US Bank has upped the signup bonus on their (proprietary points) FlexPerks card. These are points that are useful for buying you paid airline tickets, not points that transfer to airline miles. In general they won’t get you much value for premium cabin international awards.

But it’s a good signup bonus, a fun promotion, and they offer good value in the spend category of charitable donations so that’s a unique feature.

Here’s the offer:

• You get a minimum of 20,000 FlexPerks points after $3500 spend within 4 months
  
• Then you get an additional bonus based on how many medals the US wins during the Winter Olympics — each Gold is worth 500, each Silver 250, and each Bronze 100.
  
• Results from the last Winter Olympics would have yielded a bonus of 29,550 points so ~ $600 in travel.

The card earns 3 points per dollar on charitable donations, 2 points on gas, groceries, and airlines, and 1 point on everything else.

Each point is worth up to 2 cents when redeeming for airfare. But it’s tricky to get that much value out of them. They don’t allow partial redemptions. A $380 ticket costs 20,000 points (1.9 cents per point). If you buy a $420 ticket, though, that’s the next redemption tier and costs 30,000 points (1.4 cents per point).

Each redemption bundles an airline fee reimbursement of up to $25 in ancillary fees charged by the airline as well.

There’s no fee the first year, then $49 thereafter.

Afraid the US won’t earn any medals and you’ll wind up with a bonus worth only ‘up to’ $400? You can wait. The offer is valid through March 7. That’s nearly 2 weeks after the end of the Olympics, so you’ll know the results by then. I wouldn’t wait until the very end of the promotion period, though, because you’ll need to receive the card and make a purchase with it by March 31 in order to be eligible for the medals-based bonuses.

(HT: Mommy Points)

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