Here’s how I met the Capital One Savor minimum spend to unlock the $300 bonus

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I recently wrote about why I signed up for the Capital One Savor Cash Rewards Credit Card. Initially, my biggest motivation in signing up was the welcome offer — a $300 bonus after meeting minimum spending requirements. But having the card has encouraged me to better strategize my credit card spending, and I now make an effort to charge groceries, dining and entertainment to my Savor card to earn bonus cash back.

The information for the Capital One Savor Cash Rewards card has been collected independently by Million Mile Secrets. The card details on this page have not been reviewed or provided by the card issuer.

The Savor card is the first cash rewards card that I’ve ever had in my wallet and I love it. I have already started to see the benefits of earning cash back for the purchases I make every month.

The strategy I used to meet the minimum spend in just three weeks

It was fairly easy to meet the minimum spending requirement on the Capital One Savor card because I knew I had an upcoming business trip for which I needed to book travel. At my company, employees pay for all travel expenses upfront and are reimbursed later. I knew that between flights, car rental, Airbnb, and meals out during the trip, I would be very close to meeting the minimum spend requirement (if not exceeding it). There were two strategies that worked especially well in this situation:

• I waited to open the card until I knew I’d have a large, reimbursable expense to charge to the card.
• I offered to book all of the travel for two coworkers who were joining on my work trip.

Not only was I able to save my coworkers time by arranging all of the travel (since we were going to the same place, taking the same flights and staying at the same house it wasn’t much more effort on my end), but with this approach I both met my minimum spend and was able to earn extra cash back. There was no risk since I knew that I’d be paid back for all of the money that I spent, and it helped our accounting team manage just one expense report instead of three.

Come up with a manageable backup plan, just in case

Before I signed up for the Capital One Savor card, I knew there was a 99% chance I would be able to meet the minimum spend requirement within the first month. But I felt a little better knowing that if for some reason my business trip fell through, I would still be able to meet the requirement within that time frame.

Here is how I determined a secure backup plan:

• I analyzed the amount of money I spent across other credit cards every month. Some of these charges were predictable (like utility bills and groceries) and others were less so (happy hours).
• Based on my average monthly charges, I determined that if I charged everything on this Capital One Savor card I would be able to meet the minimum spend requirement within about six weeks.
• To add extra security and give myself a head start I signed up for automatic monthly payments for all of my utility bills with this new credit card.

Although I had a specific strategy and a manageable backup plan, there are many different ways to meet a credit card’s minimum spending requirement.

Have you opened a card recently that had a minimum spend in order to receive the sign-up bonus? Did you map out your strategy ahead of time? How did you plan to meet the minimum spending amount? I’m interested to hear how other readers plan for this when they open a new card. Let me know your feedback in the comments section below!

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