ChiefNWA

Hey all,

Just got the SPG Business card a few days ago and have to spend $8,000 to receive the 35K point bonus. My mother is getting a new roof soon so I was thinking of just putting that on the card and eating the fee since I don't come close to 8K in spend normally.

The merchant charges 3.19% for Visa/Mastercard and 3.49% for Amex/Discover. I could go through their 3rd party pay system and pay that. My other choice is to send money to my mother via Paypal and pay the lesser fee. My question is, do Paypal transfers like that post as a purchase and will an $8K transfer via Paypal raise redflags with Amex?

romania2007

do you pay rent or mortgage? using plastiq or similar service will cost less than paypal. Also prepaying insurance/ other bills is also an option.

Will the merchant accept gift cards or money order? If yes, then you can reduce the fee by significant amount.

acarney

I would caution the gift cards, I'm fairly certain there have been reports of Amex watching/looking for gift card purchases within that initial spend window and clawing back rewards.

Plastiq seems to be more under the radar for them so that might be an option... Plastiq might actually be an option to pay the builder, though you might need to submit an invoice or something to Plastiq so they see you're actually covering a service and not trying to pay your buddy or something.

With that said, Plastiq can take a LONG time at times... like 20+ days, so.... you might want to get the ball rolling long before the builder heads out to the house to start work.

Edit: Also, if you haven't done so yet, you can pay your taxes/your mom's taxes with the card.

dinanm3atl

Taxes are coming up. Charge it and pay it off. Should get a lot of spend.

I assume PLASTIQ shall be good to go. Bill pay service should count as a 'purchase'.

Gig103

Prepaying recurring bills, now that's clever.

romania2007

Would Amex know even if he buys gift cards from places like cvs, walgreens?

acarney

Possibly, I don't have first hand experience of this but I've seen some posts here that claim Amex gets very detailed purchase information and can see basically the same information that is on your receipt... at least from select merchants. They're also one of the few that I think specifically call out gift card purchases can not be counted toward initial sign up offers. At least I think I've seen that in their terms of service...

You can always go for it and see if it works, you'll probably have better luck if it's peppered in with normal spend, but if you HAVE to have those points, or if that's the ONLY reason you got the card, I wouldn't risk it. Go check the manufactured spend section and look at Amex cards... there's a bunch of people suggesting the only way to be safe getting sign up bonuses are through real organic spend.