Through Saturday, August 29, Officemax is having an unadvertised special where you get a $15 rebate when you buy $300 worth of Visa gift cards. I made a whopping 24,000 miles during a promotion just like this one around Christmas by driving around to different OM stores. By buying 3X$200 gift cards you will get an instant $30 discount off the total automatically. The gift cards each have a $6.95 fee so your total for all $600 in gift cards will just be $590.85 [(3X$206.95) – $30]! This means you are getting $10 for free!
Hello, free lunch!
But wait… There’s more! If you use a normal miles earning credit card you will score 591 miles or points, but if you use the Chase Ink Plus card (which gives you 5X points on Office Supply stores like OM) you will take home almost 3,000 of the ultra valuable Ultimate Rewards points.
You can usually do this once per day at every OfficeMax in your local area (if they aren’t sold out of course). Note this works for the $200 and $100 gift cards but the $200 are a better value since the fee is approximately the same. Keep in mind that even though they are merged, this promotion is only at OfficeMax stores not Office Depots. You can also call before you go to make sure they have the $200 Visa’s in stock so you don’t waste a trip.
Make money and miles… Does it get any better?
World Cup madness is upon us and I wanted to see what last minute trips were available with miles to get you to Brazil. Since the matches are scattered around Brazil over a large timeframe, this was a perfect opportunity to come up with some creative frequent flyer tickets! Here are some of the options I found using my article on 
There is TONS of availability for this city. You could use this as a jumping off point for many of the other cities. To keep things simple (and the milage costs down), I am only going to focus on the non stop available awards. For just 50,000 Avios + $88 you could fly down from Miami and see three world cup matches!
For the non stop there is only availability after the USA match but you could see the first match of the Round of 16. You could spend the rest of the time on the beautiful beaches of Recife! For only 40,000 Avios (the same amount as the sign on bonus for the 
You could do the same thing from anywhere in the US for the higher price of 60,000 AA miles + $118.
How does this sound for the ultimate long weekend? Fly into Rio on Thursday night, July 3, arrive at 5 in the morning on July 4, attend the quarter finals that day at the famous 
You can’t make the Colombia match unfortunately for the cheapest miles price, but you can make it for 3 matches including the Quarter-finals in the amazing city of Brasilia for only 40,000 Avios (which you could get from the sign up bonus of the 
Like the other options you could travel from anywhere else in the US using 60,000 American miles once you find your connecting flights to Miami.
For just 40,000 Avios and $88 you can leave in two days and see Argentina, Costa Rica, and England play, and also catch the first round of 16 match in Belo Horizonte, one of the most beautiful cities in all of Brazil!
As with the others, 60K AA miles is also an option if you aren’t located in Miami.
You could then buy another $65 ticket from Cuiabá to Brasilia to catch your frequent flyer ticket back from there.
Only the $25, $50, and $100 Amex gift cards work for this promotion. The best value is to buy two $100 gift cards each with a $5.95 purchase charge. Once they scan the coupon code from their binder, it will remove $15 from the cost of $105.95X2 which gives a grand total of $196.90. The cards you should buy look like this.
If you have the 
How did I do it?
By running around to multiple Officemax locations and getting creative by bringing my Dad and nephew into the store (so I had 3 customers and I could get the special deal 3 times), I was able to make 15 transactions over 4 days.
