Credit Card Churning
How I've Made Over $8,000 In Credit Card Signup Bonuses

I’ve earned over $14,000 in credit card rewards since I started tracking my cash back about 9 years ago, but more than half of that total, or $8,160, came specifically from credit card sign up bonuses:

Credit card sign up bonuses (also known as welcome bonuses) usually come with a spending requirement and time limit like spending $4,000 on your credit card within 90 days in order to obtain the bonus. These bonuses can really turbo charge your earnings because in some cases you can end up earning an imputed cash back rate as high as 23%¹ as opposed to a 2% cash back everyday rate for some of the better high-rewards credit cards.

There are a ton of credit cards with sign up bonus offers, but there are only a handful of credit card sign up bonuses that are worth it to me, which you can deduce from the table above. My absolute favorite right now for welcome bonuses is the Chase Sapphire Preferred credit card.

The strategy of repeatedly signing up for credit card bonuses is commonly referred to as credit card churning and can be quite lucrative when done right.

Some credit card issuers try to limit credit card churning by restricting how often any given individual can earn welcome bonuses. So since I can only apply so many times within a given time period for sign up bonuses using my and my lovely wife’s credit, I have family and friends that will periodically let me open up credit cards in their names which I just use, earn rewards, payoff and then close. Most people probably don’t have those additional options, but even without that extra assistance I believe the average financially responsible person can easily earn around $1,000/year in credit card bonuses by just churning a few high-bonus credit cards a year if they so choose.

This video is a little long but it contains a lot of great advice and warnings about credit card churning. I agree with the vast majority of what he says, but do take exception with a few things. Regardless, if you want to learn more about churning, this is a really nice video to help you learn some basics.

1. For example, taking the $905 bonus amount I earned from the Chase Sapphire Preferred card on 11/22/20 and dividing that by the $4,000 spending threshold (assuming you spent no more than the $4,000 required) would give you a 22.6% imputed cash back rate.