newsobserver.com projects - Cashing in your points... - Comments

Re: Cashing in your points...

princessmom327 — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:03:04 -0500

We just spent a weekend in D.C. and used Amex points to pay for PART of our hotel bill (so instead of $400 I paid about $240). It helped us get away for a short vacation over the holiday without breaking the bank. I use my point mostly for travel. I especially love my Amex points as it will let you pay for ALL or PART of your purchase with points.

Re: Cashing in your points...

gr8des9er — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:57:49 -0500

We use our AMEX card like a debit card, for the majority of our day-to-day expenses like gas, groceries, etc. We've accumulated alot of points that way, but we redeem our points for Home Depot gift cards, usually. It's helped us with several home improvement projects (most recently, last weekend for instance, we paid $25 for a new storm door--2 $100 gift cards, coupon from the 2009 Entertainment book for an additional discount, installed it ourselves). We won't be using AMEX for holiday purchases, per se, but it will definitely help our budget flow in the coming months.

Re: Cashing in your points...

slfore — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:56:14 -0500

We are sitting on a huge pile of points. Hope to use them some day to book a really nice vacation.

Re: Cashing in your points...

magsmom — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:46:52 -0500

We have a credit cart that automatically sends us gift certificates (to amazon.com) every time we reach a certain points threshold. We've used those certificates every year to help defray some of our Christmas expenses. Between those and the free introductory membership that Amazon Prime offered last year, I think we pretty much did all of our shopping through Amazon.

This year, we don't have prime, but it's still a great deal, especially since you can buy just about anything through Amazon.

Cashing in your points...

suestock — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:15:38 -0500

I got an interesting press release this weekend from American Express about how more consumers are using their credit card rewards points for holiday purchases this year. I'm particularly interested in this because I've found a lot of people will just sit on piles and piles of points because they don't know how to redeem them or they are waiting to make some huge purchase in the future.

What are you doing? Have you redeemed points this year, and what did you buy? Or, are you saving up 10,000 points for some big-ticket item?