How to meet bonus spending requirements (Part 2)

This is the second of a 3-part series in which we will detail strategies you can use to meet credit card minimum spending requirements to get a sign-up bonus.

As a refresher, Part 1 is located here.

A few other strategies you can use which are not so obvious to most people, but also easy to do, are the following:

1. Overpay your insurance, cable, internet and phone bills, and use the credit over time. Alternative, you can simply overpay and ask the cable, insurance or telephone company to send you a check for the overage.
2. Buy holiday, birthday, and other presents ahead of time. Look at your friends and families’ birthdays and see who has one coming in the next few months, and buy their presents now. If it’s the summer, get your Christmas shopping started, save the gifts, and you won’t have to go through the hassle or the crazy lines during the holiday season. As an added bonus, you won’t be shopping with a deadline, and that will give you time to plan your purchases, coupons, special offers, shopping portal bonuses and implement other money-saving strategies.
3. Buy gift cards and use them over time. With this method, you’re hitting your spending requirement now, and using up the gift cards for your expenses later. Think of places you usually shop at for daily expenses, whether they are Walmart, Publix, Target, etc. Most of them sell gift cards. If you want even more flexibility, you can buy American Express gift cards, which can be used everywhere.
4. Buy “free-after-rebate” items. Freebie-depot.com has an ongoing list of items that you can buy and then apply for a rebate and get most or all of your money back. A great way to build up your spending while getting free stuff in the process, although it takes some discipline and patience filing for tracking all your rebates.

In the next and final post of the series we will share the final few tips that we use on a regular basis to build up our spending. Those tricks are typically used more by seasoned travel-hacking veterans, but they are the most exciting to execute.