I am at work today, but it is pretty quiet. I think many people just assume that everywhere is closed. DH has the day off and is doing the stay-at-home-dad thing today. I am happy about that. Lots of good one on one with the kids. That and everyone is a bit sick, so it's good that they can all be at home resting.

So, last month I signed up for a Gold AmEx to earn 25,000 worth of points. My plan all along was to use this "free money" to help offset the bathroom remodel costs. AmEx has a feature where you can pay with points directly to Amazon. I also figured I could redeem for Home Depot cards as well.

Trouble is/was that I couldn't get the points posted to the account fast enought to help with any Home Depot spending. And the Amazon thing equals $1 to every 14.2 points. Which would mean that my 26,209 points would get me only $184.57.

I checked into using the points to book our rental car for Maui. Which would be a $1 = 10 points transaction. But, the rentals were thru a more expensive rental company so I really didn't feel like that was the best (highest yielding) option either.

Redeeming for a cash gift card would be $1 = 20 points. Even worse!

Here is what I ended up doing:
The Old Navy GC were a straight up conversion at $1 = 10 points. I bought five $50 cards and one $10 card. The $50 cards I sold to Plastic Jungle for $212. The $10 I will use myself in the store or give to DD as a special gift, or something like that.

The Chase card I'm using to purchase the items from Amazon is giving 5% back.

After all the calculations my "free money" works out like this:
$212 - cash from Plastic Jungle
$ 10 - gift card
$ 13 - 5% Chase reward
$235 total,
which is a "loss" of $25 if I could have just cashed out the 26,000 points to $260. But that's better than the $185 I would've gotten if I had just used the points directly for Amazon.