Don't sleep on the next couple weeks of manufactured spend

There are a couple current and upcoming manufactured spend opportunities I want to make sure readers are aware of.

Office Depot/OfficeMax Visa gift card promotion through March 17

This promotion comes around every few months and is always a good opportunity to load up on Ultimate Rewards points for folks who have a Chase Ink Plus, Ink Bold, or Ink Cash small business card. The current iteration of the promotion is $10 off $300 or more in Visa gift cards.

If you buy two $200 Visa gift cards with $6.95 activation fees, you'll end up paying $3.90 in activation fees after the $10 discount is applied, or 0.2 cents per Ultimate Rewards point if you pay with a card earning 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent at office supply stores.

This is worth doing basically regardless of your liquidation method. Even paying Plastiq (you can find my personal referral link on the Support the Site! page) $4.88 per card in liquidation fees brings your cost per Ultimate Rewards point up to just 0.68 cents each — a good deal!

Grocery store gas points on Visa gift card purchases between March 16 and March 22

Slightly overlapping with the Office Depot promotion, via Miles to Memories I saw that Giant, Stop & Shop, and Martin's stores will offer 2 gas points per dollar spent on Visa gift cards between March 16 and March 22.

These stores usually don't offer any gas points on prepaid debit card purchases, so it's potentially lucrative to time your grocery store manufactured spend to periods when these promotions are in effect, if you drive and especially if you have a way of storing extra discounted fuel.

I don't drive but have mused in the past about options for distributing fuel points to folks who do (there are some more great suggestions in the comments to that post).