Good Idea or Waste of Time?

So, do you think this is a good idea or waste of time? A summary:

• Order $250 or $500 in presidential dollar coins.
• Pay with your cash rewards credit card.
• Deposit the money at your bank.
• Pay your credit card bill with the money at your bank.
• Get your cashback from your credit card.

For those of you wondering, there's no shipping charges (it's supposedly taken off on the final, confirmation screen), so there are no additional costs.

My question: is it worth the time and effort or is this way of making money too much hassle for too little reward?

Comments

[Ed]

I will do it if you do it. Sounds like a plan... but you are really making much on the deal. Being that you can get 2 orders of each president... I think I would have to at least do a 10K order for it to be worth my time.

[MonkeyMonk]

I'd say waste of time unless you're able to do a really big shipment w/ little to no risk.

[Jim]

To make your $2.50 in rewards from a $250 order, you're charging much higher credit card merchant fees and shipping fees to the U.S. Mint. It's not illegal, but morally speaking I think it's dangerously close to ripping off Caesar. Personally, I plan to order them, but that's because I plan on circulating them, which is the stated intent of their free shipping program.

[Jim]

Seems a little too 'gimmicky' to me. I think theres better more honest ways to make a buck.

I think most rewards would get 1% back on this as a general purchase. SO that is $2.50 or $5.00 rewards. You can't deposit 250 coins in an ATM so you'd have to go and stand in line and do it in person. I'm not sure that the trip to the bank is worth $2.5 or $5. I guess it depends on what your time is worth.

I'd be concerned about how fast you get the order from the mint. Its not going to be shipped fast and they might end up with a backlog and a few days to process etc. You might have to pay your CC bill out of pocket before you get the coins.

Jim

[MasterPo]

IMO the coins are just a gimmic for the mint. They will have no real value in the future.

However, the concept I agree with. I do that right now. I have a Costco Amex that I get a rebate check for Costco at the end of the year. I charge as much as I can of daily expenses on the card and transfer the cash from the checking account to a high(er) yield savings account. When the bill comes I have the money to pay it off in full plus a bit of interest.

I'm hoping for a very large rebate this year. That will be the test if the effort is worth it going forward.

[Randy Peterman]

Ha ha! That reminds me of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFCjppyOkS0
Paying for things with pennies.

[Bad_Brad]

Even at a pretty juicy rewards rate of, say, 5% (which you wouldn't get - it would be more like 1% or 1.5%), the reward of buying $500 worth of coins and doing this little trick is a whopping $25. If it's worth $25 to you to place the order, receive the order, then go to the bank and deposit the coins. As for me, my time is more valuable than that.

[Kevin]

Waste of time for a $2.50 reward. You could probably walk around the block and find that much in change.

Speaking of, I found $20 on our morning walk last weekend. Paid for our coffee we were on the way to get.

[bettis]

i vote 'waste of time'. i believe you could use that time & energy towards something more profitable. heck, if you could use that energy to cook dinner one evening, as apposed to dining out, and make up the difference.

[a]

This would drive me insane, but I have a friend who would be all over this. So I'm going to have to say that it probably depends on the person.

[Jaime]

I think it is not correct morally speaking. But I am very surprise with the comments about "waste of time". I am from Mexico, and over there the minimum wage for an 8-hour day is 45 pesos (4 dollars for an entire day). It is amazing the difference between these two neighbor countries.

[Uncommonadvice]

Sounds like a lot of hassle

[BLU]

Waste of time - especially if there are shipping costs.

[Dan]

I've done this deal myself, and there are no shipping charges. So far, between my wife and I, we've ordered $7,500 worth of coins of the 6 or so presidents they've released so far. If you time the order just right, you get the money in your account for almost 2 months before you have to pay it on your credit card bill. I put the money in our "extreme checking account earning 5% interest. Between that and our 1% cash back we made more than $106. Just think how much it'll be if I keep doing this for every president. The only hassle was taking the boxes of coins down to the bank. It was worth it though, just to see the look on the tellers faces. I've certainly done more work for less money. The beauty of it is I don't have to put any of my money up front. For all these bank bonuses and such, I have to put $50 to $1000 of my own money, and leave it for as long as 6 months for just $100. Here, I get $100 for nothing. It's all good.

[Online Dividends]

I think that the best way to do this trick is to open a 0% intro cash back APR credit card for as long as possbile -12-18 months. Then you order as much as possible in coins and you will earn a double reward - 1% cash back plus interest for several months to one year.

Online Dividends

[asithi]

Will do it when I was a college student. Had free time then. Now, I rather spend my time walking around the neighborhood working on my health (and maybe picking up change). That is too much effort to make so little in return for me.

[Hank]

This sounds like a new weird version of arbitrage. Banks and other institutions have to use computer systems to trade in high volumes to make any real money. Sounds like a waste of time to me, but an interesting idea nevertheless.

[Josh]

Onlline Dividends is the only person who understands the way to do this deal. If you are doing it for cashback on a card only it is a waste of time. When you couple this with a 0%-no fee balance transfer on a credit card and deposit the funds into a high yield savings/checking account- then it is a worthwhile scheme.

[mbhunter]

I can see the banks getting sick of this in a hurry, and then they'll start charging to accept the coins.

Or, the Mint will just stop shipping them for free.

I get them a few rolls at a time, spend them, and look for errors as I go along.

[MelMoitzen]

To me, it's a no-brainer to buy and circulate them, but IMHO you really don't have to go through the extra trouble of depositing them since you're going to be spending that amount in cash anyway. Every dollar you circulate is a dollar in cash you're not drawing out through an ATM, so that money remains in your account drawing interest.

The extra month or two in interest you might yield at 3%/year by rushing the coins to the bank is probably negligible compared to the instant 1-2% return you'll yield as a rebate on their purchase. And if you need to make a special trip to the bank to deposit them, you'll probably burn up the potential extra earned interest in gasoline.

And you risk ticking off the personnel at your branch (you never know when you'll need a special favor from them) and putting this program in jeopardy if this is done on a large-enough scale.

The point is--use the coins as the program intends for you to use them, the dollar coin REALLY is a great idea and everyone wins by using it in the long run. Get a good rewards rebate card, and consider that 1-2% to be your commission earned for promoting this program by spreading the word about the coins.

I've bought $1,000, and that supply should last for about 3 months as our standard method of payment for expenses under $5, tips, etc.

[Lynn]

This sounds like a fun idea! :) I work at the bank so transportation there isn't an issue for me. :)

[BA]

Tell me where else you could earn 1% on a $500 investment for a 30-day period.
Annual ROI is 12%.