Travel Party of 5 | Points & Miles for Family Travel

Using Your Credit Card Credits to Give Back

• Raya & Duane

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Links to Activate Instacart credits:

United Cards: https://www.instacart.com/p/chase-united?unauth-refresh=1

Chase Ink Cards: https://www.instacart.com/p/chase-ink?unauth-refresh=1

Chase co-branded cards (Marriott, Hyatt, etc): https://www.instacart.com/p/chase-cobrands?unauth-refresh=1

What if the credits you ignore every month could stock a food bank, surprise a caregiver with lunch, or stretch a teacher gift from thoughtful to unforgettable? We walk through the exact playbook we use to turn small, forgotten perks into big, tangible help—no coupon spreadsheets, no all‑day errands.

We start with quick wins you can do tonight: send a hot meal using Uber, DoorDash, or Grubhub credits to a friend, a grandparent across the country, or a new parent who needs a break. Then we level up with the Amex Gold Dunkin credit, turning it into donut drops for local schools, fire stations, or hospital staff. For holiday gifting, we show how certain Chase cards’ DoorDash pickup credits can buy third‑party gift cards through the Flower & Gift Boutique, often turning $10 of credit into $15 or $25 of spending power. Pair that with Chase Freedom rotating categories and you can fund Angel Tree or sponsored family gifts while maximizing rewards.

If you plan to donate cash, don’t miss airline partnerships that return miles for every dollar—Southwest Rapid Rewards and American Airlines often run strong promos—so your generosity fuels future trips too. We also highlight creative uses for credits like the Amex Platinum’s Saks benefit and the Business Platinum’s Dell credit to supply shelters and student programs with essentials. And yes, that old suitcase can do real good at a foster care agency.

Our deepest dive is a step‑by‑step guide to using Chase co‑branded Instacart credits and Instacart Plus to buy exactly what local food banks request via Community Carts. We cover card activation links, stacking free Plus months, choosing a food bank, and a simple checkout routine that waives fees and adds a small tip. With a handful of cards, we donated over $120 of groceries with about $20 out of pocket—set it up once and repeat it monthly in under 15 minutes.

If this helps, share it with a friend who hoards points, subscribe for more practical travel and points tactics, and leave a quick review so others can find the show. Tell us: which give‑back hack will you try first?

SPEAKER_01:

In honor of Thanksgiving this week, we are diving into a couple of creative ways you can utilize your credit card credits to give back. So listen in. Hi, I'm Raya.

SPEAKER_00:

And I'm Dwayne.

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And we are your hosts of the Travel Party of Five podcast, where we share how we travel as a family of five around the world.

SPEAKER_00:

We will also share how we use points and miles to travel as affordably as possible and sometimes even completely free.

SPEAKER_01:

So if you're wanting to travel more with your family, but you're not sure how, we'd love for you to listen in.

SPEAKER_00:

So welcome to our podcast where we hope you learn a thing or two to get you closer to your next trip.

SPEAKER_01:

And I think this is going to be a bit of a shorter episode, giving it is the Thanksgiving holiday week if you are in the US. But I wanted to talk about a couple of things that we've been doing recently to attempt to give back to either other, you know, people that we know or our community in general. And I in particular did one thing a couple of weeks ago where I was able to donate over$100 to a local food bank. And I'm going to give you all the details of how you can do that as well, utilizing some credit card off uh sorry, credit card benefits that you may not already be using. Um, so I'm gonna jump into just a couple of quick things first that you might just not be thinking about when you're thinking about either earning points or utilizing benefits on credit cards that you already have and are already paying an annual fee for or not. Some of these benefits are on no annual fee cards. So let's jump into a couple of the main um things first. So first and foremost, I want to say if you have these benefits on your credit cards and you are consistently using them every month for yourself, then keep doing that, right? I don't see any harm in that. You're paying the annual fee, and this is a way to recoup those credits back. I, however, have some credits on cards that I don't use, and I hate letting them go to waste, but it also is like really going out of my way for me to use them for personal use. And so I just find myself not using them. So if there's like a way that I can think a little bit outside the box and use those credits and give it to somebody else, then that makes me feel really good, first of all. But second of all, then those credits are not going to waste, right? So I can feel a little better about the annual fee that I'm probably paying for that card. So here is a couple of maybe outside of the box things. So if you have Amex, you know, Chase, Amex or Chase cards, and you have either Uber or DoorDash credits or Grubhub or whatever it may be, you know, and maybe you're not using those every month. What if you use those credits to send a meal to a neighbor or a friend that lives across the country or a grandparent or a new mom, right? Anyone who maybe can utilize that benefit, especially if you live in an area where you don't maybe have easy access to DoorDash or Uber Eats or whatever it may be, think about using those credits and giving someone else a meal. Um, you know, I have a grandma who lives across the country, and you know, my grandfather recently passed away in the last couple of years, but before that, you know, she was his caretaker for several years and it was very taxing. And so I would just try to send her lunch, you know, maybe once a month just to kind of brighten up their day a little bit, maybe get out of the monotony of just the day-to-day-to-day things. And I wasn't using credit card credits for that, but it was a nice gesture that I was able to do from my phone from completely across the country. And I don't even think at the time we had any credit cards that had these benefits. But now that we do, you know, if I wasn't utilizing them, I would be sending some type of a lunch or dinner to someone that I know every month. So also can just be a great way to just keep in touch with people and say, hey, I was thinking about you, and I would love to send you dinner tonight or whatever it may be. So that's one um one thought. Also, things like the$7 Dunkin' credit that comes with the Amex gold card. Um, you can use that for Dunkin' Donuts, obviously. And if you consistently use that, then by all means go ahead. You also can theoretically use the the credits at Baskin Robbins. I've heard, I haven't tried that. Um, but again, if that's if there's a Baskin Robbins near you, go go crazy. But if there's not, then maybe an option would be to load the$7 credit every month and then, you know, pick up a dozen or two, two dozen donuts and drop them off to your local EMS or fire station, bring them to a local school, you know, bring them to a hospital. You know, everybody loves welcome treats or surprise treats. So that could be one way that you could utilize that credit. I know that$7 credit is a little bit wonky. So we live very close to a Dunkin' Donuts, and so we actually use ours every month. But um, I think that that would be a really good way to again just make yourself feel a little bit good and use that credit for someone else. Also, we are coming up to the time of year where you're probably looking for teacher gifts or gifts for, I don't know, maybe your housekeeper or landscaper, mailman, whoever. Um, last week's episode, I talked a bit about utilizing the gift card store in the DoorDash app. And you also can do this in a slightly different way. So certain Chase cards come with either one or two$10 monthly credits that have to be used on pickup orders. They're they're referred to as like a grocery credit, but one way that you can use them without having to buy groceries, is you can go into the DoorDash app again, and this time you're gonna look for the flower and gift boutique. Okay, you have to do it through there, or else your orders will get canceled. So you're gonna go to the flower and gift boutique, select pickup, and then you're going to look at the gift cards. You could order other things too, like whatever, they have lots of stuff in there. Ours had like has like party stuff, and I do think this varies a little bit by uh geography and location. So, like I know a friend of mine is able to purchase$15 Starbucks gift cards, which is fantastic because the credit is$10. So you're paying$5 for a$15 gift card. However, for me, the smallest denomination I have for Starbucks specifically is$25. So still, I would be paying$15 for a$25 Starbucks gift card, which is still a win, especially if you're gonna spend that anyways. But if you were gonna get a$15 gift card for your kids' teacher, then do this instead and give them a$25 gift card for the same amount out of pocket. Or, you know, there are other gift card options in there as well, and you can choose a different option that you think might be better. Um, so that's another way to utilize those credits is by purchasing gift cards again through the flower and gift boutique. And again, you will have to go and pick it up, um, but you shouldn't have any issues. And we have a couple of cards that have this credit, and I'm actually gonna do this before the end of the month. And will I give it to their teachers or will I keep it for myself? I don't know because we do spend a good amount of money at Starbucks. And so, either way though, another great use to utilize those credits. There are also airline programs that have different promotions where you can donate your points and or earn a good chunk of points by donating. So just so I'm not gonna, this is not an exhaustive list, but just so you know that this exists and is a thing in case you want to look into it. Um, Southwest has where you can donate, or I'm sorry, where you can earn rapid rewards points while supporting uh organizations like the Red Cross, um, Airlink, Team Rubicon. So again, I think it's for every dollar you donate, you get 10 rapid rewards points. So if you're going to donate to these organizations, anyways, maybe look into, you know, is there a way I can maximize my donation? Um, another one is American Airlines. They, I think, generally have a partnership with Stand Up to Cancer. And if you donate, sometimes they have promotions throughout the year, but I think the standard donation is 10 AA miles for every dollar. I do think a couple of times a year they do like 50 uh miles for every dollar you donate. So keep an eye out for that. I don't think that's happening right this second, but um it definitely was a thing a couple of months ago. So again, if you are planning to donate to any of these organizations, just you know, do a quick search and see if there's any way to just maximize the donation you're gonna get. Um, there are ways where you can also donate your points. Um, I don't know a ton about that, but like for I for example, I think Alaska, you can donate your points to Make a Wish Foundation. Um I think if you have a surplus of of Alaska points and maybe you're just looking for a way to give back a little bit, that would be a great option. We don't have that many Alaska points, so I'm I'm probably not one that's gonna donate my points at this point in my points journey because we don't have that many. But again, if you have if you're sitting on millions of points, I would keep that in mind. Although if you're sitting on millions of points, I don't know if you're why you're listening to this podcast, but more power to you. Um, some other credits that could potentially be utilized to gift items to other people. The Amex Platinum has a$50 SAX credit. You could buy things like socks or gloves or hats and donate those to a women's shelter. The Amex Biz Platinum has a$150 Dell credit. If you've kind of maxed out the stuff that you can buy from Dell, because it just keeps the list just keeps getting smaller and smaller. Every time I sign on, I'm like, okay, what else can I get here that I don't really need? Um, so think about buying like headphones or keyboards or whatever, and maybe give them to like a student program, right? For underprivileged or marginalized uh kids who are maybe attending college for the first time. Um, I don't have any specific organization, so you would have to do a search in your area as to what's available. But again, I think, you know, like local foster care companies. Um, oh, that reminds me of another one. If you have old luggage, okay, don't give it to Goodwill, but instead look for a local foster care organization in your area where you can donate your luggage to, because a lot of these kids go from home to home and they just have trash bags to put their stuff in. So please, please, please, if you have luggage that, you know, maybe is not looking the best, but still functional, give it to a foster care agency in your area. One more thing I thought of before I jump into the main thing that I did a week or two ago and will continue to do going forward, is if you have a Chase Freedom or variation of the one of the Chase Freedom cards with the rotating bonus categories, this quarter the categories are old Navy Department Stores and PayPal, but PayPal is only for December. So I feel like generally this is an easier one to max out because you can just pay using PayPal for things and as long as you have that card linked. But if you cannot max that out for some reason, or maybe you don't have a PayPal account, if you are doing one of those Angel Tree um donations where you adopt a child or a family from the Angel Tree and you buy you're buying them gifts, um, organization or sorry, not organizations, um, stores like Kohl's will code as a department store. So utilizing your Chase Freedom card at Kohl's to purchase the gifts for this family that your child or whatever that you're gonna sponsor for the holidays could be a way to obviously not only get the things they need, but max out that credit for you for the quarter as well. So something else to think about. Um, but let's dive into the kind of really main thing I wanted to talk about today, which is utilizing the Instacart credits that come on the co-branded chase cards to donate to local food banks. So I did this like a week ago, maybe two weeks ago at this point, and was able to donate$120 to a local food bank and I spent$20 out of pocket. Most of that$20 was just small tips for the delivery driver, but I was able to do this completely from my laptop. I never left my house, and I was able to put to use all these Instacart credits that we are not using because I don't use Instacart very often. I find it difficult because this the prices of the items for the most part are higher than they would be if you went in the store. And there are some stores where that's not the case, and they do say on there, like you know, in-store prices. Um, but the stores I found myself wanting to get things from do not say that. And so we just don't use these credits, and we have a lot of cards that have the credits. So, first let me tell you the cards that contain these credits, and then we'll walk through the process of how to get it set up. It is a bit time consuming in the the first time that you do it, but once it's all set up, like next month when I go to do this, it's gonna be very easy for me to do. Okay, so the Chase cards that have the credits are the Ink Business Cash, the Ink Business Unlimited. So, no, those are both no annual fee cards as a side note that come with these credits. So that's phenomenal. Um, the Southwest Rapid Rewards cards, Marriott Bonvoy cards, United cards, including the business card, because that's the one I have, World of Hyatt, IHG1 Rewards, British Airways, Aeroplan, Airlingus, Disney, and Iberia. So if you have any of these, either ink cards or co-branded Chase cards, they either have$10 or$20 Instacart credits you can utilize every single month. These cards also come with three months of Instacart Plus, which is the other piece of this puzzle that you need in order to make this work. So the process works like this. First of all, you have to activate the Instacart credits on each card. And the way that you do that is different depending on the type of card you have. So, for example, if you have a Chase Inc. card, there is a specific link where you would go to activate your Chase Inc. business card, Instacart credits. If you have United cards, there is a different link, same thing where you would go to activate activate your United cards. And then if you have any other Chase co-branded cards that I mentioned, so that's like the Aeroplan, the Southwest, the Marriott, then there's a third link where you activate the credits for those cards. I can put the links in the show notes for each of the Ink, the United, and the other co-branded ones. So I'll do that. Um, but you have so step one is you have to have an Instacart account. If you don't create one, it's free. And then you're going to sign into your Instacart account, and then you're going to enroll with your eligible card. And whether the credit is$10 or$20 depends on the type of card. I think for the Ink business cards, it's it is$20. I also think the United cards are$20 monthly credits, and I think the rest of the co-branded cards are$10 a month. But when you sign in and once you link them all, and then you go to do an order, you'll change the payment card and it'll give you the credit amount and it'll show you what it is. So you know every time. So once you start linking these cards and activating them within your Instacart account, it is going to like so every card has the three months of Instacart Plus. As you add more cards, it is going to extend the expiration date of Instacart Plus automatically. So for example, if you load two cards that have three months of Instacart cred uh Instacart Plus, it's going to give you a six month expiration window. If you load three cards, it's going to give you nine months. So it's basically like uh I don't know what the right word is, but like waterfalling the um the membership, the free membership instead of making you use all of them all at once, because that doesn't make sense. So if I if I had 10 cards and I loaded 10 cards in there, then I've got uh 30 months of Instacart Plus for free. So keep that in mind. Um the other thing to note is if you have multiple of the same type of cards. So for example, if you have two Chase Inc. unlimited cards like we do, you can only link one Chase un Chase Inc. unlimited per account. It like doesn't recognize the second card for whatever reason, and you won't get the credit. So Dwayne and I each have our own Instacart account, and most of the cards are linked under mine, but then there's I think two or three that are linked under his account as well, just because my account wasn't recognizing because it was a second card of the same type. Once you have this all set up, and it does take some time, I would bank depending on how many cards you have, I would bank on spending about an hour getting it all set up. Okay. That's about how long it took me the first time. But once it's set up, the actual ordering is very easy and quick. So once you've got all your things set up, you're gonna go to um, there's a way to find this in the Instacart app or website, but I had a hard time. So I would actually recommend just Googling Instacart Community Carts, and then it's gonna give you a list of all the different organizations that you can donate items to. I struggled a little bit trying to find one that was local to me. I settled on St. Mary's Food Bank because I do think that is local. Um, but there are like a lot of options. So maybe if you wanted to donate to one outside of your area, you could do that as well. You know, feeding San Diego is on there. There's food banks in Boston, Minnesota, I mean Georgia, like they're all over the place. So choose whatever one you want. Um, again, I chose St. Mary's food bank, but you do you. And then you're just gonna click on donate items. And I'm going through it right now so I can give you very descriptive um directions. So as long as you're logged in and then you click on the food bank that you want to donate to, it's then gonna pull up a list of their most needed items. So when I'm looking at this right now, it's cans of vegetables and spaghetti and applesauce and almond butter, um, Campbell's soup, sliced peaches, all sorts of things that are not gonna go bad. And so you can just add whatever to your cart. So if you have a$10 credit, you're gonna want to spend as close to$10 as you can. And if you have a$20 credit, then again, as close to$20 as you can. Once you have filled your cart, you're gonna click on review donation, and then it's gonna take you to the basically the checkout field. So it for me, it says delivery time is within five days. It has my phone number, it has the card linked with the offer I'm using, and then it'll have it should have on the right hand side delivery fee should be free, service fee should be free because those are included with Instacart Plus. That's why the membership is important. And then it's gonna give you an option for a delivery tip. I did a$2 tip for every order. You do have to do different orders for every single card. That is part of why I don't utilize this for personal use, is because I find that very tedious and I don't want to have to tip, you know, every single time to get my groceries delivered, right? With six different orders. So, anyways, I feel much better about doing the doing it this way. Um, you also can link your um loyalty uh reward account. So, for example, in Arizona we have fries, which is a Kroger subsidiary, and so I put our fries number in there, and so I will earn a few, you know, fries points, which are generally like used for fuel points for us, um, on this order as well. So then I'm just gonna click on donate now, and that's it. It's done. And I'm gonna just rinse and repeat for every single card that has a credit on it. So when I did this a week or two ago, I did I think seven orders and I paid out of pocket roughly$21 total across all orders. Again, most of that was a$2 tip per order, but there was, you know, obviously a little bit of overage. I I think I averaged around$11 per order total, and or if it was a$20 credit, like$21. So I always wanted to go a little over. I never wanted to do under. And so I was able to donate$120 worth of food to a local food bank, and I never had to leave my house, and that was just for the month of November. So I will continue to do this for the month of December and onward as long as these credits exist because I'm not using them anyway. So it's no money out of my pocket, really, other than the$20 that I spent, and I am happy to spend$20 a month if it helps contribute to families in need in my local area. So I just think like, imagine if everybody did this. Imagine how much progress we could make towards, you know, feeding the unhoused and families in need. Like it would be so incredible. So if you do this, please send me a message because I would love to know and I would love to share. Um, there are a bunch of articles and probably Instagram, Instagram reels about this as well. So if you're trying to go through the process of getting all the credits activated, do a quick Google search. There are articles that will kind of walk you through it. I know I had to do that a couple of times when I was trying to do it because they don't make it easy. I definitely think this is a credit where they offer it and they are like, let's make this as hard as possible so that people maybe don't use it and it saves us money. But again, once you have it set up, it is so easy to do. So when I do this for December, um, maybe I'll even do like a screen recording of it because it's gonna take me 15 minutes or less to do all seven orders. And then that'll be another$120 that I've donated, which feels great to me. So if you have any questions, send me a DM on Instagram. If you are listening to this episode, the week of Thanksgiving, which is the week it comes out, then please know that I wish you and your family a very wonderful, healthy, happy Thanksgiving holiday and a wonderful holiday season. We are very grateful for all of you who tune into this podcast every week or every month. And we are super grateful because we would not continue to do it if people were not listening. So thank you. Happy holidays, and we will catch you next week. Bye.