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Groupon has a limited-time deal on new Costco Gold Star or Executive Memberships. There are two options. Offer expires December 21, 2025.

$65 for Gold Star Membership Package

• 1-year Gold Star Membership (normally $65 by itself)
• Membership card for the Primary Cardholder and one additional Household Card for anyone living at the same address, over the age of 18.
• $40 Digital Costco Shop gift card Valid in-store and online. The Digital Costco Shop Card will be emailed within two weeks of sign-up.

$130 for Executive Membership Package

• 1-year Executive Membership (normally $130 by itself). Executive membership includes an annual 2% reward (up to $1,250) on eligible Costco and Costco Travel purchases.
• Membership card for the Primary Cardholder and one additional Household Card for anyone living at the same address, over the age of 18.
• $60 Digital Costco Shop gift card Valid in-store and online. The Digital Costco Shop Card will be emailed within two weeks of sign-up.

They’ve made it a bit more restrictive in that both the Primary and Household/Affiliate member must not have had a membership in the last 18 months. I know that some people like to alternate between a Costco and Sam’s Club membership.

Valid only for new members and those whose previous memberships (Primary and Affiliate) have been expired for at least 18 months or more. Not valid for renewal or upgrade of an existing membership.

Save even more on your Groupon with a cashback shopping portal. For example, trigger the Rakuten new member bonus ($50 bonus right now after you spend $50) and also get 4% back. If Groupon doesn’t give it to you, send them this screenshot from their own website after searching for “Costco” and scrolling down (taken 10/30/25):

Citi has joined in the ultra-premium rewards card category with the Citi Strata Elite credit card. As with similar cards, there are a lot of travel-related perks, some associated “lifestyle” perks, and a hefty annual fees. Yet our “lifestyle” is more about sneaking the 3rd kid into a Hampton Inn and booking affordable Airbnbs so we can hike in a national park with our free 4th grader pass.

I recently finished up the spending requirements for the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, and I realized that while I will get a lot of first-year value out of the card, I will also leave many of the benefits completely unused. And that’s okay! I don’t want to spend $200+ on a fancy dinner only to then have to worry about it not being reimbursed and then spend additional time arguing with customer service about it. I will pick up the easy stuff, and move on. So that is the lens for this review, as I consider my next credit card.

(Side note: You can read about some the drama surrounding this card (WSJ gift article) during its initial launch. Not the best way to treat “premium” customers… I hope Citi has ironed out these kinks.)

Perk highlights:

• Limited-time offer: 100,000 ThankYou points after spending $6,000 in the first 3 months.
• $300 annual hotel credit for prepaid stays of at least two nights booked via Citi Travel portal.
• $200 annual “Splurge Credit” at select sites (includes Best Buy, Apple, Airbnb, American Airlines, Delta Airlines).
• $200 annual Blacklane chauffeur credit ($100 January–June, $100 July–December).
• Up to $120 Global Entry or TSA PreCheck credit, once every 4 years.
• Priority Pass Select membership for access to 1,500+ airport lounges worldwide.
• 4 annual American Airlines Admirals Club lounge passes.
• Travel and purchase protections including trip cancellation/interruption, delay protection, lost/damaged luggage, MasterRental coverage, extended warranty, and purchase assurance.
• $595 annual fee.

Rewards structure highlights:

• 12X points hotels, car rentals, and attractions booked through the Citi Travel portal.
• 6X points on air travel booked through the Citi Travel portal.
• 6X points at restaurants (including delivery) every Friday and Saturday from 6p to 6a ET (“Citi Nights”).
• 3X points at restaurants otherwise.
• 1.5X points per dollar on all other purchases.

Getting low-effort value out of Citi ThankYou points. If you prefer “cash back” rewards, then you might already have the Citi Double Cash card as it allows you to earn a flat 2% cash back on all your purchases. (Notice the Double Cash still beats this fancy card for most purchases!) However, technically you earn 2X Citi ThankYou points on all your Double Cash purchases, which you are then allow to redeem at a rate of $0.01 per point. Therefore, if you have both this Strata Elite and the Double Cash, then you can combine the points and redeem that 100,000 ThankYou point bonus for $1,000 cash (statement credit). Without the Double Cash, you are only going to get 75% of that amount ($750 for 100,000 points.)

(My second-favorite option would probably be to transfer to American Airlines miles, which are probably the most flexible and valuable option for a US domestic traveler. You can use their “Cash + Miles” option when booking a flight and reliably get more than 1 cent per mile value without having to use them in huge blocks. Finally, you could wait to redeem for a gift card during a promo, or you can redeem ThankYou points at Amazon at 0.80 cents per point using their “Shop with Points” feature. 100,000 points = $800 to spend at Amazon.)

Getting low-effort value out of the $200 “Annual Splurge Credit”. Here’s their text:

Every calendar year, earn up to $200 in statement credits on your choice of up to 2 of the following brands: 1stDibs, American Airlines (exclusions apply), Best Buy®, Future Personal Training, and Live Nation (exclusions apply).

I would simply pick Best Buy as my option and then promptly buy an Amazon gift card from Best Buy for $200 and load it directly into my Amazon account balance. (Airbnb and Apple gift cards would be my next choices.) Easy. Done. Won’t forget to use up. Notice also that the credit is based on calendar year. If you apply for this card before the end of 2025, you can get $200 in 2025 and also $200 in 2026 during the first year of paying that huge $595 annual fee.

The rest is gravy on top. For example, I might use the annual hotel credit, but I also already have a ton of hotel points and not that much travel planned. I don’t want to spend $1,000 to “save” $300. I probably won’t use the Blacklane credit; I looked up my home/airport combo and it cost $165 vs under $50 for Uber/Lyft. The airport lounge access is nice but honestly most of these Priority Pass lounges are so crowded nowadays. I’ll probably use the $120 Global Entry credit depending on expiration timing, but won’t count it for now.

The main point is that you often still do well without maximizing every potential benefit. With just the easiest non-travel rewards listed above, I am already at $1,000 statement credit + $400 in Amazon gift cards – $600 annual fee = $800 net first-year value.

One of the early books that heavily impacted my investing philosophy was Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment by David Swensen. As a very successful (active!) manager of the Yale Endowment, he offered common-sense explanations of why low costs are good and which core asset classes make the most sense to own.

In addition, he pointed out the characteristics to look for in successful active management:

• Hold a limited number of stocks. Bet boldly on fewer companies (high “active share”), as opposed to being a “closet index fund”.
• High rate of internal investment. The managers should have a high percentage of their own net worth in the same funds that they ask you to invest in. They should “eat their own cooking.”
• Limit assets under management. If there is more money flowing in than they can invest efficiently, they should close the fund to avoid asset bloat. This is hard to do, as it requires them to turn down more money! 😮
• Reasonable management fees. Costs still matter, and the lower the expense ratio, the lower the hurdle to overcome and the more “alpha” ends up in your pocket.

Back in 2005, Swensen specifically named Southeastern Asset Management and their flagship Longleaf Partners Fund (LLPFX) as an example of a company that most clearly displayed all of these characteristics, but also added an important caveat at the end:

Southeastern Asset Management (sponsor of the Longleaf Partners mutual-fund family) exemplifies every fundamentally important, investor-friendly characteristic conducive to active-management success. Portfolio managers exhibit the courage to hold concentrated portfolios, to commit substantial funds side by side with shareholders, to limit assets under management, to show sensitivity to tax consequence, to set fees at reasonable levels, and to shut down funds in the face of diminished investment opportunity.

Even though all the signs point in the right direction, investors still face a host of uncertainties regarding Southeastern’s future active-management success.

So for the last 18 years (!), I have kept up with their quarterly and annual shareholder letters. (You can register for free e-mail updates, even if you don’t own their funds.)

Unfortunately, the performance of the Longleaf Partners Fund for most of that time has been rather dismal. LLPFX is the blue line, while the (no cost) index benchmark (Morningstar US Mid Broad Value TR USD) is yellow, and the category of peers (Mid-Cap Value) is red.

Here are the latest return numbers after Q3 2025:

This fund started out in 1987 and had some great outperformance all the way up through the early 2000s, which is how they became well-known. However, you’ll notice that even including its early success, over the long run it has lagged it’s Large Value index benchmark by very close to its expense ratio. (Costs matter.) If you exclude that part and invested after its early outperformance (or after you read this famous book), then you did much worse.

I am not trying to pick on this fund to be mean. I track them because they showed all the good things to look for in an active manager. They even closed the fund to new money in 2017, which means they gave up easy money when they didn’t have enough things to buy. That’s really rare! I would be happy to see them succeed.

I have access to Morningstar reports via my library, and even today, M* acknowledges that the managers of Longleaf Partners own over $1 million of the fund themselves (“eat their own cooking”), have below-average costs (for an active fund), and have a long average manager tenure (48 years). But yet their “Parent” rating is low because of their poor past performance? In the end, despite all the supposedly different factors they examine, it seems that Morningstar ratings are still primarily about past performance. LLPFX currently has 1 sad star.

For all that I can see, the managers of Longleaf Partners continue to try and do things the “right” way. They are experienced value-investing managers that showed skill and invested only in high-conviction picks. They had early success and the freedom to invest however they chose. They have shown patience and the willingness to avoid asset bloat. But even with all that they did not beat the S&P 500 or even the majority of their fund peers over the last decade.

Bottom line. Finding what has performed well recently by looking backward is easy. Actually beating a low-cost index fund for a 10 to 20+ year period in the future by picking stocks or picking a manager today is very hard, in my opinion much harder than most people like to think. I always try to remember this when I think about investing in something new that I just read about…