Black Friday deal tip: Activate your credit card’s cashback offers!

Everyone likes it very much. But many people sleep thanks to their bank’s cashback offers.

Yes, banks will credit your statements for your purchases, based on purchases made with your credit or debit card. The trap: You must first activate these offers.

So during Black Friday, it can literally pay to log into your bank account and check out the deals available to you. Every November I remember to pester my friends and family to watch theirs.

For what? Well, one of them just activated an offer of $100 off a purchase over $500 at Dell. And they were about to buy a new laptop there.

How to activate merchant offers

These cashback offers can be found in your bank account’s main dashboard or your card’s individual dashboard. They usually cover multiple categories like shopping, entertainment (including streaming services), cell phone services, restaurants, travel, etc. Sometimes it’s a percentage, other times it’s a fixed amount. Minimum spending amounts may also be required.

Some tips:

• Activate the offer before shopping! These are not awarded retroactively.
• Not sure if you activated an offer? You can filter the list to see which ones you are registered with.
• Do you have several cards? Check your offers for each of them: they may be different, even if they are both from the same bank.
• Note the expiration date of the offers.

CBS / PCWorld

How to ultra-combo with other offers

Fun fact: Merchant offers are different from cashback or rewards portals (e.g. Rakuten, Capital One Shopping).

So, you can sometimes combine an in-store discount, an active merchant offer on your credit or debit card and a cashback portal discount.

For example, currently a deal at Visible (a Verizon subsidiary offering cheaper prepaid cell phone plans) cuts the price of its premium annual plan (Visible+ Pro) in half. Normally $450, that comes to $225, or $18.75 per month.

Then, if you have an American Express or Chase credit card, you can also get a merchant offer of $30 or $15 cash back (respectively).

And finally, if you use Rakuten’s cashback portal, you are entitled to $40. Or, if you go through Capital One Shopping and visit the website multiple times, you could get an offer for $120 in rewards, which can be redeemed for a gift card (available stores vary).

Maximum cashback savings? That would work out to $155, or $12.92 per month for unlimited text/talk/data, 100GB of hotspot data, and free smartwatch data.

I’m not looking for this plan, but damn, this kind of sequence of discounts and cashback is just magnificent.