Easy $75 Cash Back For Discover Cardholders

Discover 5% Cashback

While it is extremely rare that Discover ever gets a mention on any of the frequent flyer blogs, it is that one time of the year when Discover gets their 15 seconds of fame!

To the surprise of many, I am in fact a Discover Cardholder as I may or may not have signed up for a Discover Card in college because they were offering a free Subway footlong for signing up. It is hard to imagine why that practice was outlawed…

While I don’t ever actually use my Discover Card, the only reason I have kept it for all these years is that there is no annual fee and periodically they will offer fairly awesome quarterly 5% cashback promotions.

This is very similar to what Chase does with their Chase Freedom Card.

As you can see, for this quarter, you can get 5% cashback for any online shopping purchases (up to $1,500 in spending).

Typically these promotions are retailer or category specific but this quarter’s Discover promotion is fairly limitless since basically any purchase online should technically count as “online shopping”.

Anyways, I was curious as to what constitutes an online purchase because when Chase Freedom had their Q1 2013 Drugstore 5% cashback promotion, you could easily go buy $1,500 in Vanilla Reloads at CVS and earn 7,500 Ultimate Rewards which is exactly what I did.

Anyways someone on Twitter beat me to it and tweeted out that Amazon Payments was in fact posting as “online shopping” for Discover.

So last month, I did a $1,000 Amazon transfer to a friend and waited to see what happens.

Lo and behold, like clockwork my 5% cashback on my $1,000 Amazon “purchase” posted!

Since the cap on this promotion is $1,500 in spending, this month I did another $500 Amazon transfer and netted myself another $25.

In total, I should get $75 for making $1,500 in Amazon “purchases”. Not bad for literally 1 minute of work…

My Brother and Parents also both have Discover Cards, so I will probably do the same for them so they too can get $75 each!

Remember that Amazon only allows $1,000 in transfers each month, so if you want the full $75, you have to do a $1,000 transfer in November and another $500 in December.

Since there are people that will inevitably ask this in the comments section, I will just go ahead and pre-answer the question here.

Q: If I currently don’t have a Discover Card, should I signup for one to take advantage of this promotion?

A: NO! While this promotion is great if you are already a Cardholder, outside of these promotions, normally my Discover Card gets $0 of spend in a year because their cashback program is really bad and they don’t offer any frequent flyer miles or hotel points. In addition, Discover doesn’t offer a substantial sign on bonus that would make it worthwhile to get their cards to begin with so I would not recommend getting this card.

Recap

While my Discover Card rarely gets any use on a day to day basis, these types of 5% cashback bonuses are exact the reason why I still have a Discover Card, Chase Freedom, and will probably downgrade my AA cards to a similar Citibank Dividend Card in the near future.

While the above Cards don’t earn any miles or points (Chase Freedom being the exception) and thus most people write them off, by taking advantage of just 2 out of the 8 total quarterly promotions offered by Chase & Discover this year, I was able to get $75 & 7,500 UR Points for sending money via Amazon and buying Vanilla Reloads at CVS.

If you figured out a way to max out these 5% bonuses (up to $1,500 in spend) every quarter for both cards, you could potentially “earn” $300 (Discover) AND 30,000 Ultimate Rewards Points (Chase)!

So next time you think about closing your current credit cards, instead think about downgrading to some of the above cards. While they are far from “sexy”, they can easily make you $75+ each quarter for 1 minute of your time!

In this case, it literally pays to be a Discover cardholder…

-Parag

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