Get paid to be a Sam’s Club Member

This article was written at the time of the promotion – which may have ended/been modified or changed completely by the time you read this. However, by bundling multiple offers together as I did, you will always come out ahead.

As a single-member household, there is never a need for bulk quantities of detergent, toilet paper, cereal, etc… for the immediate future. I always shopped at my local Kroger or HEB (Texas only) based on what I needed and that was pretty much it.

However, a few promos recently caught my eye and I figured why not do something different during quarantine. Since I haven’t been traveling as much my brain needs something else to keep itself engaged.

The Memberships

There’s mainly two types of memberships offered by Sam’s Club and for my use case, the cheaper – $45 makes most sense (your mileage may vary).

To learn more about the differences, click here.

The Process

I saw a rare promotional which was basically crediting you $45 (hence recouping the annual membership fee – base) and I signed up using my email to get the offer.

Since this was a public offer, it was also available on “Shop Through Chase” in the Ultimate Rewards Portal. Additionally, Chase was offering 8x points per dollar spend on the membership if I shopped through the portal.

On top of that, Dosh had a new Sam’s Club member promo of $10 cashback when using a linked credit card plus 3% off on purchases.

Accordingly, I linked my Chase Freedom Unlimited card (earns 1.5x UR points per dollar spent) with Dosh, logged into the Ultimate Rewards website and using my card to make the purchase.

Membership	Credit	Dosh	UR Points
$45	$45	$10 + 3%	$45×1.5 + 360

To make my first transaction to trigger the credits, I activated the Q2 2020 quarter on my Discover card (sock drawered for ages) to get the 5% cashback on wholesale store purchases.

The Savings/earning

Based on the aforementioned steps, the credit canceled out the annual fee, Dosh gave me $10 off, Chase gave me 360 + 45×1.5 = 427.5 points (for signing up) which at 2CPP valuation is worth $8.6 and the $45 spent in-store using my Discover card gave me an additional $2.25 in value bring the total on just the membership and first transaction to ~$21.

Now $21 isn’t really a lot but since I was able to get it at no extra effort/cost, it’s basically free money.

Now the savings part is where I think I will find the real value. Since I drive a car that only takes premium gas which on average in Houston, TX can be $2.5/gal – it costs me $42.5 for a full tank.

Thanks to sam’s club discounted gas prices, it will cost me an average of $2-2.2/gal and $37 for a full tank. That’s a full $5+ saved per refill. Scaling up to 15,000 miles driven per year, I’ll be saving almost $200+ annually based on the car’s mileage.

This alone makes the membership a must have for me. Additionally, if I have to spend $45 (say without the exact same offers as I did this time), I would still do it just because of the overall savings.

This article was written at the time of the promotion – which may have ended/been modified or changed completely by the time you read this. However, by bundling multiple offers together as I did, you can break even pretty quickly if not make a profit on the initial transaction.

Feel free to check out the Chase Freedom Unlimited, Chase Freedom, Discover IT card, Chase Ultimate Rewards, Dosh and other apps as these can be really useful to save as well as maximize the value of your money!