Just like last year, American Express will be one of the event’s major sponsors – but this time with a much simpler promotion for restaurant guests. If you are an Amex cardholder, you can earn a $20 credit on your next billing statement after dining 3 times at any NYC Restaurant Week participating restaurant. You can mix and match the restaurants as long as they’re on the list. Last year’s promotion required a foursquare account and “synching” your Amex card, but this time all you have to do is sign up on the Restaurant Week/Amex webpage.

This offer is limited to the first 15,000 people who sign up, and each cardholder can only earn one $20 statement credit during the promotion period. Prepaid cards and corporate cards are not eligible for the promotion, nor are payments made through Amex’s “expresspay” feature. But if you are a regular Amex consumer or business card holder, this offer can be a fairly good deal. The minimum spend for your dine out to count for the credit is $24, but if you’re choosing from the Restaurant Week menu you’ve already got that covered. And getting $20 for spending $72 (plus tax) on 3 3-course lunches isn’t bad at all. There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but $20 gets you pretty close to a fourth Restaurant Week one.

AMEX offers $20 for 3 Restaurant Week dines in NY

Below is a list of cities hosting Restaurant Week this January – with California and South Carolina both promoting state-wide events. All of these have their own dates and fixed prices, so check not only for your city but also to see whether your January travel plans match up with another Restaurant Week as well.

*pricing varies by restaurant

While most participating restaurants don’t require reservations, Restaurant Week tends to bring in a lot of customers, especially to the more upscale restaurants, so it’s worth making a reservation if you can. Besides, with OpenTable co-sponsoring several of these events, participating restaurants tend to also be members of the online reservations program.

To ease the guilt from dining out after a food-packed holiday, consider the OpenTable points you’ll earn from making your reservation online and how much you’ll save at that restaurant you’ve been meaning check out when you take advantage of its Restaurant Week fixed-price menu instead. Bon Appétit!

First, there’s Amazon Prime, which, for $79 offers 2-day shipping for an entire year on “millions of items” sold on Amazon, and, in my experience, almost all items shipped by Amazon itself. Students can get one year of Amazon Prime for free, and pay only $39 per year subsequently. If you shop a lot online, or are in the market for some bulky item with a high shipping charge, Amazon Prime may be a good deal.

But to get the most out of your Amazon purchases, look into double-dipping. Since August 2011, Hawaiian Airlines’ eMarket has been giving miles, now downgraded to 1 mile per dollar, for purchases made on Amazon.com. US Airways briefly also offeredthis deal, but has since pulled it down, making the eMarket currently the only portal worth a visit before an Amazon purchase.

earn miles on Amazon purchases through Hawaiian Airlines' eMarket portal

To double-dip, take a peek in your wallet. This quarter, from January 1^st to March 31^st, 2012, Chase Freedom cardholders get 5% cash back on up to $1500 spent on gas and Amazon.com. Unless you spend over $100 on gas every week, the $1500 ceiling should be enough to let you effectively get up to 5% in savings when shopping on Amazon until the end of March.

If you don’t have the Chase Freedom card, the Citi Forward card may do the trick as well. Currently, the Citi Forward card, which gives 5 points per dollar on restaurants, books, music, and movies, seems to categorize purchases made on Amazon.com as “books,” effectively yielding 5% cash back when buying through the online retailer. However, unlike Chase Freedom’s deal, which explicitly includes Amazon.com in its 5% cash back category, Citi Forward does not offer a list of retailers eligible for earning 5 points per dollar. In other words, it’s a very sweet deal right now, but you should keep an eye on your statements since Citi can decide at any time that what you’re buying on Amazon doesn’t really count as a book.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to use points and save on cash when buying on Amazon, check your Discover balance instead. In October 2011, Discover announced a new redemption option for its cash back program: spend it on Amazon. The dollars are spent 1-to-1, but while statement credits and direct deposits can only be redeemed in increments of $50, the “pay with Cashback Bonus” option for Amazon allows Discover cardholders to redeem any amount of cash back on an Amazon purchase, which means you don’t have to wait as long to transform the cash back you earned into real cash. For this, all you have to do is link your Discover and Amazon accounts here.

But whether you use the Chase Freedom or Citi Forward card to earn more points, or Discover to redeem points, don’t forget to go through Hawaiian’s eMarket. Even though Amazon’s prices are often already a good deal, and there aren’t many coupons to be found, double-dipping can still maximize what you get out of your Amazon.com purchase.

Besides making payments on the loan during deferment, I used two shopping tools to help me work on that loan: UPromise and ThankYou points.

I’ve covered the UPromise program before, but to summarize, it’s primarily based on a shopping portal that gives cash back to users. The cash back balance can then be applied against a Sallie Mae student loan account, transferred to a 529 education savings account, or redeemed for cash. The cash back rate is often not as high as that from Discover’s ShopDiscover or Chase’s Ultimate Rewards Mall, but every so often I come across retailers that are not partners with either of these two but are in the UPromise portal.

Not that credit cards don’t help with student loans. Over the last two years, Citi’s ThankYou pointsprogram has been vital to erasing my student loan balance. I have the CitiForward credit card, which offers 5 Thank You points per dollar spent on books, movies, music, and, most importantly, restaurants, and 1 point on everything else. These points can then be redeemed for gift cards and cash, but also cheques to pay student loan or mortgage balances! Until September 2011, to get a $100 cheque, you needed 12,700 points, but since then the requirement has dropped to 10,000 points. There was no official announcement about this change, so I don’t know how long it will last – if you’re sitting on any ThankYou points and have a student loan or a mortgage, now might be the best time to redeem them.

Now, 12,500 ThankYou points trade for $125 in Student Loan Rebates. In April, 12,700 points were required for $100.

Admittedly, at 10,000 points for $100, this is the same redemption rate as for, say, a Banana Republic or a Macy’s gift card. However, I’ve found that it’s a lot easier to spend money shopping than it is to put money aside to pay off my student loan more quickly, so I prefer redeeming ThankYou points for student loan payments since it’s a way to force myself to pay down the loan with money that never made it to my hands in the first place. Besides, the redemption rate for student loans and mortgage payments is much better than for cash: $100 in cash costs 16,000 ThankYou points.

To redeem ThankYou points for student loan or mortgage payments, all you have to do is call the ThankYou network (1800-THANKYOU) and give them your lending company’s name. They will then mail you the cheque, which you can send to your lending institution along with a note with any special instructions on how to apply the payment (e.g., post everything to the loan with the highest interest rate or to the one with the smallest balance). For UPromise, even though the payments post automatically, you can also call Sallie Mae to request a change to how any payment is applied.

With less than two weeks of 2011 left, if you are also aiming to making a big chip on your student loan or mortgage balance, now might be a great time to ramp up the online purchases you make through UPromise or to redeem your ThankYou points for loan payments. The fact that now you only need 10,000 ThankYou points for a $100 cheque not only sweetens the deal but may also be the push you need – it’s not clear how long this new rate will stick around.

And if it’s too late for 2011, here’s an easy 2012 resolution for you: set up and remember to use UPromise or the ThankYou network to get rid of your student loans next year. Good luck, and have fun watching your loan balance disappear!

For those of you who travel the Northeast Regional line, which goes through DC, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, buying the points and redeeming them for travel could save you quite a bit money. The price of a one-way ticket on the Northeast Regional varies significantly based on the distance you travel and the time of day, but as an example, a ticket from New York to Washington, DC, this coming Sunday ranges from $78 if you are willing to take an 8 AM train to $134 if you want to travel in the early afternoon. Tickets on Friday afternoon may be even more expensive.

On the other hand, 3,000 Amtrak Guest Rewards points can always be redeemed for a one-way ticket on the Northeast Regional, regardless of the day, time, or distance traveled. So if you buy 7,500 points for $137.50 during this promotion (5,000+2,500), you could redeem your points for 2 Northeast Regional tickets between New York and DC this weekend, and save between $18.50 and $130.50 depending on which ticket you book; and you’d still have some points left over for your next trip. At $275 for 15,000 points (10,000+5,000), you can get 5 one-way tickets on the Northeast Regional, saving even more.

You can find similar savings on the other coast. Tickets on several train lines going through California, including the Capitol Corridor, San Joaquin, and Pacific Surfliner line, can be exchanged for 1,000 Amtrak points each way. With the 50% bonus on purchases, you can get 12 tickets on any of these Special Routes for just $220 (8,000+4,000 points for $220). In contrast, a ticket from Santa Barbara to San Diego this coming Sunday costs $41 at any time, so 12 of them would come out $492, or more than twice as much. Tickets from Sacramento to Oakland are $26 this weekend, so using Amtrak points instead would still save you money.

This 50% bonus promotion is running until September 30, 2011, and Amtrak Guest Rewards points expire only after you go 36 months without purchasing any Amtrak tickets. That means you can take advantage of the bonus now and hold onto your points until you are ready to purchase a ticket any time over the next 3 years. The only downside of this promotion, if you can count that as one, is that tickets exchanged through points cannot earn points themselves. Nonetheless, the huge savings should more than make up for that small loss.

Special thanks to the Loyalty Traveler.

I called Citibank to check whether there was a glitch in their automated system, but the customer service representative (CSR) confirmed that there was in fact a card open in my name with those last 5 digits. Luckily, there were no charges to it, but apparently it had been open for a year now. I asked for him to securely close that account, and, since I already had him on the phone, asked to make sure that there were only 2 cards to my Citibank account – the two cards I actually own. He found those and two more. There were three cards to my name that I never actually had!

None of the three cards had any charges to them, but because I do not actually have any of them their very existence was enough to scare me. The CSR was able to securely close two of them but had to write out a manual close request for the third, so I will call in a couple of weeks to check up on that.

But this is what I’ve learned from this experience:

• Read your credit card emails. Just because you get them every month doesn’t mean they are always the same. For some reason the card that triggered the notification had been open for a year but I never received any notification about it other than this one. Nonetheless, I opened and read through it because it came to a different email address than the one I use for my credit cards. Had it been sent to my other email, I might’ve never found out about it at all.

• People worry about the impact that opening too many credit cards or closing a card might have on their credit score, but there’s something a lot worse: open credit cards that you don’t physically have. I am less worried about the ding on my score that the inquirer(s) may have caused by opening the card or the dent I may have made by closing all three cards at once than about the possibility that someone could’ve actually used the cards. I do not understand how the card application happened, and why someone would have a card on my name and not use it for a whole year, but I think I’m lucky. If any of the cards had been charged, my score and I would be in much bigger trouble.

• Call your credit card company just to check what they have on file. You should definitely do that when you get a strange notification like I did, but I would recommend also calling every year or so just to make sure. Even though my “statement notification” email came from Citibank, I am calling Discover as well to verify that they really only have one card on file for me. You never know what you’ll find out – I only got the notification for one Citibank card, but once I had the representative on the line and asked him to check, he found 2 more.

I was lucky that nothing had been charged to any of the three cards I had never opened, and I hope that you are even luckier than I am and don’t have any fraudulent activity to your name at all. But with credit cards, better safe than sorry is the rule. Even if you think you’re lucky, it’s better to call and check than find out the hard way.

Since Cathay’s hub is in Hong Kong, all tickets include a stop there. For $1,880 (including taxes and fees), you can get an All Asia Pass with a stop in Hong Kong as well as two other Asian cities of your choice. The ticket allowing stops in three other Asian cities is $2,231, and for $2,582 you get to visit four Asian cities along with Hong Kong. For all three tickets, these prices are if you leave from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco, though you can pay extra to leave from other cities. Depending on where you’re flying out from, however, it may be cheaper to just buy a separate ticket to one of the four US departure cities listed above than pay for the add-on. These prices also require you that take the first leg of your flight, from the US to Hong Kong, on Monday through Wednesday during the promotion period; starting your trip on any other day of the week is $100 more.

Cathay Pacific's current ad for its All Asia Pass

There are 40 cities to which you can fly under any of the three All Asia Passes, all serviced either by Cathay or its sister airline Dragonair. These include some awesome destinations like Bali, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Phuket, Singapore, and several cities in China, Japan, and Korea (for a full list check out Cathay’s brochure).

If you’d like to take advantage of the fact that you’re flying around the world and stop somewhere along the way, you can also include “add-on cities” in your itinerary. For an extra $300, you can add one of 9 cities to your itinerary, several of them in India, but also Dubai (United Arab Emirates), Kathmandu (Nepal), and Dhaka (Bangladesh). And if you want to go all-out and take this trip on a leisurely pace, you can pay an extra fee to extend the ticket for 30 or 90 consecutive days instead, although that may not be worthwhile since you’re effectively paying extra to stay put.

If you’ve got the vacation time and the flexibility, but just need a little more to sweeten the deal, here it is: all of your travel with any of the All Asia Passes accumulates miles just like a regular ticket! It will probably be painful to come back home after a 21-day-long relaxing trip through Asia, but the miles should ease the pain. Especially if the cities you choose in Asia are far from each other, all the city hoping you do with an All Asia Pass might actually already earn you a free ticket back to Asia. This means you can explore another part of Asia in the future, or just relive this Fall’s vacation some other time.

I learned this about a year ago, when my mom was visiting me. We decided to take advantage of the fact that I was on vacation too and went outlet shopping on a weekday to avoid the crowds. The Premium Outlets chain is by far my favorite outlet option since they not only have good brands but the malls are also outdoors and the stores are for the most part clean and organized. They might not be the cheapest outlet malls out there, but the way they are set up makes for a much more pleasant experience since I don’t have to dig through heaps of stuff to find good deals.

So there we were: my mom and I on a shopping outing, on what happened to be a Tuesday. As my mom was checking out, I spotted a sign on the counter that said something like

50 Plus Shopper Perks

If you are at least 50 years of age you can take advantage of an added 10% savings on Tuesdays by simply presenting a photo identification with your proof of age to the cashier at participating stores. [taken from the Premium Outlets website]

I pointed it out, and told my mom to ask about it since we were there on a Tuesday anyway. The cashier interjected, “Don’t worry. I already applied the discount to your purchase.” If I were my mom, who happens to be in her “young 50s,” I would have been mortified or at the very least upset. But my mom took it in stride and was just happy with her discount. In fact, she then asked me if I didn’t want to buy more stuff that day, seeing as I could get the discount only with her anyway.

Photo credit: F-oxymoron (Creative Commons)

The list of participating stores for this discount varies by outlet mall, but is fairly long and includes J.Crew, Ralph Lauren, Vineyard Vines, and even Samsonite. To see the list for the Premium Outlet you are planning on visiting, just click on it on this map, then go to “sales & events”> “50 Plus Shopper Perks.”

My mom is visiting me again in a couple of weeks, and since she wants to go shopping, I will make sure to schedule the outlet trip for a Tuesday. It should be a good mother-and-daughter bonding experience – I’ll help her pick out clothes and carry her shopping bags, she’ll get me a 10% discount.

To get the bonus, just follow this link and click on the “e-mail my coupon” button. But don’t forget that if you take advantage of this deal, you may still have to pay taxes on this bonus, so that it’s really a bonus of $81.25 – $112.50, depending on your tax rate. You should get a 1099-INT in the mail around tax time next year.

I strongly believe in going through a portal whenever I online shop, so once I find something I want to buy, I put it in my check-out basket and then visit several portals to find out which one is giving the highest mileage or cashback return for that store. As I showed a while back, there isn’t one portal that is always the best – some portals have more partner stores than others, and the highest miles/ cashback yield varies by portal and store. And while I still visit several online portals, I admit that checking every one is a fairly time-consuming process if all you want to do is click “buy” and have an item delivered to your house.

Step in ev’reward. Through this website, you don’t have to decide whether visiting each portal is worth it for you – ev’reward automatically visits them and tells you what their deals are! All you have to do is type the name of the online store from which you’re buying something, and ev’reward gives you a list of portals and the miles or cashback each one will give you for making a purchase from that store. This cuts the research process to just a few seconds, and you can immediately see which portal will suit you best.

There are only two caveats that I’ve seen so far. First, some rates are a little outdated. For example, United’s Mileage Plus Shopping Portal is currently offering 2.5 miles per dollar spent at Banana Republic online, but ev’reward is showing only 2 miles per dollar. Second, it doesn’t list every portal out there, so that if you typed in “amazon.com,” you wouldn’t know through ev’reward that Hawaiian’s and US Airways’ shopping portals currently give miles for Amazon purchases.

Nonetheless, if you usually check several portals like I do before buying, ev’reward is a great starting point to find out which ones are even worth looking into. In the case of J.Crew, for example, ev’reward correctly does not list ShopDiscover as a cashback portal, so I know there’s no point in checking, which saves me some time. On the other hand, if you are not planning on investigating each portal before buying, with the ev’reward output, you can at least be sure that if you go through any portal on its list, you’ll get more miles or cashback than if you didn’t go through one at all.