Note: As of late 2017, the JetBlue component of this ONLY works if you are shopping Amazon on a JetBlue flight. The rest remains the same.
I love my Amazon Prime. Just about anything I want gets delivered to my door in 2 days with free shipping.
But what I love more is that I always get a minimum of 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent AND (when I remember to use the link) 3x JetBlue TrueBlue points for every dollar spent. How is this 11% + in cash back? Let me walk you through the steps.
- You’ll need a Chase Freedom credit card or similar card that rotates 5% quarterly cash back. You’ll also need a Chase Sapphire Reserve card.
- During the quarter of the year that Drugstores come up as the 5% bonus category, buy three $500 Amazon gift cards at a drug store (like CVS, Walgreens, etc). $1,500 is the max you can earn the 5x Ultimate Rewards on.
- (Alternatively, you could use a card that gets 5x at office supply stores, like a Chase Ink Cash, and do the same anytime using that card to buy Amazon gift cards.)
- Transfer those 7,500 points to your Chase Sapphire Reserve account where you can now transfer them or use at 1.5x on travel. (See what I did here? you earned 5X and you can redeem at 1.5X minimum, so it is 7.5% minimum effective cash back.)
- Deposit the gift cards into your Amazon account. You now never need to think about what card to use on Amazon because you are just depleting your gift card balance.
- When you want to make a purchase, start from the Amazon page on the TrueBlue site. You’ll earn 3 TrueBlue points per dollar spent. Valuing TrueBlue points at approximately 1.4 cents a point, this is an additional 4.2 cents in cashback.
7.5% Chase Ultimate Rewards + 4.2% TrueBlue = 11.7% in effective cashback. But wait, there’s more! If you are transferring Chase UR points to airlines or hotels, you can almost certainly do even better than this. 11.7% is just the baseline!
Happy shopping!
[…] via a mileage earning portal. You may have read my recent post about getting more than 11% in effective cash back at Amazon on every purchase. That’s pretty great, but there are many more ways than just […]