American Express is tightening down on gift card purchases. We’ve thankfully finished our 4X at grocery stores with Amex Gold,
Dosh has disappeared at Kroger and I’ve found my bottom limit on available manufactured spending.
I could still do Dosh for $15 each at Sam’s Club on gift cards, but the time involved to drive out to my closest Sam’s Club meant over an hour to round-trip it. When I add on the liquidation time for buying and depositing money orders, it was less than $25 per hour. I’m retired, but financially comfortable and not really a fan of driving almost an hour in touristy traffic. So now what?
Staples $0 fee promotions
I’ll continue the high paying Staples $0 fee cards when they show up. And, I’ll continue the short trip (about 10 minutes) to the local Kroger to use our Navy Federal card at 3% on groceries.
The math on the 3% card is 3X on about $1500 or $45 each, times two credit cards or $90 gross.
Then we subtract the $5.95 per card x 6 = $35.70 and minus $6 worth of money orders for a net of $48 in under 1 hour. The $1500 per card, per trip is a little scary after doing only $500 per card per trip when Dosh was in play.
CVS + Pei
My other option is to go to Walgreen or CVS and use the PEI app for $5 cash back on a single $500 gift card at 2.625% or $505.95 x 2.625% = $13.28 + $5.06 the PEI refund less the $1 money order. I don’t need to go any further as there is no size to this prize.
These summaries are great for me:
- It’s the only time I actually do the math
- You get to correct my errors or suggest better alternatives, and
- I drove the hour to realize that I don’t want to spend an hour in the car for $25 net. But, it did put me over the minimum transfer on both our Dosh accounts, which will now sit unused.
Final thoughts
I know Ariana is backing off a bit on manufactured spending and it seems to be an opportune time. As is always the case, something else will show up soon and we’ll all be off to the races again.
Have I missed a great manufactured spending opportunity that you are willing to share with your fellow MS addicts? Or maybe, a new credit card sign-up bonus will show up. I’ll start looking.
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I’m confused.. i feel like theres a whole chunk of this blog missing.
How are they tightening down on GC sales?
Buyng is not the issue. Liquidating them is the problem.
How did you gather that from “American Express is tightening down on gift card purchases. We’ve thankfully finished our 4X at grocery stores with Amex Gold” from that???
They’re tightening down by not issuing points on gift card purchases.
But Amex gift card purchases at grocery stores have not changed. No issues here. Still working as normal.
For the time being!
Here is the wording in the Gold card terms and conditions:
“Eligible purchases do NOT include fees or interest charges, cash advances, person to person payments, purchases of gift cards, purchases of travelers checks, purchases or reloading of prepaid cards, or purchases of other cash equivalents”.
IIRC This wording was adding to the Gold card T and C this year and is not listed in all the available cards. It has also been reported on the financial networks Amex is in the process of revamping their rewards program due to excessive costs of the program.
It may not have happened in the grocery store yet, but I’m glad I got my $25K grocery done early in the year.
Read between the lines
PEI – $1/week
Correct, they dropped it from $5 earlier this summer.
Rick is back doing what he does best. Pumping his Dosh referral link now and cultivating his prime target market, newbies like LukeG. How come you are not trolling my blog anymore Rick? Is it because you now are back to pumping your $$ links and don’t want to affect them? Because “conversions is all that matters”, right?
George, I like your blog, but also like alot of others. When you deride other bloggers it is saying more about you, than it is them. Everyone is just trying to make a living. Ease up on the bloggers.
well .. you can see who’s the sore loser in this conversation lolz
No George, it’s because I finally realized you will say anything about a whole lot of people regardless if it is true or not.
Plain and simple
He actually left his links out of the post but I added them in. Some people want to support the bloggers they read – links help do that. If you don’t click, a demon does not come out of your screen and haunt you in your dreams for eternity. That was a chain mail rumor made up in the 90’s.
well .. you can see who’s the sore loser in this conversation lolz
Office Depot has $10 off the fees of $300 worth of MC gift cards this week. I’ve been loading up there. I know many back off from MC in favor of visa but I have an abundance of grocery stores that easily liquidate these.
I also just discovered this week by error (I am sure many already knew) Publix auto-drains gift cards. Makes it easier not to make the request to split transactions.
I’m having a hard time justifying it for anything other than 5%. u using the CIC?
Ink – 5% UR.
data point – no gift card purchases from Safeway on my Amex Hilton earned points this cycle. 🙁
Thanks for the data point. The game is indeed changing
Data Point, in DC area there are 17 Staples and non of them allow more than one VGC per costumer per week. Also, there are 9 Office Depot and only two are selling Visa Everywhere when months ago you were able to find “Everywhere” or selling only $100 VCs denomination, at the same time the only WM from 17 that used to allow 4 GCs swipe is now against it too. Giant grocery stores used to sell MCs and VCs with 3X for gas and now they reduced it to 2X, they also don’t allow GCs for MOs. The game has become a little bit of a hassle, after Amex don’t credit points for GCs and making new rules for big spenders. What do you guys think?
Ric, thanks for the comments. In my area there are two staples and we can get $2k per day from each if we wanted. Grocery stores are still good but the card companies will kill that. There was a data point last week the aspire card did not pay on someone’s card.
I think we get what we can, when we can knowing that the game is constantly changing and getting more difficult.
I’ll do 3x but 5x is my target.
Good morning guys , have a question, I got an email offert from Delta skymile, AMEX credit card (60.000 miles) if I buy GC from Staples, are they going to count that as a valid points? If not, what other options do I have to manufactured those points? Thanks