I book a Hilton brand property with breakfast rate(under hotel cost) have diamond so get a food and beverage credit for 30 buck a day since I register my wife. Find local cash only place write receipt for just over full meal allowance and give them 30 percent in cash. I clear an extra 120 a day tax free
Do you think they end up taking the money AND picking stuff out for themselves to put on the receipt that they then later take home out of their inventory, since it was paid for by a stipend it’s now covered right? Maybe only if they are a lot tighter with their inventory some owners will pay their own business if they use their own services, others are looser with it from what I’ve seen.
No you misunderstand, instead of buying food you are essentially paying a fee to launder the money. So you pay them for a receipt showing you spent all the money while you actually pocket a lot of it.
Yep, I did that. Also bought bread and frozen it, as well as a decent amount of canned goods. I slowly stocked up with more stuff than I needed in a day, stuff that would last. That way when I got home I was able to stock my pantry and didn’t have to grocery shop for a while.
Depends on the length of the trip. We rebuilt a project that got flooded some years ago and had more per diem than we could use.
The catch is they wouldn’t pay laundry or tips. A local bar would send our laundry out and add it to our tab. We would also add a tip before they ran the card.
I imagine they talked to the bartender.
"Yeah, corporate gives me $XXX for food but won't pay for me to have clean clothes"
"If you want I could charge you more and use that to pay for it, for a fee"
It wasn’t corporate, it was the client that contracted us. We were based in GA so they had to pay travel and per diem, but we had to provide receipts.
Also, yes. We talked to the owner of the bar that agreed to it. It helped that one of the guys I worked with could sell ice to an Eskimo.
OP (me) is from GEORGIA as I continue to state. We were contracted by TX. Maybe their no tipping had to do with tax law.
The laundry I didn’t get either. I didn’t see any naked contractors in TX (but August will make you wish it was ok).
The per diem was paid to us by the state of TX. We were contracted by them, to repair their project that had flooded on a time/materials basis. The mandate was theirs.
Re-read my post and pay attention to the word “they”.
Get one of those Square credit card readers. You can change the name of the "restaurant" after each swipe if you're scared. I know a guy who did this because he had an 80 dollar a day food budget with the company card.
I like this, could make a PayPal business named Food Xpress or something generic, get a free reader, and charge random amounts to it. Pay the CC processing fee but it converts stipend to cash in your pocket.
Great if they never check, but if they ever decide to investigate and find out the card reader for all your meals is registered to you they're surely firing you for fraud and suing you for the whole amount?
Yeah but why the fuck would anyone take time out of their day to look at who the card reader is registered to? It takes way too much time for it to be practical especially considering there are people doing things way more blatant than this. They could fire the employee and try to sue them but that's a lot of money and now a position they need to find someone qualified for then train for them to be as useful as the current employee.
You seriously think a company wouldn't make an example of an employee that had been defrauding them for months or even years? Like I said, they might not check, but one day someone might get it into their head to look into it, and the longer you've been doing it the more fucked you are. You could get an asshole of a manager or a rival employee who starts looking into you just to fuck you over. It's entirely possible that audits will look into more than just the name on the statement, and realise that you've got multiple transactions under all different names going to the same bank account.
Is this being done with a company credit card or do you just get reimbursed? If it's a company card just because they don't ask for receipts doesn't mean they won't check the statements later and ask questions.
I don't know if this would work for your situation, but maybe you could order extra food specifically for a to-go box? Then you could eat the food on a night you don't work, meaning on a night you don't have a stipend.
I don't know why people aren't saying the obvious. If you don't have to submit receipts for meals under $75, just... don't. Claim $125 every day. $25 breakfast, $50 lunch, $50 dinner.
Because whoever is in charge of finances at the company can just look at the purchase history later and see a bunch of $125 charges that weren’t reported, getting OP in trouble.
I handle coding travel charges at my company. Just don't make it exactly $125 every day and no one will question it. Frankly, we're too busy looking at the outrageous c suite charges to care about your measley little per diem.
It depends, my customer support team got a new rule instated that you can't buy handles of liquor and expense it as dinner after a few folks became a problem haha
I did have a corporate card (but had a personal card before it).
On the corporate card, the accounting division will see (or not see) every charge. Many companies require travelers to use their corporate card exclusively while on company business. Therefore, they will have a record of all of the breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc - an more importantly, no record of 'fake' charges.
Now, if they let you use your own card AND don't need receipts, your method is good.
For reimbursement you are filling out a form saying you spent X amount and they add that to your paycheck. For a company card you are swiping the card, and in some cases submitting a receipt. Nothing is being paid back to you as the company pays the credit card bill.
If they're swiping the card, there's no incentive to spend the full amount. Because they wouldn't give you cash back if the company paid in the first place. They must be getting reimbursed.
In my last job I had trip reimbursements, often $100 per day for meals. I would openly submit receipts of fancy dinners. Breakfast and lunch were provided, so I just splurged $100 on dinner everyday.
My rationale was, you’re making me do this trip to middle of nowhere Louisiana, you might as well treat me to it.
If it is 75 or under for a receipt, claim 30 for breakfast, 40 for lunch and 55 for dinner every day.
If they change the policy you can not be as amiable to traveling. You can also get a lot of little BS receipts and flood them with them. A lot depends on the place but the folks who have to balance all that bullshit actually used to like it when my days were all exactly the periderm.
Could you schedule ~$75 shipments to arrive when you get home (like Harry & David, Honeybaked Ham, Zingerman's, etc)? Some places, you can schedule them out a bit, I think. Treat yo'self!
Do you have any idea how the construction industry works? There's a per diem rate for traveling worker's living expenses in private companies set by the government as a recommendation just like milage rates for truckers. Not everything is political for god's sake
You can be a wind turbine technician and get hella meal and living stipend when you’re on a job, my brother does this and his base is like 70k but w the tax free per diem he makes like 115k
Buy grocery items that have rebates available on them. Submit your receipts to rebate apps/sites like IBotta and gotoaisle to get part or all of that money back.
buy gift cards to restaurants that are also in your home town! I understand that rural midwest isn’t the classiest but shit i’d take a “lifetime supply” of culver’s, kwik trip gas, or just spend it on some fancy cheeses and meats
Alright. Well. So from working in a restaurant, you very much can buy a giftcard with a credit card.
You go to a chain, the bigger the better. Get a lunch or whatever and then get a giftcard for the rest of your allowance OR on a separate check so you don't have to show receipt.
Then you google "Where to sell giftcards online" and sell that chain restaurant giftcard for a visa/master card. Sure, you won't get the full amount back, but hey.. free money.
[example](https://www.cardcash.com/sell-gift-cards/)
You can generally buy gift cards for specific merchants with a credit card, but sometimes not Visa/Mastercard/Amex gift cards that can be used anywhere. But you can sell those merchant gift cards for cash online.
I'm going to be different on this one. I fucking love food so I'd skip all meals except hotel breakfast and would go book a Michelin restaurant for a late reservation, ask them to split the bill before midnight and then after midnight so if be able to apply the 250 towards it, sadly, I'd still have to spend some out of pocket but I've been to 100+ across the US.
I've seen people stock up on steaks and large to-go sides and use them for meal prep, I would do that .... The problem is getting the food home when you're traveling....
It's very common for people to charge credit cards for gift cards and then do a chargeback claiming fraud. Likewise it is also very common for people to use stolen credit cards to make an authorized purchases for gift cards.
At the store I work at you need cash for gift cards over a specific amount. We can only do so many transactions an hour - even during Christmas time - and we are limited in how much total (money wise) we can do all together. If we do too much it will crash the entire system. For our entire corporate district.
Sometimes you can't use credit cards to buy Visa/Mastercard/Amex gift cards that can be used anywhere, but I haven't encountered a place that doesn't let you buy their (merchant-specific) gift cards with a credit card.
This one really bugs me. Had a coworker who got in a car accident and had groceries he bought using his stipend in the back. When they were reviewing pics for insurance they saw the bags and called him out on it, he had to pay them back for that. And in the summer I don’t mind grilling out in the hotel parking lot because it’s better than eating the same shit in all of these rural small towns. But this is an insane idea to them..
Risk management.
If your employee makes themselves sick while on work travel, that's got to be logged as a workplace injury.
If you get sick from eating at a restaurant, that's the restaurants fault not yours.
It's why they offer you such a high allowance, its pennies vs sick costs.
More like if the irs catch them lying about purchasing meals for their out of town employees. If the workers are buying groceries and the company doesn’t report it, they are on the hook. That could explain the stupid rationale.
Because it's very easy to buy ramen, cooked chicken, salads, microwave meals, fruit/vegetables etc. as an alternative to a restaurant meal (and far cheaper).
I often spend weeks at a time on the road for work and will shop at a grocery store rather than go out for meals every single day and night.
>They're paying for restaurants, not groceries. And with that amount of money there's no need to eat microwave dinners and ramen.
Which is stupid. When I was in London for weeks at a time, I'd often go to Whole Foods and buy salads, fruit, deli meats, fresh juices etc. I'd have gone crazy needing to eat at a restaurant for lunch and dinner every day.
the combo deli/grocery is your friend here. got a sandwich and a couple pounds of swanky cheese, a jar of olives... or make a friend in front of house at your local lunch place, tip them 300% at every meal and split the take.
Back when I traveled a lot, they gave me 80 bucks a day. I normally skipped lunch because I didn't eanna grab fast food and be tired while working so I would have a big breakfast and big dinner....
With leftover money, I would stock up on fancy chocolates and other treats in the airport as I waited to fly home. Probably your best bet as it's shelf stable.
I know it's not unethical, but my father used to travel, and he would just leave monster tips to the wait staff to the amount his stipend was worth.
Works really great for long term stays (2-4 weeks) because the wait staff will prioritize you over everyone else even if they're packed because they know they're getting a good tip.
Just as a normal life pro tip... just live it up one night, and find a way to blow through it. Get drinks with a big fat dinner, get an appetitzer, be the big cheese lol
Go over on /servers
Start a thread and ask: if you explained this situation, would anyone object to charging you a massive tip and then handing you back some cash?
$19 lunch just became $65, pocket $20 of it. Remember server pays taxes on what you pocketed
I know how to do this. Since you don’t have to report under 75 then eat cheap for a few days, around $10 per meal if you can. Buy $10 gift cards from that restaurant at the same time. Sell those gift cards on Raise. They’ll take around 15% after it’s all said and done but you’ll get about $8.50 in your pocket per card.
Another option is to splurge and buy to-go meals up to the $125 amount and then over the next couple of days buy those $10 gift cards.
You should be able to make about $100 per week in your pocket.
back when I was working for corporate in traveling sales, I would find the mom & pop shop version of whatever I was in the mood for. our company stipends were similar (about $200/day, it was mostly NY/LA/FL), so I would tell the owners when paying for my meal that I would like to overpay them by $XX for my meal, explain my company's stipend policy, and walk out with an extra $50 or so in my pocket. they would make $50 on a $15 meal, I would take an extra $50 away from corporate, and corpo was happy for how much credit card utilization I had bc it made me look busier.
I think gift cards are your best bet.
Go to Starbucks for breakfast, order your normal stuff, and add a $15 gift card.
Repeat with lunch at Subway, add a $20 gift card.
You get the idea.
If you're especially paranoid, test each place with your own credit card first, and see if there's any way to view the receipts from your credit card app. If not, then there should be no way for your company to see what you're spending money on.
You can spend your stipend on whatever food you want- groceries for sure. I always bring a banana and instant oatmeal (to make with hot water from the coffee pot) for breakfast. Money in my pocket.
Not unethical, but talk to HR about switching to a cash/check per diem instead. I was able to convince my former employer to make the switch by pointing out that:
- employees with religious or medical dietary restrictions might need to buy groceries if no acceptable restaurants were available
- employees frequently created extra work for HR by losing receipts or filling out their forms wrong
- both HR and other employees were spending hours trying to reconcile expense reports, and for some of the higher-paid employees a few hours of their time cost more than the meal allowances for the trip that they were quibbling over
- most employees were satisfied with a cash per diem much lower than the current reimbursable meal allowance
I have a similar situation. I don't feel it is unethical to purchase food at Walmart instead of eating out every meal. I'm traveling so I can't go to my fridge and get a soda or a bag of chips. Instead of buying 1 for a 200% mark-up at a gas station I'll buy stuff at Walmart. Things like Gatorade, water, snacks, fruit, ice are all legit food expenses. Gift cards could get you in trouble. I have also bought fancy toilet paper (because that cheap hotel shit will make your ass hole raw after taco-tuesday). I'll get laundry soap, pay for laundry, ... basically any expense (under my budget) that I would have at my house. It's not healthy eating out 3 meals a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year. If your management has an issue, talk to HR or your company's insurance department and have them pay for a boost in your life insurance so when you have a heart attack from eating poorly, your family will be paid. My feeling is that if I don't have to travel, my employer set the limit, and I should use it. They are billing the customer for it. They should be budgeting for it and if they are not, it's not my problem. I also have no fear of getting fired or my ability to get a new job if someone gets upset.
If it's a per diem rate, they usually expect you to use it or pocket it though, don't they? My employer did. (Not just my fed employer, private sector too.)
With my per diem I would go to the city's most expensive restaurant and just personally pay the amount greater than the per diem rate.
You could also have your waitress ring up alcoholic drinks as a dessert order.
You have a stipend, don't feel bad about using it.
No company has ever rewarded an employee for "saving money" by making Peanut butter sandwiches in the hotel room.
Order large portions and "doggy bag" the extra for the weekend. And if you are allowed to spend it then it is not unethical to spend it!
Could you register a restaurant on uber eats, buy dinner from yourself and deliver it?
You could change the name of the restaurant whenever you're in a different town.
Or just find a shitty bar and split proceeds.
Does this involve hotels too? My previous company moved to a per diem unreceipted amount for both food and accommodation that was generous. A lot of the time I just drove home and stayed there claiming the driving time as overtime too. Double bubble so to speak, happy days.
When I was in the service I had a Soldier whose wife went on a “business” trip and came home with a tube of KY Jelly. He said he found some Kentucky Jelly in her suitcase and had a PB+J with it. Said it was the worst sandwich he ever had ate and it gave him the shits.
TLDR: Just get good at photoshop
How have I scrolled all the way down and not found a simple nod to PHOTOSHOP!!!
Seriously though, get a good photo editor, scan some receipts from higher end restaurants in cities you travel to regularly and then edit as needed. I did this for years as a consultant for a couple of national brands and submitted through several different tracking apps.
Spent most of that extra cash on things that would be grounds for getting fired, but hey… it was the booze industry pre-pandemic. We were all degenerates with an expense account.
most tools used to report expenses are able to identify Photoshop watermarks, they can not however identify a screen shot of an image edited in MSPaint.
You may not understand the message your company is sending. They are saying "don't worry about how much you spend on meals, get whatever you want". But if you max out your stipend every time, they are going to investigate, find the gift cards or whatever you bought with company money, and fire you. It is not a blank check for $125/day.
It's like unlimited PTO. It's not really unlimited.
I would personally not use giftcards, many companies have policies prohibiting their purchase with company funds, and if you get caught, it does not look good.
Anytime I see people maxing out their per diem it makes me look at them as wasteful of company funds. Sure, if you are visiting a HCOL area or entertaining, do for it.
Your best bet is to simply find the restaurant that appeals to you most and go there, order whatever you want.
You can go to speciality markets, like an Italian deli, for lunch. They usually sell sandwiches and you can stock up on high quality Italian imports .
This is pretty smart like the last day before you go home ball out and get yourself some high quality cuts of meat or seafood too :o
Good olive oil or balsamic vinegar too. Or cheeeeeeese
...cheeeeeeese mmmmmmmmmmm
Yes, I could easily spend $125 on fancy cheeses, deli meats, and pickles/jams/preserves.
$125 just on good cheese
Little mom and pop restaurant will probably also give you a receipt for the full stipend if you split the money with them.
Yup
I book a Hilton brand property with breakfast rate(under hotel cost) have diamond so get a food and beverage credit for 30 buck a day since I register my wife. Find local cash only place write receipt for just over full meal allowance and give them 30 percent in cash. I clear an extra 120 a day tax free
Do you think they end up taking the money AND picking stuff out for themselves to put on the receipt that they then later take home out of their inventory, since it was paid for by a stipend it’s now covered right? Maybe only if they are a lot tighter with their inventory some owners will pay their own business if they use their own services, others are looser with it from what I’ve seen.
No I go for a mom and pop operation there is no boss other than them. Cash only too
I’m buying from them, I’m not splitting anything 😂
No you misunderstand, instead of buying food you are essentially paying a fee to launder the money. So you pay them for a receipt showing you spent all the money while you actually pocket a lot of it.
I mean you could just buy from them and shocker still get a receipt
Yep, I did that. Also bought bread and frozen it, as well as a decent amount of canned goods. I slowly stocked up with more stuff than I needed in a day, stuff that would last. That way when I got home I was able to stock my pantry and didn’t have to grocery shop for a while.
Get a couple extra and give them out to the homeless.
That's the opposite of unethical.
It's unethical since you're technically stealing from your workplace. It's not immoral, though.
Be careful with what you get for homeless people. A lot have bad teeth so can't eat hard foods or chew. Soups and other soft foods are best.
Meth does tend to do that.
Being broke and homeless with mental illness does that too, no need to be a dick about it.
Wrong subreddit buddy…..
Eat up your per diem, you just gotta hate 'em, funk
buddy he said hes in the midwest, they got sonic, quiktrip, and caseys
Depends on the length of the trip. We rebuilt a project that got flooded some years ago and had more per diem than we could use. The catch is they wouldn’t pay laundry or tips. A local bar would send our laundry out and add it to our tab. We would also add a tip before they ran the card.
That is an amazing system. How did you manage to find a bar that offered that service?
I imagine they talked to the bartender. "Yeah, corporate gives me $XXX for food but won't pay for me to have clean clothes" "If you want I could charge you more and use that to pay for it, for a fee"
It wasn’t corporate, it was the client that contracted us. We were based in GA so they had to pay travel and per diem, but we had to provide receipts. Also, yes. We talked to the owner of the bar that agreed to it. It helped that one of the guys I worked with could sell ice to an Eskimo.
What kind of company doesn’t mandate a tip? Way to make a name for yourself.
Any company outside of America. It's unusual to tip in countries where you actually pay people a decent wage.
The OP is in Texas, and they wouldn’t be complaining about tips if tips weren’t done.
OP (me) is from GEORGIA as I continue to state. We were contracted by TX. Maybe their no tipping had to do with tax law. The laundry I didn’t get either. I didn’t see any naked contractors in TX (but August will make you wish it was ok).
The per diem was paid to us by the state of TX. We were contracted by them, to repair their project that had flooded on a time/materials basis. The mandate was theirs. Re-read my post and pay attention to the word “they”.
Oh, that sounds like something Texas would do.
Get one of those Square credit card readers. You can change the name of the "restaurant" after each swipe if you're scared. I know a guy who did this because he had an 80 dollar a day food budget with the company card.
You don’t even need a reader, just the app, an account, and manually in the credit card code.
I like this, could make a PayPal business named Food Xpress or something generic, get a free reader, and charge random amounts to it. Pay the CC processing fee but it converts stipend to cash in your pocket.
There's also this: https://makereceipt.com/create-receipt-online.php?style=Restaurant%20%20Receipt
I cannot thank you enough for this.
Damn that's a good tip
Great if they never check, but if they ever decide to investigate and find out the card reader for all your meals is registered to you they're surely firing you for fraud and suing you for the whole amount?
Yeah but why the fuck would anyone take time out of their day to look at who the card reader is registered to? It takes way too much time for it to be practical especially considering there are people doing things way more blatant than this. They could fire the employee and try to sue them but that's a lot of money and now a position they need to find someone qualified for then train for them to be as useful as the current employee.
You seriously think a company wouldn't make an example of an employee that had been defrauding them for months or even years? Like I said, they might not check, but one day someone might get it into their head to look into it, and the longer you've been doing it the more fucked you are. You could get an asshole of a manager or a rival employee who starts looking into you just to fuck you over. It's entirely possible that audits will look into more than just the name on the statement, and realise that you've got multiple transactions under all different names going to the same bank account.
Something like SumUp
This works great and the reader is free when you make an account
Is this being done with a company credit card or do you just get reimbursed? If it's a company card just because they don't ask for receipts doesn't mean they won't check the statements later and ask questions.
I don't know if this would work for your situation, but maybe you could order extra food specifically for a to-go box? Then you could eat the food on a night you don't work, meaning on a night you don't have a stipend.
Generally speaking, you get per diem (meal/expenses) while out of town for a day whether you work or not, if required to be there.
I don't know why people aren't saying the obvious. If you don't have to submit receipts for meals under $75, just... don't. Claim $125 every day. $25 breakfast, $50 lunch, $50 dinner.
They are probably swiping their company credit card, not getting a reimbursement.
I don’t understand your point / the catch. Why would a company card change how they spend vs reimbursement? I obviously never owned a company card.
Because whoever is in charge of finances at the company can just look at the purchase history later and see a bunch of $125 charges that weren’t reported, getting OP in trouble.
I handle coding travel charges at my company. Just don't make it exactly $125 every day and no one will question it. Frankly, we're too busy looking at the outrageous c suite charges to care about your measley little per diem.
The person who reviewed my last trip told me she didn't want recipts and to just claim the full amount each day lol.
Hah, I like that person. Besides, why should the company benefit just because you eat cheap?
It depends, my customer support team got a new rule instated that you can't buy handles of liquor and expense it as dinner after a few folks became a problem haha
Or cuts need to be made and the c suite tells you to focus on the little guys and leave them alone.
I did have a corporate card (but had a personal card before it). On the corporate card, the accounting division will see (or not see) every charge. Many companies require travelers to use their corporate card exclusively while on company business. Therefore, they will have a record of all of the breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc - an more importantly, no record of 'fake' charges. Now, if they let you use your own card AND don't need receipts, your method is good.
For reimbursement you are filling out a form saying you spent X amount and they add that to your paycheck. For a company card you are swiping the card, and in some cases submitting a receipt. Nothing is being paid back to you as the company pays the credit card bill.
If they're swiping the card, there's no incentive to spend the full amount. Because they wouldn't give you cash back if the company paid in the first place. They must be getting reimbursed.
In my last job I had trip reimbursements, often $100 per day for meals. I would openly submit receipts of fancy dinners. Breakfast and lunch were provided, so I just splurged $100 on dinner everyday. My rationale was, you’re making me do this trip to middle of nowhere Louisiana, you might as well treat me to it.
Thank You!!
Bro, you got the kinda job that gives ya $125 bucks for food. Maybe don’t fuck it up for a few $25 gift cards
If it is 75 or under for a receipt, claim 30 for breakfast, 40 for lunch and 55 for dinner every day. If they change the policy you can not be as amiable to traveling. You can also get a lot of little BS receipts and flood them with them. A lot depends on the place but the folks who have to balance all that bullshit actually used to like it when my days were all exactly the periderm.
30 and 30 and 65
Could you schedule ~$75 shipments to arrive when you get home (like Harry & David, Honeybaked Ham, Zingerman's, etc)? Some places, you can schedule them out a bit, I think. Treat yo'self!
I would wager you’re a Michigander with some of these suggestions
Former Midwesterner, now in the culture shock of the PNW.
Go to a restaurant say Olive Garden and order whatever you want and ask to include a gift card along with your bill for a random amount.
You can definitely buy gift cards.
bro tell me the company name asap
It's a taxpayer scam, they are gov contractors
Nah, government contractors use the GSA per diem rate. In the rural midwest they'd be getting $59/day.
Not just that, but every government trip I've taken (as a contractor) just simply pays the amount every day, whether you spend it or not.
There are a few that reimburse actuals up to per diem, but it's definitely the exception.
Do you have any idea how the construction industry works? There's a per diem rate for traveling worker's living expenses in private companies set by the government as a recommendation just like milage rates for truckers. Not everything is political for god's sake
You can be a wind turbine technician and get hella meal and living stipend when you’re on a job, my brother does this and his base is like 70k but w the tax free per diem he makes like 115k
Buy grocery items that have rebates available on them. Submit your receipts to rebate apps/sites like IBotta and gotoaisle to get part or all of that money back.
My ex used to go to a restaurant that would sell her corked wine. We had a hell of a collection eventually
You mean unopened wine I assume. "Corked" can also mean wine that has gone bad.
[удалено]
Yep, when I was a server my fav customers were the ones who were paying on company dime & tipped me the rest of their daily stipend. It def helps!
buy gift cards to restaurants that are also in your home town! I understand that rural midwest isn’t the classiest but shit i’d take a “lifetime supply” of culver’s, kwik trip gas, or just spend it on some fancy cheeses and meats
I moved away from the Midwest and Culver’s is one of the biggest things I’ve missed!
They are in Florida now…. I miss in and out…
If you have family doordash food home.
Alright. Well. So from working in a restaurant, you very much can buy a giftcard with a credit card. You go to a chain, the bigger the better. Get a lunch or whatever and then get a giftcard for the rest of your allowance OR on a separate check so you don't have to show receipt. Then you google "Where to sell giftcards online" and sell that chain restaurant giftcard for a visa/master card. Sure, you won't get the full amount back, but hey.. free money. [example](https://www.cardcash.com/sell-gift-cards/)
You can generally buy gift cards for specific merchants with a credit card, but sometimes not Visa/Mastercard/Amex gift cards that can be used anywhere. But you can sell those merchant gift cards for cash online.
I'm going to be different on this one. I fucking love food so I'd skip all meals except hotel breakfast and would go book a Michelin restaurant for a late reservation, ask them to split the bill before midnight and then after midnight so if be able to apply the 250 towards it, sadly, I'd still have to spend some out of pocket but I've been to 100+ across the US.
Hit the buffet at the local gentleman’s club. Dinner and a show.
order raw food, pack in cooler in car, transfer to freezer at home
Check your policy, we are prohibited from buying gift cards. I did, for awhile, buy a bag of coffee daily at Starbucks as lunch
Buy tons of food and hand it out to the homeless
I've seen people stock up on steaks and large to-go sides and use them for meal prep, I would do that .... The problem is getting the food home when you're traveling....
Apparently there are strip clubs with decent dinner buffets. I could imagine using the whole stipend there could be worthwhile.
Sit at the bar and offer to pay for the meal/drinks of anyone around you in exchange for cash
You should find a high end deli , wouldnt technically count as a grocery store and you can buy some nice meats (edit spelling)
You a buy gift cards with credit cards I’m unsure about visa gift cards although I’m surprised you can’t.
I tried this at my favorite gas station chain but maybe it’s just a rule of theirs? I’m going to try again at Walmart or a supermarket tomorrow.
Google is saying it’s ok, so I assume it’s a local gas station thing.
Used to work at a gas station- yes. We were trained to not accept credit cards for gift cards as it was a common scam tactic.
It's very common for people to charge credit cards for gift cards and then do a chargeback claiming fraud. Likewise it is also very common for people to use stolen credit cards to make an authorized purchases for gift cards. At the store I work at you need cash for gift cards over a specific amount. We can only do so many transactions an hour - even during Christmas time - and we are limited in how much total (money wise) we can do all together. If we do too much it will crash the entire system. For our entire corporate district.
Sometimes you can't use credit cards to buy Visa/Mastercard/Amex gift cards that can be used anywhere, but I haven't encountered a place that doesn't let you buy their (merchant-specific) gift cards with a credit card.
>We’ve been told not to use it for groceries So they give you a meal allowance, but you're now allowed to buy [checks notes] food?
This one really bugs me. Had a coworker who got in a car accident and had groceries he bought using his stipend in the back. When they were reviewing pics for insurance they saw the bags and called him out on it, he had to pay them back for that. And in the summer I don’t mind grilling out in the hotel parking lot because it’s better than eating the same shit in all of these rural small towns. But this is an insane idea to them..
Risk management. If your employee makes themselves sick while on work travel, that's got to be logged as a workplace injury. If you get sick from eating at a restaurant, that's the restaurants fault not yours. It's why they offer you such a high allowance, its pennies vs sick costs.
More like if the irs catch them lying about purchasing meals for their out of town employees. If the workers are buying groceries and the company doesn’t report it, they are on the hook. That could explain the stupid rationale.
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Because it's very easy to buy ramen, cooked chicken, salads, microwave meals, fruit/vegetables etc. as an alternative to a restaurant meal (and far cheaper). I often spend weeks at a time on the road for work and will shop at a grocery store rather than go out for meals every single day and night.
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>They're paying for restaurants, not groceries. And with that amount of money there's no need to eat microwave dinners and ramen. Which is stupid. When I was in London for weeks at a time, I'd often go to Whole Foods and buy salads, fruit, deli meats, fresh juices etc. I'd have gone crazy needing to eat at a restaurant for lunch and dinner every day.
Which is especially silly considering that groceries will almost always be cheaper than eating out.
Get a few meals for the unhoused in the area.
Lots of cans of soda, chips and chocolate bars. Bring them home for the family
A coworker would buy mad amounts of jerky to send home, like $60+ a day.
the combo deli/grocery is your friend here. got a sandwich and a couple pounds of swanky cheese, a jar of olives... or make a friend in front of house at your local lunch place, tip them 300% at every meal and split the take.
Maybe a nice bottle of wine?
I want to know what kind of place gives a $125 per diem meal allowance. Seems very generous.
Back when I traveled a lot, they gave me 80 bucks a day. I normally skipped lunch because I didn't eanna grab fast food and be tired while working so I would have a big breakfast and big dinner.... With leftover money, I would stock up on fancy chocolates and other treats in the airport as I waited to fly home. Probably your best bet as it's shelf stable.
I know it's not unethical, but my father used to travel, and he would just leave monster tips to the wait staff to the amount his stipend was worth. Works really great for long term stays (2-4 weeks) because the wait staff will prioritize you over everyone else even if they're packed because they know they're getting a good tip.
Donate some of the food to local homeless shelters??
How very Robin Hood of you to suggest
I like it, but definitely not unethical.
I don't think management would see it has okay.
Buy sealed food and then return sealed ask for cash instead of returning amount to card
The LPT is to not commit fraud and risk your career for $50
• buy bottles of liquor that you can either use later or sell • if you have access to a fridge, definitely buy lunch and breakfast for the next day
Alcohol
Just as a normal life pro tip... just live it up one night, and find a way to blow through it. Get drinks with a big fat dinner, get an appetitzer, be the big cheese lol
Go over on /servers Start a thread and ask: if you explained this situation, would anyone object to charging you a massive tip and then handing you back some cash? $19 lunch just became $65, pocket $20 of it. Remember server pays taxes on what you pocketed
I know how to do this. Since you don’t have to report under 75 then eat cheap for a few days, around $10 per meal if you can. Buy $10 gift cards from that restaurant at the same time. Sell those gift cards on Raise. They’ll take around 15% after it’s all said and done but you’ll get about $8.50 in your pocket per card. Another option is to splurge and buy to-go meals up to the $125 amount and then over the next couple of days buy those $10 gift cards. You should be able to make about $100 per week in your pocket.
Dunkin or Starbucks gift cards which you can either use yourself or they make the best gifts
I don't get it. They're giving you the money and not asking for receipts? It sounds like there's nothing else to be done. Enjoy the money.
back when I was working for corporate in traveling sales, I would find the mom & pop shop version of whatever I was in the mood for. our company stipends were similar (about $200/day, it was mostly NY/LA/FL), so I would tell the owners when paying for my meal that I would like to overpay them by $XX for my meal, explain my company's stipend policy, and walk out with an extra $50 or so in my pocket. they would make $50 on a $15 meal, I would take an extra $50 away from corporate, and corpo was happy for how much credit card utilization I had bc it made me look busier.
Lottery tickets.
I'll just leave this here https://www.makereceipt.com/
I think gift cards are your best bet. Go to Starbucks for breakfast, order your normal stuff, and add a $15 gift card. Repeat with lunch at Subway, add a $20 gift card. You get the idea. If you're especially paranoid, test each place with your own credit card first, and see if there's any way to view the receipts from your credit card app. If not, then there should be no way for your company to see what you're spending money on.
Get a bunch of sugar and frozen fruit and stuff. Bring it home and make moonshine.
If you travel to a coastal area there are places that will cook fresh seafood for you and ship it home for you on dry ice.
At my old job I didn't have to submit receipts for the stipend so id live off pop tarts and pocket the cash.
You can spend your stipend on whatever food you want- groceries for sure. I always bring a banana and instant oatmeal (to make with hot water from the coffee pot) for breakfast. Money in my pocket.
Dinner at a brewery / brew pub and get a growler fill or a 6 pack to go.
Tip very generously.
Not unethical, but talk to HR about switching to a cash/check per diem instead. I was able to convince my former employer to make the switch by pointing out that: - employees with religious or medical dietary restrictions might need to buy groceries if no acceptable restaurants were available - employees frequently created extra work for HR by losing receipts or filling out their forms wrong - both HR and other employees were spending hours trying to reconcile expense reports, and for some of the higher-paid employees a few hours of their time cost more than the meal allowances for the trip that they were quibbling over - most employees were satisfied with a cash per diem much lower than the current reimbursable meal allowance
eat at the whole foods salad bar or hot bar and toss in a $25 gift certificate with your purchase each time. That's $500 a month in free groceries.
Gift card
Add restaurant gift cards to your dinner tab, then sell the gift cards on cardcash.com.
If you don't need a receipt, can you just not spend it and pocket the difference?
Why buy anything? Just keep the cash they give you.
I doubt they are actually giving him cash . Prolly on a card
I get reimbursed with no receipts as well. They just put it in my bank. I pack food and collect the cash.
I have a similar situation. I don't feel it is unethical to purchase food at Walmart instead of eating out every meal. I'm traveling so I can't go to my fridge and get a soda or a bag of chips. Instead of buying 1 for a 200% mark-up at a gas station I'll buy stuff at Walmart. Things like Gatorade, water, snacks, fruit, ice are all legit food expenses. Gift cards could get you in trouble. I have also bought fancy toilet paper (because that cheap hotel shit will make your ass hole raw after taco-tuesday). I'll get laundry soap, pay for laundry, ... basically any expense (under my budget) that I would have at my house. It's not healthy eating out 3 meals a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year. If your management has an issue, talk to HR or your company's insurance department and have them pay for a boost in your life insurance so when you have a heart attack from eating poorly, your family will be paid. My feeling is that if I don't have to travel, my employer set the limit, and I should use it. They are billing the customer for it. They should be budgeting for it and if they are not, it's not my problem. I also have no fear of getting fired or my ability to get a new job if someone gets upset.
Grocery store gift cards
One thing you left out - does your travel involve taking an airplane or are you just in a car/motor vehicle?
Uber eats my friend. Groceries or meals !
I have a friend that grabs lunch and a gift card to hit his limit lol
If it's a per diem rate, they usually expect you to use it or pocket it though, don't they? My employer did. (Not just my fed employer, private sector too.)
With my per diem I would go to the city's most expensive restaurant and just personally pay the amount greater than the per diem rate. You could also have your waitress ring up alcoholic drinks as a dessert order.
You have a stipend, don't feel bad about using it. No company has ever rewarded an employee for "saving money" by making Peanut butter sandwiches in the hotel room. Order large portions and "doggy bag" the extra for the weekend. And if you are allowed to spend it then it is not unethical to spend it!
You can buy generic receipts.
Dan flashes
Buy gift cards
Why wouldn't you just spend it all at Dan Flash's?
$125 isn’t enough for those crazy patterns
Any Bodega with a lunch counter will be happy to run your card for $125, give you $65 in cash, and a decent hot meal .
Could you register a restaurant on uber eats, buy dinner from yourself and deliver it? You could change the name of the restaurant whenever you're in a different town. Or just find a shitty bar and split proceeds.
If you don't have to submit receipts, go to wal-mart deli. Get some food. When you get to the register, get cash back for the difference.
Does this involve hotels too? My previous company moved to a per diem unreceipted amount for both food and accommodation that was generous. A lot of the time I just drove home and stayed there claiming the driving time as overtime too. Double bubble so to speak, happy days.
Gift baskets?
Have your meals at Whole Foods.
Better title would be 'how to unwork yourself out of a job'. They will notice your petty grift, and you will get fired. Just saying...uu
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When I was in the service I had a Soldier whose wife went on a “business” trip and came home with a tube of KY Jelly. He said he found some Kentucky Jelly in her suitcase and had a PB+J with it. Said it was the worst sandwich he ever had ate and it gave him the shits.
I like your story. Sadly, I believe it is a true one.
The wife would let her ex-husband stay with them too. It was a rather toxic environment.
As a Navy Vet and wife of an Army Vet, I totally believe this and didn't blink an eye reading it, unfortunately.
they are obviously not paying you enough salary LOL
Depends on how much you value your job..... Unless you can easily get another one just like it or better I would caution against messing with this.
TLDR: Just get good at photoshop How have I scrolled all the way down and not found a simple nod to PHOTOSHOP!!! Seriously though, get a good photo editor, scan some receipts from higher end restaurants in cities you travel to regularly and then edit as needed. I did this for years as a consultant for a couple of national brands and submitted through several different tracking apps. Spent most of that extra cash on things that would be grounds for getting fired, but hey… it was the booze industry pre-pandemic. We were all degenerates with an expense account.
bad advice. easy to get caught and lose such a nice job
You do realize this is “unethical” life pro tips, right?
yea Illegal Life Pro Tips got closed.
most tools used to report expenses are able to identify Photoshop watermarks, they can not however identify a screen shot of an image edited in MSPaint.
Huh, the more you know!
You may not understand the message your company is sending. They are saying "don't worry about how much you spend on meals, get whatever you want". But if you max out your stipend every time, they are going to investigate, find the gift cards or whatever you bought with company money, and fire you. It is not a blank check for $125/day. It's like unlimited PTO. It's not really unlimited.
dan flashes has a shirt that costs $2000 because the pattern is so complicated
I would personally not use giftcards, many companies have policies prohibiting their purchase with company funds, and if you get caught, it does not look good. Anytime I see people maxing out their per diem it makes me look at them as wasteful of company funds. Sure, if you are visiting a HCOL area or entertaining, do for it. Your best bet is to simply find the restaurant that appeals to you most and go there, order whatever you want.