Our challenge of who can efficiently spend $20,000 to hit the 150,000 Membership Rewards from the American Express Business Platinum card is ongoing. Last week, I gave a short update to our challenge which consisted of me announcing that I ordered about $16,000 worth of gift cards. Many of you know already know my modus operandi, and that is to gift card churn.
Most of my inventory has arrived, from the picture above (chapstick is used as a reference to how tall it is), that’s 48 letters worth of gift cards, which will be digitally sold. So far, the time committed into selling, I’ve allocated a generous 1.25 hours for the first $10,000. That $10,000 has been packaged and mailed out where I am now waiting for payment.
The next $5,000 so far has taken me 5 minutes to open the envelopes and I expect to take no more than 45 minutes to remove them from the letter, type them into a spreadsheet, and sell. That will be easy peasy.
The toughest part now, is that I’m still looking for gift card deals for the remaining 25% of the spend. I’m still looking at purchasing a few American Express gift cards so that I can earn portal cash back in order to keep my costs down. This will play the part of lowering the average cost basis whereby deals that didn’t look profitable can become breakeven or better. This is where I wish I had some AMEX gift cards lying around because it would have come in handy for the Hyatt Gift Card deal on eBay.
This particular deal is selling Hyatt gift cards at 12.5% off. My best rate to sell is 85.25%, so the math wasn’t quite there. To add to the math not working, I had already maxed out the eBay bucks so I wasn’t going to receive at a minimum 2%. If I had an AMEX gift card in play this would have made the deal a lot easier to accomplish. I still made it work.
What did I do to make it work? Using a little bit of sorcery from the portals and Gyft and some more portals, I was able to get the math to work and it became a money maker.
Wow, you maxed out your $500 max of eBay Bucks in under 2 months? Not bad.
Ebay helped me out with the 5x
Me too, I am nearly $400 too now and could have been $20 more if stupid SVM didn’t cancel my whole order..
Miles Per Day is right. You are fight for 2nd-5th place!
I’m cool with that
Well the obvious thing is to do PPDG on Ink first for eBay eGC then use those for the actual GC purchases to goose things. And portals both times. Had good luck with that myself.
Got any Safeways in your area? Hint hint.
PPDG? Why Safeway?
I never even know where to start…I will gladly read any information. Just don’t know where to begin. Any helpful links so I can do my own research?
Try Doctor of Credit there’s some useful Manufactured Spend articles that Chuck Sithe covered
chasingthepoints, I will keep checking on Doctor of Credit, I frequent his site too. Tons to wade through, which is fine by me. Educating and fun! Thanks.
PPDG = PayPal Digital Gift
Safeway because they have promo like instant $15 off on $150 AMEX GC purchase, etc. And earns gas points where applicable. I don’t know the current deal or care since Safeway chain isn’t here. But, easy to connect dots to understand…but this is for small fishes…not much for people who rotates $20k…unless get a tons of Safeway Club cards and load the Just 4 U coupons, which I don’t think you should cross the line of…
MrWho, I am certainly a small fish. Don’t have the time to up my game. Safeway is definitely a local option for me, so I will see if I can find more info somewhere on the ways to take advantage of their options. Thanks so much.
I wish I could order from PPDG, each time I try, there’s an error message to use a different payment method, so it never winds up not working out for me.
I also wish I was in a market where Safeway served. I’d buy out all their gift cards and the exchanges would beg for mercy and tell me to stop listing them!
Lol, same here. Once exchange’s senior business analyst called me and said is there anyways I can diversify little bit in Gift cards? She noticed that over 98% of my sell was only 1 merchant. I told her I got too, you guys are reducing rates of that merchant anyways..! But 1 thing I didn’t understand, what was her problem with me pushing so many of same merchant when in fact their inventory of that particular merchant always used to nearly 0-10 most of the time. I thought they should appreciate me pushing their fast moving cards.
That’s how I feel, if they’re always low on inventory, who cares? Usually it helps us because the rates for those cards stay up.
Il nous a menti, il nous ment, il ne parle pas bien français, il est très mauvais gestionnaire, heureusement il nous restera son fils………il n’aura plus ma voix !!!!!
Just cause it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s not super helpful.