OHMYGOD, how GLORIOUS is that picture? I was Google Imaging ‘riding unicorns’ and after a couple of page downs, I found Liam Neeson riding a unicorn, and that led me to click on it, which then led me to celebrities riding unicorns. I was going for a hilarious celebrity photo – maybe of A-Rod’s centaur picture, but then I saw Bieber, which got me excited but he wasn’t riding a unicorn, and then a few photos later…that magnificent photo was in front of me. Sure, it’s not the BEST photo of her, and maybe if I spent more time looking online, I could find a better one, but I figure I should spend more time writing a post rather than spending an hour Googling photos of “Taylor Swift on unicorn.” Wait. One second. Let me go Google that directly.
HOLY CRAP HOW COULD I FORGET ABOUT THIS PHOTO.
Dang it, I wish I knew Photoshop. If someone can Photoshop these 2 photos together, maybe I’ll give you a prize or something. Oh wait. Where was I? Sorry, I got distracted there.
So let’s say hypothetically you were able to find the mysterious unicorn. Okay let me back up real fast. A couple of people have asked me to define a unicorn. A unicorn in the MS world to me is essentially a way to get scalable miles and points for FREE with VERY LITTLE EFFORT that is not widely known. For instance, buying Staples VGC with Ink will generate some relative cheap miles, but everyone knows about it. Opening a checking account that lets you charge up to $100K as an opening deposit is not really a unicorn. That’s more like a leprechaun. The points are free and it’s not widely known, but it’s not scalable unless you start opening up checking accounts for family members, but eventually there is a cap. A unicorn to me would be a re-loadable debit card that takes ANY Visa/MC(I’d love AMEX but let’s be realistic here) with low or no fees and virtually no limit on loads (see the Goodwill cards before it died.) So let’s say you were able to find this mythical winged creature, how would you ride it?
Everything has a breaking point right? And then you’d have to figure eventually other people will find it right? So if you were only riding it say once a week, and now thousands of people have found your unicorn, it’s going to die very fast and you missed out on riding it more often than once a week. It’s almost like you’re playing chicken with yourself and time. Because it is a matter of time before it’s found. But you don’t want to kill it yourself.
I bring this up not because I’ve found the unicorn. I bring it up because there are many leprechauns and lookalike unicorns out there in the MS world. I think all of the bloggers now realize they should stop blogging about leprechauns even and for sure, they won’t blog about a unicorn if it’s found. Well, maybe except for Leff. So assuming that it stays hidden for a while, how much would you load per day/week/month? How often would you try to unload? It’s not smart to load $3K and then run to WMT to buy a $3K MO later in the day. You’d want to show some real spend too. Maybe you shift all of your 1X spend to the card, kinda like working out your little unicorn before you take it out on a flight to Walmart? Do you load $5K a month? Do you load $10K a month? Do you load $50K? Do you set up a $5 Amazon allowance on it? If you do that, then now you sort of have to figure out the math on the opportunity cost of that ‘fake’ spend. So my question to you is – how would you ride this unicorn?
Just for the sake of sharing ‘terms’, I refer to the diverted / diversionary spending, to keep a given product alive as “camouflage spend”.
Mix in daily coffee run, a few bucks of items at grocery store (with cash back, natch!), bag o’ munchies at the gas station, etc etc… to generate count of and variety of transactions to help shield reloadable product from shutdown.
Has worked for 17 months for TMob, 15 months for PPMC, PayPower, etc.
Sure, missing out on 500-1000 pts a month across all those transactions, but more than made up for by bonused-earnings to reload these cards, up into the 10s of thousands of points per month per product.
Nice work indeed. You’re one of the few people I know who is still going strong on PPMC.
It depends on the issuer how you ride it. Ride it hard, then found you get blacklisted for all of their product currently available/future products…that doesn’t seem to be fun.
Hi Vinh, I tried emailing you a couple of days ago about joining your Seattle group. Is that still happening?
Yes, I replied saying you needed a gmail address.
I never got a reply, strange. I’ll send you an email using gmail.
Ride it hard until it dies because the “Unicorn” is going to be found by others than myself (inevitably) and the “Unicorn” will die. It’s just a matter of when.
The thought that people can be good “stewards” so as to allow for longevity of the “Unicorn” is a myth in the manufactured spending world. Because at the end of the day, we are cold-hard, selfish, capitalist.
Hahaha. This is what I’m afraid of with every unicorn – if I don’t hit it hard, someone like Zach will and it’ll die for the both of us.
Here’s the ironic thing: a few post before you explain a work around for a ban that you have from retailers. This isn’t a “Unicorn” and you rode it to death. Now, we could argue because this isn’t the “Unicorn” strangling this lesser creature to death was fully justified (it’s not as pretty, it wasn’t as good of a deal, etc.). But I would argue my original premise to both the “Unicorn” and other “opportunities”: that at the end of the day we are cold-hard, selfish people.
I agree with you that people are selfish, but there are times to strangle a deal (a reselling item) vs something that is this fragile.
did you get to ride the holiday unicorn at the corner of happy and healthy? oh what fun it was to ride it for 3 days and free MS all the way! nothing can be kept secret at the ‘city and I’m not even sure whether the collaborative ‘abuse’ of a ‘few’ caused the unicorn to die. Oh well…on to the next unicorn sighting!
Haha I like it. You aren’t alluding to the Christmas trees while WAGing the dog are you? Haha nah I didn’t partake. My stores are too strict.
My goal would be to do 10k to 20k monthly but not in a set pattern and with real spend added. And not just $5 here and there. Too many idiots try to go too big and kill things like this. It’s important to have several avenues of earning and not to overwork just one.
You realize 10K is already on the high side right? Even so, how much 1X would you put on it? $1K? $100?
Good point. I guess it depends more on what the marketed value or goal of the card is. If it is a Buxx style thing then it would have to be very low <$500 or you clearly aren't in the demo of the card. So I think maybe spend would depend that.
Okay..so 5% real spend. I think we have the same idea.