Blog Archives

IDEA ON EARNING 6K/7K UNITED MILES FOR ~$55

8/23/2015

There is currently an offer available for new members of Mileage Plus Dining where you could earn 6k United miles if you are MileagePlus member or 7k United miles if you are MileagePlus Premier member. Let's dissect the offer to see what it really means. Below is what is stated for the offer:

Spend $30 on your first dine within 30 of joining the prgoram and earn 1k. (2k miles if you are Premier member).
To earn the additional bonus miles: upon completing the initial bonus requirements above, but within your first 60 days since creating a profile, you must dine at any participating restaurants, bars, or clubs and spend at least $100 (including tax and tip) on your checks to earn 1,000 bonus miles; spend at least $250 (including tax and tip) on your checks to earn 2,500 bonus miles; or spend at least $500 (including tax and tip) on your checks to earn 5,000 bonus miles.

In short below is how the spend and earnings would look like:

$30 within first 30 days of joining the program - Earn 1k (2k miles for Premier members)
$30 (within first 30 days) + $100 (within first 60 days) - Earn 2k miles (3k miles for Premier members)
$30 (within first 30 days) + $250 (within first 60 days) - Earn 3.5k (4.5k miles for Premier members)
$30 (within first 30 days) + $500 (within first 60 days) - Earn 6k (7k miles for Premier members)

Now here is one of the way (Thank You Amex!) using which you can maximize this without dining and minimum out of pocket cost. There is an American Express Sync offer for dining place called "Buca Di Beppo" where you get $10 statement credit for spend of $50. The Amex sync offer expires on 09/16/2015. This restaurant is a participant on United Mileage Plan dining and other Reward Network Dining Program at lot of locations. (You will need to check for your location, but below is a snap shot in Bay Area). The interesting thing is that they sell gift cards for dining with them in their restaurant locations and buying those gift cards would still trigger the cash back and bonus for United Miles. Also these gift cards have "re-sale" value of ~70% at the time of this writing.

Buca di Beppo locations in Bay Area

So here is the gist of the deal:

Buy Buca di Beppo gift card of $50. American Express will give you statement credit of $10. You can re-sell this gift card for ~$35 on gift card re-selling website. So your out of pocket cost is $5 for spend of $50 on dining gift card.
To scale this to maximum amount of $500 additional spend you will need to repeat above another 10 times with different American Express cards registered for "Buca di Beppo Amex sync promotion".

As you can see if you spend ~$550 (spend needed to earn full promotion bonus) you would earn 6k or 7k United miles (plus any additional 5 miles/$ spend for your dining). Thus for an out of pocket spend of $55 you can earn 6k or 7k miles.

Of-course there are better ways to maximize this deal. As a teaser by going after just the initial sign up bonus for multiple family member accounts you can earn 1k/2k miles for net cost of $5 only!

0 Comments

BUYING E-BAY GIFT CARD AT 5% to 10%+ DISCOUNT

8/11/2015

1 Comment

As most of you guys know that E-bay is one of the go to place to rack up miles/points at near zero cost. The way this works is as below:

E-bay frequently sells various merchant gift cards at discount of 10% to 20% off.
Ebay also runs "Ebay bucks" program, where you earn at-least 2% "Ebay bucks" for all purchases on Ebay including "merchant gift cards" which are paid as rewards for future purchase. Lot's of time Ebay runs promotion where instead of usual 2% rewards it pays anywhere from 6% to 10% back in rewards "Ebay bucks".
Other gift card re-sellers such as Cardpool, Save-ya, Raise, etc.., most of which you can look up via giftcardwiki or giftcardgranny usually pays equal or more than your purchase cost for certain merchant gift card such as Staples, ToysRUs, Gas Cards etc.
So, by buying and selling the gift card for certain merchants you earn miles/points for close to zero cost.

Now here is the interesting part of this whole cycle. You can technically use "Ebay gift cards" to make all your purchases on Ebay. These Ebay gift cards can be purchased at 3% to 5% discount at many of the same gift card re-sellers to whom you sell the "merchant gift cards" or you can also purchase them at many B&M stores such as Staples, Safeway, Rite-Aid etc. So essentially you are bringing down your cost further to buy/sell merchant gift cards. (Note - Ebay limits the "Ebay gift card" usage to $500 / 30 days for unverified Paypal account and $5000 / 180 days for verified paypal accounts).

Here is the interesting tid-bit and highlight of this post. If you are Amex Target redcard debit card holder (which is a similar product to Bluebird & Serve) you can purchase Ebay e-gift card through "target.com" for 5% discount when you use your "Amex for Target redcard". Here is the interesting part though. You can make the entire payment for the purchase using "Target gift card" with a very small amount charged to "Amex for Target redcard" and still receive 5% discount on the entire purchase amount of "Ebay e-gift card". Since target gift card can easily be bought from 3% to 7% discount (or more if you know where to look), you are easily looking at purchase E-bay e-gift card from at minimum 5% to more than 10%+ discount.

So, enjoy the discount while it lasts and maximize your miles/points for near zero cost.

1 Comment

IDEA ON EARNING 6K/7K UNITED MILES FOR ~$55

BUYING E-BAY GIFT CARD AT 5% to 10%+ DISCOUNT

Author

Archives

Categories