michaelhong.com

This is a pretty amazing deal for those with Starwood Preferred Guest accounts and a Delta SkyMiles account. Right now, Delta is running a promotion where you can earn up to a 150% mileage bonus when you use a select group of 150+ SkyMiles partners. If you look in the Terms and Conditions, you can see

Convert Partner Points to Miles:
Club Rewards from Diners Club International; Banco Santander Brazil—SuperBônus Program; HSBC Clube de Beneficios; Hertz #1 Awards; Choice Privileges; EA$Y CHOICE; Hilton HHonors; Hyatt Gold Passport; Sirius by Jumeirah; Marriott Rewards; Priority Club Rewards; Radisson goldpoints plus; Sofitel Compliments Points; Sol Meliá MaS Rewards; Starwood Preferred Guest; Taj Inner Circle; Wyndham Rewards.

Unfortunately, American Express Membership Rewards is not listed. Basically, transfer 20,000 SPG points to your Delta account and SPG automatically bumps the transfer to 25,000 as usual. Add the 150% bonus on top of that (37,500 miles.) The 25,000 points then becomes 25,000 + 37,500 miles = 62,500 miles.

Let’s say you wanted to buy SPG points. Starwood will sell them to you for 3.5 cents/mile. If you were to buy 20,000 miles, you would be paying $700.00. Transfer those into a Delta account with this promotion, and you would be paying $700 for 62,500 miles which would come out to 1.12 cents/mile.

Now, the question that is up for debate is how much are DL miles worth? That’s up to you. It’s pretty tough finding a domestic SkySaver (Delta’s lowest redemption option) flight. SkyChoice flights are 50,000 miles roundtrip. Let’s say, worst case scenario, you bought miles from SPG at 3.5 cents/mile and used them for a SkyChoice flight, you’d be paying $560 and have 12,500 miles left. If you were lucky enough to find a SkySaver ticket, you’d be paying 25,000 miles or $280 with 37,500 miles remaining. I find SPG points to be pretty valuable, but I might transfer 20K of them over to Delta since I fly NW anyway. On the other hand, Business Class to Europe is 100,000 SkyMiles. Mathematically, it’s only 32,000 Starpoints though you’d have to transfer 40,000 to realize the benefit.

If you’re still feeling saucy,
1) Go hereand register [delta.com] with your name and SkyMiles number.
2) Then head to the SPG site here and click on the TRANSFER NOW button
3) Login and transfer 20,000 Starpoints. You should be all set.

Discussion and the original thread can be found here [Flyertalk.com] Credit goes to OP andymo99

Fry’s has the MyBook 1TB Studio Edition for $159.99 which is a great price if you need FireWire 400/800 or eSATA. I saw the Essential Edition 1TB at Amazon for a similar price, but it only has a USB 2.0 connection. Might as well pay the same price and get the “cooler” white MyBook plus FireWire 400/800 and eSATA in addition to the USB connector. I pounced on the deal and mine has shipped and should be arriving on Thursday to replace my 500GB MyBook that acts as my Time Machine backup for my Hackintosh. I’ll be using the eSATA port which I am nerdily excited about. If you have a computer that doesn’t have FireWire ports, DON’T get this unless you really like white.

Link: FatWallet

I missed this deal last time when the cashback was at 35%. If you don’t know about it, basically 

1) Go to search.live.com

2) Type “cheap wii” without the quotations. Other search terms include “cheap lcd” “cheap ps3″ etc.

3) Click on the 30% cashback icon. You will be taken to ebay. From there, enter any search term you would like. Any Buy-it-now item is eligible.

4) When you click Buy it now, you should see the discount shown in the transaction before you purchase the item. Make sure it shows the discount.

5) The transaction should appear within a day or two and the cashback should be available within 60 days.

I just picked up a Dell 2408WFP to accompany my other Dell 24-inch. Unfortunately, the other monitor is the Dell 2407WFP, but color matching isn’t really an issue to me. It will be nice to be finally going dual 24s.

There is a maximum of $200 cashback per transaction. Some people are going crazy buying stamps, gift cards, coins, and other sketchy things. I’m sure there are ways to profit from it, but I was just looking to save money on an item I have been eyeing for over a year.

I buy a crapload of stuff from Amazon. I have an Amazon Prime subscription and most of the stuff that I ship two-day (free with Prime) usually comes the next day. Prices on Amazon fluctuate quite a bit. Only recently did I realize that Amazon has a 30-day price guarantee. The downside is that you have to track the price yourself over the 30-day period. However, there are two sites that will track the price for you. One is RefundPlease, the other is FlamingoWorld’s Amazon Price Drop Tracker.

At both sites, you just enter the ISBN/ASIN number, the price, the date you purchased the item, and your email address. If you’re worried about spam, you can just use a throwaway email address. Just make sure you check it!

Once you receive an email notification that the price has dropped, then go here: Amazon’s Return & Refunds Contact Form.

Log in with your user/pass and your recent orders should pop up. Let’s take my awesome recent purchase, the ice cream maker, as an example. Check the order whose price has dropped then click the Email button under customer service.

Now, under the issue dropdown box, select refund inquiry.

Then in the message box, just explain that the price of your item, <ITEM NAME HERE>, that you purchased on <PURCHASE DATE HERE> has dropped from $XXX.XX to $XX.XX and that you would like a refund of the price difference. You should receive an email from Amazon issuing the refund. I’ve recently used this to recover $20.00 from the price of my A/V receiver.

Easy peasy.

Last week there was a smoking deal on an Xbox 360 Elite from Dell. It included the console, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance/Forza 2 combo and two faceplates for $299. I was lucky enough to get in on the deal thanks to boogi. (My 360 Elite was built on 04-30-2008.)

It appears that the deal has returned, albeit not as good as the last one.

Now you can save $100 from the $449.99 retail price. Still an awesome deal, considering right now the 60GB Xbox 360 Pro is selling for $350. So basically for the same price, you get the black 360, a 120GB HDD vs a 60GB, two games (of questionable value, but hey, they’re free and Forza 2 is great), and two faceplates (also of questionable value, but again, they’re F-R-E-E).

Head over to Dell Home and enter coupon code V8Q199$GCXJWL$ at checkout. The code expires on 8/20. This makes me wonder if the Elites are being cleared out for a new model. Supposedly price cuts are coming in September on all models, but even then, the Elite is rumored to be dropping to $400, which is still $50 more than this deal. Doesn’t matter, if you need a 360 now, this is a sweet deal.

Xbox 360 Elite bundle [Dell Home] via Fatwallet
Use coupon code V8Q199$GCXJWL$ at checkout (EXP 08/20)