For me it saves about £200 a head, and £150 of ryanair or aer lingus flights on top can't be sniffed at when you factor in adding baggage

Going to be trying to get an Amex platinum chargecard too for the trip, spend £2000 (got at least £1300 in flights to start me off, so only really need £700 in some form or another, easy enough with a few full tanks of petrol, and a few big shops) in 3 months and get effectively 20,000 avios. £50.50 topcashback works out at another 12,000 avios on top making 32,000 avios then all I need to do is a big shop or a pc upgrade through a site that takes paypal (can use Amex on paypal to pay on places that don't usually accept it) then cancel the card.

And while I'm at it take advantage of being able to get a free Cathay Pacific gold card with the Amex (basically instant BA silver tier status as they are a Oneworld partner) before paying off & cancelling the card as it's a £450 annual fee (pro-rata though so will probably work out around £90 in charges)

I converted a lot of my topcashback rewards into clubcard points and then into avios. There is a limit of £50 a year of that. I am at 98 000 avios at the moment, but will start to really add to it with flights from 2016 on. I found the cheap BA flights site and will really abuse that site when I have cleared all my debts.

There was an offer with an Amex card that if you spent £15000 in a 12 month period they would reward you with a companion ticket. Which would have been worth 150 000 avios for the one trip I am saving up for.

The 2 cards that offer the companion flight are the ba amex ones, that one is £150 a year, the free one is £30k a year (but you can reapply 6 months after closing the previous one)


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I would probably pay the fee for one year as it will amount to a companion ticket, if I plan purchases well.


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You don't really have to

You can use them to buy gift cards (there was a prepaid mastercard in Tesco that was withdrawn due to abuse from this, people buying £1000's at a time, claiming it back via NS&I and losing £1 in processing) but you could pre-pay a load of shopping if you wanted to

It's how I plan to hit my initial spending on the plat card when I apply for it

How does that work? I looked at the Tesco gift cards and they seemed to be for up to £50 and not for anything that I would want.

You buy the prepaid debit/credit cards then use them to get the money out to pay off the card you bought them on (some places see this as very suspicious as you can probably tell!)


Or you could buy gift cards at whichever supermarket you do your shopping at in advance for that supermarket, effectively buying your groceries in advance

The grocery gift cards (student ones) are the ones to go for I think but haven't looked into it properly yet

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That was probably why I did not see it. I would have thought that the withdrawal of the cash from the prepaid card would have been deemed a cash withdrawal and so subject to a handling fee. Or that the purchase of a prepaid credit card with one card might have been seen as a cash withdrawal as well.

I was actually considering getting a dollar prepaid card for my planned trip to the USA.


I can see that aspect but I spread my shopping around so might buy from three or four supermarket chains. Plus my last Tesco order was for around £100 and has lasted me two months already and I still have two crates to go. So I could prepay for decades.

I had envisaged building up a cash reserve, then spending each month and repaying in full, then in the last month to meet the spending target for the year replace my computers as they will be enough to hit that magic target. So possibly wiping out that reserve in the last month.

I will have to look into prepaid cards anyway. Thanks.

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