Huge New BONUS on 4 Credit Cards + This Card is DONE

In this video, we will look at new elevated welcome bonuses on four Hilton Hotel cards from American Express, why this American Airlines credit card from Barclays may soon be discontinued, and we have an easy way for you to earn a few thousand extra IHG points. Hey credit warriors, my name is Ben Hedges, aka The Credit Shofu, and on this channel I post content about maximizing credit card rewards to travel the world for free. If you like the sound of that, please subscribe, and this video is brought to you by Rocket Money, but more on that later. So Hilton is one of my favorite hotel chains. I have stayed at Hilton properties such as the Conrad Las Vegas where I was upgraded to a Strip View King Suite because of my Hilton status, more on that in a moment. I've stayed at the Conrad DC where having the Hilton card got me extra value with things like free breakfast, and the Hilton Tel Aviv where I had access to the VIP lounge again because of the Hilton status from my Hilton credit card. That's all their high-end stuff, but I also often stay one night at a budget Hilton property when I go skiing throughout the winter, and I've got good value out of Hilton points. They may not be the most valuable points from a cents per point basis, but it's easy to earn a lot of them, and one of the best ways to earn a load of Hilton points is with the Hilton credit cards from American Express, which are all currently offering elevated welcome bonuses, so let's go through So this is the entry-level card with no annual fee. I think back in the day when I got this card it was a 75,000 point welcome bonus, and I remember I used the bonus and some extra points I had earned from spending on the card for a couple of free nights at the Beverly Hilton in obviously Beverly Hills. That was one of my very early points redemptions that got me into this whole hobby. I think it was 60,000 points a night at the time, and my bonus was 75,000 points on the card, so I collected some more points from the spending to get up to the 120,000 points that was required, but right now you wouldn't need to collect quite as many extra points because currently the bonus on the Hilton honors basic no annual fee card is 100,000 points, and that's for spending $2,000 in six months. If we use a points guy valuation, he values Hilton points at 0.6 cents a piece, so that gives us $600 in value. The Hilton honors card is a great starter card to get. It earns seven points per dollar on Hilton, and five points per dollar on dining, groceries, and gas, and then three points per dollar on everything else. Didn't I say Hilton points were easy to earn? And that bonus runs until January 8th, 2025. But let's now move on to the next one, a card that I personally have, the Hilton honors surpass card. So this is one of my favorite cards. I'll tell you exactly why in just a moment, but first let's look at the bonus. It's 165,000 Hilton points for spending $3,000 in six months. At 0.6 cents a point, that is worth $990. The reason I like this card so much is that you get Hilton gold status, which gets you things like free breakfast and a room upgrade. It's also a head start if you want to get diamond, which is what happened to me in the past. I had enough stays a few years back to go from gold to diamond, which is what got me a suite upgrade at the Conrad in Las Vegas. The annual fee on this card is $150, but there is a $200 annual Hilton hotel credit, which is dished out at $50 per quarter. And as of now, you do get reimbursed if you use it to buy a $50 Hilton gift card to combine with the credit in the following quarter or combine with more gift cards or points or whatever you want to get a free night. As for point earning, this one gets you 12 points per dollar on Hilton spend, six points per dollar on dining, groceries and gas, four points per dollar on online purchases and 3x on everything else. That 4x online was added in a recent revamp that the card had this year. Then we have the reason that I really like the card and that is the free night award. If you spend $15,000 on your card in a year, which I often do, okay, I often pay my taxes with this card, you get a free night award, which can be used at almost any Hilton property, even the really high end ones. I normally value it at about $700, although you could get even more value out of it if you manage to find availability at, say, like a beach villa in the Maldives or something. But for me, $700 is about the average value I realistically get from it. Let's now move on to the next one, the Hilton Honours Aspire card. So this is the high level card from Hilton and Amex and it gets you diamond status and a load of other credits that completely offset the $550 annual fee. And this card is currently offering 175,000 Hilton points for spending $6,000 in six months. That's $1,000 a month. And at 0.6 cents per point, the value of that is $1,050. The cool thing is though, this card actually gives you a Hilton free night every year, not just after your anniversary, but every year, even in year one. So you would be getting 175,000 points plus a free night worth on average $700. So that is a total value of $1,750 in your first year without even mentioning all of the credits you get on the card. But if you don't want to commit to a card with such a high annual fee, there is another way to get 175,000 points. But first, do you know how much money you are wasting on subscriptions you forgot you signed up for? For me, it was hundreds of dollars a year. Well, today's sponsor Rocket Money is here to help. I have found Rocket Money very useful for cancelling unwanted subscriptions. Once you link all your accounts, the app will show you all of the subscription payments you're making each month and you can find ones that you're not using anymore. Like this Calendee subscription is costing me $14.99 per month, but I'm not currently making use of it. Well, Rocket Money can cancel that for me in just a couple of taps. Here we go. And shortly afterwards, I got an email saying it was successfully cancelled, saving me $155 per year. In addition to cancelling unwanted subscriptions, I have found Rocket Money very useful for budgeting. I can see on the app that I'm bringing in more money each month that I'm spending, and then I have monthly spend broken down into different categories with budgets for each. For dining and drinks, I've set it at $300 per month. Good. We're still under that. And the app will send me a notification when I hit the limit. For groceries, it's $500. Unfortunately, this month, I'm still under that as well. It really helps me to track where every penny is going. And speaking of keeping track of my money, another feature I really like in Rocket Money is tracking my net worth. I'm blurring the numbers here, guys, but you can see how it works. It adds up all of your assets and how much money you owe against them. And the data changes in real time as you pay down mortgages, as your stocks rise or fall, and as your bank balances change. You can see mine has gone down a little bit recently because property values have fallen just a little bit in the last few weeks. And here you can see how much is paid off on the mortgages on my two properties. And this updates automatically every month. Rocket Money gives me such a complete picture of my finances, including both my monthly spending and my overall net worth, as well as the power to find and cancel subscriptions I've forgotten about. So take control of your finances today. Go to RocketMoney.com slash Ben to get started for free. OK, so one hundred and seventy five thousand points. And that is the current bonus on the Hilton business credit card from American Express. Yes, this is the same bonus as the Aspire, but the card has a hundred and ninety five dollar annual fee instead of a five hundred and fifty dollar annual fee. However, the spending requirement is a little higher at eight thousand dollars. And this offer, as well as all the others, run until January 8th, 2025. All right, let's now move on to a couple of other things. Let's first talk about an airline credit card that could be discontinued very soon. And then I'll tell you how you can get a few thousand points. So CNBC came out with an exclusive article, one of those citing people with knowledge of the situation, talking about how Citigroup is in talks with American Airlines to become the exclusive issuer of American Airlines credit cards. This would mean that the Barclays aviator card is discontinued. Now, you may think, wait, I didn't even know that there were two issuers of American Airlines credit card anyway. I just knew about the city ones. And those ones all have limited time bonuses at the moment, by the way. But no, there is actually another card issued by Barclays, which is the American Airlines aviator card. This is because when American Airlines merged with U.S. Airways in 2013, American Airlines had cards issued by Citi and U.S. Airways had a card issued by Barclays, which was then rebranded as an American Airlines card. And both partnerships were actually renewed in 2016. I guess they were both making money for Americans. So why not? But they were given different channels of promotion. Basically, Barclays were only allowed to promote their card in flight. So when you have an AA flight attendant trying to sell you on a credit card in the air, that's the Barclays card. The Citi card is more profitable for AA and the Barclays card portfolio apparently has more people with lower credit scores and more delinquent accounts. If Citi does manage to get this deal done and become the sole issuer for American Airlines, they will likely sign a seven to 10 year deal and take over the accounts of the existing Barclays card holders. So if you have an aviator card right now, it might just get turned into a Citi Advantage Platinum Select World Elite Mastercard. Gosh, that's a mouthful since that's the one with the exact same annual fee as the Barclays aviator card, $99 a year. And then the aviator card, that whole brand would be discontinued. It's not 100% guaranteed to be happening, but that is what Citi Group and presumably American Airlines are trying to do. All right, now for our final story today, and that is how to get an easy few thousand IHG points. Now, I can't remember if I've talked about this one before I might have done, but this offer is actually live now as of September 19th. Okay, I might have talked about it before it was live, but that is getting 3,000 IHG points for every two nights you stay from September 19th. So from now up until December 31st, until the end of the year, you do have to register to activate the offer with your IHG account login details. And then you are good to go. Pretty much any paid night seems to count for this. So not reward nights or nights using a combination of points and money. But other than that, most nights should be eligible. And the two nights don't need to be consecutive. It could be two nights at different hotels. You get 3,000 points on top of what you normally earn for staying the two nights and whatever you earned on your credit card for paying. And you can do it as many times as you want until December 31st. I stayed at two IHG properties recently in DC, two different intercontinentals, the Wharf and the Willard. I had a great time there, but those two hotels are definitely on the high end. However, IHG does have lower end properties like Holiday Inn. So yeah, if you're looking for something more on the budget end, they do have that too. I'll put the link to sign up for this deal in the description or in a pinned comment so that you can check it out. And guys, that is the video for today. Thank you so much for watching. And don't forget to take control of your finances with Rocket Money and get started for free at rocketmoney.com slash Ben. Link is also in the description. Please subscribe to our channel if you're new and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.