How to Load PayPal Cash cards

Why Templates? gives you a set of valid reasons on why to use such templates or basic workflow diagrams on a day-to-day basis. To summarize, if you run out of big bonus spend cards (or soon enough you will), the world of category rewards aint so bad. You could make some decent money, though not as much as the 100k or 75k cards. But still, I think it makes sense to pursue this during lull times. The reason to use templates is to simplify your process and think less about which cards and where to spend. I just print them out and put it in my room or car. If you wanna go real agile (software programmers know what I am talking about), you could print it out and paste it in your study room or bed room. Trust me, it just frees up the mental resources down the line. These money loading business could quickly go out of hand with you not knowing where you loaded and how to verify it, which store to go and which card to put the spend on. The best way is to just write it down, the good old-fashioned way. Eventually, it will evolve to just a bunch of templates that you could be tweaking as these rewards structure, the way the prepaid cards are loaded and the credit card programs inevitably change.

Now that we have seen the Amex prepaid cards usage as intermediary, it is time to move on to other cards. One card that has often helped me meet the minimum spending requirements as well as the category bonuses is the PayPal cash card. The Paypal MyCash card is a form of prepaid card which can be bought from 7-Elevens mainly. Since Chase and Discover classify this as gas station, you are likely to get the 5% category bonus which in a given quarter, on a $1500 spend, amounts to $75 per card. That is not super much, again, but enough to go to that fancy restaurant and chug it all in, in a guiltless fashion :).

The PayPal MyCash card can be loaded immediately from the paypal.com/MyCash website. So it is very similar to the Vanilla Reload card network. There is a monthly load limit of $4000 which after years of bugs seems to have been fixed by PayPal (finally) in July 2014 where this limits resets at the start of calendar month.

The PayPal MyCash card costs $3.95 and is the least expensive card out there. And hopefully this card and 7-Eleven sticks around though many 7-Elevens accept only cash due to some abuse by over zealous spenders. It is an effective tool to meet minimum spending.

For category bonus, apart from Discover IT, Bank Amerirewards and Chase freedom, the Chase Ink+ or Chase Bold offer 2%.

Is it worth it or really any cost benefit analysis is there? At 2% its a bit difficult to justify. At 5%, it seems there are reasons to justify. There are some cards which offer 4% such as the USBank Flexperks, provided you use their redemption programs.

This is one of the main bread and butter programs for many including myself. This method gives decent payout. You are coming out ahead with 40 bucks after spending $1000 on the 5% category cards. So that is $160 when you are in full flow. With Bank of America cards, that is 3% instant cash back. Still that is decent enough reward points. Who would not like $80 after expenses per month for other stuff? It is like fun money or charity money or just restaurant money to try out new stuff.

Like in all other programs, use this one too with discretion and don't get shut down by PayPal or 7-Elevens. As long as you buy something and pay bills, you are using other services and hence would be in good standing with these companies.