 American Express Offers has been on a tear off lately. Not all deals are good and not everyone gets targeted for great ones, but lot of these deals are released on Twitter and so if you have synced your American Express card on Twitter and follow handle "@OffersBot" you will be alerted whenever new American Express Offer is released.
You can earn membership reward points (MR points) or cashback using the deals in addition to meeting the minimum spend (for a new Amex Card to get Sign-up Bonus) and generating slight profit. As of this writing you could still enroll in American Express NewEgg offer using hashtag #AmexNewEgg to get $25 statement credit for spend of $200 on NewEgg. For e.g. Buying $100x2 Visa gift card will cost you $8.94x2 in Fees, but after $25 credit from American Express you will still have profit of $7.12 and will have spend $217.88 on your American Express card. There are other offers such as #AmexBestBuy (No longer available) where you get $25 in statement credit for purchase of $250. Even if you have nothing to buy from Best Buy you could simply purchase the Best Buy gift card of $250 and sell it off at ~90% of its face value to various gift card re-sell websites and thus recover your $250 back ($225 from re-seller + $25 from American Express) while earning Amex MR points or Cashback. Then there are offers which do not look that lucrative or might sound like you cannot take much advantage of, but in reality if you dig deeper you can profit from them as well. Few such targeted offers are:
The idea is to analyze some of these offers to maximize your profit from them. So, get on your Social Media Gear (Twitter) and get earning with these Amex offers.
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As you would have already heard around AMEX Small Business Saturday registration has already started. Essentially through this promotion you can make $10 or more purchase on each of the registered card at qualified small businesses (you can search for small businesses near you here) and AMEX will credit $10 back to your account. Per card you can do 3 such transaction, so in essence you would get $30 free credit for shopping on Small business Saturday. The purchases has to be made on Saturday, November 29th only.
Also, you can register as many of your AMEX cards as possible and each would earn $10 x 3 ($30) credit. The registration can be done through this link or if you have your AMEX card synced through twitter you can just Tweet #AmexShopSmall to registered that sync card for Small Business Saturday promotion. Hurry up and register all your eligible cards as the registration is limited. Most of the small stores such as Dining Places, Grocery Stores as well as mom and pop shop are available and you might be also able to purchase the gift card of $10 or more for that store to use for later purchase and still qualify for $10 credit. If you intend to use the card to pay for Lunch/Dinner do not forget you can use restaurant.com purchase coupon in conjunction with the AMEX credit card to further discount your meal (provided that the dinning place is listed as small business and available on restaurant.com). Below are the terms of this promotion (courtesy AMEX): OFFER TERMS The following Offer Terms are specific to the Offer above: 1. Limit three (3) $10 statement credits per eligible American Express Card. To receive the offer, Card Members must register any eligible American Express Card for this offer. Corporate Cards and all prepaid Card products (other than American Express Serve® and Bluebird®) are not eligible. 2. The number of registrations is limited. Registration opens at 12:00 A.M. MST (“Mountain Standard Time”) on Nov 16, 2014 and will continue until 11:59 P.M. MST on Nov 29, 2014, unless the registration limit is reached sooner. 3. To receive the $10 statement credit, the Card Member must use his or her registered Card to spend $10 or more in a single, in-store transaction at a qualifying small business location on Saturday, Nov 29, 2014. For example, if your transaction is only for $5, you will not receive a credit. Multiple transactions of less than $10 will not qualify even if the combined total of those transactions is over $10. You may purchase multiple items that together equal $10 or more, but you must purchase them in a single transaction to receive the statement credit. Online transactions do not qualify. 4. Qualifying small business locations appear on the Shop Small® Map available at ShopSmall.com. Please note that the businesses listed on the Shop Small Map may change. In addition, business location and other information provided on the Shop Small Map may contain inaccuracies or errors, including as a result of information provided by third parties. Transactions with political campaigns or political action committees as well as purchases at gas or service stations do not qualify for the statement credit, regardless of whether they appear on the Shop Small Map. 5. If American Express does not receive information that identifies a transaction as having occurred in-store at a qualifying small business location on Nov 29, 2014, the transaction will not qualify for the statement credit. For example, your transaction will not qualify if it is not made directly with the merchant. In addition, in most cases, you will not receive the statement credit if your transaction is made with an electronic wallet or through a third party or if the merchant uses a mobile or wireless card reader to process it. 6. The statement credit will appear on your billing statement within 90 days after Nov 29, 2014, provided that American Express receives information from the merchant about your qualifying purchase as described above. Note that American Express may not receive information that identifies your transaction as a qualifying transaction if the items from your purchase are not all provided to you on Nov 29, 2014. For example, if you purchase an item that is not available until after Nov 29, 2014, that item will not count towards determining whether your transaction qualifies for the offer. 7. The statement credit may be reversed if the qualifying purchase is returned or cancelled. POID BHYI:0001  One of the biggest advantage of keeping American Express Credit Cards is the various offers where it provides a statement credit for purchase at specific merchant (either in-store or online) or for travel related activity such as hotels or airlines purchase. American Express has a dedicated website for information regarding this offers which can be found here. While some of the "deals" would be directly related to you as you might be shopping at that merchant anyways, there will be times where there are offers which you would feel are not useful to you.
In reality some of these non-relevant or non-useful offers might have a potential to make some free money or earn free miles/points if you are willing to put little effort. Let's look at couple of these offers to see how can you walk away with either "free money" or earn miles/points for free using these AMEX offers! Buca di Beppo - Get a one-time $15 statement credit by using your enrolled Card to make a single purchase of $50 or more in-restaurant at Buca di Beppo by 8/17/2014. Buca di Beppo is an Italian dining restaurant chain which currently has an offer on Amex for earning $15 statement credit for spend of $50 or more. You could get this offer added by using the Twitter Tag #AmexBucadiBeppo on your Twitter Synced Amex Account. Now lets see how to make money on this offer! 1. Buy a gift card of $50 in the store with your synced amex card. You will get $15 back as statement credit. So, total out of pocket cost is $35 2. Sell this gift card to "cardpool" which pays 75% of the card value ($37.5). 3. Topcashback typically provides 4% cash back for sell transactions at cardpool website (The cash back is limited up to the purchase of $1k in buy/sell gift card). Thus you would earn $37.5 x 0.04 = $1.5 cashback! Thus looking at above, you would earn a cool profit of $37.5 (from cardpool) + $1.5 (from Topcashback) + $15 (Amex statement credit) - $50 (purchase cost) = $4 profit while earning 50 points/miles for spend on your American Express card. If you have 4 American Express Cards with this offer loaded you could make $16 of profit while earning the points/miles at the same time. Best Buy - Get a one-time $25 statement credit by using your enrolled Card to spend a total of $250 or more at Best Buy by 9/2/2014 (In store or Online). Most of the folks would have something to be bought at BestBuy. But buying something of $250 or more might not be something they would have planned. You could get this offer added by using the Twitter Tag #AmexBestBuy on your Twitter Synced Amex Account. It should be noted that most BestBuy stores do sell generic visa gift cards which are pin-enabled in the denomination of $200 and has a purchase fee of $5.95. These Visa gift cards could be used in any other store and thus a potentially lucrative option. Let's see some math here. 1. Buy a $200 visa gift card and $45 BestBuy gift card. Your total cost would be $200 + $5.95 + $45 = $250.95. You will get back the statement credit of $25. 2. Sell the BestBuy gift card to "cardpool" if you do not have any use of it, which sells at 89% of the card value ($40.05). 3. Topcashback will provide 4% cash back for selling BestBuy gift card. $40.05 x 0.04 = $1.6 Doing the final tally we have $200 (visa gift card) + $40.05 (from cardpool) + $1.6 (from Topcashback) + $25 (Amex statement credit) - $250.95 (cost of purchase) = $15.7 profit while earning 250 points/miles on Amex Credit Card Spend. Hopefully this will help you to look at the American Express offers from a different perspective going forward!  Wishing all the folks around the world a Happy New Year. May you travel more and enjoy best things in life. As a quick update there are lot of AMEX offers which are ending tonight on Dec 31st 2013 or Early January 2014. So kindly check back your Amex Sync offers remaining and take advantage of them before they are gone. If you not interested in really buying any stuff, you can make miles and money by buying Visa/MasterCard or buying and later selling merchant gift cards. Below is the list of interesting offers which you could do online before the year turns to 2014.
Also one of special interest to me is "Neiman Marcus" which expires on Jan 6th 2014. The offer is to spend $200+ online at Neiman Marcus and get $50 as statement credit. You could buy Neiman Marcus virtual e-gift card online and earn miles from various shopping portals for this purchase. This e-gift card resells for 83% of face value as of this writing so you could end up making ~$16 on this. Enjoy and have fresh start to 2014!! |
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