I came across this concept while checking out other travel blogs and people who go crazy over airline miles. It seemed simple enough so I decided to try it myself on a small scale to see just how well this idea works in practice. So in really simple form here is how you get your airline miles for free!
Step 1- American Express BlueBird
I had never heard of this thing until a few weeks ago but basically it’s a free ‘checking’ account that is reloadable offered by American Express. You sign up and they send you a card that you can load money on to and off of. The idea is that you can load money into it and then pay bills online with virtual checks or use it as a normal American Express card and buy things with it.
Their target market seems to be people that would normally have trouble opening a bank account or would just rather not. You can load these cards with money several ways and it’s a great way to turn cash into checks to pay bills, if you get paid in cash…
Yeah so I am not their market that is for sure. But that does not mean that we can’t take advantage of a few features they offer! So your first step is to go to the BlueBird website and sign up for one of these things. It is totally free and they mail you a card in a few days.
Step 2 – The Credit Card
Time to find a Credit Card offer! I just signed up for the American Airlines Visa Card from CitiBank for this experiment but you can pick any card or cards you like depending on your needs. Some people make ‘runs’ on sign ups and get 4 or 5 new cards all at once. I am starting slow and easy though and you should too! Your going to be walking a grey line here so until you are comfortable with it take it easy.
I picked my AA CitiCard because my next adventure is to go to Sydney Australia and I decided that I wanted to go for free. This card will give me 50,000 American Airline miles if I spend $3,000 over the next 3 months. I checked AA’s website and it says Miami to Sydney will cost me 37,500 miles + taxes/fees.
The card will also give me priority boarding and my first checked bag for free, which are great extra perks. AA normally charges $50 a bag for luggage so it is going to save me some extra cash. It is $95 a year to have the card but the first year is free.
So I picked my card, signed up and was instantly approved. Card came in the mail and I am ready to go.
Step 3 – Vanilla Reload Cards
What you need to do now will be the hard part. What we are hunting for now is a Walgreens or CVS that sells Vanilla Reload Network ‘Prepaid Reload’ cards and will accept credit cards for them.
This is going to be hard because many stores have stopped accepting credit for these cards. You may need to drive around to a couple until you find one that doesn’t care or doesn’t train their employees that well. It is not the computer that will stop the transaction but the employee not wanting to get yelled at.
These cards hang out of the end cap with all of the gift cards and prepaid visa cards. You are able to choose a reload amount for the card between $20 and $500 USD at the time of purchase. There is a small $3.95 fee to charge the each card but who cares we are after ‘nearly’ free miles!
So grab a reload card and head over to the checkout. Tell them you want $495 on the card and swipe your credit card from step 2 though the machine. Cashier will ask to see the card to enter some number and you’re done!
So either this worked out fine, or the cashier said no, or your card was declined. If it worked great your ready to move on. If the cashier said no time to find another Walgreens, CVS, or wait for a shift change. If the card was declined it was fraud prevention for the card. Call them up and sort it out and try again. Seems its weird to spend large sums of money at a CVS, go figure.
You have a few limits here, you used to only be able to buy $1,000 per day of these cards from CSV. Some say it is now $5,000 per day… You also have a $5,000 a month limit of reloads on the BueBird card. So don’t go crazy! You have 3 months to meet your spend, spread it out.
My first day I only got $450 to make sure this worked. The second day I went back and bought two cards at $495 each. So in two days I had already done about $1,500 of my $3,000 target spend.
Step 4 – Reload the BlueBird
Success you have a Vanilla Reload in hand now to do something with it. Head over to VanillaReload.com and scratch the back off your card. In the top left there is a “Apply Your Reload” option. Enter the code from the back of your card here and press continue.
On the next page is asks where you want to apply your reload. On this page enter the 15 digit number off of the front of your BlueBird card. Double and triple check you have the right number! Check the accept box and continue.
On the next page confirm you are sure to apply it and continue. You should now be at a success page that says your reload has been applied.
If you now sign on to your BlueBird account you can see you have been credited the $495 dollars.
Short Recap So Far
So here is what we have now done.
- We signed up for a prepaid card that will allow us to pay bills online or transfer money into our normal bank account.
- We signed up for a new credit card that will give us a ton of miles for meeting a certain minimum spend in a given time frame.
- We used this credit card to purchase a Vanilla Reload card from CVS, Walgreens, or wherever we could find one.
- We went to VanillaReload.com and deposited the reload card into our BlueBird Account.
Step 5 – Paying the Credit Card
Now that we have money in our BlueBird account we can use it to do a whole bunch of things.
You can use the ‘Pay a Bill’ option and use that to pay your credit card.
You can get some BlueBird checks and pay the credit card that way. The checks were free and shipped free for me.
You can withdraw the money from BlueBird and just put it back into your normal bank account.
Use one of these three methods and pay off the credit card bill from step 2.
Step 6 – Repeat
The credit card is going to want you to spend anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 over three months. If you personally do not spend this much money then you use the technic I have outlined above to ‘Manufacture’ the spend. This is called MS or Manufacture Spending and is common among the mile sites and bloggers.
Try to use all of these cards as they want you to! You can’t just buy the reloads and only pay off card. That is going to raise some red flags. Use the cards to buy lunch, deposit random amounts into and out of the cards. Make it look as normal as possible. The idea is to artificially increase your normal spend not launder money though these cards. Pay other real bills with this method, pay your rent, or even your student loans.
Need to spend $3,000 over three months? Then once a week for 6 weeks buy a $495 card and follow the steps above. Buy more, buy less, do whatever you are comfortable with at first. Hell do multiple credit cards and CVS’s if you want. I have read about crazy people that buy $5,000 worth of cards at one CVS in one day!
The Dangers
Is this legal? Yes. There is no law against it. But that does not mean bluebird or the credit cards want you to do it.
Do people get caught or in trouble? Not that I have found. The worst I have seen is a letter from a credit card telling a guy to stop. But this guy had almost a MILLION miles racked up and had been doing it for years.
Be smart about things, go slow, and get comfortable with the process before you go crazy with it. Definitely not for the faint of heart! But if your normal monthly spend is $500 and you need to meet a $3,000 goal you could just do this 3 times and reach that spend! Think of it more as an assistant to reach a goal.
Other options.
This is just one method of meeting your minimum spend. There are tons of other things you can do and the mile experts are always finding new loopholes. Some people use Amazon Payments similar to paypal and send money to their friends and have them write checks. Some people get credit/debit cards and just reload from debit at a Walmart Money Center. There are lots of things you can try once you get this system set up for further research check out these other websites. FlyerTalk.com, ThePointsGuy.com, FrugalTravelGuy.com, or MillionMileSecrets.com
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