American Express Gift Card to Maximize Credit Card Rebate Promotion

To maximize a recent credit card promotion my wife and I each need to spend $2,500 in the first month. Problem is we don't even come close to spending $5,000 with our normal monthly expenses. We have been assessing our options to maximize our monthly spend and decided to purchase a $2,000 American Express Prepaid Gift Card to maximize our spend for the month.

The primary advantage of the American Express Gift Card is its basically a gift card good anywhere Amex is accepted so we can use it to pull in monthly spend from future months into the current month to maximize our monthly spend. There is only a $3.95 purchase fee plus shipping charges to purchase the card. There are no transaction fees or other typical fees associated with some prepaid cards.

Before we ordered the Amex gift card I signed up for a Big Crumbs account which offers a 1.6% rebate on Amex gift card purchases which earned us a $32 rebate on the gift card purchase in additional to the credit card miles promotion. The $32 will more than offset the $3.95 purchase fee and the shipping charges. We also used a Big Crumbs Free shipping promotion code to get a $5.95 discount on our shipping (because the gift card was over $500 it had to be sent 2nd day express and we still had to pay $3 towards shipping).

We are coming out a bit ahead by earning our credit card rebate AND getting a rebate through Big Crumbs. Rather than the typical 1% credit card reward/rebate on your run of the mill purchases we are basically earning roughly 2% -- 1% through the credit card transaction and 1%+ through the Big Crumbs rebate. I guess you could do this for all your typical credit card spending to maximize your rebates. I cold foresee if I ever had an extremely large purchase (new kitchen cabinets come to mind) that I wasn't going to earn more than a typical 1% rebate on that I could use this approach to roughly double the rebate.

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Comments (4)

Are you sure you have to reach the spending limit in one month? If you are speaking of the BA card, then I was told we have 90 days to hit the $2,500 mark. My wife and I are in your same situation, and we are spacing out our big purchases over three months to get the extra 50k miles bonus.

Posted by Ryan | June 8, 2011 1:40 PM

How is this different from 2% cashback that amex offers?

Posted by Anonymous | June 8, 2011 3:14 PM

Ryan, No your right - we have 90 days to reach the $2,500 in spend on each card, but given we want to travel this year I want to make sure we hit the $2,500 spend in the first credit card statement to allow time for the miles to show up in our account and still have a chance of finding available reward flights.

Posted by 2million | June 8, 2011 4:59 PM

Anon -- If there is an Amex card that has a 2% cashback then you could use this technique to add an additional 1% cashback on your spend. So 2% Amex credit card rebate + 1%+ Big Crumbs rebate on gift card purchase = ~3% rebate.

Posted by 2million | June 8, 2011 5:01 PM