The Ultimate Guide to Manufactured Spending Methods (2024)
Updated April 21, 2024
Welcome to the party!
This is our definitive guide to manufactured spending methods, now updated with the latest info for 2024. This content is useful for both beginners and seasoned experts - we’ve included a variety of techniques not found anywhere else on the web.
If you’re not yet familiar with the incredibly profitable hobby that is manufactured spending, we suggest you start by reading our beginner’s guides to learn more.
All of these plays are viable and scalable, and to prove it, we are using all of them in our $100,000 manufactured spending challenge, where we share monthly posts with details on our churning progress. By applying these methods in that series, we have so far earned over $20,000 of value in just 4 months.
Most of the best manufactured spending methods are shared freely on this website. However, the most profitable and exclusive plays are limited to members of the Churner’s Lounge, to ensure that the plays do not go away anytime soon.
We’ve broken down our manufactured spending methods into the following 4 categories:
Funding financial accounts
Buyer’s Groups
Gift card liquidation
Miscellaneous plays
Funding financial accounts
Beginner Friendliness: 5/5, Scalability: 1/5, Spend Volume: 3/5
Good for: Visa Sign-up bonuses
Funding financial accounts directly via credit card is one of the simplest ways to get started with manufactured spending. With these types of methods, you typically open some kind of financial account, such as a checking/savings account or CD. Once you’ve opened the account, you will be offered the opportunity to initially fund the account using a credit/debit card with no fee, up to several thousand dollars!
The challenge with these methods lies in finding financial institutions that allow you to fund their accounts with credit card. Fortunately, we’ve done that research here for you, and provide a list of specific institutions you can leverage.
To see this play in action, check out our May update from our $100,000 spending challenge.
Buyer's Groups
Beginner Friendliness: 4/5, Scalability: 4/5, Spend Volume: 4/5
Good for: Getting large amounts of spend without ever leaving your house!
Buyer’s Groups are online resellers that will refund you for items that you ship to them. For example, you could purchase a Kindle on Amazon, which you directly ship to a Buyer’s Group warehouse. Upon receipt of that item, the group will refund your bank account with the exact amount of your purchase.
This is also a simple and beginner-friendly avenue for manufactured spending, which can be easily scaled to tens of thousands of dollars. To see this in action, check out our May update from our $100,000 spending challenge.
The main risk with shipping physical goods to a third-party is that a lot is out of your control. If a package gets lost, you may have to intermediate between the group, the seller, and the shipping company to find an agreeable arrangement. Fortunately, I have only experienced this one time, despite shipping over $20,000 worth of goods.
My preferred method here is to use Buyer’s Groups that purchase e-gift cards. With these types of groups, there is no actual shipping involved - you simply purchase the e-gift card online and type the card number into the group’s online portal.
Gift Card Liquidation
Beginner Friendliness: 2/5, Scalability: 4/5, Spend Volume: 5/5
Good for: Most reward plays can easily use these approach
Using gift cards to do manufactured spending is probably the most common method of doing MS. The process can essentially be summed up as the following: Purchase gift cards (typically Visa gift cards, or VGC) using your credit card and convert them back to cash.
For purchasing gift cards, I suggest you to read the following post, which should have all the info you need.
With regards to liquidation, there are several techniques out there, which I generally break into 3 categories:
Bill Pay Services
With these methods, you typically will use a service that allows you to pay a bill using a Visa gift card. These services maintain a list of billers that they are compatible with. Fortunately, this list often includes banks and credit accounts. Thus with these methods, you would be liquidating your gift card into your bank account, via the bill-pay service.
The primary services that support bill payment using gift cards are: Plastiq, PayPal, and Western Union.
The key challenge with these services is twofold. The first is to find a biller that is compatible with the bill payment service. The second is to slowly scale up your liquidation so that you don’t trip any flags and get your account banned.
Conversion into cash equivalent
With this set of methods, you will convert your Visa gift card into some intermediate form that can be immediately converted into cash.
The most popular method from this group are Money orders. Many locations (grocery stores, USPS, etc) will allow you to purchase a money order using a gift card. The money order can then be directly deposited into your checking account, much like a check.
Fund reloadable debit cards
There are a surprisingly large number of services that offer fee-free Visa debit cards, which you can load from another debit card. Now, you might be asking, “why would I want to just pass on money from one debit card to another?”
While Visa gift cards officially fall into the category of “debit cards”, they generally have more restrictions than real debit cards. Real debit cards will generally have your name printed on them, and can be used at pretty much any payment location offline and online.
On the other hand, Visa gift cards have more restrictions about how and where they can be used, which is what makes them so hard to liquidate.
By transferring the gift card amount onto a debit card registered in your name, you can: (a) pool funds from multiple gift cards into one card, and (b) liquidate them more easily. The liquidation itself is handled by any of the other methods described on this page.
Some interesting debit cards to keep an eye on are the: Walmart money card, Serve card, and more. Our most interesting cards are kept in our Churner’s Lounge.
Miscellaneous Methods
Here we list a whole bunch of one-off methods that don’t fit cleanly into the categories above.
Learn how you can fund a certificate of deposit account directly from your credit card to churn points!