Vanilla Ink Bold

Ladies and Gentlemen, how would you like to travel business class to Europe or Asia round trip for $300-$400 dollars? Yes, the price of a cross country domestic flight in economy could get you a much better vacation, but where's the fun in that? This system takes a little reading to understand, a little more work then other deals, but in the end it is easier than it sounds and well worth the trouble. 3 steps to follow!

Step 1.
Hopefully you have read about Chase Ink Bold card, if you haven't you can here. Leveraging this cards 5x bonus in office supply stores is the key point. You can use your Ink card at Office Depots to buy the blue Prepaid Amex card pictured to the left. These cost $4.95 to buy, and a maximum load of $500. Load $500 on a single card and you net your self 2,500 Ultimate Reward (UR) points.





Step 2.

So now you have a prepaid card full of money, and you still have a $500 credit bill to pay off, this doesn't seem like a good deal. Well you can now take the AMEX prepaid card to a CVS or Walgreens and buy a Vanilla reload network card, again picture to the left. These cost 3.95 and can be filled up to $500. Now you have invested $508.90 into a bunch of different cards not to mention time and gas, this deal seems to be getting worse. On top of this, vanilla cards are hard to come by, here about how to find these cards.





Step 3.

Bluebird card is another prepaid American Express card that has recently came out, and has drastically changed this game. It acts similar to a free checkings account and is re-loadable by the vanilla reload cards. You can put your $500 spent on cards into this account, and from this account you can use it to pay bills normally not payable with credit card, such as mortgage, car loans, student loans, rent, AND EVEN YOUR CREDIT CARD BILL. Register online, it takes about 10 days to receive your card, totally free. You can even withdrawal cash out of an ATM but that results in services fees. The Points Guy has a good summary of the card.

Does this sound like a good deal yet? Let me delve into it a little further.

• You can earn 5x points on things you couldn't even earn points on like mortgage, and loans.
• YOU CAN PAY YOUR INK BOLD CARD WITH BLUEBIRD

Lets say you buy 4 amex prepaid, then 4 vanilla reloads for a total of $2035.60 ($35.60 in card activation fees). You can then load $2000 onto your Bluebird card and PAY OFF your Ink credit bill. That means you have a net loss of $35.60. Or you can think of it as paying $35.60 for 10k points. That calculates to $0.003, 3/10 of a penny per point.

Gather 'round. Real world example time. Keep in mind that Ultimate Rewards (UR) has a 1:1 transfer ratio to United Airlines (UA):

You want to fly from Los Angeles (LAX) to Hong Kong (HKG) using UA. UA's award chart shows that the trip would cost 120k points. And like we said above, one UR point costs $0.003.

Which means, 120,000 x $0.003 = $360. $360. I'll let that sink in. That's $360 (+ tax) for a round trip ticket to Asia.

Oh, did I mention that trip is for business class?

If you're able to churn 2k UR points a month, that's 120k points a year. You can also book hotels with UR points. At this price, you can get Park Hyatt in Paris, Sydney or Maldives for around $75 a night! These usually cost $1,000!