Who is the best beneficiary of this blog or who is the target audience? Lot of us at some point are targeted with big bonus credit cards. Many times this leads to more curiosity and subsequently applying for more cards which offer similar big rewards. Soon, this list exhausts as there are only a bunch of cards and banks which are going to offer big sign up bonuses. While big bonuses are definitely the best way to rake up huge bonuses in relatively less amount of time, soon one starts to explore around and see if there is a way to get these points outside of the big bonus spending.
To put it in various levels as if we are playing a video game:
Level 1: We are in the first phase. The beginner will go full jerk on the various available big bonus with minimum spend and sign up as much cards as banks offer. At this point, you are scouring internet and forums and getting the best links and calling recon line with various lies and have stacked up to 20-30 cards. The CVS guy sighs when you walk in the door and most vendors place a bet on what you are going to buy when your car pulls in. You likely have an excel or some sort of doc and some app to track these rewards. You would also cash in this points fairly frequently. Push comes to shove, you comment on various forums about how mean all those other people are who are collecting such points and on the way ruining methods such as gift cards or vanilla reloads at Wal-Mart or CVS among others.
Level 2: This is where the banks have started flagging you and you keep seeing “Your application is under careful consideration and requires review”. You know the recon numbers by heart and beg everybody for reconsideration. You kinda look like a desperate junkie as you enter the venerable halls of Dollar Stores for yet another round of reload. At this point, your big bonuses from big banks have dried up. Suddenly the 2% and 5% category bonuses sound good. The 2% is still lame overall unless you do something like $4000-$10000 on them. But again this is something that you do on the side. No biggie. The 5% and above on the other hand, now they are definitely more enticing and almost equivalent to the big bonuses. Here is where you start thinking more about the perpetual point machine or some way so that you can at least get part of your money back from your weekly grocery run. The Amex preferred card (6%) among others is what is catching your fancy. You are fine with paying annual rewards as long as you are coming out ahead in the year. Kudos, you have entered the big league now. You are sort of a leader now and one step ahead from becoming a big executive in this business.
This blog is more for level 2 readers. I hope to provide you with tools, apps and insights on the best strategy there is without having to compromise too much of your time or go into too much hoops. For starters, I don’t think manufactured spending is a good term. It is just that we are spending normally and on top of that some more smart, creative spending. But then again, I don’t bulk up on vanilla reloads or other gift cards. I pay my bills with money order since that is what is acceptable in many cases. I use credit card for most spend. The only really creative thing, if you could say that, is using prepaid cards. But this is more of a security issue rather than anything else. There are pros and cons is every approach. With prepaid cards, you can pay bills and mortgages. With credit cards you can’t. With good prepaid cards from reliable banks such as American Express or Chase, you feel relatively more secure compared to a Netspend or some such stand alone entities. You want some assurance from the customer service representatives in case you need their help. Also, you don’t want to make a consistent business model out of it. As in, I am fairly fine if I am NOT able to load my prepaid cards say once every 3-4 months to the maximum limits allowed.This cool down period and say audit period (yeah, audit!) is where you could scan around and check if everything has been going according to the plan.
At level 2, you apply maybe few big bonus spend cards and they are necessarily a blip in the long scheme of things. Since you are constantly making 4% or 5% or upwards, you need to focus on just having this 10k – 15k spend or so. Of course, reading at the forums, there are people who are already doing this and they scale this too heavily. For instance, I have seen folks who go over 50K per month(!) on spend. This is for sure going to raise some eye brows. Even 10k itself is huge but if there is spend then it makes sense to act. Sparring an Amex Bluebird or similar cards, which have a 5k or so limits and which can be used to pay your mortgage, others will raise the flags. If you use money orders to pay your rents or bills, then it is fine. But roundly depositing it in banks over and over again will surely send the alarm bells ringing. And reviews surely happen, We have seen this in the past with CVS and Wal-Mart shutting down their operations to reload cards. It was going well till someone decided to abuse the system ruining it for everyone. The same thing happened with 7-11 stores. They were pretty chill with credit card charge until complaints started to flow in. A local friendly 7-11 store held ground for a long time even when others stopped taking credit cards. Then one guy went and loaded 25k+ worth cash card in a single day. This surely and obviously set off alarms at various levels and this store too stopped accepting credit cards. Not to whine about this but at level 2, you have started accepting the limits of this and want to just put in a basic model which would get you the category bonuses while also hitting home runs during the big spend season. Essentially, this level 2 is all about covering 10 yards at a time and when there is a good chance, take a long shot and get that big 50 yards at one go. So if you are in that advanced state of doing this for fun, putting some charges on your cards and only seasonally rotating them ,then you are in the right place. This blog is also about me learning some of the tricks of the trade from you and other readers so that together we create a worthwhile set of strategies and tools to think less about credit card spend and more on how to maximize the profit.
Time and again, I have pondered over why to write this blog? What is the purpose and who is the target? How to write this blog in the best way possible for all? What are the values and the tools to best automate those values? What is the way to monetize this site in a sustainable fashion. When to go for own domain or host it under a wordpress or blogspot? Where to host this site etc.?
In this post, hopefully we have answered one of the question as to who this blog is intended to and who is the target audience and how will they benefit from it. Thanks for reading.
Credit Cards Earning Points on Steroids 