u/Imaginary-Dog-5053

I need to step up my clothing game at work, in a more senior level role at a large corporation. Problem is, it's extremely hard to find ethical brands that make that type of clothing. The only one I ever see recommended is Eileen Fischer, and her clothes could not be more wrong for my body/style. I've tried shopping Poshmark and Thredup for brands that fit my style (j crew, banana), but the fit oseems to vary wildly even within brands, and I only have maybe a 25% success rate. I am particularly in need of some colorful blazers and nice tops to wear under blazers. Complicating things is that I am 5'2", 115 lbs, with broad shoulders. Typically a size 0. Appreciate any recommendations!

Hi, I'm a female who recently started traveling for work more (3-4 days), and am struggling to fit all the needed shoes and toiletries in my travelpro Maxlite 5 carryon. I'd prefer not to have to check a bag, I just need a smidge more space. I generally prefer soft sided bags (I find the clamshell inconvenient for packing and unpacking), but it seems like all of the larger-size carryons are hard shell. Is the away bigger carryon the best option here (hard shell, as their soft shell doesn't get great reviews), and will it be meaningfully bigger than my Maxlite? Their listed volumes are nearly identical but I'm wondering if travelpro is overstating.

Are there any bigger soft sided that I'm missing?

I recently got a new Citi credit card, followed all the steps to add it to my Google wallet, everything looks good on Citi's end. But the card will not work on either my or my husband's phone anywhere we try it. Citi is saying the transactions are being approved from their end, but then rejected by the merchant. Has anyone had similar issues? How do I fix this? It's making the card all but worthless.

Hi, we are not club wyndham members but have planned a whole vacation with extended family around being able to book the Margaritaville side of the hotel for a family member with food allergies. We are traveling in April, and booking isn't open for any of 2027 yet. Anyone have insights into when that might open?? I'm getting nervous since we already booked everything else.

I don't know if this is a parenting issue per se, but we are really struggling to build relationships as a family within town. My children have individual friends, and my oldest is on many sports teams and has good networks (and my husband coaches and has built relationships with other coaches). I also volunteer with the schools and we know many people in town.

But when it comes to actually doing things with other families, we have never managed to click with anyone. (We moved here 6 years ago, during COVID.) There are some families I have tried to build relationships with, and have invited them to so many things, but everyone always seems to have other plans and no one ever reciprocates. We have literally never been invited to do anything with another family, and I feel weird about continuing to ask. I feel really lonely, and sad for my kids. We like to go to the beach, hike, and ski and have no one to do these things with.

I don't know what else to do. Maybe we are unpleasant to be around?? I don't think so but I am just not sure how other people manage to build these relationships. Anyone else struggling?

TLDR: Buying Wyndham points saved $12K on a family trip

This is a fairly niche situation but wanted to throw it out there for anyone considering something similar. I am taking my mom on a trip for her 70th birthday. After a lot of research, we settled on the Wyndham Grand Rio Mar. Rooms during the week I was booking were $1,100/night. The points required are only 30K/night, for an effective 3.6 cpp. I have a lot of Chase points and thought about transferring those, but then stumbled on a thread that said buying Wyndham points outright is a better value; sure enough, there was a promotion for an 80% bonus when buying points, making them 0.7cpp. But, I could only buy 180K points total and wanted to stay for 7 nights (210K points), so I applied for the Earner Plus Credit Card to get a 45K bonus and a 10% discount on my points bookings. So I only needed to buy 144K points, for a total of $1,040 (and I earned $20 back through Rakuten, so really $1,020.) So buying the points for the entire trip cost less than a single night cash would have. I then did the exact same thing over again with my husband applying for a card to get a second room for my mom. So an all-in cost of just over $2K instead of $15K. (And ended up using my Chase points for free flights for all 5 of us.)

Timing-wise, the cards took about 5 days to arrive in the mail, I bought the points that day, made the card payment 2 days later, and received the 45K bonus points the day the statement closed, about 3 weeks later.

I am trying to book the Grand Rio Mar, I just earned my bonus from signing up for the earner plus and have enough points, but the 10% discount isn't working? Anyone else having issues? Is it related to the new credit card drop?

I currently have all of our credit cards for award travel in my name; I want to have my husband start signing up for the SUBs. We missed the last time the Sapphire Preferred had the 100K bonus. It just came back and I went to do it, but the Chase referral portal is down? Is this happening to anyone else?

A cautionary post for any other parents of school-aged kids trying to get into the points game -- it can be really hard to actually get good point value when travel is inflexible. I've been accumulating Chase points for several years (Freedom Flex + Sapphire Preferred) and have over 600K. Read into the hype about the Hyatt value and got their card, as well as a JetBlue card, thinking I'd set myself up for some good redemptions. Unfortunately, in practice, given that I have fixed, limited travel dates that align with school schedules, and always have to buy 4 tickets and have to select my seats, I have incredibly poor redemption options and just did the math and figured out I would have been better off just using a flat 2% cash back card this entire time. Some more details below.

I had planned to redeem the points for a stay at Dreams Playa Mujeres for myself and my sister's family for our mother's 70th birthday next year. There was a really good deal on the cash rates when I went to book, so CPP value was only going to be about 1.5 cents. Not great but I figured OK. Then we had a change in circumstance with one of our family members where a food allergy is going to make an all inclusive too risky. So, plans changed, I looked around a lot and settled on Wyndham Rio Mar in Puerto Rico (Margaritaville side so we have kitchens.) I figured I'd use the Chase points on JetBlue and get the similar 1.5 cpp. Well, turns out JetBlue inflates its points on routes during school vacation weeks, and it's only 1.1 cpp (I checked several routes and confirmed this for a fact. Infuriating.) I'm still going to burn the points on it because I have been sitting on them for years at this point, but it's just an incredibly deflating end to all of this.

I'm going to close the Preferred, Hyatt, and JB cards and get a capital one flat 2% back.

Hi, I wanted to gut-check this plan. We are taking a trip with my sister's family for our mom's 70th birthday next April. Kids 18 months, 6, and 9. The baby is allergic to peanuts so we need a kitchen to make her meals, so we had planned to book the Margaritaville side. However, we are finding it is quite challenging to get availability there, and I'm nervous I won't be able to get 3 units. So, now I am thinking of getting two regular rooms (by purchasing points -- it cuts the cost by 80%!) and one 1-bed in Margaritaville for the kitchen.

But I'm also toying with the idea of renting a 3 bedroom in the Ocean Villas next door and then booking a few nights at the hotel to get access to their pools/the waterslides and splash pad for the kids (on points it works out to $175/night which is cheaper than buying a day pass.) Any thoughts on that strategy? How do they verify that you are a hotel guest, are there wrist bands?

I booked this because I was anticipating earning cat 1-4 certificates. I booked on points figuring I could swap out for certificates later-- it turns out that is not possible, which is incredibly annoying. By the time I got the certs, there was no longer points availability and I was never able to swap it out (and now I have two useless certs because there are no 1-4s anywhere near where we live outside Boston. I'm pretty much done with the Hyatt credit card.)

Anyway, this is a cool, modern hotel with fun theming and decent size rooms. The room layout wasn't ideal-- one of the beds was only inches from the wall, making it hard to get in and out. But plenty of room to move around otherwise. Clothing storage was a bit lacking for a family of 4, just one small armoire and 3 drawers. We kept some clothes in suitcases on top of the set of drawers.

Now, my main warning: this is actually not a very family friendly hotel. The in-house restaurant has a fairly upscale, expensive menu that lacked choices my kids would eat. For breakfast the best option for them was the buffet at $17, which they of course ate approximately $5 of food at. And without a pool, there was really nothing for our kids to do when we returned after a day of sightseeing. (It was pouring during our trip, so we weren't able to walk around and explore the city more.) This is also significantly more expensive than many other hotels in the city that do have pools.

Overall, great choice for an adult or older kids using a 1-4 certificate; maybe over priced otherwise.