Last month I signed up for the BoA card where I get $200 and the Southwest card where I get $500 in rewards. Well today they both are available!! With the BoA card, if I redeem straight into my checking account with them I get an extra 10% so right now my reward balance is $229. I ran into a slight problem with the Southwest card because over the weekend it stated my reward points had been awarded. However, when I was playing around with it and trying to redeem for a Walmart gift card it wouldn't let me. This morning I had to call and explain the problem and they stated for whatever reason, my credit card had not been linked to the rapid rewards and that's why I was getting that error. They stated it should be corrected by the end of the day and I just checked again and it has indeed been fixed.

Another thing I noticed with redeeming for the gift card is that the highest denomination is $50 so I would have to order 10 in order to redeem all of my points. As a matter of fact I have 52,000 because of the other charges. I think for now I will just redeem one at a time and use it for groceries but I haven't made up my mind just yet. What do you guys think? The $229 is going towards the mortgage for sure and when I purchase a gift card for groceries, I will reduce the budget by that amount and put towards the mortgage as well.

$700 in snowflakes in one day is sweet!