Earn $1,000 For A Few Hours of Work

My friend and his wife each recently cashed out $500+ cash-back checks from Chase Sapphire for a total of just over $1,000 for opening 2 credit cards and just a few hours of work.

In February 2012, my friend and his wife each applied for a Chase Sapphire Credit Card with 50,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards bonus points promotion after you spent $3,000 on the card in 3 months. Chase Ultimate Rewards are worth $0.01 per point for cash rewards so 50,000 points are worth $500. It easy to request a rewards check via their web site or you can apply the points to travel purchases for further bonuses, but these days people are opting for cash if they don't have near term travel plans.

How to Increase Spend for Credit Card Offers? While your monthly expenses could be a couple grand per month, its difficult to effectively target all your spend on the right credit cards to make sure people meet the spending requirements. They successfully used Amazon Payments to spend $1,000/mo on each credit card in round trip transactions. His wife would transfer $1,000 to him from her credit card and then he would do the same from his credit card. It worked out well with two of them doing it at the same time to effectively pass transfers back and forth. 

Does It Damage Their Credit Score? My friend's wife was initially resistant to the idea as she was concerned about hurting her credit score. It took repeated attempts and a little negotiation on my friend's part to convince her to try it with this rare opportunity. After all he has been taking advantage of credit card balance transfer and promotions for over a decade with no permanent impact to his credit score.  


How Much Time Involved? Here are some estimates of the time involved in this for each credit card promotion:

• 20 min to open the credit card online

• 10 min to perform two $500 transfers on Amazon Payments in Month 1

• 10 min to enroll account online and setup automatic payments

• 10 min to perform two $500 transfers on Amazon Payments in Month 2

• 10 min to perform two $500 transfers on Amazon Payments in Month 3

• 30 min to cancel the credit card before 1 year anniversary to avoid annual fee

So it took about roughly 2 hours worth of work to earn each $500+ bonus, or effectively $250+/hr. I'm thinking this has to be close to some of the easiest money they have ever made or at least at a minimum one of the highest returns for time/life energy they've found.