Mileage Award Strategies for Credit Cards

[torque 704]

We just signed up for a card that will pay for one-way to Asia as a signing bonus.  

We have to charge $5K in the first 3 months.  

It's 2 miles per dollar spent, twice what we have now.   We'll have enough to do the trip in a few months, given what we have in mileage accounts already.  Money should be spent on family.  Because that produces pussy.  

In developing our strategy, I read some articles.  Some guys cycle credit cards, signing up for the bonus and then cancelling the card one day after getting the rewards.  They keep a spreadsheet on all the cards they are juggling so they don't pay an annual fee.  We're going to stick with the 2-1 mileage deal, we have a small business so we can charge business expenses.  

But there were other strategies I saw, the most cunning of which was  buying money from the US Mint by credit card, then depositing the money into banks.  Zero transactions costs, zero money spent, and as many miles as you care to run through the card.  The companies got the US Mint to cooperate with them in shutting that sweet little type of operation down.  Not illegal, just obscene, lol.  

 I used to pay off my mortgage with a credit card, then pay the credit card.  That alone got me a free Asia trip every two years, and it was on top of my normal credit card spending.   But they figured it out and stopped me from doing it.   I'm up for anything that is legal but getting away with murder, figuratively.  

 

 

[Butch 3,456]

Apart from a couple of fully legal "scams", the CC companies are clued up these days. We put all our business expenses on AMEX for the points, then claim the VAT back at the end of the Tax year (20%), it's simply using a regular CC for business use as opposed to using the HSBC one which the account is with and getting jack shit in return. AMEX also have a travel agent service which we also put on expenses, it gives preferential avios points as well as the purchase points so again, kind of getting two for one.

I guess some people are too busy to go through the T&C's of credit cards looking for loopholes these days.

[jacko 8,815]

2 hours ago, Butch said:

I guess some people are too busy to go through the T&C's of credit cards looking for loopholes these days.

My eyes are not as good, can't read them nowadays. 

[torque 704]

We've gotten away with it before.  

Chase Bank offered us a deal, we took it, cashed the miles in, and dumped them.   Two round trip tickets to Hawaii.   We put our bills on autopay to that card for three months, that's all we had to do!

There's really two phases to this.  The other side of it is cashing in miles correctly.  I can get one free international trip for 60,000 miles, that is the best deal I have with my partners today.

Other partners are 70,000 and much higher.   

I am going to do an experiment.  I will not reveal what it is until if and when the miles are in the bag.  But if it works I need to run the miles up big time while the gettin' is good.