Nov 29 - Small Business Saturday Next Week

On Sunday, my father work up early and logged into the American Express website ShopSmall.com and registered all 28 of our individual American Express cards.

Now, to be clear, we don't have 28 separate accounts (we only have 9 primary accounts), but we do have 1-2 authorized users for each primary account and a few Amex Serve cards.

Immediately, we received confirmation emails that each of our cards were registered. And when we logged online to our Amex account, we also saw that the Small Business Saturday offer had been added to all the others we registered for.

So now we have a few weeks to figure out how to generate 84 separate transactions of $10 each in a single 24 hour period on Saturday November 29. That will generate up to $840 of free spend for us. But of course, my family's not that greedy. So we're going to find small ways to help our local community (businesses and residents). Here's our rough plan for now...

- $20 nail salon appointment
- $20 dry cleaning from Ivy Cleaners
- $60 late lunch from Ootoya
- $40 groceries from Garden of Eden
- $200 of gift cards from Morton Williams Supermarket (to give away to the needy)
- $40 of Korean groceries from Hana Mart
- $200 of gift cards from Hill Country BBQ (to use for later when we take visitors out)
- $40 happy hour (drinks and oysters) at BLT Fish
- $70 dinner at Izakaya Nomad (seen here)
- $50 worth of wine at Landmark Wine

It looks like even with all that, we'll still have about $100 hundred left that we won't be able to spend. I suppose we can always get even more gift cards at Hill Country or Morton Williams, or more bottles of wine. We'll see how it goes.

The one thing we need to do know is to make sure each of our Amex Serve prepaid cards has at least a $30 balance on each of them. We had already loaded and emptied out most of our Serve accounts already, but thankfully we had one account that was yet to be emptied. So we used that one to send $30 to each of the 4 other Serve accounts.