It is now just over 12 months since TopCashBack began allowing people to withdraw some of their cashback as Tesco Clubcard points – but it is limited to £50 a year. Accordingly if you made your first Tesco CC withdrawal from TCB at this time last year you can now begin your second £50.

With a 5% bonus on the amount you withdraw as Tesco CC points and then 250CC converting into 600 Avios or 625 Virgin Flying Club miles (that’s without the current Virgin bonus) this is a great way to get your money out of TopCashBack. [Assuming you value an Avios point at more than 0.5p each – which you ought to if you are collecting them.]

How to split your money up to get to £50:

After you have logged into topcashback.co.uk, go to your account section. While you could look just at the ‘payments’ section, I would also look at the ‘earnings’ section – to see what you are expecting in shortly. Remember the objective is to get to £50, or as near as possible, without going a penny over.

When you go to payments you will probably find Tesco initially showing as “0 clubcard points” with “See info” button beside it.

This is either because you have more than £50 to withdraw and/or because you have a non-Tesco eligible merchant included. (Or it is because you did not make your first Tesco withdrawal when the option became available – look in payments history and put your own date in your diary.)

Some retailers have special conditions, Accorhotels cashback can essentially only be withdrawn by BACs so you need to exclude that. Also Hilton Hotels cashback can ONLY be paid as Tesco clubcard points, but it accordingly does NOT get counted against the £50 a year Tesco limit, so don’t include any Hilton cashback in your £50 calculation.

[Note: Hilton are also at 7.5% cashback for the next 4 days!]

Anyway, to split your payment by merchant look above the payment buttons:

And then expand the section. While you can not break it down by cashback transaction sadly, you can split up the merchants included:

So I’m removing merchants where I have over £50 waiting to be paid, and I’m not including my Hilton – at least to begin with – so I can use the calculator to try different combinations of the remaining merchants to get the cashback as close to £50 as possible (but not over).

Tip 1: Remember to look at what earnings you have arriving shortly.

Tip 2: If you can get yourself a small multiple of 5p short of £50, you could then use the free 5p cashback offered by fly.com to get yourself further 5p multiples to round up. (This is tesco remember, so every little helps!).

With Accorhotels removed, and with the right combination of merchants I now have £49.95 of cashback selected, and with the 5% bonus this becomes £52.44:

Which will become 5244 Clubcard points, and then 12,586 Avios – which I’m quite happy with for £50 of cashback.

Remember: Cashback is never guaranteed, don’t make the purchase if it can’t live without the cashback.