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.
Continue reading...