Making Spare Time Productive!
It’s easy to see the disadvantages in a situation like ours, in being unemployed. Be, in fact, it’s possible to be very productive with your time when you have plenty of it. For example, in the past few weeks, I have been spending my time studying loyalty and reward schemes.
For example: I have found that it is quite easy to save enough BAMiles (British Airways Miles) to get two return Club Class (Business Class) tickets to the United States, Mexico or Canada inside three years!
How? Three easy steps:
1) Get a British Airways American Express Premium Plus Card
2) Join Tesco Clubcard
3) Order your grocery shopping online. This is so you can use special vouchers that give you 500/750/1000 bonus points for a £50/75 shop. (These can only be used online.)
Now! In more detail:
1) Apply for an American Express BA Premium Plus Card. These earn 1.5 miles for every pound spent. But even more importantly, if you spend £10,000 inside one year, they give you a free companion ticket, allowing you to take someone else with you for free, doubling it’s value!
2) The annual fee for this card is £120 per year. However, if you have an existing American Express credit card (which costs nothing), this drops to only £30 a year.
3) Join Tesco Clubcard to earn Points every time you shop for groceries at Tesco. Order them online to be delivered, and you can then take advantage of all the ‘get 500/750 points free for a £50 order’ codes that are out there, and it is possible to make 10,000 Clubcard points a year.
3) Convert the Clubcard Points into BAMiles. Each Clubcard point is worth 2.4 BAMiles, so those 10,000 Clubcard Points become 24,000 BAMiles. Plus another 6,000 from just the ’normal’ (non-bonus) points to make that 30,000 BAMiles a year.
4) Add this to the 12,000 BA Miles you earned through putting all your expenses onto the Amex BA credit card. (Based on a typical £8,000 a year normal spend).
5) In your third year, or whenever you’re getting close to your BAMiles target points, bump your card spending to £10,000, or else use Paypal and to ‘charge’ your card the difference between what you have spent that year versus the £10k you need to spend (e.g. £2000 in the £8000 example). Then withdraw the money back to your own bank account. (Total cost: about £70 in PayPal fees.)
6) The above step will take your spending for the year to £10k, entitling you to a FREE Companion Ticket!
7) You now have around 160,000 BAMiles. Go to BA Miles website, and redeem this for a Club Class Ticket to USA/Mexico, then use your free Companion Ticket to take your wife/husband/Significant Other with you!
8) You are now on your way to a FREE Business Class trip to US/Mexico/Canada!
If I had been working, I would not have had the time to do all this research!! But I am so glad I did, as now I will be able to save tens of thousands of pounds over my lifetime taking advantage of this!
So, being unemployed might have COST me a thousand pounds or so in savings, but I’ve GAINED several tens of thousands of pounds in savings, through the research I did in that time. A GREAT investment, I would say!
Unemployment Made Productive: That’s The Buddhist Way! XD