If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you should definitely know by now that I am a huge fan of sign-up bonuses. I have written about credit card sign-up bonuses, bank account sign-up bonuses, and also about free vacations that I’ve been able to obtain using the bonuses themselves. If you’re completely unfamiliar with these bonuses, I’d suggest starting with credit card bonuses as they as usually the easiest. I wrote about the basics of credit card bonuses in the past which should give you some background and information on how it all works.
I have spent the past 27 months (starting April 2015) aggressively pursuing sign-up bonuses to assist on my path to financial independence and to earn some free vacations and weekend trips. Since beginning I’ve kept a close record of everything I’ve signed up for including: bonus amount, spending requirement, how long the account has to be open, how to avoid fees on the account, date approved, and date closed. I transposed some of this information into an Excel document in order better visualize the pertinent information and to determine how much I had actually earned from these bonuses. The results were ridiculous and really surprised me!
Let’s go ahead and look at a couple of screen shots of the spread sheet and then I’ll discuss some of the specifics.
In total this is: 27 new credit cards and 23 new bank accounts opened in the past 27 months!
So from the totals at the bottom, you can see that in cash bonuses I made $5,800 plus a $650 cell phone credit which I also count as cash, which equals a total of $6,450. I included three credit card referral bonuses ($50) on the spreadsheet, but since those don’t actually count as sign-up bonuses, I’ll subtract them out. So that equals $6,300 total in cash earned. This is with fees that I paid already being subtracted out. You can also see that I earned a total of 915,000 miles/points and 4 free hotel nights. The $6,300 in cash shown here is obviously quite a bit less than the $11,000+ number I stated in the title, so where did the extra $5,000 come from? The extra money came from selling my Chase, Citi, and AMEX points for cash. This is not the ideal situation for most people as the cash value is significantly less than the value I could get for these points if redeemed for travel. The reason I did this is that my primary goal is reaching financial independence as soon as possible, and there is no way that I would have used all of those points on travel in the next several years. I’d rather have the cash now and earn more points for travel later that I will use primarily after financial independence in two years. Here is how much I got for the points after all fees:
- 250,000 Membership Rewards Points (AMEX): $3,262.45
- 97,000 Thank You Points (Citi): $1,106.64
- 80,000 Ultimate Rewards points (Chase): $1,116.35
- Total: $5,485.44
Now adding the $5,485 to the $6,300 earned in cash bonuses mentioned above, I end up with a staggering total of $11,785 in cash! You may notice that the amount of points I sold are actually more than the amount I got from the sign-up bonuses and the reason is that I earned additional points on the cards while meeting the spending requirements.
If that isn’t awesome enough, I’ve also used some of the airline and hotel miles as well as the 4 free hotel nights for some great stays including:
- 1 night in a suite at the Fairmont Copley Plaza in Boston.
- 1 night at the iconic Plaza Hotel in New York.
- 2 nights at the all-inclusive Hyatt Zilara Rose Hall in Jamaica. (We got an additional 2 nights from Whitney transferring some of her Chase UR points to Hyatt.)
- 2 nights at the all-inclusive Holiday Inn Resort Montego Bay in Jamaica.
- 2 Round trip flights from Charlotte, NC to Montego Bay, Jamaica on Southwest.
- 2 Round trip tickets from Charlotte, NC to Aruba on American Airlines. (Scheduled for December this year!)
- And many weekend trips where we spent a night in various (not as memorable) hotels using Hyatt, IHG, or Hilton points.
When all is said and done, it is safe to say that I’ve gotten/will get well over $25,000 in value from all of these sign-up bonuses. That’s over $10,000/year of additional TAX FREE income. How amazing is that??
If you haven’t started pursuing sign-up bonuses, I strongly encourage you do so ASAP. These bonuses can lead to serious value even if you don’t go as extreme as I have over the past two years. Feel free to reach out to me with questions or comments in the comments section below or the “contact me” section above! Thanks for reading!
***I want to give a huge shout out to the Doctor of Credit blog which played a major role for me in finding all of these bonuses. That is the site where I recommend that everyone start!
Fifth Wheel Physical Therapist 
Which ones do you think offer the most/quickest cash reward to start out with?
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I always recommend starting with the Chase Freedom or Discover IT for those that don’t have experience with sign-up bonuses. They are good cards to keep long term with no annual fees and bonuses that are easy to achieve. Check out the link at the top this post that says “credit card sign-up bonuses” for more information. The links to the cards in that post are also my referral links which I’d greatly appreciate you use if you decide to try them out!
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Hey Jerod,
Loved reading this post as I too love racking up points and benefits. But how much did you have to spend to accumulate all of these points?
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I never actually added it up but let me do it real quick. It comes out to $46,000 in minimum spending requirements. On the surface that seems like an insane amount and it definitely is but there are some secrets involved here. Many bank accounts will allow you to fund your accounts with certain credit cards which counts as spending on the credit card instead of a cash advance. $10,000 or so was probably from funding accounts in that manor and it basically allows you to kill two birds with one stone by funding a bank account for a bonus while simultaneously helping to meet a minimum spending requirement on a credit card. My monthly expenses are on average $1000-$1500/month (depending on the area of the country we are living in at the time) so around $1250 * 27 = $33,750 of my normal living expenses were put on cards that I was in the process of reaching the sign-up bonus. I also did some manufactured spending (google this if you’re unfamiliar) when I first started in order to meet some of the requirements.
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Very interesting. $34K over 27 months is not bad! Thanks for your insight!
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It can definitely be done. No problem!
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That sounds amazing! Good job with the excel sheet keeping you on track.
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Thanks for reading, Denzel! Keeping record of everything is key, otherwise it gets overwhelming very quickly.
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I enjoyed the article. I just started toying with this and I’m on my second credit card and third bank account getting bonuses. Question: do you close out the credit card accounts as soon as you get the cash bonus? Any suggestions on getting cash bonuses? That’s mainly what I’m focused on right now.
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I only close the card if it has an annual fee and even then I only close them after a year when the annual fee is due. I wouldn’t close it right away because of the impact on your average age of accounts. There are a lot of cash bonuses but don’t forget that you can sell almost any points and many times they are worth more than 1 cent per point so don’t pass up the big point bonuses just because you’re looking for cash mostly. Do a google search on selling points and you’ll see what I mean! Good luck!
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What website did you use to sell your points? Those redemptions seem really high compared to what I’ve seen looking into it.
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Hey, Jeremy! Send me a message in the “contact me” section and I’ll let you know which site I use. Since it’s a fairly grey area, I don’t want to put it out there for everyone
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How has this affected your credit score?
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My credit score was 780 when I started. The lowest it’s dropped was to around 750 when I was opening several cards per month but is currently at 768, it really isn’t a huge impact contrary that popular belief. The increased available credit helps to negate some of the decrease caused from the hard inquiries. Hope that helps!
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I’ve also been reading your income driven loan repayment posts and my question is, you’ve been able to maintain a pretty high credit score even though your loan balance is growing through the REPAYE program?
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Yeah my credit score really hasn’t changed much since I started on the income based repayment plan. Although my debt is growing, it really isn’t increasing very quickly due to the 50% capitalized interest being forgiven under the REPAYE plan combined with my small monthly payments.
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