Happy New Year! Since Chase has posted the Freedom 2014 quarterly calendar, here is how I plan to manufacture spend with the card.

Quarter 1 – January to March:

• Gas Stations
• Starbucks

Starbucks I will not be manufacturing too much spend as I frequent them almost on a daily basis, but I will reload my gold card with the Freedom.

Gas stations, I plan to visit any 7 Eleven that sell either Vanilla One prepaid card or Paypal My Cash cards with credit

Quarter 2 – April to June:

• Lowe’s

If I were to take advantage of the second quarter, I would go to Lowe’s. Except, I haven’t figured out how to leverage Lowe’s gift cards to churn profitably. Ordering online for bonus points or cash back and reselling Lowe’s gift cards sell for too little value for this to make it a profitable proposition. Buying gift cards inside a brick and mortar Lowe’s do not offer enough high value cards.

There’s still a few months away to think about this one. For 2013, I did not participate in Q2. Oftentimes, Lowe’s gift cards only resell for 86 or 87% of the face value. If you click through the UR mall for 5x and the Freedom for 5x, there’s still a 3 to 4% loss which does not make this a good proposition.

Quarter 3 – July to September:

• Gas Stations
• Kohl’s

I plan to continue the cycle again with the gas stations and not buy anything with Kohl’s

Quarter 4 – October to December:

• Department Stores

I will hold out and gift card churn with department stores like Neiman Marcus if there are mall promotions again. If Chase’s Ultimate Rewards Mall is offering Kohl’s at 10x and can be resold at 85% of the value, then I will go that route to maximize Q4.

Total Haul:

As a reminder, I have both the Visa and Mastercard Freedom. I plan to spend the max, $1,500, with the hopes to earn at least earning 45,000 Ultimate Rewards points for 2014. From 2013 and projecting into 2014, I expect to spend about $75.