Back in May, I joined Miles Per Day's $20,000 spending challenge. The idea is to spend $20,000 on the American Express Platinum card within 90 days for the greatest amount of profit and the least amount of effort/time. The full sign up bonus of 150,000 Membership Rewards Points is earned when you spend $20,000 in 90 days.
A couple of notes to start with:
- Everything that has been sent to Amazon has been sold and I am only waiting to be paid for one iPad because it was returned and resold so there is another delay in payment after the refund.
- Almost all spending has gone through American Express gift cards first at a 2.25% payout from Top Cashback which leaves a net of 1.9% after fees.
Here is some updates from some of the other contestants:
Chasing the Points updated Wednesday night, he had a slight loss, but was able to spend the money rather quickly. Best infograph ever!
This is Noah of Money Metagame's last update - He has not updated since my last update.
This is Vinh of Miles per Day's last update. I am curious how he is doing in all of this.
The Numbers Breakdown
All of the spending took place between 5/10 and 6/21, about 6 weeks.
- Spending Complete: $19,911 - this number actually decreased since last time. I applied a Bed Bath and Beyond 20% off coupon and the price of the Roomba lowered by $100.
- Inventory Total: $405 - One laptop was returned, it will be shipped back to me soon, this will hurt my profit margin until it is resold.
- Selling Price of Merchandise after Amazon Fees: $20,482.53
- Net After Fees - $571.53
- Profit Margin from Sale - 2.87%
- Portal Cashback - $897.51
- Ebates - $343.99
- Be Frugal - $341.19
- Top Cashback - $53.70
- Shop Discover - $96.33
- Portal Miles - 4,720 = $62.30 - See Frequent Miler Fair Trading Prices
- United - 4,720
- Loyalty Points - $279.18
- eBay Bucks -$42.48
- Staples Rewards $24.70
- Best Buy Rewards - $32
- Sam's Club Cash- $180
- All forms of Portal and Loyalty $ - $1,478.20
- Assumes all forms of extra cashback and loyalty points are the same. They are most definitely not.
- Portal Cashback is regular cash, but can take a while before it is available. Most of my portal cash will not become available to me until July or August.
- Shop Discover rewards can be used to buy gift cards at a discount so their value is greater than what is listed.
- Value of United Miles entirely depends on how they are redeemed.
- Loyalty Points are not cash at all. You won't get credit card rewards or loyalty points when using loyalty points.
- You can only unluck any of their value with a sale in the future.
- Can expire and become valueless
- Sam's Club Cash is not available to me until March 2016. Most of the loyalty points have already been used in other purchases.
- Net after Portal and Loyalty Points - $2,049.73
- Profit margin after Portal and Loyalty Points - 10.3%
- Total Times Spent: ~15-17 hours.
- It took me the longest. I am getting better with time as I do more deals.
Thoughts and Looking Forward
- I think the challenge went very well for me. I really stepped up my reselling game and learned a lot of great information.
- My profit is still being held up by a return. Profit margin would be over 12% without that return ($405) and should get back over 11% once it is resold with some loss. That's part of the reselling model. Nothing to be upset over
- Most of my sales had profit margins of 5-10% before portals. I had some real duds though that threw off my profit margin (including that return - it was a loss before the return!). I've become better at recognizing higher margin sales and if I can focus on that going forward, I will do much better.
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