So I got my wife’s AMEX Business Platinum in on Friday. Mine should arrive on Monday I hope. That means I need to spend $20K in the next 3 months. I’ll walk you guys through the best way to do this and how I plan on doing this. I know my regular monthly spend isn’t $7K a month, so we’ll need to manufacture the $20K. Immediate thoughts:
- Walmart is currently selling $100 FIXED VALUE AMEX cards for $100 (no fees) through 12/31. I’ll probably buy about $2K for this. If you have the money to float, this basically pushes out your 3 month deadline. If you are bad about losing gift cards, you may not want to go this route. How to liquidate the $100 AMEX cards down the road, use them at non-bonus category stores like Home Depot.
- AAA is currently selling their $500 Visa gift cards for NO FEE through 12/31. I haven’t checked my local AAA yet, but if they do, these are Metabank and can be unloaded at WMT or grocery stores or even Evolve. If this offer is still going on, I’ll probably buy $5K worth.
- AMEX Gift Cards – If a portal comes back with 2X miles or 2%, this is how I’d use up the remaining spend. I currently have $30K worth of AGC, so this isn’t my preferred route.
- Everyday non-category spend – While it’d be easy to put all of my daily spend on this, I like to optimize my spend. I could easily use this card at restaurants, but I’d just rather use my Citi TY Preferred that gives 3X. I also still have the WF 5% at grocery and drugstores. I really don’t do any other spend outside of those 2 categories (gas is on my Chase Ink Bold), so this won’t really help for the $10K.
Anyone else have any other ideas?
whoa, you got the AMEX Biz Plat in Oct 2014… how were you able to get it so quick, again in May 2015?!
I have about $1200 worth of planned spending on online merchandise once the card arrives. Should I buy them with the card directly? It’ll be eBay purchases via PayPal and 2 other lesser-known sites (car parts + hobby stuff on sale).
Oh yea, and the $200 airline gift cards will make it $1400 total out of the $10K required spend.
Yes, just buy them directly with the Plat card although depends on what site it is, you might be able to get it for cheaper by buying gift cards for that site using your Plat card and then buying the items using the gift cards.