Maximizing spend on credit cards maximizes your miles. Perhaps you can’t hit the spending requirement for a card you want or maybe you want more cards and more points. The below strategies can help you maximize your spend to reach your goals without hurting your budget.
Monthly payments/expenses
Most monthly payments/expenses like internet, insurance, and donations can be put on a credit card, giving you a base level of spending every month. It is a bit of effort to update these every few months, but it’s a solid way to directly convert your expenses to experiences.
Paying for groups
Get the bill for dinner or for that group Airbnb. This is a great way to leverage your spending by the number of people in the group. A $30 per person meal for 4 people can give you 80% (20% x 4) back on your $30 when working on a sign up bonus. Redeeming these point smartly at 2 cents per point can easily turn those points into $48 back (4 x $30 x 20% x 2) toward travel. Shouldn’t the person receiving the greatest return on their credit card get to pay?
Work expenses
Perhaps you travel for work or your work has events that someone needs to pay for. See if you can put these expenses on your credit card and get them reimbursed. This definitely helps making submitting expense reports less agonizing.
Rent/mortgage or other’s rent
This is typically the biggest monthly expense and it has massive points earning potential. The downside is that there will likely be a fee. Ideally, if you are renting, your landlord has a portal to pay with a credit card for no fee. If not, you can use a service like Plastiq to pay rent or a mortgage. There is a 2.9% fee, but with cards earning 1-2% and sign up bonuses returning another 10-20%, as long as you were already planning on spending that 2.9% on travel you come out ahead by a lot. For example a $300 travel budget used to pay fees instead of travel allows you to spend an extra ~$10,000 on your credit cards. This is easily $1,000-$4,000 toward travel. If you’re interested in using Plastiq you can sign up using my referral link and if you spend $2,500 in 30 days you get $1,000 fee free dollars (~$30 of value).
Taxes
The IRS allows people to pay their taxes with a credit card. Unfortunately there is a ~1.85% fee to do this. So why would anyone want to pay more during tax season? Once again, this fee is easily offset by sign up bonuses. You can even overpay your taxes and the IRS will refund you the excess. This a great way to complete sign up bonuses for cards with massive spending requirements and to get a little enjoyment and some nice returns from paying taxes. Check out this post for details on how to earn 20-40% back on tax payments with credit cards.
College
Many universities allow you to pay for tuition via credit card. Typically there is a fee for using a credit card that negates any regular earnings. However, leveraging sign up bonuses can easily net 20% back on tuition payments and hopefully make tuition a bit less painful.
Gift cards
A common technique to increase spending is to buy VISA or other gift cards and either use them for purchases or try to convert them back into cash. In my opinion this is often more effort than it’s worth, but if you’re interested it can help maximize your spend.
