Frequent Miler on the Air - 10 frequent flyer-ish things we're thankful for | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep283 | 11-29-24

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we're chatting about the 10 "Frequent Flyer-ish" things we're thankful for! (01:01) - A reader shares all the ways their recent trip was impacted by Frequent Miler tips! (02:58) - It in the hands of SAS now! (05:50) - Wyndham Biz drops Caesar's match Read about changes to casino status-matching for free cruises here. (09:38) - Avianca LifeMiles Elite Card: Up to 120K miles Read more about this card bonus here. (12:10) - Bonvoy Brilliant cardholder “Luxury Experience Rate” at participating properties Read more about this new Luxury Experience Rate here. (16:09) - Citi Double Cash & Custom Cash: 24-month extended warranty Read moe about the Citi Double Cash & Custom Cash 24-month extended warranty here. (17:11) - U.S. Bank Smartly Credit Card: Up to 4% cashback Read more about the US Bank Smartly card here. (22:03) - C1 Shopping targeted deals (26:46) - Bilt - earn points when buying a home & using an eXp Realty agent (29:41) - Huge welcome bonuses continue (31:37) - Awesome category bonuses continue (33:01) - The Amex points parade marches on (34:48) - Paying taxes great way to meet min spend (36:13) - PayPal waives credit card fees when doing good Listen to our Coffee Beak Episode about Kiva loans here. PayPal Giving Fund Fundraiser Hub. (39:25) - Transferable points programs keep expanding (43:42) - Award chart sweetspots live on Find AA's excellent partner award chart here. (50:06) - Free changes and cancelations continue for US airlines (except for basic economy types of fares) (52:09) - Status matches create opportunities (55:00) - Airlines continue to make business and first class more aspirational (58:22) - Loyalty partnerships create sweet opportunities (1:03:41) - See our how-to video for Rooms.aero here. (1:06:26) - When you get a new card, what's the checklist of tasks you do to keep it all organized? Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event! Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, 10 frequent flyer-ish things we're thankful for. Since it's Thanksgiving weekend, we figured we would look at the state

of the frequent miler world and look at, instead of, you know, paying attention to the doom and gloom stuff, let's look at the things that are great about this hobby and what, you know, in particular, what are the 10 things we're most thankful for? There you go. It's good to give thanks, right? To give thanks and appreciation for the good things. And there are a lot of good things in this game, and we'll get to a whole bunch of those. Don't forget, if you want to jump ahead to something or you want to go back to something later on, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. And wherever you're watching or listening to this, don't forget to like it.

Give us a thumbs up. Leave us some feedback. We always appreciate hearing from you. All right, let's drag out this week's Giant Mail back. This week's Giant Mail comes from Rick. Rick says, this is a heartfelt thank you from a longstanding fan for consistently providing both the inspiration and the practical know-how for international travel. Case in point, the 50th anniversary around the world trip that my wife and I just completed. Among your many contributions were the following. It was primarily made up of three Aeroplan awards with 5,000 point stopovers. The real backbone of the trip was finding far out Singapore business availability on Aeroplan, Newark to Singapore and Singapore

to Melbourne, courtesy of Nick's tip in an episode about a year ago. And along the way, we thoroughly enjoyed two nights in Greg's favorite Eichert's Private Hotel in Queenstown, which is a small luxury hotel of the world, and three nights in Nick's Grand Hotel Victoria on Lake Como, which is another SLH property. It was the grandest trip we've ever taken, and it would have never happened without you guys. Again, many thanks. Thanks to you, Rick. It's always great to hear those stories. I love hearing from people who are able to succeed at the game because we have a lot of fun doing this and it's fun to watch other people having fun doing it too. So glad that you found some nuggets of wisdom here and there every now and then we try to drop one or two of them, you know, when they come to us. And so I'm glad

you've enjoyed them. I particularly enjoyed hearing from people who've liked hotels that I've reviewed while like the Grand Hotel Victoria and Lake Como. It's always kind of reassuring to know that I haven't oversold a place as being better than it actually is. And I've heard lots of good feedback about that hotel in particular, which has been good because it's certainly one that I enjoyed quite a bit. So I always love to hear when people also enjoyed it. But yeah, that sounds like an amazing trip, Rick. Well done. Hats off to you. Yeah, it really does. What a great way to celebrate your 50th. That's fantastic. So good job.

Exciting times. All right, let's talk about our Million Mile Madness Challenge. Speaking of traveling all around the world, Greg and I and Stephen just got done doing that recently here. And now it's sort of all over, right? Million Mile Madness. We've crowned a champion. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the 2024 Frequent Miler Annual Challenge number two champion, Greg the Frequent Miler. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. But it's worth noting that I'm the provisional champion.

True. Because I can't really win unless I get the million points from SAS. So as a reminder, we each flew, Nick, Stephen, and I each flew 15 different Sky Team carriers in order to earn the million points from SAS. Each of us, as we're recording this, have earned points from 12 out of 15 of those carriers. We won't have qualified for this million points until we've earned points from all 15 flights that we took. Now, it's not a surprise that not all have credited yet, so it's not like we've failed yet. In my case, I called in a support ticket for the three missing ones,

and they told me it should take about a week. As things stand, this morning I got an email from them basically saying, "'Sorry for the technical difficulties we're having, but we're working on it. So I found that encouraging that they see it as their problem, not something wrong with my flight. So hopefully that's true for all three of us as well. Yeah, you know, and the funny thing is that we each have 12, but we're not all missing the same three. So it's not like there's just a broken link with three of them. Although they did tell Greg that KLM and Air France in particular

have been common issues. But I had those credit automatically and not other ones that he had credit automatically, et cetera. So unsurprisingly, it's a little complicated getting all this to work out. But I think, I don't know, I was feeling little complicated getting all this to work out, but I think, I don't know. I was feeling really good that I got home and 12 credited by the day after I got home. I think I had 12 out of 15 and I thought, wow, that was much easier to get to 12 than I expected. I thought for sure that there would be a lot more following up to get credit for all of

these only having three to worry about between now and the end of the year feels really good to me. Yeah. Yeah, good point. And for those wondering about the participants who helped us, like when those prizes will be given out, we're going to wait and see, you know, once we actually earn the SAS miles. And then so we'll know the final, final, who really won this. And then we'll be able to give out prizes accordingly yep very good all right let's talk about card news there's a bunch of card news out

this week some of it we're thankful for some of it less thankful i'm not so thankful about the fact that the wyndham business earner card has or will be as of february, dropping the match to Caesar's diamond status. Starting February 1st of 2025, Wyndham diamond earned from the credit card, the Wyndham earner business credit card will no longer match to Caesar's diamond status. Only if you've earned your Wyndham diamond status will you be able to match to Caesar's diamond. So in other words, the easy path to Caesar's Diamond and therefore to easy cruising is going away or at least becoming much more difficult because that match will be dead, which is sad to see because it's been a great match for years and years for a lot of reasons,

not just for the free cruises, but also for the lack of resort fees at Caesar's properties in Las Vegas. That's a nice savings for people who travel to Las Vegas now and then. And, you know, the annual anniversary dinner benefit with Caesars and the free stay at Atlantis that I know a lot of people have enjoyed. So there are a lot of great benefits there that unfortunately will go away if you're not able to match from Wyndham to Caesars. However, you However, the secret will still be to get out there and find other ways to match around because there will still continue to be other ways to match around for status. There are some people who've been able to make matches to get to MGM Gold in

Atlantic City. Also, Founders Card, as far as I know, still has their Caesars Diamond status. And so that won't be nearly as cheap as the Wind of Murder business card because Founder's card is relatively expensive. But if Founder's card continues to offer Caesar's Diamond status, it'll still be a pretty discounted path to free cruises. Although I say free cruises, and of course, those opportunities are constantly changing. And so keep an eye out for an update in our post about that sometime soon, because a number of those matches have changed parameters and rules and whatnot. And we'll hear the Ocean Prime match for the MSC cruise is going to be changing some of the rules as of December 1st. So a number of changes coming down the pipe here soon, but there still are ways to cruise for free

by matching around. Yeah. So one of the funny things or unfortunate things that happened here is Nick and I recorded a number of shows before we left on our travels for the Million Mile Madness Challenge. And one of them was our favorite credit card perks. And in that show, we mentioned the ability to get Caesar's Diamond from the Wyndham business earner card matching to it. And that video published after news broke about them no longer doing this. So that was an unfortunate situation. But these things happen. What can we do? Yeah, you know, and to some extent, of course, some people think that because people wrote about it as much as we did and other blogs did, that that's part of the

reason it went away. And that's surely somewhat true. But on the flip side, I don't think any of us ever expected it would last forever and ever. So I'm sad to see it go. Also not shocked to see it go. And who knows, maybe we'll see other shortcut paths to get Caesar's diamond again in the future. Yeah. Yeah, because it used to be, right, that you could match. You didn't even need the credit card. Once you got status in one or the other, in diamond status in Wyndham or Caesar's, it used to be you were able to match back and forth each year. So keep your status forever that way. And they closed that loophole but but kept at that time the window

business business earner as a way of getting them. And now they've closed that loophole. So it's a game of, you know, whack them all to keep finding different ways to get in there. And we will. Don't worry. We'll keep looking. All right. That's not all, though. Avianca Life Miles lead card is out with a new increased offer, right? Yeah, up to 120,000 miles. This is the, I think, cardless card for Avianca Life Miles. And the first part of the bonus is probably the most interesting part. You earn 80,000 miles after $4,500 spend in 90 days. So that's just a solid offer right there. But you could get 40,000 more

miles if you spend a total of $25,000 in the first 12 months. So that part, you know, is fine if you could spend that much and you want to spend that much on the card. But, you know, I think some people might, if they sign up for this card at all, might just stop at the 80K. This is a $249 annual fee card. So it's not necessarily something that you want to jump on just for the miles. You should look at what else this card offers you. And the main thing is if you're interested in one of the LifeMiles Elite subscription plans, this gives you essentially $20 off the plans and $20 per month, right? So, you know, if you were going to get one of those plans anyway, then adding this card in only costs nine dollars more than um just

subscribing to those plans so in that situation it's probably a good deal to get the card but um i'm not you know personally since i'm not looking to sign up for one of those plans i'm not interested in this card right now yeah you have to be a life miles enthusiast is what it comes down to and so if you don't already know that this card is a good fit for you, then it probably isn't, is really what it comes down to. There definitely is a market for whom I think it makes sense. But if you don't know that it's you, then it probably isn't. So that's that, the Avianca Life Miles League card. And the reason for that, by the way, of course, is because you could open tons of other cards out there that are in transferable currencies that you could transfer one-to-one to Avianca that don't cost $250 a year. So, and or that have even better welcome bonuses than

$80,000 after $4,500 spend. So it's easy enough to get that number of Avianca Life Miles without spending as much on the subscription. And if you're not going to redeem a lot, then you won't get as much value out of the subscription anyway. So, so all that said, potentially a decent offer, not wild and crazy that you have to drop everything and go out and get it right now, probably. Let's talk about the next one up on the list. The Bonvoy Brilliant card has released a luxury experience rate. Tell me about the luxury experience rate, Greg. I like luxury experiences. Yeah. So for Bonvoy Brilliant cardholders, they're advertising this as like a temporary benefit for reservations booked by July 31st. And basically what it is is for a number of Marriott's luxury properties, if you are a cardholder, you should be able to find this luxury experience rate on participating properties.

And what it is is for $40 or $50 more per night. It really varies by property how much more this rate is compared to the best alternative rate. get a bunch of benefits that are similar to like fine hotels and resorts or, um, the chase edition or, um, or Marriott stars. Uh, there, there's a number of ways you can get these kinds of benefits,

but through this, it's like a do it yourself to get, um, $125 property credit, um, bonus Marriott points and, uh, welcome amenity.

And, um, so there's, there's actually a standard room package and a premium room package. The premium room package offers a little bit more, including daily breakfast for two. So if you don't have like Marriott platinum status, or if you're staying at a property like a Ritz Carlton that doesn't offer free breakfast for platinum members, then that could be pretty exciting, I think. Yeah, I think that's where it would come in handy because otherwise, if you have the Brilliant card, you do have platinum status, right? So you would get breakfast already at a St. Regis, for instance, but not at the Ritz. Right, right. So I looked at their

participating property list and all of the participating properties are in the brands, in the luxury brands, Ritz, Luxury Collection, St. Regis, Edition, W, and JW. But not all of the properties within those brands are listed. So, I looked for some specific ones that I was surprised. So, for example, in Chicago, there's a St. Regis there now that opened about a year ago. That's not there, but they do have like the JW and the W in Chicago listed. So, it's kind of a strange collection. I'm not really sure where it came from. gives you any real benefit above what you'd get booking through Marriott Stars or one of the other booking platforms that require a travel agent who's able to book those things.

We have a post that shows you all of those types of alternative ways of booking and how you can request details for a room rate if you're interested in that. So you might want to do that. Even if you're interested in booking one of these luxury experience rates, you might then want to get a quote for booking through Marriott Stars or one of these other programs to see what that would offer because it might offer you even better things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, when it comes to rates that include things like a property credit, I think the value is going to vary tremendously on a short stay, like a one night stay. It might be particularly valuable. But as you spread that out over time, if you're paying any more for the nightly rate, then

it pretty quickly starts to erase the value of a property credit. So I don't really want to pay in advance for a property credit. I can just, you know, pay the money at the property if I really want to buy something at the property. So you're kind of locking yourself into that. So you really have to be careful you're not overpaying essentially is what I'm saying in order to book one of these rates. But in the right situation, I think probably for a one night stay, they probably are going to work out to be a decent deal in some cases. So it's worth taking a look at. Yeah, for sure.

All right. City Double Cash and the Custom Cash. They have a 24 month extended warranty. Is this new? Is this existing? Tell me about it. As far as I know, it's new. And I think that's great news.

Cities had that on some of their other cards for for quite a while um they may have maybe they had this on the double cash way back when and and removed it i i can't remember but regardless um they now have for both the double cash and the custom cash cards their 24 month extended warranty and i think that's great because like the city double cash is one of, you know, a short list of great cards to use for all spend everywhere because it earns two transferable points per dollar. And, you know, so the fact that it now has that extended warranty means like, I personally, I'd feel a lot better using that card to pay for something expensive, like a new refrigerator or whatever it is that you might need.

So that's great news. Yeah. All right. Very good. And then the U.S. Bank Smartly credit card, up 4% cash back. So this is a card that is a little complicated because you start out earning 2% back if you get this U.S. Bank Smartly credit card. But you can earn more cash back based on the balance in investments that you have with U.S. Bank. Is that right? Yeah. So it depends how much, you know, like banking money you have with them.

A lot like how Bank of America has their preferred honors program. So, yeah, with this Smartly credit card, you started just earning 2% cashback everywhere, which isn't bad. I mean, but there's other cards that do that. But the bigger your banking balance, the more bonus rewards you get. So if you have $5,000 or more, you get like a half percent bonus. So it becomes a 2.5% everywhere card, which is awfully good. If you have $50,000 or more, you get a 1% bonus. So it becomes a 3% everywhere card. Now you're getting 2% bonus.

So it becomes a 4% everywhere card. So that's incredible. Now, yeah, there are some gotchas around like putting that much money into a us bank. So their interest rates are not necessarily the best you can find elsewhere. Although they're smartly savings, it has decent interest rate for a savings account, but it's definitely not the best you can get.

They do have self-directed investing, but that has various fees for purchasing. I mean, I can't remember the exact fees for when you're buying stocks or whatever, but the important thing is- Surprisingly, you only get 100 free online stock or ETF trades per year. And then, I mean, granted, if you're depending on the type of investment

you're doing, maybe that's plenty. But after that, you're going to pay per trade, which is unusual, I think, for self-directed, right? It is unusual. But if you're in a buy and hold situation, that should be fine. What's not necessarily fine is there is a $50 annual fee,

which the fine print says may be waived if you have $250,000 or more in investments. I found it kind of weird that it says it may be waived. So you could just deposit $250,000 and see what happens. Yeah. Yeah. That seems a little crazy. Yeah. Just looking over their fee schedule, it does look just like there's more fees than what you would typically find with self-directed accounts in other places. But at the same time, depending on, like Greg said, you know, if you're just in a buy and hold retirement account type of a situation, then 100 free trades a year might be fine for me. That'd be more than I trade in a year anyway. So come down to the $50 annual fee, which if you're earning enough at 4% could certainly become worth it. I mean, I think if you told me that there was a card that earned 4% everywhere and had a $50 annual fee, I'd

probably pay the $50 annual fee, right? Yeah, actually, great point. Great point. So yeah, and then, you know, your money's earning whatever it's earning based on your investments. So if you put it in like ETF fund that you would have had your money in anyway, then all it's costing you is $50 additional. And that's a really good point. So anyway, that's pretty exciting, actually. For those who want cash back, I mean, you can't beat 4% back everywhere. That's fantastic.

No. And for those who are saying, well, that can't possibly last. back everywhere. That's fantastic. No. And for those who are saying, well, that can't possibly last. Well, you're probably right. So get it now. Is that going to last forever? I mean, maybe not. But although, you know, we say that and the Bank of America preferred rewards has lasted for years at 2.62% back, which is certainly no 4%, but more than standard.

And yet they've still lasted. So, you know, I guess U.S. Bank is counting on being able to sell enough additional products to people with the money invested in the bank to to meet those criteria. But yeah, four percent is great. So take advantage of it while you can. And I will warn you, if you're interested in it because you do manufactured spending and you buy gift cards and redeem them for money orders or whatever, they will shut you down.

They're going to look closely at that because they definitely do not want to be funding your manufactured spending habit. That's a good point. That's a good point. Yes. It needed to be said. So very good. All right. Let's talk about what crazy thing this week.

What crazy thing has Capital One Shopping done this week? We've talked a lot about how Capital One Shopping is a great thing to sign up for and install in your browser. Because they randomly send you emails with really good offers. And the crazy thing now is just this week, like Nick and I, and probably many other people have seen outrageously good offers from Capital One Shopping. I'm going to mention a few that I just saw this morning as we're recording this. TripAdvisor, up to 50.5% back. So that specifically it was for any completed activity experience or tour. You get that much back and a instant book hotel stay 21% back from TripAdvisor. So those are fantastic rates. Staples 35% back. Dell 35% back. Dell, 35% back.

There were some exclusions, but I mean, the inclusions were like, it seems like everything. Server, desktops, laptops, accessories, monitors. So I guess that leaves out software and I don't know what else, but not that much. Sketchers, 60%. Like, I didn't know I was in the market for sketchers until i got that 60 what uh and then arrow i have no idea how to say aeropostale i don't know another 60 offer and you got some too right i did i got stanley cups which i mean i'm not trendy enough to have a stanley cup but i bet there's some readers out there who have kids who are.

And 70% back. Like again, so I think what has made this stand out to me the last couple of days is that before this, it seemed like Capital One Shopping's like kind of top off point was 30% back. Like we would see offers of up to 30% back. But lately, I've been seeing more at a wide range of places. So I got those I've got, let's see puffy mattresses at 45% back, which isn't the highest I've seen lately, I saw 70%. Recently 70% on a new mattress, like just mind

boggling. Harley Davidson, I had 40% back Goodyear tires 35% back. And there's one that I used a couple of years ago, the holiday time, because between a rebate that was available through Goodyear plus the 30% I got back from Capital One Shopping at the time that made it the best deal for buying tires for my van. So and now at 35% back, I'm gonna have to go check and make sure we don't need new tires. Because, you, you know, like Greg said, I don't know and I don't want to find out in three months that we need them because now's the time to get them, I guess. So it's worth taking a look at the emails. Now, since we're mentioning the emails, we have to also mention that Capital One has snuck a little fine print in the bottom of the email

that you would probably never see if you didn't know it was there that says you can earn a maximum of $250 in rewards on a single transaction. Now, I've earned more than 250 on a single transaction plenty of times before. And I haven't been able to find that language anywhere on the Capital One Shopping website, but it exists in the email. And at some point, I clicked through an email offer and spent a lot of money and expected to get X percentage back. And they gave me $250 back flat. And the responses to it thus far have been no, it's a cap no more than $250 in rewards per order. And I've debated how much attention I want to draw to the fact that

I've earned more than 250 on plenty of orders before. But anyway, long story short, if you're clicking through an email link, know that you probably won't or you may not get more than $250 back on a single order. But you probably could place more than one order depending on what it is you're getting. And if you're clicking through from the website, I've never had a problem with that. It was only through an email, but I ran into that issue. Yeah, that's really good to know. The other thing to know is that even though they talk about it as cashback, and we've been talking about as cashback, it's really rewards that can be redeemed for gift cards. And so you have to want one of their selection of gift. They have a pretty large

selection of merchant gift cards you can get, but it's definitely not true cashback. No, it's not. No, I, you know, I think I forgot to mention 30% back at Hilton, which I used during the challenge a couple of times and is pending in my account for stays that were, I don't know, close to $200. We got 30% back as expected on top of the Hilton rewards and everything else. So definitely some good payouts to have in there. Okay. So that out of the way for crazy thing, crazy week there.

We've got awards points and more. So for awards points and more, Built is out with some new stuff regarding, well, not really mortgages, but buying a house, right? Right, right. of being a Built Rewards member, which is if you buy a home using a EXP realty agent, you will get one point per $2 of the cost of the house. So if you buy a $500,000 home, you're talking about 250,000 built points, just boom, straight up. And built points, by the way, are super valuable. I mean, they're worth 1.25 cents each if you just redeem them through Built's travel portal, but they can be worth so much more by transferring them. They have a great selection of transfer partners. And so you could get a lot more value transferring them. Build also frequently has some really, really good transfer bonuses during their monthly rent day.

And so sometimes you can get up to like 100%, for example, bonus transferring, especially if you have platinum status, which you probably would get if you buy an expensive enough house, because one way to get platinum status by earning a lot of points within a calendar year. Do the points earned from buying a house count towards status? I don't know. Buying a home? I don't see why not. Yeah, I haven't seen any. Some things have been excluded, right? So like tax payments have been excluded, right? From earning. Oh, that's true. That's true. I'm not sure.

I haven't looked. So I'm not positive whether those points count. Yeah, so I mean, this is interesting. We've seen other entities offer rewards, miles, and things for mortgage through various different programs, different airlines and stuff have had offers like this before too. So it's not the only game in town as far as that goes. And I would think it's probably worth shopping around to see what the best deal you can get is. I'm not sure that the points would be worth enough to make a measurable difference. Well, I shouldn't say that. It would be worth enough to not shop around anyway,

to not make sure. Yeah, no's that's a great point because the um things like closing costs and and mortgage rates can vary tremendously and so you definitely want to see whether these whatever quote you get from the exp realty agent is close and the other thing it would be worth if you've shopped around going back to eXp and saying, hey, can you match or beat this offer I got from whoever? Because those things usually are subject to some, you know, haggling. There you go. All right. So interesting new opportunity there.

That brings us to this week's main event. Main event time. The 10 frequent flyer-ish things we're thankful for. All right. I'm going to kick us off, I think. And that's to say one thing that I think both of us are very thankful for, and hopefully all of us are, is that huge welcome bonuses continue. I mean, we saw some really big ones come out during the pandemic that I think when the pandemic hit and we started seeing some of those big offers because nobody was traveling, I think both Greg and I

probably sat on this show more than once that like, we didn't think those big offers will last forever kind of a thing in the beginning. This is to incentivize people. And then as time went on, we were kind of like, boy, I don't know. It's been going on a while. I don't know how you're going to walk it back now and like go back down to lower offers. And sure enough, that has turned out to be the case. 100,000 points is just like the norm now, kind of. It's like the rule used to be 100,000 point offer used to be like, oh, 100,000 points. And now it's kind of like, oh, 100,000 points.

Right, right, right. We used to write posts about how you could try to find 100,000 point offer for the Amex Platinum card. You could try. And it was like winning the lottery if you actually got it. And now, I mean, if it's less than 100,000, you just shouldn't even consider it for a card like that. There's definitely R cards that have lower bonuses,

but it is no longer a surprise to see 100K on just about any card. So that's been awesome. And I should say when I got into this game about 12, 13 years ago, like 50K was considered really good. That would be the inflated offer. The normal offer for a card would be like 30, 35K, and then they'd have a special and it's 50k now to and from school uphill both ways to uphill both ways in the snow even in the summertime yep

all right yeah and they made me go to school in the summertime for some reason all right what's up second all right uh second awesome category bonuses uh i think this started maybe five or six years ago where where the credit card companies started trying to up each other on these category bonuses where you earn like a multiple for shopping within a category of spend like at grocery stores or gas stations or restaurants or whatever. Again, going back to the good old days, which in retrospect, when I talk about this, weren't that good. When I started the blog, when I started Frequent Miler, it was exciting that the Sapphire Preferred card earned 2x on travel and dining. That was super exciting because that was the best we had at the time,

2x travel and dining, 1x everywhere else. And now that's laughable because, you know, so many cards offer a minimum of 3x in categories like that. And it's not uncommon to see 4x and even 5x for a lot of different categories. And 2x now is often the minimum. You have multiple cards that earn two transferable points per dollar for all spend everywhere. And what a great trend that is because we're earning like crazy with our day-to-day spend.

Yeah, absolutely. Great category bonuses out there. Speaking of great bonuses though, the Amex Points Parade marches on and we gotta be thankful for that, right? Because my goodness, when you talk about big offers, it's hard to not talk about Amex points parade marches on and we got to be thankful for that, right? Because my goodness, when you talk about big offers, it's hard to not talk about Amex because Greg mentioned the Amex Platinum card before, but now on the Amex business card side, we're seeing the business gold and business Platinum card offers reach 200, 250,000 points with

a single card. I mean, that's just absolutely incredible. When you talk about, you know, Greg's glory days of 50k offers there, 10 or 12 years ago, or whatever, 250,000 points from a single card. I mean, that's just that's pretty amazing inflation there, I guess. Except that the points are still really valuable. So obviously, prices have risen and everything, but but 250,000 points will still get you a lot of flying. So that's a pretty incredible offer. And we've also continued to see big referral offers. So not only can you

earn a lot of points referring friends, sometimes you'll earn as many as 30 or 35,000 Amex membership rewards points per referral on top of the person you refer earning the bonus when they get the card. But then also we've seen some things like, I think earlier this year, they ran a plus 10x at restaurants for three months. So if you referred somebody and they opened a card, not only did you get the whatever it was, let's say 30,000 points for referring somebody, but you also got an extra 10 points per dollar at restaurants on that card up to $25,000 spent over three months. That's long since expired. But that stacked really nicely for a while on my Amex Gold card where I was earning 14x at restaurants for a while between the 4x that the card earns at restaurants to begin with and the extra 10 for referring someone. So,

I mean, my goodness, the points just keep pouring in in ways like that. Yeah, it's really been incredible. What an awesome, awesome thing it is. Next up on our top 10 list is paying taxes remains a great way to meet minimum spend requirements. What? An agent told me that it doesn't count, Greg. Don't listen to that agent. The one downside that we didn't mention about all these growing big offers for welcome bonus offers is that minimum spend requirements have also gone up over time. But when we pay taxes, we can pay with a credit card with less than a 2% fee. And that's just, depending on your tax situation, can be a great way once a year or maybe quarterly if you pay estimated taxes to sign up for new cards and then meet the minimum spend by paying your taxes and paying that small fee to cover it.

Yeah. And I was being facetious about agents saying that the tax payments don't count because periodically agents give out this incorrect information. People will call in and an agent will tell them that paying their taxes, an Amex agent will say, oh, no, paying taxes doesn't count towards welcome bonus spending or you won't earn rewards on it. And it's not true. And my goodness, it's frustrating that agents keep giving that incorrect information out. But if you do pay your taxes, you will earn your points. Just be patient. They'll come through eventually. So so there you go. Paying taxes still works. Next up is PayPal waives credit card fees when doing good. So you know more about this than I do. Why don't you tell us about what PayPal is doing and how that we can be thankful for this. Yeah, absolutely. I've talked on previous

episodes about how I like to do Kiva loans, where you fund micro loans to people who need it around the world. And the cool thing about what PayPal does here is that PayPal processes the credit card transaction. So when you make loans with your credit card, PayPal processes it and does not charge Kiva any credit card transaction fee. So they eat the cost of that transaction fee. So all of your loan is going to Kiva and then being used to fund these microloans. So that's an awesome thing right there. Even better for many, if you like to donate to charitable organizations, you may have noticed when you go right to that charity's website, they may say, yeah, we'll accept credit cards,

but please consider paying some other way because it costs us X percent, or they'll say, please donate a little bit more to cover that credit card processing. Well, PayPal has this thing called the PayPal Giving Fund Fundraiser Hub, where a lot of different charities are on there. And if you contribute to those charities through that hub, again, PayPal eats the transaction fee, the credit card transaction fee. So when you donate to your favorite charity through there, they get the 100% full amount of how much you contributed. PayPal eats the fee, and you get your credit card rewards. So it's a win-win for everybody except for PayPal, although I'm sure that they are marking that down as a donation themselves as a way of – you know, they must be saving on taxes by doing that, I assume. I'm sure. I'm sure. But moral of the story is feed PayPal. They're hungry.

They have feast to eat. So give your charitable contributions through PayPal. Transcriber points. One last thing for me to say about that, I just realized. So there's a local charity in Ann Arbor that I like, and they weren't on that fundraising hub. So I asked them, I sent them a link, you know, you should sign up here. Here's where to sign up. And they did. And so now I'm able to contribute through there. And so that's just awesome.

Yeah, that's great. That's a great idea that probably a lot of people wouldn't even think of, too. If you have a favorite local charity, you might think, oh, well, they're just not on there. They're local. They're too small. But it may very well be worth their while. And especially if PayPal is eating the fee, then why wouldn't they want to sign up and give people an opportunity and then just direct their people? Hey, you want to donate with a credit card? Do it through here because it won't cost us anything. Yeah. Right. Seems great. All right. Transferable points programs keep expanding. We've seen expansion continue from the various, well, or from some anyway, of the transferable points programs, most notably, of course, Wells Fargo entering the ring this year with their own transferable points program, limited transfer partners still, but useful transfer partners nonetheless. Transfer partners that show that they're paying attention and wanted to pick an array that would be useful

to people who want to collect transferable rewards. And of course, with an ability to combine the points in your Wells Fargo cards, it's a pretty interesting program. I think both of us expected to see even more expansion out of Wells Fargo this year. They've been slower to expand beyond the initial launch, but still nonetheless exciting to see, right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, we love our transferable points. I mean, it's a way of earning. It gives you so many opportunities to earn points. Each of these banks that have them have multiple cards where you can earn the points, including, in some cases, cash back cards. In Wells' case and with Capital One and Citi, where you can earn points, cash back points, and then move them to a card that has transferable points and transfer them to airline or hotel programs where you can often get

outstanding value. And that's the game here. Earn points as cheaply or as freely as possible, and then use them for the best value. And transferable points are a big, big piece of that second part of the puzzle. For sure. For sure. Speaking of transferable points, one of the weaknesses of transferable points, one of the weaknesses of transferable currencies, I'd say in recent years has been hotel programs, because many hotel points have become worth less than they were before. Hyatt, of course, being a notable exception, but but most of the transferable currency programs are relatively weak on the hotel front, because those points are typically not worth more than airline

miles. However, Citi has added a couple of new hotel partners this year, and those are yielding surprisingly good value, right? Yeah. So Citi's added both leading hotels of the world and preferred hotels. Now, in the leading hotels of the world case, you're looking at getting about 1.6 cents per point value from your city points, which is not incredible, but it's good. It's a really decent value. And there are some amazing leading hotels of the world properties out there that you could use your points with. So that's been fantastic. Preferred hotels, they have this amazing sounding one to four transfer ratio. But it's been confusing, I guess, what's going on because we haven't been able to find many examples where you can book preferred hotels 100% with points. So we're kind of waiting for that to shake out

and see is that just a technical glitch that's happening or a real problem, but at least it has potential to be very exciting if that works out. Very good. Good to see reasonable ways to use points towards hotels. And that's certainly what Citi has added, at least with leading hotels in the world

and hopefully with preferred hotels as well. Speaking of adding partners, though, they're not the only ones. Built has added several this year. So they, we should probably first mention they dropped American Airlines and Hawaiian, I think also, but added Alaska, Tap Air Portugal and Accor, Live Limitless. So Alaska has been a good ad that kind of balances out what they've lost. And TAP and Accor add some probably more niche but interesting programs potentially. I'll be curious to see what happens with those programs moving forward. TAP in particular, they offer a free stopover on paid tickets, but not yet on award tickets. However, I understand that eventually that's going to come. So I look forward to hopefully seeing that someday.

And then that might make the TAP program more interesting than it currently is. So we'll be excited to see how that develops over time. Built added a few more partners to the stable. Yeah. All right. Next thing we're most thankful for, many award chart sweet spots live on. So to start off, American Airlines, excellent partner award chart. It lives on.

We have no idea how long. Maybe by the time this publishes, it won't be true. But hopefully it will. Nick and I just took advantage of a bunch of their amazing sweet spots on our Million Mile Madness Challenge, including flying Etihad first class apartments between Europe and Middle East for 62,500 miles. You could even go as far as between Europe and India to get that full value as well. Another one is business class. We flew Qatar, but business class on any partner between Middle East and Asia for only 40,000 American Airlines miles or first class for 50,000.

Those are incredible awards, sweet spots. Nick recently published a post about those and a few others that live on, at least for now. Absolutely love it, the Americans award chart. Another one I'm going to mention that's not in our notes, Nick, is ANA's Round the World award chart continues. So even as ANA had raised some award pricing

for other types of awards, they're amazing round the world award chart, which is really just absolutely incredible. It's possible to fly around the world for around 125,000 miles in business class. So these would be points transferred from American Express to ANA. And that's just incredible. I can't believe that that award chart, which is from like 1762 or something, has continued to this day.

Which Greg remembers, incidentally. Yeah, it is amazing that it's continued to last, right? So yeah, that's a great one to be thankful for. Even though I haven't been able to put it to use myself yet, I still have dreams of using it one of these days. So we can continue to dream and hope that we get an opportunity. Greg's used it.

So hopefully one of these days I'll get a chance to as well. We also have to be thankful for Hyatt's award chart, for Hyatt continuing to have award charts because most other hotel programs have moved away from award charts. And so we got to be thankful that Hyatt still has them because that still gives you a predictor of value. You get an idea of how many points you're going to need for a particular property in advance. And we appreciate that. And it's good to have that transparent idea of how many points awards will cost. So we love the fact that Hyatt still has award charts, not only for standard rooms, but also for suites, standard suites, premium suites. So even though they've added some additional stuff in terms of all inclusives that increased prices that, you know, I don't love that stuff as much, but it's good to have predictable award charts. I appreciate that about

Hyatt. Absolutely. And some of the awards are just astronomically good value. Not all of them, but, you know, I regularly run into like a decent hotel that's like a category one or two costing around like 8,000 points, you know, in that range per night that would otherwise cost $250, $300 for the night, you know, and that kind of thing you'll, you'll see every now and then with, with Hyatt. And of course at the top, at the higher level of the word chart, you'll see properties that would, you know, sell for like a thousand dollars going for, you know, 30,000 or whatever. I almost said Alaska. Hyatt points for those things. Speaking of Alaska, Alaska's new award charts have some great value opportunities in them.

So, for example, they have very, very low rates for American Airlines short distance flights. So I just the other day was looking for flights and saw close-in flights for Thanksgiving week were costing like $500, $600, $700 one way, or I could book with 4,500 Alaska miles. I mean, it's absolutely absurd value that is possible through that. And of course, they have other good value things like as low as 45,000 between Europe and Eastern North America. Yeah. So, Wilde, I was laying in bed the other night and I was, I must've been semi-conscious cause I had like an idea of where I was.

And I, I saw in my mind a message on Slack from Tim saying that Amex was dropping Alaska as a transfer partner at 1am. And like, and it was like 10 o'clock in my mind. And I was like, oh my goodness, we got to get a post out about this. And I was thinking about it and I was like, I knew my computer was next to the bed. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna grab the computer in a second. I'm gonna make a transfer before I run out of time. And then next thing I know, like, I don't even know if it was in the same moment, or I fell asleep and woke back up. But I grabbed my phone, and it was like 1250. And I was like,

oh my goodness, did this really happen? I wasn't sure I had opened the computer. I like I looked at different blogs to be like, did anybody else report this? Am I making them? And of course, it was all in my mind that the transfers were ending at that time. It was just something totally made up. But it's so top of mind that I don't want to miss out on the chance to transfer some Amex points to Alaska before that ends. And we don't know when that will end.

But the reason I say that of course is because, because Alaska has some really good sweet spots like that. And I would be happy to have some more Alaska miles. So I should probably make a transfer sooner rather than later. Which, which by the way, Amex does not support transfers to Alaska. They support transfers to Hawaiian. And luckily you can transfer directly between Hawaiian and Alaska now,

but just wanted to clarify that. And that was a nice little insight into Nick's fever dreams. What's likely to come up in Nick's mind. Oh, my goodness. You never know. You never know. I had to laugh at myself after I checked all of the blogs to make sure that I wasn't crazy. All right.

Or that I was crazy, I guess, as the case may be. Another thing that we're thankful for, though, let's skip ahead to the next one here is free changes and cancellations continue for U.S. Airlines, except for basic economy types of fares. But in general, when you're changing and canceling awards on the major U.S. Airlines, it's free and relatively easy to cancel, again, particularly with award tickets. So that's awesome, because it makes it possible to book trips when you think you might be able to take a trip, and then you can change your mind later on or book a backup flight if you really

need to be there for something important you can't miss, you're trying to position for a valuable international award, you can book a backup to make sure you get there. So in fact, just I was talking about this just yesterday, because we're going to visit family during the holidays. And boy, Allegiant has a really cheap flight that's very, very attractive. But if that flight gets canceled, then we're stuck, right? Because it'd be days before Allegiant have another flight. However, because of free cancellations, I can book a backup and book a different flight that say, okay, well, if the Allegiant flight doesn't go for some reason, then I could have this backup. And the ability to have free changes and cancellations makes that kind of thing possible.

Right, right, right. So, you know, the pandemic brought us the free changes and cancellations to both cash and points award tickets with the major airlines. But just this year, and not only did those not go away after the pandemic, but just this year, Spirit and Frontier added similar free changes and cancellations for most of their fares as well. So that's just an awesome trend all around. And I hope it's catching. I hope this free change and cancellation pandemic spreads outside of the United States because so far it

hasn't, but hopefully it will. That would be nice. So unfortunately, Virgin Atlantic kind of took things in the opposite direction this year, right? By increasing their cancellation. Oh, they did. Yeah. So yeah, yeah, bad, bad version. Okay. So let's see. Next up is status matches. Talk to us about status matches. Yeah, it's, you know, this is sort of a continuing and evolving thing where status matches create

opportunities that you may not have known you'd have. So, you know, for example, Delta came out early this year with a really rewarding status match where you can match from elite status in a number of other airlines. And if you did it early this year and you met the status requirements, you could keep status for the rest of this year, all of the next year, and through January of the year after that. And so it was possible to get

mid to very high level lease status with Delta very easily if you had another program to match to. And you could even qualify. This was kind of a newish thing to see. You didn't even qualify with, mostly with spend on credit cards if you wanted to. even qualify. This was kind of a newish thing to see. You didn't even qualify with, um, mostly with spend on, on credit cards if you wanted to. So, so that, that, that was really cool. Um, JetBlue also, JetBlue has a status match, which is, uh, very easy to, to, um, uh, turn into a

multi-year, uh, type of, uh, elite status. And, uh And also you could qualify with credit card spend. So, you know, a couple things there going on. Casino status matches. This is something that's ever evolving, but Nick has written many times about this and talked a bit about it earlier in the program, that by matching, by getting status in one casino program, you can match to other ones. And often those kind of matches can lead to free stuff, anywhere from

free dinners, free hotel nights, but also free cruises. And that's something specifically that we've talked and written a lot about. Yeah, there were some new ones that popped up this year. Wynn very briefly offered a match to Platinum Status, which came with a new free cruise opportunity with Holland America. And of course, Fontainebleau had a match going also. So and then when Venetian opened up their program, they had a match, which wasn't particularly interesting because they weren't offering any benefits. But it's always worth keeping your ear to the ground for those opportunities because

you never know when a new one's going to come around and what your matched win platinum status might get you next kind of a thing. Although probably those of us who've done the win one particular, we're working on borrowed time here because that'll run out at the end of January. But at any rate, it's worth keeping your eye on those things because the opportunities do evolve, but they have existed so far and continue to exist. And I have, I think I've done, what is it? Nine cruises now in the last 24 months. And we've got at least two more booked for next year so far. So yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It's worked out well. All right. Next up, airlines continue to make business in first class more aspirational.

How so? Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about business class first. So years ago, lie flat seats and direct aisle access became the norm for business class products, international business class flights. That was a great direction for things to go. But now what we're seeing is more and more

suites with doors we're seeing for the long haul flights plush bedding that is added as like a topper we're seeing better technology those kind of things for in-flight comfort in first class we're seeing more and more suites with high walls. So it's more like having like a little room than a seat on an airplane. And in multiple cases now, we're seeing situations where those suites have room not just for, you know, the old style where a chair converts into a bed, but actually having both. You have your big chair and you have an area with your bed. And Nick and I both enjoyed that on a recent Etihad First Apartments flights, which we both had separate flights, but both got to enjoy that there.

But we're seeing that kind of thing being built in more and more airlines in their first class products, which is a terrific change. And more and more, not that this is really new to first class, but we are seeing, you know, the maybe more of the ability to get top shelf drinks and food, champagne, caviar, lobster, those kind of things when you're flying first class. But not only has the situation in the sky improved for these premium experiences, but we're seeing more airport experiences open up where you have dedicated, in some cases, dedicated business and or first class check-in experiences where, so for example, when I checked in for my Japan Airlines first class flight, they led me through a private lounge area to a private security with no line whatsoever and went right through in seconds because I was flying first class and then right to their first class lounge.

And so you're seeing more and more of those kind of special entrances, special lounges, special security pathways, I guess, for business and first class passengers in certain international hubs, which is all exciting news for international travelers. Yeah, it's fun. It makes using your miles and points fun. It increases convenience, of course, and it makes it feel even more exclusive because you get that dedicated security lane or, you know, an immigration counter that, you know, it's just you.

And so it is kind of nice and it takes a lot of the stress away from the airport experience, I think, for a lot of people. And so again, it just increases the fun factor of using your miles, I think. So yeah, that's exciting to see. Yeah, absolutely.

And last but not least here, maybe, we've got loyalty partnerships create sweet opportunities. So we've seen some pretty sweet opportunities and partnerships. Marriott Aeroplan you have up here. What's up with their partnership? So, you know, they just added a partnership where the exciting thing is for people with Marri, titanium status doesn't offer a lot of benefits above what platinum status offers, but it now gives you Aeroplan 25K elite status. So get automatic elite status with Air Canada, Aeroplan, just for having Marriott titanium status. That goes along with what the existing United silver status that you already get as well.

So that's really cool. The Alaska-Hawaiian merger has created some fun, sweet opportunities. For example, the ability to transfer Amex points to Alaska by going through Hawaiian. So you transfer your Alaska points to Hawaiian and then move them to Alaska. That's a great new... Your Amex points to Hawaiian. You said transfer your Alaska points to Hawaiian and then move them to Alaska. That's a great new. You said transfer your Alaska points to Hawaiian. Yes, the Amex points to Hawaiian and then Hawaiian to Alaska.

Well, you transfer your Amex points to Hawaiian and then you transfer your Hawaiian points to Alaska. Yes. It's also given you a backdoor way to move your Alaska miles for free from one person to another. So, Hawaiian lets you move points for free if one of you has a Hawaiian credit card. And so, for example, I was able to move my wife's Alaska miles to her Hawaiian miles account, and then from there to my Hawaiian miles account, and from there to my Alaska miles account. So, it basically is a way to move Hawaiian miles account and from there to my Alaska miles account. So it basically is a way to move Alaska miles around for free if you understand that loop. So that's awesome.

Choice, they've had a long standing partnership with Preferred Hotels. In the past year, they added the ability to book with choice points online. That was an exciting new opportunity. They also then raised point prices. That was less exciting, but it's still good to be able to self-help with that one. But the one I'm most excited about is Hilton SLH. Maybe, Nick, why don't you talk about that one and why I think we're both excited about that.

Yeah, well, so of course, a year ago, we would have been probably talking about Hyatt and SLH because they used to partner. And so we used to be able to book small luxury hotels of the world, SLH properties through Hyatt, but Hyatt and SLH broke up and did their partnership, and Hilton scooped it up. And what a good scoop it was for Hilton because Hilton has added small luxury hotels to the world and they have over-delivered, under-promised and over-delivered in terms of the ability to book these. So they said that we'd be able to book some of them this year and it would be kind of a slow process adding more and more of these SLH properties on, but they've really put the pedal to the metal and made tons and tons of

these SLH properties available to book with Hilton points. And the awesome thing is that they have standard rooms available at these, in some cases, very small properties. And so they may only have one standard room, but still they've got a standard room that you can book with Hilton points for, well, of course, Hilton doesn't have an award chart, but we haven't seen standard rooms, I think cost more than 150,000 points at any of the properties yet. And more importantly, you can use Hilton free night certificates because those aren't capped. So if you've got the Aspire card, you get an annual free night certificate, you could use it at any of these SLH properties.

And some of these SLH properties can cost upwards of two grand or more a night. And so being able to use your Hilton free night certificate at a place like that is just absolutely awesome. So and increases the value, I think, of the Hilton program overall, because they've got all of these aspirational properties that I think they were missing for a long time. You know, the Hilton's are perfectly nice. I've always enjoyed Hilton properties well enough. And in fact, before I became a blogger, it was probably the chain I liked the most, because I always felt like I got the most consistency in service and experience at Hilton properties before I got into blogging anyway. But what they've been missing for me for years was more the aspirational end, you know, because it was Hilton's at the top or, you know, Conrad's

and Waldorf Astoria's, which are nice, but there's just only so many of those that seemed unique rather than just in a regular city location. And so now they've got all these really unique properties around the world. So, and great opportunities to either use your points or your free night certificate. So super exciting. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, a couple of things, Nick didn't mention that I'm excited about the ability to get a fifth night free with Hilton points is extended to SLH, which is really remarkable. So really can make your points super valuable when spending on SLH. The other thing, it's more, I don't have any way of proving this, but it seems like award availability at these properties is better under Hilton than it was under Hyatt.

And again, I have no way of proving that, but just my experience has been that it hasn't been that hard to find at these top hotels, you know, availability. Now you do need, ideally, to use a tool like rooms.aero, which we have a video showing how to do that to find availability. It makes it a lot easier anyway to find availability. But at some of these properties, there's a lot of availability for these very, very desirable properties. So it has made me kind of overnight a Hilton fanboy when I didn't pay attention to Hilton much at all before the SLH moves. So great job, Hilton, scooping that up. Well, and it suddenly makes it more reasonable than ever to consider, probably anyway, or

arguably, transferring Amex points to Hilton, especially when there's a transfer bonus, or certainly buying Hilton points if you know you're going to have an SLH redemption. I mean, my goodness, there's so many times when I've looked and seen SLH properties where you could buy the points from Hilton for significantly less than the cost of a night at that particular place. So there's just great opportunities to be had. Yeah, yeah, totally. Just real quick on that. So when they have sales, it's usually you're buying Hilton points for half a cent each. So a the top of the top of the top of line 150,000

point per night property would cost you $750 to buy the points when they're on sale like that. But you'd be able to buy, you know, get five nights because of the fifth night free for the cost of, you know, four nights. And so you're talking about what would normally be, you know, maybe a $2,000 per night property. So $10,000 if you're paying up front for five nights. But what, $3,000, I think, to buy the points and do the fifth night free. So, you know, even if you're starting from zero, uh, you hit a good sale and you could, you could book an incredible, um, vacation that, that normally you wouldn't, you know, even consider doing because it would be, uh, you know, 10 grand for it. But now you're talking about, it's not,

you know, not free, nowhere near free, but still not, not a bad price for a luxury property for sure. Yeah. Well, and you know, we've, we were saying some of these places are $2,000 a night or more, but don't discount the or more part also, because we, we've seen some of them. Right. Even significantly more. I mean,

there was that one in Montana I wrote about those like five grand a night, you know? And so five nights stay there, it costs you 25 grand or $3,000. If you bought the points for it, kind of a thing or whatever it was like, I can't remember the exact details. Yeah.

And, and not only that, some of these are don't cost 150 000 points per night some of these two thousand dollar per night things are 120 000 uh you know so so you know that brings down the cost even more when it's like that so yeah um so there you go three cheers to that so we're we're suddenly big fans of hilton all right i think that wraps up this week's main event and brings us to this week's question of the week. Now, this week's question of the week was a really long email that came in that was probably a good topic to talk about at some point. But I'm going to pick out just one specific small piece of it. So I'm going to read the intro. And if you've seen the email, Greg, don't worry, we're not going to go through the whole thing.

I'm just going to start it out and then pick out one specific piece of it. So let's see. Harry writes in and says, I'm several years into the Points and Miles game. I enjoy the hunt and have benefited greatly both financially and from new experiences using the frequent miler resources. Certainly been a boost to the financial payback. Thank you. But as my portfolios have grown to 10 plus cards and 20 plus programs, I find that I'm spending far more time than I would like on all three aspects of the game, chasing points, keeping track of the acquired assets and making redemptions. And so he wants us to talk about time savers. But I'm going to jump to just one specific piece that he had here. And he said, have either of you gone spreadsheet free? If so, maybe reviewing a checklist of the administrative steps you take

when a new card or spending bonus arrives would be instructive. Say one, set up auto pay, two, add a card to travel freely, three, update other online tools, four, initiate the big purchases and bill pay is needed to earn the signup bonus, five, update pocket reference card for best earning cards by spending category. So what I really want to ask you, Greg, is if you get a new card,

what is your plan of attack? Like when you first get the card, what's the checklist of stuff that you do to keep it organized? Because I mean, we've talked before, I don't know, maybe not everybody heard, but there was a live stream a while back where we each shared how many cards we had in our household. And I think I had the least at 62 out of me and Greg and Tim and Steven, and that's not 62 in my name, that's 62 between my wife and I. But still, I think everybody else had more than I did between player one and player two so uh so you get a lot more cards how do you

how do you go about organizing that right right well many things he mentioned are things i do um i so when i get a new card i do add it to travel freely so that it will um you will alert me that the minimum spend requirement is coming due soon. It'll alert me annual fee is coming up soon, so you might want to downgrade or cancel or whatever after that. So I definitely do that. I am not at all spreadsheet-free, though. I rely on spreadsheets a lot. So I have two relevant spreadsheets here that I update, maybe even a third if we want to talk about that.

One is I keep all the credit card numbers in a spreadsheet. Now my spreadsheets are securely locked with passwords and all that, but I keep the full number. And that way, when I'm traveling wherever, I don't have to bring 80 some credit cards with me to make sure I have a card if it comes up that I need one, I have all the necessary information in that spreadsheet. I also add it to a sort of to-do spreadsheet where I list the credit card number, the minimum spend required, and how much I've spent so far all in that spreadsheet. And so I keep track of that there. The other thing I keep in that to-do spreadsheet

is any coupons that come with this credit card. So for example, if it's a Amex Platinum card that has the $200 airline fee credits or whatever, I list that and put how much I've spent so far this year towards airline fees so that I make sure I earn the full $200. So I list all the, not all the credits, because just the ones that I really want to make sure I use, I list in that to-do spreadsheet. And the final one, I have a spreadsheet that is my travel planning spreadsheet put all the trips that I'm planning to take and or have have booked and I keep information in there about like credit card perks that are noteworthy like like oh this card offers a companion ticket or something so that it's kind of a reminder like I need to use that perk for one of these upcoming

trips and then when I do use it for an upcoming trip I put it in there and this is fairly new So that it's kind of a reminder, like, I need to use that perk for one of these upcoming trips. And then when I do use it for an upcoming trip, I put it in there. And this is fairly new. This is something I started just this beginning of this year. Because when I put, let's say, I put a free night certificate in there. Later, if I end up canceling that trip, I need to remember, oh, that free night is still there and needs to be used before it expires. So then I move it down to another section of the spreadsheet. It's sort of like a to-do, like don't forget to use this free night. So that's what I've been doing. It's

a lot of manual work, but it's been necessary to keep my sanity and keep all this stuff straight. Part of the cost of playing the game, huh about the last piece so he said do you update your pocket reference card for the best earning cards by spending categories you get a new card do you like then kind of update which card you're going to use for which type of purchases if it's in my wallet at all times, and I just use those for everything. I use my business earner for gas, I use my city prestige, no longer available to new applicants, for restaurants, that kind of thing. So I have a very small set that I carry with me. When I have a new card, it's usually stays at home. It usually meet the minimum spend through online things like paying taxes, we talked about earlier, that kind of thing. And it stays in a binder. Most of the time, that's what happens with new cards. Same, same, same for me. I don't chase very small category bonuses either.

So like if I get a card that offers a streaming bonus, I pay $17 a month for Spotify, but like, am I going to bother changing which card that's on for an extra point per dollar a month? Like an extra 12 points a year. I mean, I'm not going to worry about that. It's too small of a win. So, so with those really small things, and that's, I think, when I saw the actual, the full length of

this email, and like the, I could see the stress that somebody was under trying to keep track of all these things. And one of the things that came to my mind was simplify. Like, don't worry about all of the small wins necessarily, or all of the tiny pieces. Worry about like the macro stuff. If you're earning a few big welcome bonuses a year, you don of the tiny pieces worry about like the macro stuff like you know if you're earning a few big welcome bonuses a year you don't necessarily need to worry about do i update the pocket card as to you know whether i need to earn 4x on dining or 3x on dining but you know like yeah yeah yeah no that's a really good way to put it like like think about it this way let's say you spend thirty thousand dollars a year on credit cards. And let's say by maximizing what's

in your wallet at every time you can earn an extra point per dollar. So an extra 30,000 points is nice. But if you think about how many points you get with each welcome bonus and how much less stress you'd have if you compartmental just say if you compartmentalize the way i talked about um then it can uh just make your life a lot easier and it's it's not 30 000 points is not you know if you're doing a lot of this is this is a small a small price to pay don't sweat this reality is probably gonna be less than 30 000 points of difference too right for most people for sure i mean a bunch of the stuff that you talked about, like Greg said, I mean, all good stuff there. And I still use spreadsheets also

for a lot of different things. Uh, although I'm perhaps less, uh, less spreadsheety, I guess, but, uh, but I still, I have a spreadsheet for, for instance, for the platinum cards in our household with the airline fee credits and the FHR credits and everything else so that I can keep track of which ones have been used and which ones haven't. So, I mean, there's, I don't think there's an easier way to keep track of stuff like that than to just use a spreadsheet. And Greg's point about the free night certificates is a really good one because you want to know when that one's going to expire when you cancel that reservation. And so I did that also this year. But I'm not like pouring over that regularly, because I'm not using all of those things all the time. Now, my wife tends to

be more of a list person, she likes to write things down, she is not like a spreadsheet on the computer person at all. And so she's doing most of the monthly credits, and she just has it in a notebook and has it written down as to which cards need to be used in which places in order to use the monthly credits. And first of the month, she busts out the notebook and goes through one by one and does them all. And so, you know, different strokes for different books. Yeah, yeah.

Paper notebooks. Wow. Less from the past. She hates spreadsheets. No interest in spreadsheets. Well, you know, that's good tech. It works without electricity. It does.

Yeah. It does. It doesn't work when you're like 3,000 miles away from the notebook necessarily. No, no. But near infinite storage, it's good stuff. Search capabilities are limited.

That's true. That brings us, I think, to the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed this episode and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our frequent miler insiders Facebook group where you can ask and answer questions all the time. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future

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