The $20k Platinum Spending Challenge

There’s been a large number of newly minted American Express Business Platinum Cards all thanks to Miles Per Day. I’ve never seen so many comments in one post before. @412, and he didn’t even reply individually to all of them, but at the low end that’s 206 unique people asking for the code.

During the course of the day yesterday, this tweet kicked off the premise of the $20,000 Platinum Spending Challenge.

Reselling $20,000 for the 150,000 AMEX Business Platinum offer http://t.co/9D9nGS5BCo

— Vinh (@MilesperDay) May 12, 2015

You can follow along all of the other tweets here that led us to where we are

The Rules:

I didn’t play too much of a role, Noah (he writes Money Metagame) + Vinh squared everything away quickly where I just said “looks great”

Goal: Meet $20,000 minimum spend requirement of the Amex Business Platinum card in the most efficient way possible that returns the most money back to you (manufacture the spend) in 90 days.  The “winner” will be the person who has the most profit with the least amount of time.  The  winner will be arbitrarily judged by the community at large because there’s not an actual prize here.

1. Must spend $20,000 on AMEX Platinum Business card (see rule 10) within 90 days.
2. Sales won’t need to be completed in 90 days, but if you still have inventory left over after 90 days, that will affect how you are judged.
3. You can finish early but cannot count more than $20k worth of spend.  You cannot “cycle” the money or re-use profit either. Once you’ve spent $20K, you are done.
4. As the $20,000 spending requirement on the Amex Business Platinum inspired this goal, we won’t count any credit card earnings or signup bonuses except for the signup bonus on this card (150,000 MR) and points generated by the spending on this card (20,000 MR).
5. Profit will be calculated by adding Cash, Cash Equivalents (staples rewards, best buy rewards, ebay bucks, fuel points, etc.), and points/miles earned from portals along with the 170,000 MR earned from the actual spending.
6. Time is also a very important factor in the process of manufacturing spend, so keep at least a rough estimate of the time spent, miles driven, etc. in the pursuit of spending, buying, unloading, and/or selling as a part of this challenge.
7. It is at the participants’ discretion how much information he or she shares about how the methods used.  This will entirely be on the honor system.
8. You may only count purchases actually made and used towards your profit totals, no hypothetical where you “would have bought AGCs first”.  We usually discuss the best case scenarios for MS, but lets keep this challenge in the real world and look at our actual returns.
9. You can start whenever you want, and you can backdate purchases starting on 5/4, since that’s when the challenge unofficially started.  If you bought AGC at 2.25% that day using another cc, you can claim that spend was on the Amex Plat.  If you also bought Raise GC on 5/4, you can’t claim you used AGC on that purchase, but you can claim you would have put it on the Amex Plat.  It’s on the honor system.
10. If you didn’t get the AMEX Business Platinum card, use any credit card and pretend you placed the spend on the AMEX Platinum card (but you can’t count the bonus spend on the actual card you used)

The Challengers!

Copied from Miles Per Day:

• Miles per Day (reselling)
• Money Metagame (gift card churning)
• Oren’s Money Saver (reselling)
• Twitter user @DaveSmth1919 (???)
• Twitter user @Steven C (???)
• Twitter user Dc (???)
• Me (gift card churning)

What’s Going To Happen:

As far as I know, everyone has had the card as I just signed up for the card today and was approved which is why we allowed some of the back dating to occur because they already received the card and were starting to hit the $20k spend.

This will be a lot of fun for me. It was a tough time for #milesmadness for me and I didn’t fully participate in the way I wanted to. I can’t speak for everyone, but I anticipate that we likely won’t be sharing new methods not already posted, but a high level of understanding how we will hit the $20,000 in spend. So for those that are easily disappointed, I don’t know what to tell you. What I can tell you that I’ll do is a big amount of gift card churning. I know how I’ll spend $10,000, but the second $10,000 I have to put some creativity into it. When I chase the 1x, it’s easier because there’s easy ways to multiply it into a 2x with a few dollars more. It’s slightly more difficult with an AMEX card because I can’t use it to load a Buxx card for instance.

I’m not sure what the end results will look like, and I don’t know what the Twitter users’ methods are. They could blow us out of the water before we know it! At the end of this, I’m curious what the time consumption is as I just wrapped up spending 6 hours of gift card churning as well as their cost basis.