You Can Make Money From Credit Card Offers If You Are Careful

How’s Your Credit Look?

You should always ask yourself, do you have the credit for this card? A lot of these limited time offers are for top of the line products which require a good to great credit score. For example, you might be tempted by the 40,000 point bonus on the Chase Sapphire Preferred, but if you’re just starting to establish credit, the Chase Freedom card would probably be a better fit. And even though the Freedom card normally comes with a $100 bonus, you can wait for a higher offer with that card too. It’s been known to go as high as $250 during promotional periods. This is one way to make money from credit card offers – choosing the right offer at the right time!

Give Yourself the Best Chance to Get Approved

Did you know that you can actually manipulate certain parts of your credit score? Here is one of the most important credit card utilization tips: pay off all your balances a couple weeks before applying for a card. This will lower your overall utilization rate and give a temporary boost to your score. Doing this can allow you to make money from credit card offers by picking offers for balance transfers and opening new cards. You aren’t going to get rich off of such offers, but you can make a couple hundred bucks here and there!

Can You Meet The Terms of the Card?

Limited time offers can give your points and miles balances a nice boost but you also need to ensure that you can meet the terms of the offer. Some limited time offers will give you more points but they’ll also require you to spend more money to get the bonus offer. One way to spend more money without actually spending it is through manufactured spending techniques.

Either way, make sure that you don’t get too excited by the bonus points and forget to read through the terms of the card. It would be a shame to apply for a limited time offer but not be able to hit the spend requirement.

Limited Time Offers Can Help With Annual Fees

I don’t normally like paying annual fees but if there’s a card with a limited time offer, those extra points could offset that fee. A recent example of that would be the Citi Executive Advantage card. The standard offer comes with 50,000 bonus miles when you sign-up but there is also a hefty $450 annual fee.

Normally, I wouldn’t even consider paying that high of a fee but when they bumped their offer up to 100,000 points, the extra 50,000 points made up for that fee and then some. I actually liked the card so much, I ended up applying for one for my wife too.

To Make Money from Credit Card Offers You have to Get Cards Before They’re Gone

Another example of a great limited time offer is the Barclaycard US Airways card. The current sign up bonus is 40,000 points but since US Airways and American Airlines will be merging in 2015, there are only a few months left to apply for this card. We aren’t sure exactly when this card will be going off the market but since American Airlines has an exclusive partnership with Citi, new cardholders won’t be able to get this card once the merger is complete so you should apply now before it goes away.