Effort man transforms an every-day truck into an out-of-this-world ride
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الجمعة، 30 سبتمبر 2016
Fewer People are Defaulting on Student Loans — But Don’t Celebrate Yet
When you prepare to graduate from college, the idea of actually paying back your students loans might ruin any cake-and-balloons celebration you have planned.
Incessant warnings about the consequences of defaulting on your loans can take the wind out of your mortarboard and make you wish you could stop time and enjoy life before repayment begins.
But now there’s some good news about the state of federal student loan repayment in the United States. Sort of.
Federal Student Loan Default Rate Drops — Slightly
The three-year federal student loan default rate has dropped a whopping 0.5 percent — from 11.8% to 11.3% — for students who started repaying their loan between 2012 and 2013, the U.S. Department of Education said.
More than 5.2 million borrowers entered repayment between October 2012 and September 2015, and 593,182 of them have defaulted on their loans, according to a media release.
So if the percentage seems low, remember that we’ve got almost 600,000 graduates and former students who are totally screwed.
While such a decrease might seem trifling, let’s put it in perspective: The default rate has declined continually since 2012, when it was 14.7%. Talk about recession woes.
Why Do Loan Default Rates Matter?
The release discusses the “cohort default rate,” which is the “percentage of a school’s borrowers who enter repayment” on certain federal loans “during a particular federal fiscal year, the Department of Education explained.
The loan default rate doesn’t just affect students who are wringing their hands over their next steps.
Schools with high default rates may find their eligibility to be a part of federal student aid programs limited or completely revoked. For-profit schools are notorious for being on the sanctions list.
Remember, Defaulting Is the Worst
A loan default rate approaching 10% doesn’t mean it’s time to rest on your laurels when it comes to paying down your student loans.
Defaulting occurs when you haven’t paid your federal loan for an entire nine months; at that point, your entire balance comes due and can quickly escalate to a collections situation.
Deferment and forbearance may be options for you if you can’t pay your loans, but the first step is communicating with your federal loan administrator.
Income-based repayment options may also be available to help you get through difficult financial times while still remaining in good standing. Feeling completely overwhelmed? Refinancing your loans can help you get a lower interest rate.
Once you’ve done everything you can to get your payments under control, consider bringing in extra income to put toward your loans. It may be a long road to freedom, but picking up a side hustle can help you ensure you’re doing all you can for your financial future.
Your Turn: Have you ever defaulted on a student loan?
Lisa Rowan is a writer and producer at The Penny Hoarder. She will be paying off her graduate school loans until the rapture, and probably after.
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15 Things You Need in Place for Creating Your Personal Brand
When you think about it, a personal brand is one of the most useful things you can build.
It’s powerful. It’s valuable. It’s killer.
But it also takes a considerable amount of work. As I’ve built my personal brand over the past few years, I’ve discovered that one’s personal brand doesn’t merely grow when you acheive some level of business success.
Instead, you have to work hard at it.
Building a personal brand is almost like building a business. You have to identify your target clients, discover the best marketing methods, and relentlessly work to deliver what they want.
But the results? Worth it!
As you build your brand, it becomes much easier to connect with prospective clients, close deals, and grow the opportunities that weren’t possible when you started.
To get to that point, you’ve got to start with the right foundation.
Seventy-seven percent of B2B buyers said they speak with a salesperson only after they’ve performed independent research online.
More than 50% of decision-makers have eliminated a vendor from consideration based on information they found online.
With this many eyes watching, it pays to build your personal brand in the most effective way.
I’ve had success with growing my personal brand because of careful planning. I had things ready to go before I started promoting myself.
Here are the things you’ll need to have in place as you work to develop your personal brand.
1. Head shots
I am immensely thankful that we’ve moved beyond the Glamour Shots era. Still, the people who used those portraits throughout their professional lives had the right idea.
(kind of…)
When you start to promote your personal brand, you want to be easily recognizable, and you want people to take you seriously. I have a number of professional head shots and photos that I use across my online properties for consistency.
As my appearance changes (and, yes, I do age…or mature), my head shots get updated.
Take pictures that represent the personality you’re trying to portray, and use those images across all your social channels, websites, gravatar accounts, and author bios.
2. Your focus
Entrepreneurs working to build a personal brand typically want to be known as experts in something. When you’re creating your personal brand, you need to identify that one thing that’s your passion and area of expertise.
- What are you focusing on?
- What’s your unique angle?
- What do you want to build your business around?
- What’s your ultimate vision?
Understanding your focus and your vision helps lay the groundwork for the rest of the steps you need to take to create and launch your personal brand.
3. Your elevator pitch
Let’s say you and I meet in an elevator. I strike up a conversation that quickly leads to your work. You’ve got about 30 seconds to explain what you do.
Can you condense your job or brand down into a short pitch that’s clear and gets the point across?
This pitch isn’t just for personal connection opportunities. The same brief statement can be utilized throughout social channels and online bios to help followers and prospects best understand who you are and what you bring to the table.
Write up what you do and what makes you valuable, and don’t be afraid to make it detailed. Once you have the information down, start trimming.
Keep trimming until you get it down to a strong, impacting statement.
4. Know your USP
Your unique selling proposition (USP) goes hand in hand with your elevator pitch. This is what sets you apart from others in your industry or specialization. If there are 2,000 other entrepreneurs offering the same service, why should your prospective customers choose you?
Why should your audience pay attention to you?
What is your unique value they won’t find with anyone else?
Your USP should be a succinct, single-sentence statement of who you are, your greatest strength, and the major benefit your audience will derive from it.
USPs typically fall into 3 categories:
Quality – It’s about superior materials or ingredients, craftsmanship, or proprietary manufacturing. Think “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza.” from Papa Johns.
Price – Price isn’t the best USP, but it can work if you offer the best prices, low rate guarantees, price matching, bulk discounts, or unique special offers.
Service – This can be unquestioned returns, satisfaction guarantees, or extended services to delight customers. Think Tom’s Shoes’s practice of giving shoes to the needy.
This is a critical component for branding. You’ll use this to craft your pitch, and it will be prevalent in virtually all of your marketing messages and outreach.
5. A defined audience
Defining your area of expertise is only part of the journey. You have to know to whom you’re catering. Building a brand is useless unless you’re targeting the right people.
You have to define your audience so that any content you create is relevant, your marketing turns heads, and you can eventually monetize your brand.
Think of it like a game of darts. You score if you hit the board, but you score higher if you hit dead center. Without a target, you’re just throwing darts blindly.
When you know your audience, you can:
- create highly valuable content specific to their needs
- generate offers that will provide solutions to their greatest problems
- create brand advocates who will embrace your message and help spread it for you
- identify the best ways to engage your audience
- identify places to find them
Defining your audience takes time and research, but without a clearly defined audience, you’ll never grow your brand.
6. A student mindset
You have to maintain the mindset of a perpetual learner, no matter how much experience you gain in your field. Change happens fast, so adopt the “I am a student and always need to learn” attitude.
Tune in, listen, and stay up-to-date with industry trends.
If you fail to stay relevant, people will stop paying attention to you.
It never hurts to learn new things, develop new skills, and expand your knowledge. Everything you learn is an opportunity to pass something new to your audience and provide more value.
7. Create a marketing strategy
Before you launch your personal brand, you need a strategy that details how you’ll promote yourself. While it doesn’t need to be as robust as a marketing strategy for a major brand, it’s still a good idea to create a documented marketing plan you can follow.
This should include (but isn’t limited to):
- social media deployment and posting schedule;
- plan for influencer outreach and engagement;
- content marketing strategy for the creation, distribution, and promotion of content;
- SEO and link building strategy with tactics like guest blogging to improve visibility;
- community engagement strategy for groups and sites such as Quora.
8. A personal brand audit
While you’re in the process of creating your personal brand, you likely already have public information available about you.
Before you push the growth of your brand, take the time to audit your online presence. Do extensive searches for your name and identity online.
This can help you manage anything that doesn’t mesh with your brand image as well as show opportunities for your branding campaign once you get started.
This isn’t a one-time audit, either. Schedule routine reviews of your personal brand to monitor how you appear on the web.
9. Create a personal website
A website isn’t just a place to toot your own horn.
You certainly want to show off your expertise and the work you’ve done. You also want to make sure you control as much real estate around your brand as possible.
A branded website is another source of content that will show up at the top of the search results when people search for information about you.
Having a website ensures that you stay in control of the top search results rather than allowing third-party sites to shape your online image.
10. Define your story
The strongest personal brands are carried by a potent narrative. The people most interested in following you or working with you will want to know your story.
If you specialize in more than one area or have a series of things you’re passionate about, a narrative becomes even more important.
It’s a unified theme that ties everything together.
Think about some of the most well-known personal brands like Mark Cuban, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, or Richard Branson.
In every case, the stories are well known and the narratives lend tremendous weight to these people’s brands, ultimately defining how we see them.
What’s your story?
11. Build on Feedback
Even when we look into a mirror, it’s not easy to define ourselves and understand who we are. It’s just not that easy to form an objective opinion of ourselves.
Use the feedback from others you know to build the framework for your personal brand. Ask people you trust, e.g., colleagues, friends, family and co-workers, to describe you with just a few adjectives. You can also ask additional questions like:
- What do you think I’m good at?
- What do you think my weaknesses are?
- What are my greatest strengths?
12. Define your goals
Why are you developing this personal brand? Is it to create a solid image to help you land a better position in your career? Do you want to create a more trustworthy and authoritative persona to land clients?
Creating goals can help you shape your personal brand and the direction of your promotion and marketing. Aside from your major goals, you should also define smaller, more readily attainable goals.
Where do you want to be in 6 months? In a year? What are your traffic goals for your brand website?
When you create goals, break them down into smaller milestones, and create a roadmap you can follow from launch to achieve those goals.
13. Create a personal style guide
Brands often use style guides to define the appearance of their logos, fonts, and colors to represent themselves and their products/sevices. This may even include employee dress code.
Everything you do contributes to your personal brand. Create a personal style guide similar to what the brands use. This way you have a consistent representation of your personal brand.
This should include the way you dress, carry yourself, behave with others, and even write and respond to emails.
14. Create a content strategy
Even though I mentioned creating a marketing strategy already, I feel it’s important to list this on its own. Not everyone will create an overall marketing strategy or social media plan. At the very least, you should create a content marketing strategy.
Much of your branding will revolve around content.
You’ll use content to build authority and show your expertise. You’ll create guest posts to generate referral traffic and links. You might create short videos to share your ideas.
A content strategy can help you maintain a consistent schedule and generate the right topics for your audience as well as give you the greatest chance of growing your personal brand.
Moz has created a terrific content strategy framework you can use to plan your own.
15. Perform a competitive evaluation
Personal brand building isn’t a popularity contest, but it does pay to know where you stand in the crowd.
Occasionally, you can collect some data, e.g., from Google trends, that will display the general query interest around your personal brand.
You want to know some of the key metrics around your brand so you can pivot and act accordingly.
This data is from Buzzsumo.
In the early stages of building your personal brand, you may or may not be selling anything. Regardless of your approach to monetization, you have competitors. They’ll fall into two categories:
- Direct competitors, competing for your audience’s money
- Indirect competitors, competing for your audience’s attention
Once you’ve identified your audience, you need to take stock of the industry and find out who is turning the heads of your audience and what they’re using to keep them engaged.
You don’t want to mimic your competitors. That’s bad. Remember, you want to be unique.
A competitive evaluation will give you the insight to take whatever your competitors are doing and do it 10 times better so you can capture and hold the attention of your audience.
Conclusion
Your personal brand is how the world will see you. For that reason, you need to polish your brand and give it a strong start, out of the gate. Starting with an unpolished and uninteresting brand is only going to hurt your efforts.
Including these elements in the launch of your brand will connect you with the right people. Those people will begin to identify you with a specific industry or area of expertise. As you share information and build rapport, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a trusted authority in your niche.
It won’t take long before the right opportunities will present themselves, and your branding efforts will begin to pay dividends.
Have you started building and promoting your personal brand? Which elements do you think are most important for making you stand out in your industry?
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Target is Hiring 77,500 Seasonal Workers — You’ll Get $15/Hour and 10% Off
I went into Target last night looking for batteries, and I came out with a killer job tip.
Turns out, Target stores nationwide will be hosting a huge seasonal hiring event in two weeks.
All told, the retailer is looking to hire 70,000 team members to work in-store and 7,500 for distribution and fulfillment facilities during the holiday season.
That’s a lot of open seasonal jobs!
And they’re with a company that takes care of its employees.
Target Employee Benefits
In addition to competitive pay — including its recent jump to a $15-an-hour minimum wage — Target employees get a 10% discount on Target purchases.
Target also offers a flexible schedule “to help you balance life and work.”
To join in, look for Target stores in your area. Each will hold an in-store hiring event on Oct. 14 and 15 from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Drop in during that time to meet the team and learn more about the open seasonal jobs. You may also have the opportunity to interview on the spot, so dress the part and prepare for common interview questions!
Ready to make some money and work for a company you love this holiday season? Mark your calendars, and apply ahead of time online right here.
Want to hear about more of the sweet job opportunities we find for you? Make sure to follow The Penny Hoarder Jobs on Facebook so you never miss a jobs post!
Your Turn: Will you stop by your local Target’s hiring event this October?
Dana Sitar (@danasitar) is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder. She’s written for Huffington Post, Entrepreneur.com, Writer’s Digest and more, attempting humor wherever it’s allowed (and sometimes where it’s not).
The post Target is Hiring 77,500 Seasonal Workers — You’ll Get $15/Hour and 10% Off appeared first on The Penny Hoarder.
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This Study Shows Millennials Might Not Really Be as Lazy as You Think
Before I came to work this morning, I went to a coffee shop and wrote for an hour and a half.
Not because I needed to express myself, or because I had a coffee craving — though I enjoy both of those things — but because it’s how I earn extra money.
And among my fellow 30-year-olds, that makes me far from unique.
In fact, 44% of workers aged 25-34 and 39% aged 18-24 also have side gigs, according to a recent CareerBuilder survey of 3,244 people.
Nearly half of millennials work on top of their full-time jobs? Seriously?!
Why So Many Millennials are Making Money on the Side
I want to believe 44% of my peers have side gigs because they love them.
But the numbers tell a different story.
Among all age groups, only 12% of workers earning more than $100,000 had side gigs, as compared to 34% making below $50,000. And the workers most likely to have them are in notoriously low-paying industries like leisure and hospitality, retail and transportation.
To further prove these side gigs aren’t passion projects: “71% of workers… do not want to turn their side gig into their day job and 76% don’t plan to own their own business in the future.”
Worst of all, 80% say they’re not in their dream jobs, and 44% don’t think they ever will be.
CareerBuilder suggests these side gigs are a good thing, saying they help you “be a better employee.” Although I agree side gigs can help you grow career-wise — I find these numbers completely disheartening.
I write on the side because I want to, not because I have to — but it seems like I’m one of the lucky few.
If you’re working a second job because you’re struggling to make ends meet, here are a few ideas that might help:
1. Pursue Your Dream Job
To me, the saddest statistic is nearly half of the people surveyed don’t think they’ll ever be in their dream job. If you think that, you’re probably right — you’ll never be in your dream job if you don’t actively seek it out.
Take Action: Try this career quiz to see what you’re born to do, and then follow our TPH Jobs Facebook page to stay on top of all the latest openings. Maybe apply at one of these companies where you can work your way up to a six-figure job.
2. Get Paid What You’re Worth
Like your current company, but need a side job to stay afloat? Then you’ve got to ramp up your paycheck.
Take Action: Ask for a raise. The worst that can happen is they say no. But if you take the time to build these key career skills and use this salary negotiation strategy, hopefully you’ll knock it out of the park.
3. Make Moves
If you don’t have luck with either of those strategies, then it might be time to move somewhere cheaper. Cost of living varies wildly across the country — moving elsewhere might mean less struggling.
Take Action: Research cheaper alternatives to popular cities, and metro areas where your paycheck will go farther. If you work for a large company, ask your employer about the possibility of transferring.
If you work a side gig because you enjoy it, keep slaying.
But if you’re just trying to pay the bills, I hope these strategies help you earn more money — because if you’ve read this far, I’m confident you deserve it.
Your Turn: Do you work a side gig?
Susan Shain, senior writer for The Penny Hoarder, is always seeking adventure on a budget. Visit her blog at susanshain.com, or say hi on Twitter @susan_shain.
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Eight Discount Grocery Strategies That Will Keep Your Food and Household Prices Low
This week, we’ve taken a serious look at making your food cheap. We’ve looked at using a $1-per-meal strategy and then some ideas for implementing that strategy with very cheap recipes for snacks and light meals.
However, these strategies mostly focus on the actions you need to take in the kitchen to save money. In reality, the place where we spend most of our money on food is actually at the grocery store, and for my dollar, there are few ways to beat the savings that one can get from simply choosing a discount grocery store and making that your main place for grocery shopping.
Confession time: I am an avid discount grocery shopper.
That means that the vast majority of the time, I do my grocery shopping at a place that is known primarily for low prices. I go to the grocery store to shop for groceries, not for ambiance or samples or concierges or pretty displays. I want good prices on the things that I buy, and I want to get out of there as soon as I can.
In addition, I spend as little of my time as possible in the grocery store. I don’t view it as a “destination” or as a place to wander and hang out. I view it as a place to get the food that I need and get it home with the least possible time and money cost.
All of this adds up to minimal time and minimal money spent on grocery shopping. I go to the store with a plan, I’m confident that my store of choice has low prices and that my list has items that are on sale already, and I just take care of business.
Here are some of the specific strategies I use to make this work and keep my grocery bill as low as possible by taking advantage of discount grocery shopping.
Use an actual discount grocer and/or warehouse club.
This really is a pretty obvious first step. If you’re not shopping at a discount grocer, you’re spending money for things like packaging, advertising, and ambiance instead of food. To me, that’s a waste of money. I want my dollars to go toward food when I’m at the grocery store.
How do you find a discount grocer, and how do you know if a particular store is one? Consumer Reports actually already has a great little guide to discount supermarkets. Their top five discount chains? Trader Joe’s, Fareway (that’s where I shop!!), Market Basket, Costco, and WinCo. If you have any of those stores near you, you’ve got access to a discount grocer. I would personally add three more chains to that list – ALDI, Sam’s Club, and BJs.
Choose your ‘primary’ store and learn its layout.
The key is to choose a supermarket that you’ll use every week that has consistently lower prices than the competition. Price should be your focus. Sure, other stores may have better ambiance and more esoteric product selection (like Whole Foods or your local co-op), but you can take advantage of those for individual ingredients. Your main store should be price-focused and it should be your default stop for grocery shopping.
Once you’ve decided on your store, get to know the layout. If you shop there regularly, you should start picking it up by default anyway, but be extra mindful at first as to where everything is in the store. Don’t be afraid to actually draw a diagram on a piece of paper while you’re shopping there, not only for future reference but to aid you in memorizing where things are.
Why is this important? The next two steps should make it clear.
Watch the store flyer every week.
Most discount grocers go even further than their low everyday prices and put many items on sale each week, which they share with shoppers via their store flyer. They also share these flyers via their website.
Whenever you’re thinking about grocery shopping, stop first and visit the website of your preferred store and download their flyer. Use those on-sale items as the basis for your meal planning. Speaking of which…
Make a meal plan and grocery list before you go, and organize the grocery list to match the store’s layout.
This kind of ties the last two pieces together into one convenient strategy. You’ve got your flyer, so pick out some interesting ingredients from that sale flyer and use it as the basis for your meals for the week. Simply list what meal you’re going to have each day and make sure each one relies on a sale-price ingredient or something you already have on hand.
From that meal plan, build your grocery list by simply writing down the ingredients you need to pull off those meals. That’s really all you need to buy, after all.
Since you know the store layout, organize your list based on the layout of the store. Put all of your “bread aisle” items together. Put all of your “refrigerated” items together. Put all of your “freezer” items together. Put those sections on your list in an order so that you’ll just walk right from section to section as you go through the store. This makes a grocery store visit even faster since you’re not backtracking, and that means even fewer impulse items in your cart.
Stock up big on sale-priced nonperishables.
If your grocery store flyer includes a great sale price on a nonperishable item that you know you’ll use in future meals – like pasta, for example – don’t be afraid to hit that sale hard.
We’ll usually buy as many as 10 boxes of pasta (since we eat pasta once a week) when it’s on sale at the store. We’ll buy many, many cans of diced tomatoes if they’re on sale. We fill the cupboard with things like these because we know we’ll use them in the next month or two.
We don’t use this strategy for perishable items. If an item has any risk of going bad, we don’t buy it in bulk. We buy merely the amount we think we’re going to use.
- Related: 15 Items Always Worth Buying in Bulk
Listen to uptempo music while you shop.
Grocery stores intentionally play music with a slow beat in order to encourage shoppers to walk more slowly in the store, which gives them more time to look at the goods on the shelf and then make impulse buys. Uptempo music in your ears overrides this, meaning you’ll move much more quickly from item to item.
In addition, the faster music that you choose will gently distract you away from the items on the shelves when you’re shopping so that impulse buys are much less likely to grab you. It also helps you to avoid hearing the audio advertisements that stores often play when you’re shopping – no more getting distracted by a “big sale on potato chips!”
Figure out the price per unit when buying a specific nonperishable item.
If an item isn’t going to go bad in your cupboard, you should almost always be buying the version that’s cheapest per unit – per ounce or per individual item.
Many stores will list the cost-per-unit right on the price label on the shelf, but if you’re not sure, the easiest way to figure it out yourself is to simply figure out a numerical count of how much “stuff” you’re getting – the weight is a good number – and then open up the calculator app on your phone. Enter the price of the item you’re looking at, then divide that by the amount of “stuff” you’re getting. That’s the price per unit for that item. Do the same calculation for other ones you want to compare and then go for the one with the lowest price per unit.
If an item is in multiple locations, compare the prices.
Even the best discount grocery stores will offer similar items in different places in the store with different prices. Take advantage of this.
My favorite example of this is the difference in prices between cheese and deli meat at the deli counter versus in the refrigerator section. You’ll often find the exact same brand of cheese in the refrigerator section – or at least some very similar alternatives – and the price will vary substantially. Often, there will be sales at the deli counter that don’t appear in the refrigerator section and vice versa. Thus, if you have “sliced cheese” or “deli meat” on your list, check both areas.
If you use these strategies, you’ll milk the maximum value for your dollar from your grocery store visit. Doing so lowers your food bill for the month, which means you have money left over for other elements in your life – paying down debt, building an emergency fund, saving for the future, or whatever else your dreams and plans may hold.
Good luck!
Related Articles:
- The Emergency Food Fund: Why Every Family Should Keep Three Easy Meals on Hand
- 20 Strategies for Radically Cutting Your Food Expenses
- Four Best Credit Cards to Take to the Grocery Store
The post Eight Discount Grocery Strategies That Will Keep Your Food and Household Prices Low appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
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Help to Buy mortgage guarantee scheme scrapped
The government has decided not to extend its Help to Buy mortgage guarantee scheme beyond the end of 2016, as previously planned.
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Investigation launched into energy provider 'E'
An investigation has been launched into gas and electricity provider ‘E’ amid concerns over its approach to recruiting new customers.
Energy regulator Ofgem says it will examine whether E has breached its rules, which state that sales and marketing information must be complete, accurate, and easy for people to understand.
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Guaranteed Getaway: Credit Cards That Offer a Free Hotel Stay Each Year
While hotel points can go a long ways toward helping you achieve a heavily discounted trip, a free night’s stay can only sweeten the deal. Fortunately, a handful of hotel credit cards offer just that – a free night you can redeem every year, regardless of how many points you have.
Four Credit Cards that Offer a Free Hotel Stay Each Year
While some of these free nights are earned on your account anniversary, others are offered as a bonus for meeting a minimum spending requirement. If you’re interested in earning a free night or two, check out the following cards and details:
Citi® Hilton HHonors™ Reserve Card
The Citi® Hilton HHonors™ Reserve Card offers an array of free nights you can take advantage of. Not only do you earn two free weekend night certificates after spending $2,500 on your card within the first 90 days, but you score a free weekend night certificate on your account anniversary when you spend $10,000 on your card annually as well. A $75 annual fee does apply, but it is more than offset by the fact that two free nights can be worth up to $1,000.
The downside to this offer, however — at least for business travelers — is that your free nights are only good on weekends. After calling Citi, I confirmed that weekends include Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings. So if you’re in the market for a Monday to Friday trip, you’ll be out of luck with this offer. But if you’re craving a weekend away, it might be perfect for your needs – and if you’re planning a week-long vacation, you can at least score two of the weekend nights for free.
Highlights:
Marriott Rewards® Premier Credit Card
Just like the Citi® Hilton HHonors™ Reserve Card, the Marriott Rewards® Premier Credit Card offers a signup bonus in addition to a free night on your cardmember anniversary. Currently, this offer doles out 80,000 Marriott points after you spend $3,000 on your card within the first 90 days. As a bonus, you’ll get 7,500 additional points when you add an authorized user and they also make a purchase, plus one free night stay at any Category 1-5 property after you carry the card for 12 months. An $85 annual fee does apply, and it is not waived the first year.
Highlights:
Club Carlson℠ Premier Rewards Visa Signature® Card
The Club Carlson℠ Premier Rewards Visa Signature® Card offers a pretty sweet deal for people who love free hotel stays. With this card, you’ll earn an amazing 85,000 points after you spend $2,500 on your card within the first 90 days. As an added bonus, you’ll also get another 40,000 points each year on your cardmember anniversary. Since Category 1 properties start at just 9,000 points per night, you can stretch both bonuses fairly far. Plus, you’ll earn 10 points for every dollar spent at Club Carlson properties and five points for every dollar spent elsewhere.
Highlights:
IHG® Rewards Club Select Credit Card
The IHG® Rewards Club Select Credit Card offers one of the best “free night” promotions in the business. This is mostly because you can use the free night you earn each year on a hotel stay at any InterContinental Hotels Group property in the world. There are no limitations other than award availability, and you can easily stretch the value of this free night quite far by booking one of their high tier properties.
For example, an overnight at the InterContinental Le Moana Bora Bora can easily cost $600 per night, yet it is free with your annual free night certificate. Since this card also comes with a hefty signup bonus, it is a no-brainer if you love to travel and don’t mind staying only at InterContinental Hotels Group properties. Plus, the $49 annual fee is waived the first year.
Highlights:
How to Get the Most Out of Your Free Nights
While earning a free night or two can help you save on travel, it pays to be strategic about it. These tips can help you find the right offer and extract the most value out of your free night benefit:
Weigh the pros and cons of annual fees.
Although you may not want to pay an annual fee, doing so can garner a ton of value. After paying the $49 annual fee on the IHG® Rewards Club Select Credit Card, for example, you can easily score a hotel night worth $400 or more. If you’re fee-averse, you can also consider a no-fee rewards credit card instead.
Related:
Choose a hotel chain you’ll actually use.
A free night won’t do much good if you’ll never be able to use it. Before you sign up for a co-branded hotel credit card, make sure to browse available properties to make sure they’re in line with your expectations and travel habits. Also make sure your hotel brand actually has properties in countries and regions you plan to visit.
Book high-value properties with your free night.
When it comes to your free nights, you don’t want to use them at the cheap hotel or motel down the street if they’re valid at any of the hotel chain’s properties! To get the most value out of this benefit, stick to booking higher-end properties with your free night. Not only will this let you stay in nicer places than normal, but you’ll get more “bang for your buck” as well.
Consider pairing several travel or hotel credit cards for a longer trip.
If you can’t decide between hotel or travel credit cards, getting more than one might be your best bet. Consider getting a top-tier travel credit card with transferable points, plus a hotel credit card – or even two hotel credit cards that complement each other. The more points and free nights you earn, the easier it will be to piece together a longer trip out of your free nights.
Final Thoughts
Hotel points are great, but free nights are even better. And with any of these cards, you’ll get a little bit of both. If you pair one of these cards with an awesome travel or airline credit card, you might even be able to book the bulk of your upcoming vacation for just a fraction of the cost.
For the best travel deals, make sure to check out our comprehensive guides on the best travel and rewards cards on the market.
Related Articles:
- Best Hotel Credit Cards
- Best Rewards Credit Cards
- Best Airline Credit Cards
- Best Cash Back Credit Cards
The post Guaranteed Getaway: Credit Cards That Offer a Free Hotel Stay Each Year appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
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