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As reported by The Points Guy and Lucky, American Express Membership Rewards points (US program) transfer with a 50% bonus to Starwood Preferred Guest through March 31. Normally 3 Amex points transfer to a single Starpoint. With this bonus the ratio is 2:1. That’s not necessarily a good deal. Membership Rewards points, by a wide margin, are best used (1) transferring to airline miles (2) during a bonus promotion (3) for low-level premium cabin award redemptions. Hotel redemption are generally not even close in terms of value. In most cases, even with this promotion, they’re still not. It takes 24,000 – 32,000 Amex points for a single night’s stay at one of the full service brand hotels in many major cities in the U.S. (“category 5”), for instance. Still, it’s a better deal than many…

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I spoke with Jillian Berman about getting her first credit card, and here’s the resulting Huffington Post article. We talked about most importantly paying off your credit card each month, and if you’re not going to then rewards aren’t the first consideration, interest rates and fees are. We also discussed credit card signup bonuses, which came up in the article in the form of not being afraid to apply for multiple cards, the additional salient point is that having more availability credit that you aren’t using is good for your score (shows how responsible you are with credit). If you spend $2000 in a month and have a $5000 limit (even if you pay off that $2000) you are using 40% of your available credit. If you spend that same amount and have $20,000 in…

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