For the most part miles earning is an art. But in the case of racking up points on a credit card, it’s a little more of a science. Credit cards give miles, points or cash when you spend on their credit cards. Some of us have figured out ways to spend little to no money to rack up spends on our credit card.
It’s simple. Credit card spends –> rack up miles –> when you buy gift cards –> which you later turn into cash.
If you’re lucky you can get free miles or, if you’re as crazy as some of my friends, you can make a decent profit each month.
First off, decide how much you can spend on a card naturally. Then, meet the remainder of the requirement with a few tricks.
1) Amazon Payments
I’m a self proclaimed early adopter of Amazon Payments. Payments.Amazon.com allows you to send $1,000 to a person for free. Paypal will send money to someone from a credit card as well, but they’ll charge you 3%. Amazon however, is currently free. However, there’s a cap of $1,000 per calendar month.
Make sure you register a credit card and bank account online to be allowed to send the full $1,000.
2) Vanilla Reloads –> BlueBird –> Bill Pay
Update: Unfortunately as of early April 2014, you can no longer by VRs at CVS on credit card. You’ll have to find other methods.
First you have to purchase the bluebird startup kit at Walmart (a $5 purchase).
Then, you have to purchase MyVanillaReload cards, not to be confused with the MyVanilla Debit (which comes into play under a different strategy.)
You can buy these MyVanillaReload cards at various drugstores and gas-stations. 7-11, CVS, etc, but the goal is to find a place in your local area that a.) carries the MyVanillaReload cards and b.) allows you to purchase and load them with a credit card.
Once you’ve established that you can indeed buy the VR cards with a credit-card, you can then load $500 onto each card (for a fee of $3.95 per card). Often there is a limit of $1,000 of loads per day. Many CVS’ have supposedly increased this limit to $5,000 but it still seems to vary.
Once you have loaded your VR cards, head over to VanillaReload.com to plug in that card’s pin (found on the back of the card).
When you plug in a valid VR card pin it will then prompt you to enter the number of the card you want to reload. In this case, you would want to plug in your BlueBird card number.
Again there are limits. You can load $1,000 onto your bluebird per day and only $5,000 per month.
Now of course you still need to use the Bluebird to pay off the card you used to purchase the VR cards in the first place.
For this, you’ll need to set up a bluebird account. Do that here.
Then finding bill-pay is easy as it’s part of the navigation under “pay & transfer”.
Then, you can follow the prompts to set up a new “payee”.
3) Shopping Portals
There are multiple examples of shopping portals. One popular one is the Chase shopping portal, which earns Chase points. There are also portals like Big Crumbs that are cash rebates.
I recommend checking Chase Ultimate Rewards’ shopping portal, or any bank portal, and other cashback portals.
So now you have a number of options….
Buy Gift Cards
- Buy Gift Cards –> Use www.giftcardgranny.com or other shopping portal
- Sell Gift Cards –> Plastic Jungle
- OR, take Gift Cards to a store where you can buy a Visa gift card.
Buy Items
- Buy Item –> Sell item on ebay, amazon or craiglist
- or Buy Item –> Return it to a place that has 100% returns and will return product on different card or in cash. (Personally, I’ve never done anything close to this, but know tons of people who do. It’s not in my comfort zone but I have no problem saying that people do this.)
Any of these things can be maximized if one of your credit cards offers a particular bonus for the portal you buy through. Chase’s Ink Bold often has great bonuses through Chase shopping portals. The Ink bold has 5x bonus on office supplies, some cards have big bonuses on groceries, etc…
4) Amex Gift Cheques & Gift Cards
I haven’t done this in a long time, but back in the day I had a number of rebates for Amex Gift Checks which made buying them free, and they were incredibly easy to deposit. These are not travelers checks but gift checks.
Every once in a while I would search for Amex Gift Check promo codes on google and find them for free shipping. And one time I was able to combine it with a fee free code. At that point it’s as good as buying $1 coins for free. I grabbed a few of those. 😉
5) My Vanilla Debit
MyVanilla Debit is something we use less often because you can really only register one per person. You can buy one at various convenience stores, drug stores, etc, and load it with $500 and then load Vanilla reloads onto it as well.
From there you can withdraw at some banks, similar to a cash advance. Or you could just go to Walmart and buy money orders for super cheap. The biggest expense would be the Vanilla Reloads.
6) Look for sales and deals
This may sound not very applicable but it’s just true. I’ve written about how to take your miles game to the next level and I talk about combining the different strategies you know. Whether you’re a programer, extreme couponer, or business man… surely you can innovate.
And in the miles game sometimes it’s hidden in plain site.
Ways To Meet Spend Requirements I Haven’t Used
1) Kiva
This is a Microloan platform. The concept of Microloans is brilliant as a form of helping start businesses in poor areas. Muhammad Yunus, who started the concept, won the Nobel Peace Price not but a few years ago. Since then many companies like Kiva have popped up.
The concept is that you give a small loan and get all your money back. However, this is not a charity, and frankly I haven’t looked into the company. But it’s popular in the miles world because you can fund your loans with credit cards and eventually get all your money returned to you in full. (But if this is for charity, I highly recommend Yunus’ Grameen Bank (and his book Banker to the Poor (although this is entirely off subject))).
2) Pay your bills ahead of time
I think this is fluffy advice, but people do underestimate the power of their own spends. Put all your bills on your cards, and then if you need more help, pay ahead of time.
I don’t do this, because I don’t have any bills. No car, no home, no insurance, no electricity/water/sewer bill, etc…
A few other things you can look into are Venmo, Greendot, Serve Swipe, PayPower, and Amex Target.
In my opinion, the key to taking this to the next level is a card with the right bonus, or a trick with no fees at all.
I’ll leave you with two resources for learning more:
1) Frequent Miler – By far the best blog on covering these topics.
2) FlyerTalk forum – Here is a forum dedicated to similar topics.
If you have any suggestions or tips, feel free to add some!
I really appreciate this article. I’ve found a CVS that will sell VR with a CC. I’ve set up my Bluebird account. I need to spend $3000 per month in this method, and I think I can. Where to train is going off the tracks is that I’ve read more than a few people say that if you go home with your VR and load the VR to your BB online, there is a $100/day and $1000/month limit. These same people say that if you go to Walmart, the limits increase to $1000/day and $5000/month. Could you explain what you do, and if you perform the upload on your personal computer, and what limits you’ve encountered? Thank you.
Jason below has it right, re. the $1k load limit to Bluebird.
Learned the hard way recently of the hassle you encounter when you try to load more than 1k. At the VR site, the system there actually seemed to let me load 3 $500 in one day. (I forgot about the limit). But when I checked balanced at BB account, realized my mistake, but was puzzled why VR web site appeared to let me load all 3 cards.
Long story short, I had to make several calls to Bluebird before I could get one of the overseas reps, on a second day, before the missing $500 was found and then loaded. (involved having to cross check the pin #’s on back of the cards)
Lessons learned: yes, just 1k per day, even if the VR system appears to let you load more. #2: Keep your loaded VR cards, with printed confirmations — though be forewarned that the confirmations themselves don’t give you the info you’d need to figure out which VR card loaded and which one didn’t. (yes, a self-inflicted hassle)
Second question: I’ve read of plenty of problems with Bluebird bill pay. Would you recommend moving money from BB to your personal checking account? Can you perceive of any potential pitfalls in doing so? Thanks again.
Bart,
Bluebird should be 1K/ day and 5K/month to load online as well. Regarding the bill pay, if you can order checks from them (I got mine when they were free about a year ago) you can do it yourself. I’m always uneasy having them do it since they may be late and cause me to miss a payment, but if I write the check myself I have control over it. I know many people haven’t had problems with withdrawing straight into your bank account, but I prefer to just authorize a check to myself and deposit, I’m not sure why it makes me feel safer but that’s just me.
Thanks Jason, good info.
How long have you been writing BB checks to yourself and depositing it? Just wondering if it’s safer to write a check to my wife and then deposit to our joint checking account.
Jonathan,
Not too long, I only do so when I have to meet spend. I doubt it’s any concern, since many people do this to transfer money between accounts. Although I do think it’s safer to have a friend deposit to their account and have them transfer through the bank (if you bank at the same institution), I dont’ think writing checks to yourself is of any concern unless someone else knows something I don’t.
Blubird checks are still free for new accounts.
Thanks for answering Jason!
loyal3.com – buy & sell stocks with a credit card. Caps at $137,500 per month; but 1% cash back credit cards will net ou about $1375/month.
That takes some guts to day trade it. But heck, I buy some stocks anyways.
No need to purchase at Walmart. Just sign up online for free.
https://www.bluebird.com/?SOLID=SEMBB&extlink=bb-us-acquisition-sem-branded
Thanks for the link.
Hey guys, my comments were deleted? I was looking forward to your answer, and now I’ve forgotten what I asked. 🙂
Well, heck now they show up.
The site has a spam filter to figure out what’s actually coming from a person. Sometime it awaits moderator activity. But sometimes it figures it out.
I have soooo much trouble buying Vanilla Reload cards. We only have a couple CVS stores in my area and they do not allow me to buy them with a credit card. So irritating. My husband has been traveling for work lately and has been able to buy them with a credit card at CVS in other states.
I have the best luck ordering from giftcardmall.com . Of course, I have to actually go into the Walmart store to load them. And I don’t like that. 🙁
Those of you that can easily buy all these VRs are very lucky.
Well, the number of those people has decrease this week thanks to CVS changing their rules.
Buy Mastercard/Visa gift cards (you can even get them with your name on them online) (5X bonus if you can find them at the Office supply store), activate PIN. Go to check cashing place and swipe them like ATM cards (usually a .50-$1 fee) get money order. Repeat.
@JB, what is a check cashing place? A bank?
Not a bank. one of those places with thick glass. Just google Check cashing and your zip. Then call and ask them if you can buy money orders with your ATM card. Then go there, if they balk at you using a gift card without you name on it, go somewhere that doesn’t bother to look at the card.
Like I said, the Vanilla Debit cards can be advanced at certain banks. But good to know other cards do the same thing at … check cashing places.
@JB – never even thought to try that, thanks for the tip.
JB, which websites sell visa gift cards with your name on them? Thx.
KIVA is not a “charity”. It is a non-profit in the best sense of that. Using KIVA you loan money to people who are working hard to improve their lives in places like Cambodia, Guatemala, Kenya, etc.
Using KIVA to “launder” your artificial spend is somewhat dubious from a moral point of view. But, if you put $1,000 into KIVA and loan it out for a couple three years that’s one thing. If you put $1,000 into KIVA, don’t loan it and pull it out a month later, that’s pretty scummy.
My impression was that they don’t let you pull it out right away that it has to complete a cycle that takes years. Am I wrong about that?
Hmmmm….. ya’all must be traveling far, far from the net and didn’t hear or have time to comment on the BIG news today, that VR’s no longer will be available for CC purchase at CVS, after today. (or so the points-o-sphere seems to be a howlin’ — check mms, for starters)
If this is true, wonder if you already made your 10K spend for your new Citi AA Exec card…. Got one myself, about the same time, and will be needing to explore other ways you’ve outline above to get to the 10k
Confirmed, no VR’s with CC’s at CVS in Charlottesville. (!)
They do have a lot of the new Vanilla Debit or Visa gift cards. But I’m as yet rather confused on if/how to use them deposited into Bluebird. (via Walmart?) Would be grateful for your comment/insight on this….
Amazon Payments will be very key. May newsletter that soon.
So with Bluebird, you go to the Vanilla Reload website, register the card and then load it to Bluebird all from the Vanilla Reload website. You load it using the VR numbers.
You can also do the initial funding for a new bank account with a credit card, PNC allows up to $2,000 funding for example. It’s best to try and use a bank that is having a banking promotion as well so you double dip on the rewards.
Drew, on the Amex gift cheques, can I deposit them to my bank account through a smartphone the way we can do the same with cheques? Sorry, I am not familiar with these gift cheques. Thanks.