The $20,000 Reselling Challenge - I'm Joining!

Vinh from Miles Per Day has started a $20,000 reselling challenge.

The American Express Business Platinum with a reservation code found by Miles Per Day is the impetus.  The sign up bonus requires $20,000 of spend within 3 months to realize the full 150,000 points.

The challenge is to resell $20,000 worth of inventory (gift cards or physical items) with the greatest amount of profit and least amount of time involved in reselling.  All this within 3 months.






The challengers are:

• Miles Per Day (reselling merchandise)

• Chasing the Points (reselling gift cards)

• Money Metagame (reselling gift cards)

• Twitter user @DaveSmth1919 (???)
• Twitter user @Steven C (???)
• Twitter user Dc (???)
• Me (reselling merchandise)

Here are the official rules from Miles Per Day:

The Amex Business Platinum $20K Challenge

Goal: Meet $20,000 minimum spend requirement of the Amex Business Platinum card in the most efficient way possible that returns the most money back to you (manufacture the spend) in 90 days.  The “winner” will be the person who has the most profit with the least amount of time.  The  winner will be arbitrarily judged by the community at large because there’s not an actual prize here.

1. Must spend $20,000 on AMEX Platinum Business card (see rule 10) within 90 days.
2. Sales won’t need to be completed in 90 days, but if you still have inventory left over after 90 days, that will affect how you are judged.
3. You can finish early but cannot count more than $20k worth of spend.  You cannot “cycle” the money or re-use profit either. Once you’ve spent $20K, you are done.
4. As the $20,000 spending requirement on the Amex Business Platinum inspired this goal, we won’t count any credit card earnings or signup bonuses except for the signup bonus on this card (150,000 MR) and points generated by the spending on this card (20,000 MR).
5. Profit will be calculated by adding Cash, Cash Equivalents (staples rewards, best buy rewards, ebay bucks, fuel points, etc.), and points/miles earned from portals along with the 170,000 MR earned from the actual spending.
6. Time is also a very important factor in the process of manufacturing spend, so keep at least a rough estimate of the time spent, miles driven, etc. in the pursuit of spending, buying, unloading, and/or selling as a part of this challenge.
7. It is at the participants’ discretion how much information he or she shares about how the methods used.  This will entirely be on the honor system.
8. You may only count purchases actually made and used towards your profit totals, no hypothetical where you “would have bought AGCs first”.  We usually discuss the best case scenarios for MS, but lets keep this challenge in the real world and look at our actual returns.
9. You can start whenever you want, and you can backdate purchases starting on 5/4, since that’s when the challenge unofficially started.  If you bought AGC at 2.25% that day using another cc, you can claim that spend was on the Amex Plat.  If you also bought Raise GC on 5/4, you can’t claim you used AGC on that purchase, but you can claim you would have put it on the Amex Plat.  It’s on the honor system.
10. If you didn’t get the AMEX Business Platinum card, use any credit card and pretend you placed the spend on the AMEX Platinum card (but you can’t count the bonus spend on the actual card you used)

This will be a good opportunity for me to step up my game in reselling.  I'm excited!  Hopefully, everyone will win with new techniques explored and talked about.