Why you don’t need an income to earn lots of points

The number one complaint I get from people (read: the one person) who read this blog is that, while they love the idea of earning tons of miles, they don’t make enough money to meet the “minimum spend”. If you don’t have an income, how could you possibly spend $1,000 in 3 months to get a credit card signup bonus? At the risk of sounding like an infomercial, I’m here to tell you that you don’t need a single dollar of income in order to earn tons of points.

The key to earning lots of points is putting enough spend on your credit card to earn signup bonuses. There are two ways of doing this. You could 1) spend money like you normally would and meet the spend. That’s pretty easy for people who make good money. For those who don’t, you could 2) manufacture spend.

What is manufactured spend?

Manufactured spend is the art of making transactions on your credit card without actually “spending” any money. There are two steps to the process:

1. Spend money
2. Get that money back

It’s not as simply as just buying things and returning them. It requires a little more work than that. I wrote a post here outlining a couple ways to do it. I’ve also copied the big ones below:

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

The point is that you don’t need to make any money at all in order to earn tons of points. Heck, I’m a lowly entry-level analyst and I have over a million points to my name! If you need help thinking about how to go about your own manufactured spend, or what credit cards you should be working on, drop me a line at info@wennecorp.com.