Rakuten AMEX points – Turning 10% cash back into 28% cash back equivalent

I’ll walk you through the process of how $8,000 spend results in a 1^st class flight from Los Angeles to Hawaii ($2,251 cost) which ends up being a 28% cash back equivalent ($2251 / $8000) using Rakuten and getting paid in American Express Points.

This is achieved through a two tiered process. Elevated earn rate and finding a redemption that’s worth more than your cash equivalent.

Rakuten offers the choice of being paid back in Cash (default) or American Express Points (opt in):

https://www.rakuten.com/account-settings.html

Rakuten will convert the cash back equivalent into American Express (Amex) Points. The formula they use is 1 cent = 1 point. Example $1.00 cash would give 100 Amex points instead.

Side note – In order to opt in, you need to link your Amex account to Rakuten. I believe this requires having an Amex card. I want to say once you switch over, you’re locked into Amex pay outs and they don’t let you go back to cash. So be sure you’re committed.

There are 3 main methods of getting Amex points:

1. Sign Up Bonuses for meeting spend requirement on new cards
2. Referral bonuses
3. Spending on the card. Some cards offer bonus points depending on the category.

On a high cash back day, Rakuten’s earn rate will be 3-5x or higher that what you can otherwise achieve by spending directly on your credit cards (bonus categories included).

I have the Amex Blue Business Credit card and the earn rates are: 2x points on purchases up to 50k year and 1x points on all other purchases.

Rakuten offers 10% cash back (or more) several times throughout the year. 10% earn rate is 5 times better than my 2x earn rate on my credit card. This means I only have to spend 20% of the amount to produce the same number of points. Example $5000 * 10% = $500 versus $25000 * 2% = $500

By taking advantage of elevated cash back days, regular credit cards won’t be able to match our earn rate.

Why are Amex points so good?

https://global.americanexpress.com/rewards/transfer

Amex has transfer partners that will let you transfer your points to other programs. This offers a lot of flexibility rather than being stuck with 1 program.

Once we have our points, the next thing we want to do is to find a deal on our points redemption that is worth more than its cash equivalent.

Side Note – In order to know if we are having a good or bad redemption it’s important that we have a baseline to reference. If $1,000 spend gave us $100 cash back (10,000 Amex points) we want to make sure our redemption gives us $100 OR MORE. We want to avoid redeeming $100 for something that would cost $60 (We would be better off paying $60 out of pocket and saving the points for something better). 

For this example, I decided to tinker with Hawaiian Airlines which is a transfer partner. I used Google Flight Matrix to see a calendar of flights from LAX (Los Angeles) to HNL (Honolulu), 1^st class and nonstop for the month of November. I was intentionally looking at high priced flights which landed me on November 24^th 2025. I went over to Hawaiian airlines website to confirm availability and see its price in cash ($2,251) and points (80,000 Amex). 

Assuming we can get $8,000 spent on a 10% cash back day that would earn us $800 cash which then gets converted to 80,000 Amex points. Doing this will mean you achieved the following:

• Earned at 5 times the earn rate of the Amex Blue Business. Getting 80k Amex points on the credit card would have required $40,000 spend on the 2x bonus category or $80,000 spend on the 1x earn category.
• Turned your $800 into $2,251 equivalent

This means, ASINs with high velocity can serve as points engines to dump spend on and sell through quickly. I’ve seen Rakuten offer 15 or even 20% which would require even less spend.

Side note – A 1^st class flight will deliver the same experience if it costs $700 or $2000. It just feels better from a redemption standpoint to frame it as a “deal.” The best use of your points is always going to be whatever you enjoy. By taking the cash equivalent into consideration, it helps the bragging factor.

You’ll eventually come across the term CPP (Cents Per Point) and this is intended to help you determine your baseline value of redemption. For our example this would be the math. (2251 / 80000) * 100 = 2.81 CPP. If you want to do further reading this is a good starting point:

https://thepointsguy.com/loyalty-programs/monthly-valuations

The website will list what’s considered a good CPP. Your goal is to get the same or better. 

The problem I have with CPP is it doesn’t take into consideration your EARN rate. Using our example, we get 80k Amex points on $8,000 spend versus $80,000. That’s why I like to think of its cash back equivalent as a better metric. $2251 / 80k spend = 0.281 or 2.81% cash back equivalent which is still stronger than a straight 2% cash back card but no where near as strong as our 28% cash back equivalent via 10% cash back on Rakuten. 

Some other things to consider – Rakuten pays out every quarter (3 months) and this is assuming all of your transactions qualify and award correctly. There is a bit of lead time to factor in for positioning. At the end of the day, the points are for redeeming. Do what makes most sense to you. This was written with the goal of getting the most “value” on the redemptions. 

On 2/14/2025 I had my first Amex payout from Rakuten for 336,503 points and now need to decide how best to redeem them. I’m still new to this process myself but feel good from what I’ve seen so far! 

P.S. 

If anyone wants a Rakuten or Amex CC referral I would be happy to share it LOL. Otherwise, for all my other credit card point enthusiast out there, please let me know if I missed anything or if there’s something you’d like to add <3. 

PPS

https://amex.point.me/ is a good Amex points search engine to find good deals! The regular website will also support chase points but that link will be only for Amex.

Also forgot! Be sure to know that if you pivot to being paid out in Amex points, you will be shutting off your cash back payouts. I would HIGHLY recommend being paid out in Amex points if you intend to travel, otherwise you’d probably be better off being paid in cash. I have my 2% cash back credit (capital one) to pay me out in cash to still have that as a possibility.