A few months back I shared a post highlighting what I felt (and still feel) was an outrageous sign up offer. This is follow-up post #1 highlighting how I’ve taken advantage of the triple cash offer from Venmo/Synchrony for the Venmo Credit Card.
The jist is this: 9% back in ANY category of spend is impressive. 9% back at grocery stores (3% base earn x 3x sign up promotion) is downright crazy. Without even introducing any schemes to shift spending towards grocery category, this is stupid value. Adding in those schemes, this is highly lucrative. This is about abusing those schemes.
Enter Visa Gift Cards.
It is not only possible, but actually quite easy, to shift most normal spending towards grocery stores. Vanilla Visa Gift Cards look, feel, and swipe just like any other Visa card, with a few select differences. Purchasing these cards is possible at many grocery stores, with some restrictions or complexities added. The biggest hassles is frequent grocery store stops, some difficulty with online transactions (registration often requires to add billing address), and limits in purchase size of $500 per card. And of course, the purchase fees.
Step 1: Purchase Visa gift card at grocery store for $500, or $506.95 including fees
Step 2: Use that gift card as you would any other credit card, drain it to zero
Step 3: Profit
The math is solid. It’s a moneymaker.
- $500 Visa Gift Card Purchase (maximum variable load amount)
- $6.95 purchase fee (fixed cost)
- Total transaction size: $506.95 ($500+$6.95)
- $45.63 in rewards ($506.95 x 9%)
- $38.68 in rewards net of fixed purchase fee ($45.63 – $6.95)
- $461.32 total cost for a $500 gift card
- Earn rate of $38.68/$500 = 7.74%
My strategy is simple
Put as much as humanly possible on Visa gift cards purchased at grocery stores. Buying something at the store? Use a visa gift card. Buying something online? Use a visa gift card. Paying an electric bill? Use a visa gift card. 7.74% is substantially higher than the 3% earn base (both for Venmo card and others). An extra 4.74% on EVERYTHINGI buy? Why leave money on the table!
I won’t go into deep the value back, yet, but I’m well into 3-digits in cash back rewards monthly in my first few statement cycles on the card. It’s good. My original “maybe I could make $10k on this promotion” was a little overstated, as I’m avoiding abusing this to the full extent possible as I would actually like to keep the card/relationship and avoid being blacklisted by Synchrony. That said, as you can tell from the right side here, I’m growing a nice collection of cards here…
The fun still has three months yet to go, so who knows what’s next?!
Post-ending gif
