Best ways to manufacture minimum spend

As an incredibly well-known blogger with a huge following, I often get stopped in the street and asked questions.

Okay fine, I get Facebook messages from my friends. But a kid can dream, right? The message I get most often is "I love the idea of getting all these miles but I can't meet the minimum spend on all these credit cards to get the signup bonuses." With that in mind, hopefully this post will be helpful to those of you looking to meet minimum spends but don't have the significant expenses required to do so.

"Manufacturing" or "churning" spend is the process of spending money to get money. Many points and miles do this because have a lot of minimum spends to meet in a very short timeframe, and they simply don't spend the kind of money required to meet these spends on their own. Here are the best and cheapest (you can actually make a little money doing some of these) ways that I know of to meet minimum spend.

1. Amazon Payments

Required: Bank account

This is probably the easiest one. You go to payments.amazon.com, make an account (it will work with an existing Amazon account) and send money to someone. You can send up to $1000 a month on your credit card with no fees. That means if you send someone $950, they will receive $950. All they need to do is write you a check or transfer you the money back in some way. Find a friend, send each other payments.

Steps

1. Credit card payment to friend's Amazon Payments Account
2. Friend sends you the money back (not on Amazon Payments)
3. Pay off credit card

2. Vanilla Reload to Bluebird

Required: Bluebird account (free at www.bluebird.com), store that sells Vanilla Reload cards

This is slightly more difficult than Amazon Payments in that you need to find a store near you that sells Vanilla Reload cards. These are essentially Visa gift cards that you can purchase for $3.95 apiece. You can add up to $500 onto it at the store. Once the card is activated at the store, you can go online to the website on the back of the card and load the funds onto your Bluebird account. The funds appear immediately, and once they are there you can send them from your Bluebird to a credit card to pay it off. For a more detailed tutorial, check out Million Mile Secrets' post

Steps

1. Purchase Vanilla Reload at store
2. Load Vanilla Reload onto Bluebird online
3. Pay credit card with Bluebird

3. Visa Gift Card to Bluebird and/or GoBank

Required: Bluebird account (free at www.bluebird.com) and/or GoBank account (free at www.gobank.com), TopCashBack account (free at www.topcashback.com), nearby Wal-Mart

This is the most difficult in terms of steps but is my favorite because it is very replicable and has the least risk of account closure involved. First you'll need to buy Visa gift cards. These are available on GiftCardMall. But don't go directly to GiftCardMall, first go to TopCashBack and then click through to GiftCardMall. This enables you to receive cash back when you purchase the gift cards. If you purchase enough cards, the cash back actually outweighs the per-card fee, so you'll end up better than even. Once you receive the cards, activate them and set a PIN for each of them on the GiftCardMall site. Then you can bring them to Wal-Mart and load your Bluebird or GoBank with them. Once Bluebird/GoBank is loaded, you can pay off your credit card with it. For a more detailed tutorial, check out Million Mile Secrets' post (note that his post says there are $1,000 gift cards, but there are only $500 ones now). This post details steps for Bluebird. For GoBank, you do the same thing except choose "GreenDot" instead of "Wal-Mart Money Card" at the Wal-Mart Money Center.

Steps

1. Purchase Visa gift cards on GiftCardMall through TopCashBack
2. Load Visa gift cards onto Bluebird or GoBank at Wal-Mart
3. Pay credit card with Bluebird or GoBank