Automate Your BankAmericard Better Balance Reward Monthly Purchase

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BankAmericard® Better Balance Rewards™ credit card from Bank of America

As Doctor of Credit mentioned last week, the BankAmericard Better Balance Rewards credit card is the best no annual fee card you can convert a Bank of America card to.

Here’s why:

  • There’s no annual fee, so there’s no cost to keep it.
  • It can earn you an easy $100-$120 per year.
  • It requires very little of your time to earn the $100+.
  • It has the underwear factor.
  • Why not? If you have a Bank of America card sitting in your sock drawer, you might as well convert it and make use of it again.

The reward structure is a little different on this card, compared to most rewards cards. It works like this, if you pay more than your minimum payment (or in full if the balance is under $25) every month per quarter, you will receive $25 as a statement credit ($30 if you have a Bank of America checking account). The trick is to make a small purchase and pay it off every month to get the bonus. So, if you have this card or plan to convert it, here are a few ways to accomplish that goal.

Quick Note: I would not suggest anyone sign-up for this card. I only advise that you convert a card you are not using to this one. There are many better cards worthy of a hard inquiry.

Quick Methods

There are many ways to hit transaction requirements, so I will just mention a few here.

Amazon Register

If you sign-up for Amazon Register before 10/31/14, all swipes are 1.75%. The lowest denomination per swipe is $1.00, so you would be looking at about $0.02 in fees per month with this method. This is not automated, but it would realistically only take about 1-2 minutes per month. This method works for pretty much any mobile payment system.

Amazon Gift Cards

Amazon gift cards can be bought for $0.50. That’s not as good as it used to be ($0.15), but if you shop on Amazon as much as I do, this is worth doing. This is also a no fee option, if that’s important to you.

Bill Payments

Many billers let you pay with a credit card and often times any amount can be paid. For example, my electricity bill can be paid with a credit card and I can pay as low as $0.10 per transaction.

Automated Methods

The automated methods listed below are somewhat time consuming to set up and they have the most fees, but they are also automated which makes life a little easier.

Selenium

Selenium is a program that is able to record and play a set of steps you input into a browser. For example, if you wanted to login to Facebook enter a specific status then log out, Selenium could record that and replay it. In other words, you would have a status posted hundreds of times in a row by using that sequence. That example would be very annoying to your Facebook friends, so I don’t suggest doing it. This is a browser extension, that I think works best in Firefox. I use Selenium to automate Amazon gift card purchases, but you could use it for any of the above methods.

Amazon Subscribe & Save

You can subscribe & save to many different items on Amazon. If you subscribe in 1 month intervals, you will have a monthly charge completely automated. I suggest you subscribe to an item you will actually use, but if you want a few cheap ideas, here are a few commonly under $3:

Paypal

If you have a Paypal business account you can set up recurring payments for as low as $1.00. There is a $0.30 + 3% fee ($0.33), so it’s expensive compared to the above options, but you can set it and forget it. Here’s how you set it up:

  1. Login to Paypal.
  2. Sign-up for a Paypal business account, if you don’t already have one.
  3. Go to “Tools” and select “Recurring Payments”.
  4. Select “Create a Subscription button” and set it up as shown below. Basically this sets up the Subscription button to charge the “customer” $1 every month.
    Create a PayPal payment button - PayPal
  5. Select “Save Changes”.
  6. Select “Email”, copy the URL that generates and go to it in an incognito browser.
  7. Sign-up for the recurring payments with a new Paypal account and let it do its thing.

If you have any ideas not mentioned above, I’d love to hear them!

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