I recently explained how to use Amazon Payments to meet minimum spending requirements or increase your spending on credit cards in part 1 of my series on manufactured spending.  In part 2, I’ll walk you through using Vanilla Reload Cards and a Bluebird Account in order to exponentially increase your spending activity.  If you haven’t already opened a credit card to earn miles, do so.  For some large sign up bonuses, I recommend the British Airways or American Airlines credit cards.  If you feel comfortable getting both, you could very quickly amass over 150,000 miles in your coffers.

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Many credit cards offer large, attractive amounts of bonus miles on new accounts after spending a minimum amount of money within a certain period of time.  The amounts vary: sometimes they are as low as $2,000 or $3,000 but as high as $20,000.  The timeframe in which you must spend this amount is typically 3 months but it can be as long as the first year of account ownership.  To meet the minimum spending requirements (or just plain increase the amount of miles or points that you earn) on credit cards like the recent American Airlines or British Airways offers, there are some ways that you can achieve this without having to spend much or any of your own money.  This practice is known through blogs and various forums as “manufactured spending” and I’ll describe two of the easiest and most common methods in a posting today and tomorrow.  As with anything, moderation will be the key to your success. Continue reading…