The AMEX Business Platinum $20K Challenge

I’ve had a lot of new hits to my site due to the AMEX Business Platinum 150K offer.  Some people have asked the best way to spend $20,000 on the card in 90 days.  Easy.  Buy $20,000 in Visa Gift Cards and load them to Redbird.  Need some circles and arrows?  Click here.  You will need to buy 40 x $500 gift cards at a cost of $4.95 each.  Total cost would be $198 for your 170,000 AMEX MR points.  I recommend that everyone do this.  If you’re feeling frisky, add in AGC at 2% as an intermediary to make a profit of $162.50 or a total margin of  0.8%

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s explore two other popular manufactured spend methods to spend the $20K to earn those 170,000 MR points – reselling vs gift card churning.  From yesterday’s post, I challenged some other bloggers who focus on gift card churning to see what kind of margin they could generate.  We could then compare it to reselling’s margin and try to settle the age old debate – blue/black or yellow/gold is reselling or gift card churning more lucrative?  Thus, let me introduce you to:

The Amex Business Platinum $20K Challenge

Goal: Meet $20,000 minimum spend requirement of the Amex Business Platinum card in the most efficient way possible that returns the most money back to you (manufacture the spend) in 90 days.  The “winner” will be the person who has the most profit with the least amount of time.  The  winner will be arbitrarily judged by the community at large because there’s not an actual prize here.

1. Must spend $20,000 on AMEX Platinum Business card (see rule 10) within 90 days.
2. Sales won’t need to be completed in 90 days, but if you still have inventory left over after 90 days, that will affect how you are judged.
3. You can finish early but cannot count more than $20k worth of spend.  You cannot “cycle” the money or re-use profit either. Once you’ve spent $20K, you are done.
4. As the $20,000 spending requirement on the Amex Business Platinum inspired this goal, we won’t count any credit card earnings or signup bonuses except for the signup bonus on this card (150,000 MR) and points generated by the spending on this card (20,000 MR).
5. Profit will be calculated by adding Cash, Cash Equivalents (staples rewards, best buy rewards, ebay bucks, fuel points, etc.), and points/miles earned from portals along with the 170,000 MR earned from the actual spending.
6. Time is also a very important factor in the process of manufacturing spend, so keep at least a rough estimate of the time spent, miles driven, etc. in the pursuit of spending, buying, unloading, and/or selling as a part of this challenge.
7. It is at the participants’ discretion how much information he or she shares about how the methods used.  This will entirely be on the honor system.
8. You may only count purchases actually made and used towards your profit totals, no hypothetical where you “would have bought AGCs first”.  We usually discuss the best case scenarios for MS, but lets keep this challenge in the real world and look at our actual returns.
9. You can start whenever you want, and you can backdate purchases starting on 5/4, since that’s when the challenge unofficially started.  If you bought AGC at 2.25% that day using another cc, you can claim that spend was on the Amex Plat.  If you also bought Raise GC on 5/4, you can’t claim you used AGC on that purchase, but you can claim you would have put it on the Amex Plat.  It’s on the honor system.
10. If you didn’t get the AMEX Business Platinum card, use any credit card and pretend you placed the spend on the AMEX Platinum card (but you can’t count the bonus spend on the actual card you used)

Participants

• Chasing the Points (gift card churning)
• Money Metagame (gift card churning)
• Oren’s Money Saver (reselling)
• Twitter user @DaveSmth1919 (???)
• Twitter user @Steven C (???)
• Twitter user Dc (???)
• Yours truly (reselling)

As you can see, it’s the JV team of bloggers.   If you want to join in, just let one of us know.  You can also “unofficially” play along too at home.

Frequently Asked Questions

• How often will we update this?
• A: We’re thinking bi-weekly

• Will be updated as we get more questions