Automate Your BankAmericard Better Balance Reward Monthly Purchase

October 8, 2014
/ Credit Cards Manufactured Spending Tips
/ 5 COMMENTS

Disclaimer: This website is monetized by ads and other affiliates. As such, this article may contain affiliate links. If you decide to use them, you can sleep easier knowing you're helping me give my cats a better life. :) I really appreciate your support!

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:

Login to Paypal.
Sign-up for a Paypal business account, if you don’t already have one.
Go to “Tools” and select “Recurring Payments”.
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.
Select “Save Changes”.
Select “Email”, copy the URL that generates and go to it in an incognito browser.
Sign-up for the recurring payments with a new Paypal account and let it do its thing.