For the last few months, I have been thinking of ways to manufacture spend/buying points cheaply.
Let’s do my favorite part of the post, some math on manufacturing points.
As of this month, Sears.com offers you 5x bonus points per $1 spent. Let’s look at the figure below on using the Chase Freedom or Sapphire Preferred:
Clearly, the Sapphire Preferred wins by giving you an extra 5.07% more points because of the dividend on ALL points earned. Now let’s say you upgrade your Sears gift cards because they sell for a paltry 83% from their face value to a 90% one.
It will cost you $100 for 6420 Ultimate Reward points. This becomes $.0156 per point. The $.0156 per point, obviously will go lower on many factors, like below:
- Selling the gift card for a higher rate
- Sears has a higher Ultimate Rewards bonus
- Cash back bonuses from sites like TopCashBack or Big Crumbs offsets the price that is greater than the UR bonus
UPDATE:While editing post, just remembered. I maxed out on Cardpool.com, if you are a new customer to Cardpool. Definitely sign up with TopCashBack and sell on Cardpool.com you could get an additional 4% back, which would become a cost of $60 for 6420 points and the cost per point would be $.00934.
Math is a little off..6420 points for $100 is 1.56 cents per point and not 0.0156 cents per points (maybe you meant $0.0156 per point?)
Thanks NB, you are correct, my math is off. Corrected to read $.0156 per point