MEETING YOUR CREDIT CARD SPEND FOR BONUS MILES

The big question for most of the folks after signing up for credit card is how do I meet minimum spend requirement? Good offer might have a minimum spend of $2.5k to $3k to be done within 3 months. Now if you get 3 such cards, voila you need to meet ~$9k in 3 months. Don't worry, there are quite a few number of ways which can help you with that. Some of them are free (small hassle) while some are easy but has small 2% to 3% cost associated. Before we start there is a great article here by millionmilesecrets which will get you started. Let's look into the free one's below:

1. Doing FAR (Free After Rebate) Deal: Lot of store's will have FAR (Free After Rebates) promotion now and then. The most easiest and frequent one is from Staples where you do every thing online including even submitting of the rebates form. Heck, you can even earn bonus points on this. Check out FrequentMiler blog to learn more on this. OfficeMax frequently has FAR deal, but albeit it earns MaxPerks dollars which you can redeem in only OfficeMax. If you are a regular shopper at OfficeMax then this could be for you. Freebie-depot is another place which lists the FAR products from brick & mortar and online store. (Albeit you have to pay taxes on these deals).

2. Amazon Payments: You could do a transfer of up to $1k/month from Amazon Payments account to your partner/friend Amazon Payment account using a credit card. Your partner/friend can then transfer that amount to his bank account and pay you by Check or Cash. Make sure you do not transfer money back and forth between your's and your partner/friend Amazon Payment account or your account might be flagged. This is the best way of meeting your spend requirement in short time without any charge.

3. AMEX Serve Prepaid Card: This is another card which can help you meet some spend requirement. Currenly Serve currently allows up to $250 of loading through your credit card without any additional fees (Citi Credit Card which ideally charges Cash Advance for money loading on prepaid cards also seem to work as purchase). You could also get free $25 when you open Serve and load $25 on it through your bank account before September 30th. Here is the link for the deal (There is no hard credit pull when you take this card).

4. AMEX Reloadable Prepaid card: This is a good deal if you can buy the Reloadable Vanilla Card at office-depot using credit card. You would also get $25 if you open AMEX Prepaid account and fund it with $200 before August 31st. Here is the link. (There is no hard credit pull when you take this card). 

5. Buying Gift Cards: If you know you would have future purchases from Amazon you can buy Amazon Gift Cards from any brick & mortar stores (grocery stores or office item stores). You could even buy other major chain gift cards such as BP Oil, Jiffy lube, Lowe's from these stores to be used for your future purchases.

6. Wells Fargo Prepaid Card: This has some fee associated but a great way of meeting your minimum spend requirement. You can load up to $2.5k per day. There is a great article by View From the Wing blog which describes the details of this. You can check his blog here.

7. Buying AMEX/VISA/MasterCard: You could even buy these prepaid gift cards from stores that allows you to buy them using Credit Cards. Many stores like Kroger, Office-depot and Office-Max will allow you to buy these cards using credit cards but YMMV. You will need to find the stores that allows this. Since these cards charge an additional purchase fee of $5.95, its best to buy a highest value card of $500, thus minimizing the out of pocket additional cost to ~1.2%.