First, let me tell you what this post is not about. It is not about the successful experiment lab assistant Jeff conducted recently. He bought a $100 Visa gift card at Staples.com (for $105.95) after going through uPromise for 5% cash back. The exciting news is that the experiment appears to have worked. 5% of his cost, $5.30, has posted as pending to his account! This means that if you buy Visa gift cards this way, you will get most of the $5.95 transaction fee back ($5.30 via uPromise) and still get 5X points if you make your purchase with a Chase Ink card.
This post is also not about how to increase the uPromise cash back to 5.5% by setting up and linking a savings account. According to the uPromise web site, you can get a 10% annual bonus on all of your earned cash back, so 5% back becomes 5.5%. This is really extraordinary because 5.5% cash back from a Visa gift card purchase of $105.95 comes to $5.83. In other words, you would get back all but 12 cents of the card’s $5.95 fee and still get 5X points by making your purchase with a Chase Ink card!
What this post is really about
Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, TopCashBack has just raised their Staples cash back rate to 5.5% and now explicitly includes gift cards!
While this is the same rate that is possible with uPromise, this is much easier. I purchased a Visa card earlier today, so I should learn soon whether the TopCashBack approach has worked.
Either way, 5X
Whether you prefer to earn 5.5% cash back from TopCashBack or from uPromise, this is an extraordinary development. It literally means that all purchases made with these $100 Visa cards earn the equivalent of 5X Ultimate Rewards points (less a small rounding error of 12 cents)! Imagine if you were to buy and spend 16 of these cards each month… You would end up with 96,000 over 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points! (Here’s the math: $106 X 5 points per dollar = 530 points. 530 X 16 cards X 12 months = 101,760)
Note that the TopCashBack rate can be pulled at any time. If you notice the rate drop below 5% or so, you might want to consider the uPromise route instead.
Spending and cashing out
While 5X everywhere is exciting, carrying a wallet full of gift cards is not. In future posts, I’ll discuss ways to simplify using gift cards, and legal ways to cash them out.
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Sites like Upromise and Topcashback no longer offer cash back for the purchase of giftcards
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Has there been evidence that these points actually got posted to the account from the online staples purchase?
And has anyone actually had luck purchasing a prepaid card within the last month with a credit card? Everywhere now has signs that they can only be purchased with cash, and have had registers deny the transaction when hoping the cashier would look the other way or while trying to stick into a multiple item purchase…
FrequentMiler,
I believe we can just order the permanent card online on netspend or mio website (with a $0 balance). And then load using the vanilla reload pack. Don’t see any reason why it won;t work.
FrequentMiler,
Have you explored using a reloadable Visa or Master card. Vanilla reload participates in NetSpend and Mio network, so a reloadable card of those networks should also work. (i.e. ordering a reloadable card online from the network website and then reloading using OD prepaid cards)
It will help for places where AMEX is not accepted.
Ashish: I haven’t found one in my area to try it. If you can find one, let me know how it goes.
[…] posts about how to earn nearly 5 points per dollar on all purchases. For examples, see “5X Everywhere!” and “Almost too good to be true”. Both tricks require a Chase Ink business card which […]
[…] bank gift cards (e.g. Visa, Mastercard, or Amex gift cards). For some examples, see (“5X everywhere!,” “Turn your Amex into Visa and Save $,” and “Almost too good to be true”). Buying […]
Thanks. Let me know if you are ever successful using the Office Depot card online at a discount gift card site. Thanks for all of your efforts on the blog. Before you started I was just learning about shopping portals, finding the best bonuses on credit card spend and was getting into doing a few things with gift cards. I have a business and have no problem spending lots on credit cards. The information/schemes I have learned has multiplied what I was earning on the same spend. I came upon your blog just after you started and it is the first thing I read each morning. I hope to meet you and discuss some strategies – maybe in Chicago?
Scott: Thanks! Yes, I’ll be at the Chicago Seminars (I’m even scheduled to do a talk on gift card churning). See you there!
Just to be clear, the question above relates to using the Visa Gift card to purchase discounted retailer gift cards online through a cash backl portal.
Scott: I’ve had some trouble using the $500 Visa online too. I wonder if some verification systems look for more than just zip code. I’ve had better luck with the $100 Visas from Staples and the $200 Visas from OfficeMax. With those, you register your full address and phone number.
Has anyone had success using the Vanilla Visa bought at Office Depot online at a discounted giftcard seller. I just tried at plastic jungle and the site just returned a blank form after I inputted the Visa card info. I have registered the card online with my zipcode.
[…] Frequent Miler gives us details and instructions for how to earn 5X points on almost all of your purchases. It takes a little bit of effort, but the rewards can be more than worth it. Details HERE. […]