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So, I was looking at my credit card statement this morning and was pleasantly surprised to see I was on track again to pay for Christmas presents with my Amazon Reward Points. So the way I do it is I pay for all my inventory and supplies and pretty much everything else I can with my card. I know this is not new and most people do the same thing (not sure how many people are reaping this much as it seems crazy that there could be that much money given away). Anywho, my Amazon card does not cost anything to have since I pay every week, just to keep up with it. This is a little extreme but when I was in college the credit card companies would set up outside in-between the bar and Dominos and would give away free pizzas for signing up for a card, needless to say I got in some trouble. So paying every week just gives me a little piece of mind. So I get 1% cash back in the form of amazon points. So this year I should have $600. My question is, are there other card you guys use and if so are there any other ways to make more off what your already using?
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We probably have the same Amazon card. We pay out eBay fees each month onit, plus all our monthly expenses. Card is paid in full before they charge interest.
We buy lots of items for our rentals with these free points.
The other option is to get a travel rewards card and earn flight miles.
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Captal One Cards…
New cardholders, get $150 cash within 90 days of the new card when you charge just $500
Then 3% on dining – 2% on groceries and 1% for all other purchases.
0% interest 1st 15 months
No Annual Feeshttps://www.capitalone.com/credit-cards/cash-back/
get $200 cash if you charge $1000 in 90 days with the QuickSilver Card
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2% cash back card from Citi (use for everything except what’s mentioned below)
3% cash back on gas card from Bank of America
5% back Amazon card that I will also start using at Whole Foods soon
5% rewards credit card for TJMaxx/Home Goods/Marshalls
5% discount (and free shipping online) Target card -
There is a whole on-line community that revolves around gaming the system of credit card points and travel rewards. Usually it is called travel hacking (though not really hacking, more like obsessively following the rules of the system to maximum advantage). For those interested, good resources that aren’t trying to sell you something or refer you for their own benefit are Flyertalk.com–go to their forums and there is a subforum on Credit cards with a wiki sticky at the top listing the best current offer for each credit card (many times a card will have multiple offers available–you want to sign up for the best one) and also DoctorofCredit.com.
This can be a huge time sink, but if you enjoy this sort of thing, you can learn how to get lots of points (though it used to be much easier). I found it fun to follow for a while but then it got exhausting and I’d rather just keep my life more simplified.
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I really wanted to get into the Travel Hacking. But two issues:
–We honestly dont spend enough each month to gain enough points.
–It was all just too complicated for me. It seemed like guys were signing up for new Credit cards each month, charging thousands of dollars, paying it all off, then cancelling, all while collecting points. Hats off to them.-
Yes, it is complicated. The people who were opening multiple credit cards a month usually were doing something called Manufactured Spend which is basically finding ways to move money between your own accounts and get it to count as spend. Most of the easy ways to do this aren’t around anymore or aren’t as openly shared or are methods that would make me uncomfortable.
And you usually can get more points in good sign up bonuses than in day to day spending which is why people into this get cards as often as they can handle the spend and the credit card companies allow. Over the past couple years, some card companies restricted the number of cards people can get but if you aren’t going crazy with applying for cards, this wouldn’t be too much of a factor.
A related hobby is bank account bonuses. Again, this gets complicated following all of the guidelines and keeping track, but there are a lot of people playing this game. It makes me exhausted just thinking about it again.
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So the guys who seem to always travel first class around the world…how are they getting so many points? How could you get that points from signing up for cards?
I feel its like the reseller gurus on Youtube where there’s some part of the story thats not being shared.
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Even without manufactured spend, it is still feasible to get enough points/miles for a trip to Europe in business class pretty easily. Get a Chase Sapphire Preferred — sign up bonus is usually 50,000 point but occasionally goes to 60,000, so sign up when it is 55,000 or 60,000 (sometimes you can get 5000 points by adding an authorized user like your significant other). Then get a Chase Ink business card for another 50,000 to 60,000 points. Both cards are on the Ultimate Rewards point system so these points transfer to pretty much all major airlines or hotels. Get the cards when you have big projects or inventory buys so you can handle the $3000-5000 spend in usually 3 months (so likely get cards sequentially and not at the same time). Both cards have bonus categories of 2x-5x for actual spend so with the two sign up bonuses and the points from the spend, this covers most round trip tickets in business class to Europe.
The people who have the blogs and are racking up massive points/miles by lots and lots of credit card applications are usually are doing some combination of manufactured spend, mileage runs (buying and flying on a cheap flight that will earn a lot of miles just for the purpose of earning the miles), or retail arbitrage to get the spend. It is crazy reading about some of the tactics.
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One addition about business class flights to Europe, American did recently change their mileage chart from a flat rate to more of a dynamic model so it is not as easy to always find the base mileage rate. I think most other airlines still have a flat mileage rate but I haven’t kept up with recent changes. Plus American is usually not the best choice for mileage awards to Europe since they almost always try to route you through London and the UK assesses a surcharge of hundreds to thousands of dollars on mileage flights. So if you are looking to book a mileage award to Europe, avoid flying to and from US to UK.
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Also, some less crazy tactics that people into this use to earn points are that airlines and hotels often run promotions that give bonus points. Sometimes they had it so you could earn points for just doing simple social media stuff (like us on Facebook) with a series of activities that would boost the promotion points. Radisson, a number of years ago, ran a promotion where you could earn massive points for staying at any of their hotels a certain number of times. You could do something like, book two nights at a room at a low end, cheap local Park Inn for $50 a night and earn enough points for 1 night at a Radisson Blu in Paris. Unfortunately, that particular promotion has never come back around as far as I know. But there usually are some promotions going on–you can usually earn more bonuses if you are working and have work travel to help you meet some of the promotion requirements.
Also, many credit cards will offer retention bonuses when you try to cancel. There is a thread in that same Flyertalk.com subforum on Credit Cards where people post data points on which card they tried to cancel and what retention bonus offer–if any–was offered. Warning–if you really don’t want to cancel, be careful with your language during the phone call so you don’t actually get your card cancelled.
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There was a story in Canada a few months ago about a guy who was living off of “manufacturing” points. He found a crazy loophole with one retailer.
The Canadian Mint, which makes all the coins in Canada, sells collectable coins at face value. For example, you can buy a $500 collectable coin for $500. This $500 is worth $500 and any bank has to accept it as much.
What this guy was doing was buying up these coins for face value, using various credit cards, collecting the points, then turning in the coins to pay off the balance on his credit cards, keeping the rewards. He would do it over and over day after day.
Eventually, he was doing it so much, that someone wondered why so many oddball coins that were just released were being deposited in banks, narrowed it down to him, and figured it out.
I’m sure there are similar ways to buy something on a card, turn it into equal cash, pay off the card but keep the points/miles/benefits.
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That sounds like the ultimate manufactured spend 🙂 I think you used to be able to something similar with the US treasury–both coins and bonds, but they changed it. And it used to be pretty easy to buy visa and mastercard gift cards with a credit card (if using a 4x office category credit card and during one of the frequent gift card sales at the various office supply stores–you usually would be making money even after the fee) and then use a Target redcard account or a Walmart serve account to load the gift cards and then transfer the funds to your bank account or directly pay off the credit card. But these days are no more.
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I see your crazy mint coin guy and raise you my pudding guy: https://gizmodo.com/how-an-engineer-earned-1-25-million-air-miles-by-buying-1339646546
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2% back on everything – Fidelity Rewards Visa
3% restaurants and travel – Costco Visa
4% gas – Costco Visa
5% on categories that change quarterly – Discover-
Terri,
I’m impressed that you can handle remembering the changing quarterly categories for 5% rewards! I once had a card like that from Chase, but it was too much for my little brain to keep track of, so I closed the account. 🙂 -
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I do the most boring thing possible with credit card rewards and rely on cash back only rather than fiddling around for points that I might never redeem or trips I wouldn’t have taken without rewards
6% back on groceries – Amex Blue Cash Preferred (w/ annual fee)
5% back on Amazon purchases – Amazon store card
4% back on gas – Costco Visa (the Amex card above gives 3% cash back on gas)
2% back on everything else – Citibank Double Cash card -
Whole lot going on here, guess im lazy with my flat 2% cash back visa card. Going to have to check into some of these other cards. Thanks for the tips.
Pudding guy is amazing, 12,500 cups of pudding, how does someone even deal with that much pudding. Even giving it away to the Salvation army and coworkers he must have had a backlog of the stuff lying around.
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