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

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.

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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!