$100,000 MS Challenge: Week 1 ($1,495 Earned!)

Summary

This week has been eventful! In addition to starting the $100,000 MS challenge, I managed to get a good head start - $6,597 in spend for $1,495 in value earned!

$3,000 for Chase IHG Premier: 175K IHG Points ($1,225)
$1,500 / $25,000 @ 9X on the Amex Gold: 13.5K Amex MR Points ($270)
$2,097/ $30,000 for Amex Delta Reserve: No value so far

Challenge Recap

For those that are new here, you can learn more about our 2023 $100,000 manufactured spending challenge here. In short, we are trying to manufacture spend $100,000 this year, which will earn us $20,000+ in credit card points. All the techniques and methods used will be transparently shared on here!

With that, let’s dive into our specific updates from this week:

Chase IHG Premier: 175K IHG Point Sign-up Bonus

2023 Spending Goal: $3,000 ($0 so far)

This week’s spend: $3,000

The 175K sign-up bonus (SUB) is the highest one that’s been seen on this card. Signing up for this card was a no-brainer, especially since I have a trip to Japan planned in June, where IHG has gorgeous 5-star hotels. Look out for a travel report once I come back to see the value I got out of these points!

The SUB spending requirement is $3,000 in 3 months. I was able to entirely knock out this one this week.

MS Plan

For this one, I went with the tried and true - funding bank accounts. For details on this method, read our post here. I went with creating an account with GESA credit union, which allows you to fund each account with $5K (psst.. you can make more than one account at the time of application!).

This allows me to easily knock out the spending requirement for this card in one-go.

Amex Gold: +5X points at Grocery Stores

2023 Spending Goal: $25,000 ($0 so far)

This Week’s Spend: $1,500

This rewards play is arguably the juiciest rewards play we’ve seen this year. We’ll have a post up on this play soon, but in short: If you refer someone to an Amex card, you will get +5X on any spend at U.S. Supermarkets. So.. if you refer someone from your Amex Gold, which already earns 4X on U.S. Supermarkets, you would be earning 10X points!

This bonus runs for 3 months from the referral approval date, and caps at $25,000 in spend. My goal here is to hit the full $25,000 for this card within the 3 months.

My MS plan for this rewards play

At grocery stores, there is only really 1 scalable play, which is buying open-loop (e.g. Visa) gift cards, which you then convert to cash. We’ll have a post on this play soon, but so far I have made 1 trip to my local Kroger store and bought 3 x $500 ($1,500) in U.S. Bank Visa gift cards. I’ll share more detail on my liquidation play for these soon, but most likely I will use some combination of Money orders / Bill Pay services.

This comes in at a fee rate of ~2%, which I’ll happily take for 9X (Effectively making this a 7X play).

Amex Delta Reserve: Aiming for Diamond Medallion Status

2023 Spending Goal: $30,000 ($0 so far)

This week’s spend: $2,097

This rewards play is probably not of interest to most, but as a Delta loyalist, I’m looking to earn Diamond Medallion Status for 2023 (which also gets me the status for 2024). This gives me access to free upgrades, priority boarding, lounge access (across Skyteam Partners), and a few other smaller perks. I fly to Europe several times a year, so access to Delta’s Skyteam partners Air France and KLM are really beneficial here.

Fortunately, I have the Amex Delta Reserve, which gives me status-earning miles (MQMs) for credit card spend. With the card, I get 15,000 MQMs for $30,000 in spend, which should be enough to earn Diamond status, when paired with my planned Delta flights for this year.

MS Plan for this card

Fortunately, with this card, there are no specific spending categories that I need to worry about - my only focus is on hitting $30,000 in spend. However, the one constraint I am applying here is that I don’t want to spend any of my own money towards fees in hitting $30,000 in spend. That rules out most gift-card based plays, which typically have a 1-3% fee range.

Funding bank accounts would generally be a good MS method for this kind of requirement. However, since this is an Amex card, I knew I would have a hard time finding banks that accept Amex for large funding volumes.

Instead, I will be using Buying Groups for this card. Buying Groups are resellers that will buy electronics and other limited stock items from you at a pre-determined rate. Whenever an item goes on sale (say, a laptop at Walmart), they will send out a notice to all members of the group, and let them know the rate they are buying at.

Unfortunately, these groups have recently started buying items at below cost, which is effectively equivalent to paying a fee to do MS. For example, a laptop may sell on Walmart for $500, but they may only pay you $498 for the device. Since I’m not interested in paying any fees, I’ve had to pass up some of their deals. Currently, about half of the deals are still at-cost, so I partake in those.

My favorite group so far this week has been BuyForMeRetail, which had a quick turnaround time for paying me for some Apple Watches that I bought and shipped on Day 1 of this challenge. We’ll have a detailed post out on Buyer’s Groups soon that lists the groups that have a good track record of paying out to users in a timely fashion.

Anyways, that’s it for this week. Stay tuned for more MS insights next week!