When I signed up for the Chase Sapphire card, I swear on all things holy (note: I’m not religious, so…take that for what it’s worth) that it had a typical 80,000 points bonus plus an extra 30,000 points if you spent $20K in the first year. I didn’t pay much mind to this because it seemed impossible that I would spend that much money on my credit card in a year (spoiler alert: I do). After I hit the first bonus, I called Chase to double check if that year-bonus was a thing, because I am a double checker.
Note: my memory is shit and I can’t guarantee I did that.
A few weeks ago, I logged in to check and I’ve spent enough money, but no bonus. I called Chase. They said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I said, “no it’s a thing,” and they said, “we’ve never offered that.” I said, “okay but it’s a thing.” I Googled and of course you can’t find it on Chase, because they only show their current offers, but I found old blog posts from all the major credit card point sites. I was like, “listen, I know you have your ‘records,’ but I have a screen shot from a third party who I think is reliable.” They didn’t buy it.

I said, “I’m certain…or kind of certain…that I called several months ago to check on this. Maybe my call was recorded for quality assurance purposes?” They said they’d look into it, but they’d never offered that kind of a bonus, and if I had called in and been led astray that it was a thing when it wasn’t a thing, they’d credit me the points. I was sure that that was the end of it.
Guess what, suckers?

I’m setting this to the side for now because I’m concentrating on going to Disney World next January, but I have two sort of medium-term goals: getting my family of five to Ukraine again (Babushka Sveta isn’t getting any younger), and getting my family of five to New Zealand. Can I do both things in the next five years? Rewards are annoying and tedious and take some upkeep but good god the payoff is worth it.