Disclaimer: I receive a referral commission for the following link(s) and I greatly appreciate supporting the site: Discover, Top Cashback, Cardpool, Bloomingdale's
As I have mentioned numerous times, American Express often runs promotions through their online site. Just go to the bottom of the main site to the section that says "Offers for You" to see which offers you are eligible for.
Right now, I have the following offer on a number of my cards.
$50 off a $250 purchase from Bloomingdales. This offer can be used to make a little bit of money and some extra miles/cashback on the side as well.
Buying the Gift Cards
Here's how to do it, but please finish reading all the directions before you start because there are a few tricks I mention later that are important for the beginning:
1) Add the Offer to your eligible American Express card
2) Buy a $250 Physical Gift Card for $255 from Bloomingdale's. I already did this and got the credit.
3) You will get an email from American Express within a few hours stating that you will get the $50 credit
4) Sell your gift card to Cardpool. Currently, they are paying $207.50 for a $250 Bloomingdales gift card, but this may change depending on availability. You will need to mail the gift card to them.
Even More Enticing and Fewer Headaches
1) Start your purchase of the gift card from Shop Discover (requires a Discover it® card) and you might get another 5% cashback. I don't think it will work because I haven't gotten any confirmation from them, but it can't hurt to try. If it works, you will get an extra $12.50 so that would be nice, but don't bet on it.
2) Before you sell the gift card to Cardpool, go to Top Cashback first and you will get an additional 4% cashback on the value of the gift card you are selling. A $250 gift card will get you another $10 into your Top Cashback account.
3) Normally, one you click on the offer from American Express it will be added to that card and every card connected to that account is no longer eligible even though the offer was available on multiple cards before you added it to any of them.
There is a trick for this: Log in to your American Express account from multiple tabs and open the "Offers for You" from each tab on every card the offer is eligible for before you add the offer to any of them. You can now add the offer to each card.
I don't think this is worth it for one card, but I was able to buy 7 of them between my various accounts and that made it worthwhile.
4) I had trouble checking out if I signed in to my Bloomingdale's account. I kept getting an error that my payment was incorrect, but it worked fine if I checkout out as a guest. In addition, they had to call me for the first order to verify that it was me.
The Math
Fees:
$255 from Bloomingdales
Credits:
$207.50 from Cardpool
$50 from American Express
$10 from Top Cashback
Whatever rewards you normally get from your credit card - Let's call it 1% or $2.05
= $14.55 per card, + you might get another $12.50 from Discover, but not likely.
HT - Frequent Miler for this method
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