Tuesday Special: $4,000 Olympics Edition

The 2022 Winter Olympics are starting in a week and a half, which means Olympics related deals and product tie-ins will start zooming across our TCAS for the next month. The first one showed up yesterday:

US Bank has a sign up bonus between $825 and $900 after spending $7,500 in four months on the Business Leverage Visa card, and the $95 annual fee is waived for the first year too. (The bonus depends on on how many gold medals the US Olympic team wins, but not to the same extent as it has in years prior.) How to play this:

• Freeze your SageStream and ARS credit reports before applying
• Lower the credit limit on existing US Bank cards and wait one business day after doing so before applying
• Apply for multiple cards on the same day, hard pulls are combined
• Pending applications are likely to be approved, keep going if you’re not explicitly denied
• Park at least $1,500 in a US Bank personal checking account for better approval odds, and this is almost a must-do if you don’t have a physical US Bank branch in your city
• Set a reminder in your phone to cancel or product change the cards to something else in 366 days
• Consider going for a personal card after your business card applications too, but realize that card will impact 5/24

US Bank cards are more friendly to shenanigans than most issuers, so there’s value in having these cards beyond the sign-up bonus. If you play this right and you’re a bit lucky, you could be looking at four to five approvals, or somewhere north of $4,000 in sign-up bonuses. Not bad for a Tuesday eh? Too bad there’s no churning event at the Olympics.

Note: There’s also an increased bonus on the US Bank Altitude Connect card, but don’t let anyone sell you on it. The points can’t be transferred to a premium card for any uplift so they’re just worth a penny a piece. You can do better with other US Bank cards.

Maybe a Churning event at the Olympics wouldn’t be as exciting as shopping cart racing, but it’d be a little fun, right? Right?