit the item if you are trying to get this coverage back. But I don't have a lot of experience using this. And then last is price protection, which is very rare . In fact, I could only find two cards that had it, which were the VentureX business card and the built palladium card. And so this will reimburse you if a price drops on an item. Now, I have had a few cases where I've gotten a retailer to refund a purchase when a price drops , but in general, if you're buying something and you're kind of really worried about the price dropping more than any of these other purchase protections, and you've got the built palladium or Ventrex business, this could be a great thing, but keep in mind that the amount is pretty low, right? It's capped at two hundred and fifty to five hundred dollars. So that's a pretty decent size for something to drop in sixty to ninety days. But just want to flag that some of these benefits can go up to ten thousand, some of them go up to a few hundred. But again, Amex, Chase, City, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, U. S. Bank, discover none of them offer price protection. So when I'm generally purchasing something online, where these benefits come into play is kind of around how I optimize what I'm earning . I am going to not be as focused on getting the most number of points if I really care about these purchases , whereas for some things I don't care at all. Like I don't care about purchase protection for groceries, but I really do for something that is an expensive electronic item that I'm going to own for more than a year. And so making sure I put that on something that I'm going to get an extended warranty is important. But for something that I carry around with me a lot that I might leave somewhere, I probably care a lot more about purchase protection. And if I'm buying something online that's non refundable, I probably care a lot more about return protection. Occasionally, there's something where I need to buy something and it's in October and you know, I'm like, gosh, Black Fridays aren't gonna happen. And I bet this thing's going to be so much cheaper than, but I need it now. That's where price protection can be kind of interesting as a benefit and focusing on that you might know sales are going to happen. Now it's on you to monitor that price. And so that is something to keep in mind, but otherwise that's kind of generally how I think about this stuff and how I think about , you know, buying gift cards to get a deal on something that I want these protections on and I want the full value. I'm probably not going to use those gift cards on those kinds of purchases as much as I might in other ways. So that's credit card purchase protect . This episode is brought to you by Fora. Imagine if all the time you've spent planning trips, comparing hotels, and putting together perfect itineraries could actually become a source of income, a real business on your terms . Except instead of the headache of starting one from scratch, what if it could be so easy? That's what FORA does. 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Terms and limitations apply, subject to approval and eligibility, built cards are issued by column NA member FDIC pursuant to license from MasterCard International Incorporated . The next is Travel benefits and last week I did a very, very deep dive on when you need travel insurance and covered all of the travel insurance benefits that you get on cards. So I will at the highest level talk about what they are, but I am not going to go into details. So if you want to understand them, definitely go back last week. So trip cancellation and interruption insurance is something that's going to cover the cost of your nonrefundable or prepaid travel expenses if something comes up. It has to be a covered situation, like a major medical situation for you or your family, sometimes severe weather, named storms, jury duty, death, hospitalization, that kind of stuff. Usually on most premium cards and kind of mid premium cards, maybe three hundred dollars annual fees also . Amex and Chase are definitely the best here and in general the best travel benefits are on the Chase Hafire Reserve and the Chase Ritz card , but AmX does pretty well also in the trip cancellation. Then we have trip delay, which is kind of going to cover you if your trip ends up getting delayed or cancelled and you have to rebook your flights and that kind of stuff. That's on most premium and mid tier cards, but it's capped at five hundred dollars a person and has a six hour threshold usually. So you've got to wait until your six hours delayed. Now the five hundred is per person. So if you have more people, great, but in general it's, on most premium and mid tier cards. Delayed luggage is one that's rare. It's kind of only on premium Bank of America Chase cards and the VentureX business. And that's going to cover delayed bags of usually six hours, but it's only going to cover about one hundred dollars a day. So good, but it's not going to be lucrative if there's some really expensive stuff you need and you don't have it. Lost damage bag insurance is also one that's covered on most premium and mid tier cards and that's going to be somewhere between five hundred and three thousand dollars as long as you book the flight on the card . And for a lot of these, if you're booking an award flight, and obviously there's no dollar amount of the award flight other than the taxes and fees, for most of these , that's okay . It's only going to cover you up to the amount of those fees. So if someone gets sick in your family and you can't go on a trip with trip cancellation, you know, you might get those fees back, but you're not going to get the miles back , but you're going to need to have put all the charges on that card. Now there's some nuance to this about how it works with award travel. On the trip cancellation interruption, the benefit there is it's also often going to cover your hotels and your other expenses, but you do need to put the flight on your card . And depending on the issuer, they may or may not allow the award taxes and fees to count if the points used to book that flight were not earned with that card. There have been a lot of stories of people who've challenged this and the language is definitely kind of confusing , but Chase and Amics are the best here in that the trip cance llation interruption seems to be okay if you book with miles even if they're not from that program. Other ones, it's a little unclear. But when it comes to delayed luggage and lost damaged bags, you can put the award taxes and fees on those except for if your bags are lost and you did it with AmX. Amax explicitly for that one perk says it could not have been booked with points and miles. It has to be paid ticket. But in a lot of the loss damage bag also to be totally candid, a lot of the expensive stuff cameras, jewelry, computers, sporting equipment are often excluded or capped at five hundred dollars or one thousand dollars. So keep that in mind on the lost and damaged bags , but most cards on the premium and mid tier have this, but the expensive stuff in your bag is often not covered or covered with a low cap. Rental car coverage is another one when you're traveling that is awesome. Most premium and mid premium cards have primary coverage except for Amex and then and City who City has primary coverage, but only outside of your home country . And so this is great. Rent a car, decline the car rental insurance and put it all on your card and you're covered if something happens. Now you're not covered if you have an exotic car, a truck, an antique, a full size van, that kind of stuff, but this for me is way better than relying on my US car insurance because I just assume that if I report something to them, my rates are going to go up. So I love this. I use it all the time. It usually only works up to kind of thirty day, thirty one day rentals, and it's usually up to fifty to seventy five thousand dollars . But a lot of the premium and mid premium cards offer this with I think best in class for all of these travel things is the Chase Half II Reserve and the Rits card and now the Chase Half II Reserve business , but even a lot of the other cards have primary coverage, Bank of America Summit, Premium Rewards Elite, built, even some United cards, and then the city cards and whatnot. On Amex, you don't get primary coverage unless you sign up for their premium rental car protection , which only costs twelve to twenty five dollars per rental and covers you for forty two days and up to one hundred thousand dollars , has no deductible, but you do have to enroll in that and then put the charge on your card and pay that extra fee. So if you only have AmX, still a great option, probably cheaper than the rental coverage from the rental car company . But if you have a lot of these other cards, there's no reason to be paying Amex for your rental car coverage. One important remind , liability coverage is not included. And so if you don't have car rental insurance that will cover liability, meaning if you cause damage to other people or property , that's something where you're going to want to make sure you're covered either from your insurance or from a liability policy that you can get on your own or a liability policy that you get from the rental car company. And sometimes your home coverage may cover you in the US but not internationally. So look into that. And then finally, there are a handful of countries Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Italy, Ireland, Jamaica that various credit cards exclude for rental car coverage. So that's one where you'll want to look up if you're going to one of those countries, whether those countries are excluded. Now when it comes to rental cars, not only do you get coverage, but you usually get both status and discounts for those rental cars. So if you have a visa infinite card, which by the way, a lot of these perks on your card s are indirectly tied to the issuer, the visa, the master card and the tier of card. There's kind of visa, visa infinite visa signature, world elite, world ofge Lndes, and Worldaster Mcard s and so having different tiers of status of the card, which you don't earn. They're just kind of tied into that card , but those things are things that definitely kind of drive the perks for some things , but there are cases where the issuers are not required to pass on all of the perks and sometimes where they're kind of generic. I would say when it comes to things with limits, a lot of the perks I've said earlier, they fall into that category, whereas a lot of things I'm talking about now, discounts and benefits and free things, those are kind of definitely more for almost all of the cards that meet that requirement. So on rental cards, if you have a Visfinite card, you get status and discounts on Avis Hertz and National . If you have a World Elite Mastercard like the City Premier, you get status and discounts with Hertz, sixth and Avis . And then if you have an Amex platinum, you get status and discount s with Avis Hertz and National . And then interestingly, if you have priority pass from another card, your priority pass will get you Avis preferred plus, which also gets you a discount on Avis. Or if you have Delta status from Delta cards, you get Hert status as well. And then United has a similar thing with Avis. So you can get status with Hertz Avis national with a lot of different credit cards and sometimes six as well . And so that's definitely a thing to look into there are a lot of benefits of having rental car status and if it's free and it comes with a discount. I've definitely found myself saving money with the Capital One Venture and the Amex platinum rates and even better the, Amex rate with Hurts includes an upgrade and includes a four hour grace period on returns. And so one of the things to keep in mind on that one particular benefit is that there are times when I'm rent ing a car, I'll land at noon and my flight home is at four o'clock or five o'clock, so I know I'm going to have the car for twenty six hours. And in that case, almost every other rate than the AMX platinum rate is going to charge me two days and the Mxplatinum rate's only going to charge me one day. And so that's something that in that scenario I use all the time. So that's just something to keep in mind. Now, if you want to go deep on rental cars, go to episode sixty six, all the hacks dot com slash six . I did a whole deep dive on rental cars and all the different ways to save money there. But with your credit cards, you can often get status and discounts. Now when you're in your car, you can also, with many cards, get roadside assistance , I'm not going to talk about all of the cards that offer it because many of the cards that offer it don't give you a deal or a discount or anything free. It's just you have assistance. That is interesting but not enough to cover. Whereas if you have a chase Sppahire res Rereserve,ve business or the Rits card, they do have a roadside assistance benefit. And it looks like it's fifty dollars per service with a max two gallon fill up and you can use it four times a year. So if you have one of those cards, that actually feels like a real benef it. And so that's just something to keep in mind. I would write that number down so you have it easily accessible and can use it if you need it. Last week we also talked about a couple other travel related benefits emergency evacuation. In this case, if you need to be transported from a medical facility to another medical facility because you can't be treated properly at the one you're at, this insurance covers that. And it's usually between one hundred thousand dollars a million dollars of coverage, and Amex is hands down the best here. If you just have an Amex premium card, you are covered whether you put the trip on that card, whereas Chase and Bank of America offer this, but you have to actually pay for the trip on the card. Now, all of these perks only kick in when you call and coordinate all of this through the issuer of the insurance. So you've got to call Amix or the insurance company associated with it in order for any of this to be covered and they coordinate the whole thing. So great benefit to have it does not let you choose which facility to go to. So if you are picky and you're like, well, I don't want to go to this hospital. I want to go to another one. You're going to need another insurance and go listen to last week's episode because I talked a lot about that. But if you just want to make sure that if you have some medical emergency and the hospital you're at can't treat you and you want to get to a hospital that someone would determine could treat you, you are covered if you just hold a premium Amex card and you're covered if you have a premium chase or bank of America card and you book your trip on that card. Now, if you're traveling and you have medical situations that aren't emergencies, only premium chase and VentureX business have emergency medical and dental coverage. It's only two thousand five hundred dollars of coverage. It has a fifty dollars deductible . So it's nice to have. And again, further reinforces why I think the Chase Afric is hands down the best travel card when it comes to travel benefits, but it's not a huge amount of coverage and you're probably going to want to rely on your U. S. medical insurance or other options. Again, went deep on this last week. The last one we covered last week was travel accident insurance, which some people read and think, oh, this is for travel accidents. Like, you know, I get sick or I get hurt. No, this is if you lose your life or your limbs . And so this is coverage that most cards on the premium side except Amex and City cover a hundred to one hundred thousand dollars on these circumstances. Again, all the medical stuff, if you're worried about medical stuff while you're traveling or you're worried about travel related benefits that kind of tie into travel insurance, go back and listen to last week. What are some other things you get with your cards? I think most people know that many premium cards include access to lounges. In the last few years, one thing has changed. A lot of the issuers have opened their own lounges . So you've got Capital One lounges, Amax lounges, chase lounges. And then most premium cards include a priority pass membership as well. So that is lounges. We did a whole episode episode two hundred and twenty four on lounge and how to access them. There are some mastercard lounges, if you will. I think they're like dining experiences that have launched in Sao Paulo, Hong Kong and Sun in Mexico City at the airport, but they're only available to Worgeldnd Lse card holders, which is a small number of cards, built palladium, city strata elite, and sometimes a city globe card. And so lounges are a benefit of credit cards. I don't want to dive too deep because one we've done an episode and two, you know, lounges I wouldn't necessarily say are that hidden of a benefit. I think most people know that, but there are sometimes like on the Amex situation, there is a lounge collection that extends beyond just the Centurion Lounge and Priority Pass. Things like the Escape lounge and others. And so definitely make sure you look into that and go deep on that episode if you want some of the other tactics like joining the lounge waitlist before you get to the line. You can do that. Another benefit of almost every premium credit card and the premium programs from Visa and Mastercard is access to some luxury hotel collection. So that could be Amx Fine Hotels and Resorts, Capital One has a premier collection, Chase has the Edit, City has the reserve, Bilt has home away from home, there's Mastercard Luxury and Visa Luxury. And for the most part, the numbers they publish are kind of between nine hundred and two thousand hotels. There are probably somewhere around seven thousand luxury hotels that have these kinds of programs and so they're kind of split amongst these programs or you can work with a luxury travel agent who has access to these benefits. The way they all work is that these luxury hotels all want access to high end customers. So they partner with programs that are associated with people that have higher amounts of disposable income filtered by the tier of credit card they have or the fact that they work with a travel advisor and those hotels agree to give perks like late checkout, early check in, upgrades, property credits, free breakfast to the travelers associated with those programs if they book through those channels. The rates are usually the same. Sometimes they're a little higher, but I typically find them they're the same as what you'd find on the hotel website. So if you're booking a luxury hotel with cash and you're not trying to use a credit associated with a card . You should absolutely do it through a program where you can get the best perks. We have a whole program set up for our perks. You go to all the hacks. com slash upgrade and we've got a whole way that you can get going with that. This is all powered by the fact that I am also a travel advisor and we've built a lot of these relationships and I've partnered with a company to make that possible. And that partnership unlocks those kinds of perks at about seven thousand hotels . So I do think we have the highest number of all of these programs , but again, do not use our access to those perks if you could instead , you know, use a three hundred dollar credit for Amxfine Hotels and Resorts. That's going to be the far better deal . This episode is brought to you by Mercury, banking designed to work the way modern software does. I spend a probably unreasonable amount of time optimizing things. I've got credit card set ups that squeeze points out of every category, I've rebuilt my travel booking process more times than I can count, and I'm constantly testing new tools. But for years my business banking was just fine. That's weird, right? Every dollar of the business runs through our bank, payroll, operating costs, everything, and I just somehow accepted good enough. Mercury fixed that. I've used it for years and it's the first banking product that actually feels like modern software , doing things I didn't know I wanted until I had them. Every new project I start now gets its own bank account, thirty seconds to open, automations move money to where it's supposed to be, ACH and USD wires are free and take seconds, no phone calls, no forms, and no waiting on hold. The assumption was always that good banking meant trade offs, except the friction to get the features. Mercury doesn't have that trade off, and it's free to get started, no minimum b alance. If you're running a business, you have to check it out. Visit mercury. com to learn more and apply online in minutes. That's mercury. com Mercury is a Fintech company, not an FDC insured bank, banking services provid ed through Choice Financial Group and Column NAMBERS FDIC . This episode is brought to you by Quintz. I love summer, amazing weather, more time with a family, and more traveling. And with that comes summer a wardrobe with clothes that feel lighter and more breathable. That's why I keep coming back to Quintz. They make the best high quality essentials that feel and look amazing. In fact, I just picked up a few new lightweight shirts and sweaters that are perfect for summer nights. I just love how Quintz has managed to find that rare balance of everything feeling elevated but still effortless. 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One is that select US Bank, Navy, Federal, UBS and Chime customers have a separate program. And so you could look into that if you have one of those cards. If not, if you have a visa signature or visa infinite card, you basically get a free international data sim for one hundred and seventy five plus countries. And there's kind of two tiers and it looks like you can have both of them. So there's one tier where it works at any of their countries. And if you have an infinite card, you get a three gig fifteen day plan for free. And if you have a signature card, you get a one gig fifteen day plan. And you get each once per three hundred sixty five days. The way I read it and other people is that you get it per card. So if you have four Visa signature cards, you might be able to stack four three gigabyte ESIMs. So that's pretty cool. And then there are a handful of countries that are listed in this program where you get unlimited data for seven days if you have a Visa Infinite card. So right now that list is a little unclear because there are two parts of it on the Gig Sky site. One of it says North America, during the World Cup , France, UAE, the UK and Thailand . And then another part of the site says North America as if it's all the time France, UAE, UK, Thailand, but not Thailand. It's not on the other list. So at least for France, UAE and the UK, for sure, free seven days, unlimited data for every visa infinite card you have. And then for a signature card, free three days once per country. So you could use three days in France, three days in the UAE, and that's true also for the infinite card. So really awesome perk if you're traveling, that might not be enough data. So it kind of depends on your situation. But I was talking to someone, another parent at my daughter's school last night and they're about to go to France and they're gonna be there for six days. And I was like, Oh, do you happen to have a visa infinite card? And he looked his wallet, sure enough he did. And boom, he and his wife both have one, and so they're both going to have free seven days unlimited data that's going to cover their entire time in France, which is awesome. Last one, I think everyone knows about Global Entry and TSA pre being included. So if you have a premium card, there are forty different cards that offer this perk and I would highly recommend signing up for Global Entry and TSA pre check. You can do either . Global entry comes with TSA pre check, so that's a perk when you're traveling that comes with so many different cards that I think it's worth checking out. And so for anyone curious how I thought about what benefits and perks to include in this episode, the general idea was things that apply to multiple cards because of the issuer or the benefit or the network they're on, visa mastercard. And so that's why I'm not talking about all the travel benefits of every card. I'm focused on things that apply across cards. So that's travel. Those are all the travel benefits. The interesting bucket is probably this bucket of benefits that don't really fall in travel or purchase protection, but are kind of common across a lot of cards. So the first one is cell phone coverage. And this is one that's evolved a lot recently for two reasons. One, more and more credit cards have started adding this benefit , but to the negative, more and more cell phone issuers have started charging money to pay your cell phone bill with a credit card. I'll walk through how this works and then I'll talk about how I think about it. Usually the card has a twenty five to one hundred dollars deductible and then it covers up to eight hundred to one thousand dollars in damages or repairs and usually twice a year for any phone on your plan as long as you pay the plan bill with your card. So this is great outside of your purchase protection window, right? If you're within ninety days, go use that. If you're outside of ninety days, this is awesome and a ton of cards have these benefits . So mostly premium cards, but not all. So you've got Wells Fargo put it on their consumer cards, the Chase Inc. business preferred, Chase Freedom Flex, AmX Platinum, Amex Premium cards, VentureX, VentureX business, the built cards have it, US B theankt,ud ale Riteserve and connect. I would say if your card has a high annual fee, it probably has it. And if it doesn't, it might also have it. The downside though, like I said, is that you might have to pay a fee to pay your bill on a card. And whether that fee is worth it probably is kind of two factors. One, yes, you'll earn points from paying your phone bill with your credit card, but in general, your bill is probably not so high that that number of points is that meaningful. There are cards that offer up to five x points on credit card bills, so I'm not saying don't do that, but if you have to pay ten dollars to earn let's say your bills dollar, you're going to earn five hundred points, but you pay ten dollars to do it, I'm not sure that's worth it. But if you're otherwise going to pay for cell phone insurance and that is going to cost you more than the fee to put the bill on your card, then this is a great option. The other thing is that there are some carriers that while they charge a fee for a credit card for auto pay , they don't always charge a fee for a credit card if you just make a payment before the due date. So you might be able to enroll in auto pay from your checking account, but then right before the due date, you could run in and pay your cell phone bill with a credit card. Some also don't charge a fee for your credit card. So that makes it even better. So I know US Mobile doesn't. I know that right now I think I'm supposed to pay a fee for T Mobile business plans, but I don't think I'm being charged it. So your mileage may vary on this, but there are a lot of different ways to get this benefit, but know that the benefit for lost phones is not a part of this. It's for damage to your phone, not for losing your phone. The next one is one that could probably be an entire episode so I won't go incredibly deep into it, but that is card linked offers. And so for almost every card on every major issuer, there is some portal on the website where you can go find all of these benefits linked to your card . And sometimes they're silly like go to this restaurant and get two percent back, but sometimes they're get a hundred dollars off a hundred dollars purchase or Chase did one where I got this whoop and it was like three hundred and fifty nine dollars back. If you go and kind of regularly look at these, anytime there's a really interesting one, I'll put it in my newsletter. So if you're not signed up all the hacks. com slash email, then you kind of don't have to do a lot of the searching yourself. But you can regularly find some pretty great offers related to travel related to shopping. And I'd say probably five, ten times a year, there's an offer that you know, I was going to do something already and I earned something back. So I looked right now and you know, I've earned over a thousand dollars on Amex and over a thousand dollars on Chase from these card linked offers. So highly recommend using them or if you want to make this easy mode, there's an app called Card Pointers. And when you're logged into your bank with the browser extension from Card Pointers running, it'll auto enroll you in all of the offers . And even better, it'll auto enroll you in the offers on multiple cards at the same time. Whereas on Amex, if you enroll in one and then try go to another card, you usually can't add that same offer to another card. But if you hit the Amex servers at the exact same time you can. And so that's what the card pointer card extension does. And even better, when you're on any website where there is a linked offer in your one of your cards, the browser extension pops up and it's like, hey, by the way, did you know you have this offer? You can also use card pointers to search across all of them across all of your cards, which is great. And they've got an amazing mobile app. I think they just got Editor's choice on Apple. So I love card pointers. I've used it for years. Emanuel, the founder is a member and he's offered an awesome discount. You get thirty percent off if you go to all the hacks dot com slash card pointers. And if you're a member of all the hacks our private community, all the hacks dot com slash join, you get fifty percent off. So definitely check out Card Pointers if you want to optimize the card linked offers, which is kind of how I do that. So next perk is concierge. So most premium cards come with this twenty four seven Concierge service that you can use. It sounds so cool. It's like everybody gets a free assistant. They could do restaurant reservations, vacation requests, personal shopping . I have not found anyone to regularly get a lot of value out of this unless they want to treat it like a travel agent. I do know a few people who use their Amex Concierge as a travel agent for them. Outside of that , I think I have found limited value. The one place I think I found some value is trying to get help in a foreign country because a lot of the concierge programs have people that speak different languages or researching something. They've somehow been willing to call around a dozen stores and ask questions. I feel like some of these use cases AI will solve if not has already solved and is not worth the hassle that most of these concierge services you can only engage with by calling them. And so it kind of defeats the purpose . Like if I could message them, I'd use it a lot more, but I imagine that's why they don't make it easy because then everyone would use it a lot more. So I have not found a ton of use cases for these conciergees, but I'd be very curious if people have, and if you have, send me an email, podcast at all the hacks. com. I'd love to share that with everyone because I just I've yet to hear a ton of great use cases where this is better than doing it on your own. Another benefit a ton of cards have is a free credit score. So obviously you can go to credit karma and sites like that and get free credit scores, but it's almost never your FICO score, which is what's often being used for a lot of decisions. And they often show you your vantage score, but most card issuers give you a free FICO score. So City, Amex, Bank of America, Capital One, and Wells all give you a free FICO score. And even if you don't have a credit card, my FICO and Experient also give you a free FIGO score. Unlike the vantage score. So Chase and US banks still do a vantage score. They don't give you a FICO score. And if you want to go really deep on credit scores , I went as far down the rabbit hole as you can in episode two hundred and twenty one, but one of the perks on many of the cards you have is a free credit score. Now, when I thought about which benefits to talk about , I was trying not to focus on monthly credits and things like that, but there are a couple benefits that feel more wide across multiple cards than you know, feel like monthly credits per se because they're smaller dollar amounts and I thought it would be worth touching on here because they're not that card specific. And also they're both of them, or at least two of the big ones are chase specific. And I have yet to do a chase episode where I break down all the cards in chase like I have for most other issuers . So the first one is the Instacart benefit . And that is for many chase cards. So almost all the co brand cards, Bonvoy, Southwest, IHG, Hyatt Obios, Aeroplane, Disney, and then separately in another bucket united because the perks are a little different. And then the chase ink business cards, but not the ink business preferred, the no fee cards. So the way this works is for most of these cards, you get three months of Instacart plus and you get probably around ten to twenty dollars a month of credit as long as your Instacart plus is active. So at first glance, we don't use Instacart a lot so this didn't seem that exciting , but more and more we've been using it and using it probably multiple times a month. Now it',s great because we have multiple of these cards, and so you can use multiple of these benefits. You can't stack them on an order , though you can stack your free months of Instacart plus. I think I added five cards and that would add fifteen months of free Instacart plus. I should also say Mastercard for all cards, including a mastercard debit card, give you three months of Instacart plus and ten dollars off your second order each month as long as you have Instacart plus active. And it does say your first order needs to be on a mastercard as well. It's unclear if it has to be the same mastercard, but I could see this being something that actually doesn't get enforced like you would imagine. And I could also see this as a way to kind of stack out your Instagram plus into forever. I'm logged on right now and I'm adding a mastercard and I hit continue and it says applies to your second order each month. It does not actually say , even though the search results I found that you have to put the first order on the same mastercard . So I don't know, I'm adding it and it's just extended my Instagram plus by three months. So I think I could probably get my Instagr plus extended quite far given that it's all mastercards. That's really cool. But the reason that I've been using this a lot is that it turns out that most of the extra cost of using Instagart is negated by the ten dollars. So for example, we needed to bake a cake last night and the only grocery we needed was eggs. We'd already done our grocery shopping for the week and I went on to order a dozen egg s, and the cost of the eggs, once I met the ten dollar threshold, plus all the fees, plus a tip minus the ten dollars credit I had on a card , came out to under five dollars. So it was actually cheaper for me to order eggs than it was to go buy them at the store because it was a small order. Now, I personally don't love Instacart for one primary reason, which is it seems like things are always out of stock. Earlier this week we were trying to , instead of make a cake, we were trying to buy some cupcakes for taking to school. I ordered the same two boxes of cupcakes from three different Instacart stores, one after another and all three of them were out of stock. And so my biggest complaint with Instacart is if what you're ordering is very specific not easily replaceable , then it might be out of stock. And if you're ordering something where you're making a recipe and you need seven things and one of them's not there , then it's a huge pain. And we found that Amazon Fresh does much better at inventory and almost never has something out of stock. So that's why I don't like it as a. c Butard if you need eggs, if you need milk, if you need shredded cheese, where there are a lot of suitable alternatives, you are unlikely to have an issue . And especially if you just need ten or twenty dollars of something, the savings from your chase card or mastercard can be awesome, right? Like it can negate all of the service fees and the extra fees and make it way more convenient than driving to the store. So I used to not love this benefit because I didn't like it and then I realized I was thinking about it as a whole grocery solution instead of a gosh, I really just want a pint of ice cream tonight. Can I get it delivered to my house and not pay any more than I would have if I went to the store? And some stores and at least where we live , the delivery happens in less than an hour. It's really impressive. Also , you don't have to pay the remaining balance with the card . So you can use this to knock off ten to twenty dollars from your order and then pay for the rest with gift cards, which you can often get on Instagram for way more of a discount than the number of points you would earn on Instacart. And so sometimes they go on sale. You can also go to all the hacks com d slotash gift cards. I have Instagram gift cards today as of recording at I think six and a half percent off, but that varies day to day, week to week, month to month . And so when there's a big sale on Instagram gift cards on the internet, a lot of the suppliers that power our gift guard site drop their rates as well and you get a bigger discount. So also, Instagram plus includes a free membership to Peacock and NYT cooking. So indirectly your, Instagram plus membership gets you peacock and NYT cooking, which now that I think about it, I often share New York Times recipes in my newsletter and people write back and say, hey, like I don't have New York Times cooking and now I didn't realize this until I went through this. But if you have Instagr plus, you have NYT cooking and if you have a mastercard, you have Instagram plus. So everyone should have access to NYT cooking recipes.