1,000,546 points earned!
Background: Million Mile Madness is the fun and foolish quest to earn a million points in one month. Throughout March, I’m doing everything I can to earn as many points as I can while keeping within my ethical boundaries. I don’t expect that a million points will have been credited to my account by March 31st: points often take quite a while to get credited. Instead, I’ll track all of the points that I expect, and I’ll declare victory if the expected total is over a million. To keep things challenging, I will try to keep my net costs below $1,000.
All points earned and expenses incurred are tracked via this Google Docs spreadsheet. See all Million Mile Madness posts (in reverse order), by clicking here.
Success!!!!!
At about 3PM Sunday afternoon, March 31, I was less than 2000 points away from my goal. So, I cranked up Kivalens, and made enough loans to get to a million points & miles, and to hopefully do some good! For details about Kivalens, see “Minimum spend requirements? Kivalens to the rescue.”
So, I made it to an expected million points, but did I keep the budget to under $1000 in net costs? I believe so. In fact, right now, it looks as if I may end up with a small profit. It will be quite a while until I know for sure, though, since I have yet to sell everything bought for resale. Of the items that I’ve started to sell, most are selling quickly and at a profit.
Now I can finally take a break! I’ll follow up later this week with information about how I did this, what types of points & miles I earned, thoughts about what I’ll do with those points, and more. See you in April!
Learn about Million Mile Madness:
- A crazy million mile idea. Should I do it?
- Million Mile Madness, it’s on
- Million Mile Madness: Strategy
- Million Mile Madness: Preparing to buy & sell
- Million Mile Madness: Tracking points and expenses
- Million Mile Madness: The big churn story
- Million Mile Madness: buying, selling Kohl’s
- Million Mile Madness: Banking on Lowe’s
- Million Mile Madness: A setback from Sears
- Million Mile Madness: Pending Success
- Million Mile Madness: Bumps in the road
- Million Mile Madness: Credit scores and pulls
- Million Mile Madness: Easy points
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[…] This is really the best of times in earning miles and points. We have Vanilla Reload cards in plenty of CVS drug stores. Yes, sometimes you get the odd cashier or manager who refuses to let you buy them with a miles/points earning credit card. And some people still abuse this by buying too many cards at a time and then some true junkies hide the cards in ever more innovative spots (behind Facebook gift cards, really?). We can then load the Bluebird accounts up to $5k per month and pay our credit card bills with it. Or pay ourselves or get cash from ATMs. Or go to WalMart and do more things there. There are still plenty of other prepaid cards, from Paypal to AMEX prepaid to Target AMEX and a dizzying array of Vanilla type cards on the shelves. We now have regular gift cards that come with a PIN with detailed instructions and pics/arrows! We even have some debit cards still around that work like magic (Sun Trust Delta, my vanilla debit). Mortgage payments, check! Student loan payments, check! Estimated tax payments, check! We can pay the odd vendor who does not accept credit cards with a Bluebird check or have Bluebird send a check directly…the floodgates are open! Amazon’s Bezos strangely still allows us to use Amazon Payments for $1k per month! You can up the spening in a big way by buying and selling stuff if you are into that kind of thing (and can keep track of all of it!). It is not the amazing 5x Office Depot/VR/BB angle but still, my point is, the issue of meeting minimum spend requirements on a new credit card is NO LONGER an issue! If you have the time you can also say that hitting the spend requirements on several cards to earn MQMs (Delta cards), companion tickets (British Airways Visa), elite levels (Hilton Diamond with $40k in Hilton Amex Surpass), several spending threshold amounts in several cards, etc is also NO LONGER an issue! I think the only way to spend money (manufactured or not) and not earn miles/points is to invest in a 401k through your employer! (Anyone?) It is a miles/points earning nirvana. It is how you get Frequent Miler to earn 1 million points in a single month and not sweat about it. […]
[…] Million Mile Madness: Success!!!!! […]
Congratulations!
Congratulations! I’m looking forward to seeing what items you purchased from Kohl’s and put on Amazon. Kohl’s is definitely overpriced, but I’m thinking with the 30% discount and Kohl’s cash, you got some decent deals 🙂
@newbiee008, no I’m putting the question out there to see if others think it’s possible to duplicate the results continuously.
You should go for 2 million 🙂 Nicely done.
Great stuff. No wonder I follow all your posts. Happy Easter Greg!
congratulations!
@Wedding Spend: So you say that one should apply and approve for 11 new CCs every month of the year?!! Just to remind you, half of these points came from CC sign ups!
Congrats, as many others said, never doubted you for a second. Now the real question is can this be duplicated 11 times in a year? If so, let’s ignore the fact that some of the points are airlines points and some are hotel points and value them all at 1c each. If this can be duplicated for every month, your annual salary from earning points alone would be $120k.
So well done Greg! What an amazing accomplishment. You are, again, a legend in our little community! – Rene
@Robert I agree, loading bluebird from vanilla reloads is limited to 5k/month, so I don’t know how he could have spend $9k on that
Congratulations! It takes me all year to earn that many points. Your next post can be about how to spend all of those points.
Congratulations!
Congrats on the achievement! A million miles/points is a LOT, no matter how you slice it. Looking forward to your future posts to see some more analysis and discussion how you got there.