This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Can you make money reselling loyalty rewards or points? Some side hustles sound almost too good to be true. Take loyalty programs, for example. Now you're probably a member of several loyalty programs, if not a dozen or more. They're everywhere.
They can reward you for shopping you're already doing. You've got your frequent flyer miles. You've got all kinds of points from your local coffee shop, your grocery store, drug store, and so on. But can you turn them into a full-fledged income stream? Today's listener, Eli, is deep into the game.
He's wondering if he can go beyond personal perks and actually flip these points or rewards for profit. So let's explore whether this side hustle idea has real potential or if it is just a shiny internet myth. Or I guess it could be a myth of some other kind, but these days, most myths come from the internet. Can you profit by reselling loyalty points or rewards? Let's consider a couple of different ideas.
I'll do my best to give you something helpful, detailed question, and my answer right after this quick shout-out to our sponsor. [Music]
This might sound a little weird, but I'm kind of obsessed with loyalty programs at the moment. I've got like rewards stacked up across grocery stores, airlines, drug stores, you name it. Lately, I've been wondering, can you actually really make money off these programs beyond just saving a few bucks on personal purchases? I've seen stories online about people reselling rewards or flipping this kind of products for profit.
But I'm not sure if this is a real viable side hustle or is it one of those internet myths that sounds good on paper but never works in practice? [Music]
Eli, it's not that weird. Or if it is weird, there's a lot of other people who are also into this weird thing. And besides, in life, who's to say what's weird? Look at Reddit.
Look at Reddit for all things weird, but especially for this. Loyalty points, frequent flyer miles, everything about the whole loyalty industry. And I think Eli mentioned what? Drug stores, grocery stores, et cetera. There are all kinds of stories online about people monetizing loyalty rewards.
I will say it's a lot of work. Let's just be aware of that. It's a lot of work. There's not always a huge amount of profit, but a lot of people who are interested in this industry or this space, they partly do it because it's fun. So you've got people signing up for different credit cards.
You've got gift card resellers who buy discounted gift cards with rewards, flipping them, mileage brokers, which is kind of a gray market territory. People who are buying and selling airline miles or hotel points. That does come with some risks. Let's see what else. People who are buying gift cards and then cashing them out, just trying to like churn a lot of manufactured spend.
If you search on Reddit for manufactured spend, there's a whole subreddit of people who are basically trying to earn loyalty points by buying gift cards, cashing them out, et cetera. It's usually possible to do this on a pretty low level. The problem comes in when you try to scale it, like when you try to like cash out $50,000 worth of gift cards, then it just becomes kind of problematic over time. The gift card companies don't love it. Sometimes your bank has questions.
You end up getting accounts canceled and such, and it's like, is the risk worth the reward? Maybe you earned 50,000 points, but those points might be worth something like $500. How much work did you spend to make that $500? As I said, people who are into it, they partly do it just because it's fun. So it's not always like a strict ROI thing of like, well, I spent this many hours and this was my return on investment.
Just something to keep in mind that this is not the most sustainable business. It's more like a hobby kind of business. And I'm all about hobby kind of businesses, nothing wrong with that. Just understand that getting into it. So my first step would be go to Reddit and read up on this and get some ideas.
The people on these forums, they don't always talk in very clear language. There's like a coded language that kind of takes place because they don't want thousands of people to start using their strategies. Some people protect their information. But if you spend enough time there, you kind of figure it out. And it might lead you to some other communities where people are on Discord or more private settings sharing more openly.
That's where you go to get started. If you want to, listeners, let me know what you think. If you have a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Much more is coming out. New episodes out every day.
And of course an archive of more than 3,000 posts available for free streaming and downloading on the website. Thank you for joining me today. Take care of yourself out there. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
