Blue What? Meet Huge Spend Requirements With this Trick

**UPDATE**: This method has been ended due to some hard coding policies from Bluebird. There are however current similar ways that we will eventually write about. Google Redbird if you don't want to wait.

With my recent post on 100k AA bonus miles with $10,000 minimum spend within 3 months, many people have asked me how to meet an absurd amount in such a short time. David wrote a good summary on ways to meet spend, but since then, the bulk of our required spend is done with American Express Bluebird. This card allows us to "Manufacture Spend" meaning I can spend $10,000 on my card without really spending it. Confused? Read on!

Bluebird is a like a pseudo-checkings account brought to us by Walmart and American Express. You can sign up HERE, and your card will arrive in 5-7 days. There are a bunch of features that really don't matter to us, so I'll only go over the pertinent ones.

• No fees in the way we use it.
• Low fee ATM withdrawals for foreign transactions.
• Bill Pay feature: Send checks to whoever you want, including yourself, landlords(apartment rent), student loan agencies, and credit card companies. Yes the very same companies that you pay your credit card bill.
• Load up to a max of $1000 a day and $5000 a month

Unfortunately you cannot put money into your Bluebird account via your credit card directly, but you can load your Bluebird account with prepaid cards that you CAN buy with your credit card at certain stores. See the trick yet?

1. Buy prepaid cards at stores with your points earning credit card. 
2. Load those prepaid cards into your Bluebird
3. Use Bluebird to pay off that SAME credit card you used to purchase the prepaid cards

That way we can spend $10,000 in 2 months without really spending it! You didn't really think I spent 20% of my annual income in 2 months did you?

How to Load Your Bluebird

By far the easiest method is buying Vanilla Reload cards

They cost $3.95 and you can load up to $500 to each one. Once bought you turn it over, scratch off the label and follow the directions to load it onto your Bluebird card via their Website. To meet the $10,000 requirement, it would take you 2 months and $80 out of pocket. You can find a list of retailers that sell these HERE. The problem with many of the retailers are they will not accept credit card for these purchases. CVS used to be the go to spot, but they have recently stopped accepting credit cards for the purchase of these cards.

Other retailers that have been reported with intermittent success are Cumberland Farms gas stations, 7-11, shell and Valero. These are very much "Your Miles May Very" YMMV.

The other option is to buy VISA or Mastercard debit gift cards. These may include brands such as "One Vanilla", "My Vanilla" or variable load VISA/Mastercard Giftcards. Each one has their own fees ranging from $3.95-$6.95. You can then add a personal identification number (PIN) onto it and it acts like a debit card. With that, you can then go to a Walmart with a Money Center Kiosk to physically load each card onto your Bluebird Account. Bluebird allows you to load $1000 a day and up to $5000 a month via debit, hence why we buy these gift cards to act like a debit card. This does require you to go to a physical Walmart, and who really wants to do that with people like this there. Since the demise of CVS, these may become my main source of loading Bluebird.

Travel with Grant has a good summary on which cards can be loaded at Walmart.

You can locate a "Moneypass ATM" with this link: Walmart ATM locator. Type in walmart as the bank, then your zip code, to see if there are any around you.

As you can see, Bluebird is an essential tool in our hobby. It has drastically made it easier to hit spend limits and also a great tool for manufacturing spend. It sounds like a lot of work, but when your laying down in your flat bed full off of lobster and Dom Perignon, it will all be worth it.

100k AA miles sign up bonus!

David's last post described the thought process in choosing the right card(s) to get you that trip you've always wanted. It was thorough, detailed—and let's face it—didn't answer the question you asked in the first place: Which card should you get?

I'll cut to the chase I am telling you exactly which card to sign up for.

5 Questions You Need to Ask Yourself Before Getting a Card

"What card should I get?" That's the wrong first question.

We get this question a lot, which makes sense. There are countless options with various perks and bonuses for various airlines, hotels and travel companies. Our short answer is always the same: it depends.

Before you even consider a card, you need to answer:

1. Where do you want to go?
2. What can you get?
3. How soon do you want to get there?
4. How do you want to get there (economy, business or first class)?
5. What cards are available?

How you answer is important because not all points are created equal. Take Southwest Airlines for example. Both Goo and I are fans of it, because we fly domestically along the west coast a lot. Southwest is great for that, but it's useless for hopping oceans.

And it just so happens, we love hopping oceans.

Here's my thought process two years ago on choosing the cards that eventually helped me book a three week trip later this year that will span four countries, seven flights and all three flight classes (economy, business and first) for just $147.32.

Isn't it beautiful?

Want free easy travel? Southwest 50k offers are back

These cards are great to dip your toes into the points game. Spend $2,000 in the first 3 months and get 50k points. Although it says 2 free round trips, the points are directly converted into dollars so you are getting a value of around $900 worth of points.

For instance if I wanted to travel from LAX to PDX on Jan 24th to Jan. 27th, it would cost as low as $173 round trip. That is a great price already, but with one sign up bonus worth of points, I could make six round trip flights!

There are two brands of cards available: Premier and Plus. Both brands are available for both the personal and business card types. The big difference is the annual fee of $69 (for personal) and $99 (for business). Another difference is that the Premier will give you 6k points annual bonus for keeping the card a year (which is about $99 anyway) and the Plus gives you 3k (so it basically evens out).

Doing the final math after annual fee, you get about $800 worth of fares for free.

I have signed up for the Plus card because I already had the Premier and you can only get the bonus once.

Getting 2 versions is also a very good idea because of the companion pass that you can easily obtain. If you earn 110k points (including sign up bonus's) in one year, you can bring a companion with you at no extra cost each time you get a ticket. EVEN WITH THE POINTS YOU EARNED

Worried about being able to spend the minimum requirements? Look here for ideas to meet minimum spend. We will also be writing about the easiest method, using the blue bird card.

What are you waiting for, sign up for at least one of them!

Link to all 4 cards here

Step 1: Profit. Step 2: Profit. Step 3: Profit.

Title says it all!

If you follow our blog or listen to us preach, you'll know that a lot of our strategies have a step where we actually lose some money (most often in the form of negligible activation fees).

That won't happen this time around. Instead, it's net gain all the way. Here's what I earned today:

• 1,770 points
• $20 Staples gift card
• $11 credit for my American Express credit card

Unfortunately, this is a targeted promotion, but read on to find out how you can check to see if you're one of the lucky few!

American Airlines 50k sign up bonus

The Citi American Airlines World Mastercard is now offering 50k AA miles after $3,000 in spend in 3 months with the first year fee waived ($95). Gone are the days of 75k bonus', so a 50k bonus for a card is definitely worth considering.

• First checked bag free for you and up to 4 companions on the same ticket
• Group 1 boarding
• 1 point per dollar spent on everything
• 2x pointson American Airlines purchases
• 10% back on redeemed award flights 

But why stop at one card when you can get two?

Triple Card Update: Meeting the Minimum Spend

A little over a month ago, I signed up for three cards and I had to meet a minimum spend of $2,000 in two months and $4,000 in three months.

I managed to "spend" $6,000 in less than two months, and I was able to secure the sign up bonuses of 50k Southwest Rapid Rewards points and 80k American Airlines AAdvantage points.

Everyone should know by now that I don't work hard enough to earn an income that lets me spend that sort of money. And if I did, I wouldn't be involved with a blog that centers on affordable travel.
Luckily for me, Vanilla Prepaid Reload cards exist to help meet the minimum spend requirements.

"The Great Game" The search for Vanilla retailers

In the Prior post As good as Sherlock I had outlined my cousin and I's detective work which would potentially lead to almost as cheap Ultimate Rewards points as Vanilla Ink Bold strategy. The next step after solving the puzzle was to try and implement it. Below is the journey I mapped out. Read on to find out how I planned this!

Where can you go with 3 people for $778?

Try Australia, with a 3 day stop over in Hawaii, airfare AND hotel included. The flights are in economy, but the hotels are not in your cheap hostels or economy hotel (nothing wrong with these) but Hyatts and Marriotts. Sometimes we get so caught up in collecting miles, we forget the big picture: spending them!

I got my cousin seriously into the miles game back in July when he applied for the Ink card and Sapphire card in November, and it paid off—big time.

Southwest 50k points back!

Deals We Like has posted that the Southwest 50k Rapid Reweards points after $2,000 spend in 3 months credit card is back. Remember if you applied to one already, you can still apply to the other 3 cards since they are considered different products. I will be applying to another one myself.

Check our more detailed info on the card below!

Southwest Rapid Rewards Card

Annual Fees: 3 Reasons Why They Don't Matter

One of first tips my dad has ever given me about credit cards was to watch out for annual fees. Stay away from them. That's how they get you. Why are their services so damn special? There are plenty of cards out there who won't charge you. Annual fees? Nice try, card company. Forget them. Move on.

Yeah... about that piece of advice...

I've applied to cards with annual fees of $69, $79 and $100 without batting an eye, and I have a three good reasons why I don't let annual fees scare or stop me.

Triple Card Churn Part 1: Signing Up (American Airlines and Southwest)

At the time of this writing, I am sitting at Gate 12 of LAX waiting for my (delayed) Southwest flight back to Portland for the weekend. This trip was purchased last minute partly because of Goober's terrible planning, but mostly because I didn't mind spending ten bucks for the roundtrip ticket.

And since this blog is about cheap travel and not fail travel, I guess I won't go into the details of why Goober won't be meeting up with me in Portland or on Mt. Hood for snowboarding. (To be fair, his schedule wasn't entirely within his control. Also, he has admin privileges on this blog, and I don't want him to delete this post.)

I've made a few of these $10 flights this winter, and I'm pretty sure I acquired the taste for inexpensive trips. Unfortunately, my miles are running low, and it's time to get more. I usually work on one card at a time, so I'm stepping out of my spending comfort zone for a triple helping of cards: two American Airline cards (Visa and American Express) and one Southwest card.

Since this blog started, you guys have been reading how we've done this or completed that. Now I'm inviting you to start at beginning of a churn period and see how I'm going to attempt it.

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!

Plastic Balling: Increasing Your Credit Score through Churning

In our Credit Basics section we have described how your score is calculated by lenders. After being asked, "Doesn't opening and closing credit cards negatively affect your score?" it dawned on me that we have not fully explained how we use this game to not only keep our scores stable, but earn the status of what my old roommate called "Plastic baller"!

Chase Ink Bold

The Chase Ink Bold is a business charge card that is the keystone card in the Vanilla Ink Bold strategy. The benefits for this card are:

• The current promotion is 50k Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR) points after you spend $5,000 in the first 3 months. 
• Normally, the promo is a spend of $10,000 in three months, so get it now!
• 50k UR points are basically worth ~$500, but you can always find more efficient ways of spending the points.
• 5x points per dollar spent at office stores or on utilities like cell phone/landlines, internet and cable.
• 2x points for dining and gas. 1 point per dollar for everything else.

If used correctly, you can earn a crazy amount of UR points that can be used on various airlines and hotels.

Meeting Spend Requirements

Meeting minimum spend requirements is one of the scarier parts of travel hacking. Unfortunately, that's the most common requirement you need to meet before the credit card company will give you reward points. So it's unavoidable.

Spend requirements per card can range anywhere from spending $1,000 in three months (super easy) to spending $10,000 in three months (super hard... unless you're rich—in which case, why are you even here?). Both Goober and myself are firmly grounded in the 99%. While we're not starving, we do stare wistfully at the electronic lottery billboards.

So how do we do it?

Annual Fee? No Problem!

While a lot of credit card promos offer to waive their first year's annual fee, there are some that don't, and they want you to cough up $69-99 on your very first statement.

Don't let that dissuade you.

Chase Sapphire Preferred card

 

Chase Sapphire Preferred

This is a damn sexy card, literally and figuratively. It's dark blue, has a non-embossed front and is much heavier then any other card to the point where ~20% (complete guesstimate) of cashiers will compliment the card (you just might be able to finally score that number of the cute cashier).

The current promo is a bonus 40k Ultimate Rewards points after spending $3,000 in three months. The benefits are so good that this card should become one of your go-to cards for all your purchases even if you have no requirements to meet.

Chase Southwest Rapid Rewards Premier Card

Chase Southwest (SW) Airlines Rapid Rewards Premier Card is probably the best card for the beginner since the card user (you) has the fewest hoops to jump through to get your points.

What you need to do:

1. Spend $2,000 within three months.
2. Pay the annual fee ($99)
3. Annnnnd... that's it.

What you get:

• 50,000 Rapid Rewards points, which is approximately two round trip tickets.
• Anniversary bonus of 6,000 points every year. (which is basically the annual fee in points)

And So It Begins!

Welcome to our new project! We would like to share with you all, our hobby of traveling in style for cheap! You CAN go on the trip of your dreams now—not only when you are retired. But if you're retired, then you have all the free time to take advantage of this! 

If you are new to this concept please check out our Getting Started page to get a general idea. We will to keep updating this with new deals to take advantage of them as they come up as long as David doesn't get lazy editing our blog.

Please feel free to leave comments, questions, and suggestions about posts and the blog! We value your input and will work hard on clarifying things(well david will clarify, I just do content :P).