Here’s a guest post by fellow PF blogger NerdWallet, a fellow late 20-something personal finance junkie.  This post is about Black Friday- the only Black Friday I ever went to was in NYC.  Let me tell you…it was CRAZY BUSY.  I lined up for 2 hours to try on a pair of jeans and ended up getting them because I was so mad I it took me 2 hours to try them on.  Glad we have online shopping now.  Here’s what NerdWallet has to say about himself:

Tim Chen is a cheap nerd. NerdWallet was a byproduct of his overzealous attempt to

find the best credit card, which resulted in a database of nearly 600 credit cards and

some extremely over-the-top APR and Rewards sorting algorithms.

Coupons only get you halfway there – Save extra with “bonus malls”

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are around the corner. While most of you are

probably savvy enough to search for web coupons before pulling the trigger, you

may not realize that you could be leaving an additional 5% to 20% on the table.

Meet the “Bonus Mall”.

Bonus Mall websites are shopping portals. They generally have a huge list of

retailers, and give you some kind of kickback per dollar spent, when you click

through from the mall to the retailer.

There are over two dozen of these malls. This is because they are attached to many

frequent flyer programs, hotel point programs, and credit card programs. Bonus

malls also exist in the form of third party deal sites like FatWallet and eBates.

To give you a concrete example, I recently bought some office supplies from Office

Depot. First, I grabbed a coupon (“82632163” gets you 14% off) from a coupon

website. Second, I ran a search on NerdWallet’s discount finder tool that compares

Office Depot kickbacks at every bonus mall – there are 19 hits, which range from 1%

to 7%.

I happen to be a holder of a Chase Sapphire Preferred card, so I went with the Chase

Ultimate Rewards Mall, which gives 7 bonus points per $1 spent, or effectively 7%

off. This combined with the 14% coupon saved me over 20%!

Which malls do I qualify for?

Everyone can benefit from airline, hotel, and third party malls.

If you are willing to sign up for a loyalty program at American Airlines, Delta, United,

Continental, Amtrak, Marriott, and many other travel companies, you can participate

in their mile/point kickback programs.

Kickbacks from third party deal sites require creating a special account, which

earns kickback credits, which is more of a hassle. However, these malls are open to

anyone.

Lastly, there is a point mall for just about every type of credit card reward program

out there. Some credit card companies even have multiple point malls, depending

on what type of points you earn. For example, Citibank has both “Bonus Cash

Center” and “ThankYou Bonus Center”, depending on whether you have one of their

cashback credit cards, or a card that earns ThankYou Points.

Shop smart!