Home Remodel for Holidays Yields ~13,500 Points

My wife has been on a 'get new carpet & flooring' kick for quite some time. I have cycled through my excuses reasons multiple times the past few years on why we should wait to undertake this project. However, in November I realized I should step up and lead this project before I came home and found I was watching entirely from the sidelines (see: wife is buying on impulse).

Selecting carpet, tile and flooring that made our home attractive (see: keep wife happy) was my primary goal. Being a points enthusiast also meant I simply couldn't let this opportunity pass by without seeing what I could accomplish. Now, had all decisions been up to me I am confident I could have increased the accumulation of points and miles. I was, however, stuck in that no man's land of waiting on crucial decisions for shades of paint. . . .and tons of carpet board samples . . . and input from third parties . . . but I digress.

I determined on the front end I would buy materials only from sources I can reorder from; so no close-outs, discontinued colors, etc. And except for laying the carpet, some family members and I performed all the work.

Within this framework I formulated the following strategy to accumulate miles & points for as few dollars as possible.

- Use available American Express sync offers for Lowes.
A new offer came out in early November for spend $50 and receive $10 statement credit. I bought seven $50 Lowes gift cards. This gave me a 20% discount on $350 worth of materials purchases.

- Buy Lowes gift cards at Kroger when offering 4X Fuel Rewards.
Kroger offered 4X fuel rewards at an opportune time. I purchased ten $50 Lowe's gift cards from Kroger. If you are familiar with their fuel rewards program you will see how I saved $70. This gave me a 14% discount on another $500 worth of materials.

- Shop through shopping portals.
November is a GREAT month for online shopping. American, United, Southwest and Delta all had cumulative spend bonuses leading up to Thanksgiving. I kept track of my online shopping amounts through each portal and would spend just enough to clear a spend level. For example, Southwest offered bonuses of 500 for $150, 1000 for $500 and 3000 for $1000. So here, once I cleared $1000 total spend I moved on to different shopping portal.

- Use the MileagePlusX app.
There is no way that I could figure out to order carpet or custom order paint online and utilize shopping portals. I would have to make these purchases at the store. I could, however, pay for these purchases in store with instant electronic gift cards from MileagePlus X app. Additionally, by purchasing these items in store I was able to save 15% on paint purchases being a Lowes for Pros member and received an additional 5% off the carpet installation AND take of advantage of their free carpet installation promotion.

Now it's March and the shopping portal points and bonuses have posted. Our remodel earned the following points & miles.
(Keep in mind other holiday spending was interspersed in the shopping portals so I had to apportion the amount of cumulative spend bonuses to the dollars spent for the remodeling purchases.)

-Southwest Rapid Rewards.           5,738
-American Airline miles.               1,022
-Delta Skymiles.                               185
-United miles.                                2,086
- AmEx Membership Rewards.     4,338
-Starwood points.                             100

Total.                                             13,469

Our remodeling bill from Lowes was $2738.01. Remove $70 for AmEx credits and $70 for Kroger fuel savings and our final total was $2598.01. Considering the square footage of new flooring, new carpet, rooms repainted and new tile around fire place I am satisfied with the price.

Ways I could have made the deal better:

- I should have added the AmEx sync offers to all of our AmEx cards. Sync offers can be added to authorized user cards as well as primary cards. When the offer first came out I added the offer to some cards but when I got around to adding to the others the offer was no longer available.

- I could have purchased another $500 in Lowes gift cards at Kroger. This would have been another 14% savings on $500 spend. There was time to realize another $70 saved before fuel points were lost. However, the timing didn't work out. While my wife was waiting for some of that crucial 3rd party input on carpet the 4X offer ended. I sure didn't want to have money tied up in Lowes cards I didn't immediately need.

-I could have applied for a Lowes Consumer Credit Card for 5% off. This would have helped on $1888.01 of my spend. However, this would have required another hard credit pull and I'm looking to get back under the Chase 5/24 rule in early 2017.

- I could have had my Mileage Plus X app linked to a more rewarding credit card. I was experimenting some here and what I had hoped for didn't materialize. Oh well, that's part of the challenge.

These were my strategies for accumulating miles & points for our remodel. If you have some successful strategies then let me know. I would love to hear from you!

f you feel you benefit from this blog and are considering applying for a credit card please email me at 4points2miles@gmail.com for  an application link. I will send what I believe to be the best sign up bonus currently available, regardless of whether or not I will receive a referral bonus. Thanks!