$100,000 MS Challenge: Week 2 ($821 Earned!)
Money does in fact grow on trees!
Summary
Good progress this week, y’all. We managed a chunky $10,000 in spend, with $821.26 in earnings. This beats out last week’s spend of $6,597 in spend for $1,495 in earnings. Next week will be slower since I’ll be out on vacation, so I succeeded in some extra churning this week. I’m also going to start adding in some receipts to start building trust since I’ve gotten some comments about my churning numbers being intimidating. With this challenge, I want to prove to everyone that earning credit cards points is nowhere near as hard as you might think!
This week’s highlights:
$4,562 @ 9X / $25K on the Amex Gold: 41K Amex MR Points ($821.26 value)
$3,712 / $30K for Amex Delta Reserve
Signed up partner for Amex Platinum with 150K sign-up bonus. No spending yet.
Challenge Recap
For those that are new here, you can learn more about our 2023 $100,000 manufactured spending challenge here. In short, I am 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:
Amex Gold: 9X points at Grocery Stores
2023 Spending Goal Progress (from last week): $1,500/$25,000
This Week’s Spend: +$4,562.55
This Week’s Earnings: $821.26 value (41,062 Amex MR Points)
3 transactions of 3x$500 gift cards + fees and a random grocery item to keep the numbers unique
The remaining +5X is typically rewarded roughly a week after the transaction.
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 caps out at $25,000, and by maxing it out, I’ll earn 225,000 Amex MR points ($25,000 * 9X per dollar). This equates to $4,500 in earnings!
MS plan
Continuing the same play from last week, I am buying Visa gift cards at my Kroger grocery store, and slowly scaling up. These come with a hefty $6.95 fee, but since they are US Bank issued cards, they’re simple to liquidate. This week I made two trips to the grocery store:
First trip: Bought 3 X $500 gift card in one transaction at the self-checkout.
Second trip: Bought 6X gift cards in two separate transactions. When I finish the first one at the self-checkout, I immediately start my second transaction. Since my store is usually quite busy, no one batted an eye at this!
This comes out to $4,562.55 (9 x $506.95) in spend for the week.
Next week I’m going to explore adding in a third transaction to see if it raises any eyebrows.
One piece of advice - while Amex does not receive L3 data from my local store, I am still cautious not to have transactions that are multiples of $500 + gift card fee. I always add in an extra grocery item so that my final totals are always varied.
For liquidation, I’m using Western Union Bill Pay at Walgreens. This lets me liquidate multiple gift cards in one trip to Walgreens with a fixed $5 fee. More on this method in a post soon!
Amex Delta Reserve: Aiming for Diamond Medallion Status
2023 Spending Goal (from last week): $2,097/$30,000
This week’s spend: +$3,712.54
To recap, this is a play 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. For most, this status won’t be too interesting, but it works well for my regular travel to Europe.
From an MS perspective, this one is fun since it is not limited to any category. Additionally, I’m holding myself to the goal of not spending any money on fees.
MS Plan
Last week, I described how I was using Buyer’s Groups. This week, added in Gift Card Buyer’s Groups, which are a specific category of Buyer’s Groups, focused entirely on buying gift cards. In some ways, this is easier, since the purchase and transfer of gift cards can be done entirely online - no shipping required. Read our post on Gift Card Buyer’s Groups for more info on these.
This week, I used The Card Bay to generate $1,600 in spend. I was lucky enough to have a $500 Southwest Airlines gift card that was on sale at Costco, which I was able to purchase 2X with mine and my partner’s account. I also bought 6X $100 gift cards that were on sale at Kroger online. All of these were purchased by The Card Bay at a breakeven price.
The rest of the spend ($2,112.54) was generated with PointsMaker, another popular Buyer’s Group. This time, the transactions was focused on reselling Apple Watches through Walmart. I shipped them directly to their warehouse.
Amex Platinum: Opening P2’s first Amex
2023 Spending Goal : $0/$6,000
This week’s spend: $0
This was another crowning milestone for this week. My P2 (aka my partner) allows me to use their info to sign-up for credit cards, provided I take care of everything and make sure things are paid on time. This was their first Amex card. Having a P2 be part of the Amex ecosystem means that we’ll now be able to refer each other for cards, and start earning those juicy referral bonuses! More on this another day.
No spend on this card this week, since we just opened the card.
This card had a 150K sign-up bonus for $6,000 in spend. However, since this is an Amex, I won’t be able to use the bank account funding method. However, I have other some ideas on how to knock this one out quickly, which I’ll share next time after I’ve tested them out.
