Side Hustling Ep. 15: How a Credit Card Churning Hustle Turned into a Full-Time Income
Hey guys, back with you again for Side Hustle Tuesdays, Episode 15.
Today's Side Hustle is about a guy named Trevor who started reselling, not in an attempt to make a profit, but in an attempt to buy stuff, sell it at break even prices, and rack up credit card rewards points.
What I really like about today's hustle story is that it goes to show how something incredibly small time, can wind up turning into something much bigger. How a small time hustle can morph into a big income business.
Trevor started off reselling simply to rack up credit card rewards points, but along the way he became pretty good at sourcing products, he began to notice what sold well and what people wanted, he got a better idea of where to find details and got better at listing items on auction sites.
Before he knew it Treveor wasn't just racking up miles but actually turning a profit reselling.
Wow that's one of those things that sound obvious once you hear it. I'm gonna get my side hustle on now 😜
I'm seeing this more and more and have even done it myself. My mom racked up $2,500 real fast in credit card sign up bonuses. then a year later we did the same thing with some different cards.
Kirkland brand stuff from Costco sells real well on Amazon and eBay but I determined those to be basically break evens and they were trying to rack up the points. Seemed like the same thing.
Not sure if they still have it going but one of the best intro bonuses is the Chase Saphire Preferred, I forget the specifics but if you spend I think 3k in the first 90 days you get the equivalent of close to $500 worth or miles or travel bonuses.
Years ago I got in on the tail end of the US Mint Presidential coin churning hustle, wish I woudl have gotten in on it earlier.
Do you happen know if you get points for buying Bitcoins on Coinbase with a card and/or if they consider it a cash advance?
Yeah we busted out the Chase Saphire Preferred 4 times over! LOL. It was $500 for 3K of spending. That was a sweet one!
See I didn't know about that US Mint Presidentail Coin Churning Hustle until I saw it on your blog. That sounds like my kind of game! Hahahha.
There used to be another site where people could order anything online for Bitcoin via this service called Brawker.com. It was like Purse.io but it worked for any site on the Internet which was AWESOME. I would even fill orders to customers using it sometimes from other people's inventory. It is hard to explain how it worked. It is hard to explain the hustle my friend and I setup but it was kind of like the US Mint Hustle.
Basically there were 3 parties involved. The person wanting to buy BTC. The person wanting to trade BTC for a good online. And then there was the person selling the product who had no clue that BTC was being transacted as part of the deal. They were just some random person out on eBay or any other site. But in our hustle me and my friend knew each other but we would list a book on one of my websites for a large amount that no one else would buy. Then we would essentially sell the Bitcoin to the person on Brawker who would then use their credit card / paypal account to order the book and have it sent to the defined address.
So ultimately it was a way for people to buy BTC with a credit card or PayPal accounts without going through stuff like Coinbase and it was also a way to buy anything for BTC that was listed online. We would send the book media mail just the road so there was tracking proof. You could basically get 10% mark up on the BTC and the cost to us was a lot smaller to send the book through the mail and pay the PayPal fees. About the time we got that elite hustle started up Brawker decided to shut down. It was a huge let down for us for sure. We could have churned that like crazy and everyone would have been getting exactly what they wanted.
I have tried to figure out a way to do it with Purse.io but the issue is that it has to be on Amazon and basically you get killed with the fees on there so it doesn't create enough spread.
We need a churn baby churn thread on steemit!