Frequent Miler on the Air - A World-Class Wells Fargo Wallet | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep303 | 4-25-25

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

We tend to ignore Wells Fargo cards because there are so many other great credit cards out there, but they actually do have some compelling cards out there. In today's episode we'll discuss which ones you might want in your wallet. (01:47) - Re: Clarifying our "Beyond 100K Sapphire Preferred" episode, which you can read more about here. (19:33) - Bigger Capital One VentureX Business Card offer via private banker Listen to the podcast episode about the public Capital One VentureX Business card offer here. (22:49) - Citi decreasing redemption rates on emirates starting 7/27 (26:24) - Read more about the OneKey Cash devaluation for Vrbo stays here. (29:10) - A top up fee for priority pass lounge access (32:10) - Read more about the Japan Airlines devaluation here. (35:26) - More Japan Airlines (JAL) news Learn about how to Book JAL with JetBlue points here. (39:29) - More Bilt news (44:55) - Learn how to use Bilt to pay student loans with points here. (46:24) - United MileagePlus Showing More Awards After Changing Settings (49:51) - Wyndham Points + Cash reservations now bookable with as few as 750 points (51:12) - Learn more about Gondola here: https://frequentmiler.com/gondola/ Main Event: A World-Class Wells Fargo Wallet (57:04) - Transferable points (59:27) - Notable Wells Fargo credit cards which have transfer abilities (1:01:07) - Notable Wells Fargo cash back cards, which can be moved to a transferrable point card (1:04:33) - Here's how you can build a world-class Wells Fargo wallet (1:07:44) - Downsides (and fun hypotheticals) (1:13:32) - See our current transfer bonuses resource here. (1:16:22) - How many of your millions of miles come from sign up bonuses vs credit card spending, and where does most of your credit card spend come from? Read more about how to increase credit card spend here, and watch our episode 197 about increasing spend here. 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 – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder

Today's show is jam-packed with all kinds of information including we clarify a number of details about the Sapphire Preferred card, we talk about how priority pass seems to be adding resort fees, and how to build a world-class Wells Fargo wallet. Frequent Mylar on the air starts now. Now, today's main event, a world-class Wells Fargo wallet. We tend to ignore Wells Fargo cards a lot. They're not top of mind the way Amex and Chase and Citibank and Capital One cards are, but they have some really compelling cards, including transferable points cards.

And we're gonna talk about how you could build a really awesome wallet just with a few Wells Fargo cards. You know, I think you're gonna have to convince me a little bit, Greg, because really awesome sounds strong to me. So I'm curious to see if you can convince me that it is a really awesome wallet, but there's definitely some interesting cards.

So I'll give you that and then we'll debate whether or not it's an awesome wallet. Probably by the end of the year. Well, you know, whether or not it's really awesome really depends on whether you want to alliterate well because world class is better when talking about Wells Fargo than awesome. True. So it's a true world class wallet is what we're talking about here. Keep it world class Wells Fargo. All right. So don't forget if you want to jump ahead to something or you want

to come back to something later on, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. That's where you'll find the entire show description. So just expand that description box and you'll find links to things we're talking about and whatnot. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this video or podcast or leave us a review. We always appreciate your comments and feedback. All right, let's drag out this week's Giant Mail back. All right. This week's Giant Mail is huge. We've got a ton of Giant Mail to go through today.

So get ready for it all. It's going to be huge. Upstate New York reference. It's all in response to last week's episode, which was titled something like Beyond 100K, where we talked all about the Sapphire Preferred card. So Beyond 100K referred to the 100K offer that's out as we record this for the Sapphire Preferred card.

And Beyond was that show was all about how to get a lot of value from the Sapphire preferred card beyond just that welcome bonus. So, um, that's what we talked about last week and there was a lot of, um, good input following that. Um, one is not a specific piece of mail, but I just wanted to talk through what we've heard from a number of people from different locations, which is confusion about whether people can apply for the 100k

offer right now. So a lot of people already have or have had either the Sapphire Preferred card or the Sapphire Reserve card and wanna know, can I get in on this offer now? And so to understand the answer to that, you have to understand two basic rules. One, if you got a welcome bonus on either of those cards, the Sapphire Preferred or Sapphire Reserve, within the past 48 months, then no, you cannot get the Sapphire Preferred or Sapphire Reserve within the past 48 months then no you cannot get the Sapphire Preferred 100k offer right now and that's based on when you received the bonus not when you applied for the

card not when it was first open it's when you received the bonus if you never received a bonus then you don't have to worry about that and yes when you close the card either some people get confused And it has nothing to do with when you close the card either. Some of these people get confused and think it has something to do with closing. Like Greg said, not opening, not closing, just when you receive the bonus. Right. Then the other rule you have to know is you can't currently have any Sapphire card open in order to apply for the Sapphire Preferred card. But that's an easy fix because you can call up Jace and say, hey, can I product change this to a freedom card? And they have several freedom cards. It doesn't really matter which one you product change to

unless you actually want one of them. So I'd suggest looking into the details of each type. Freedom Unlimited is I think a good one for a lot of people, but regardless, they all have their pluses andes. The point is, that'll keep your points intact. It'll mean you no longer have a Sapphire card. And then you could just wait a few days and then apply for the Sapphire preferred. So yeah, just a long way of saying you probably can qualify, but you just need to know about those basic rules. One thing I want to add to what you said there is that every now and then somebody's confused about this, they'll say, oh, but I already have the freedom cards.

That's okay. You can, you can product change to another one. So you can have more than one. If you're product changing, you can't, you can't apply for a second copy of the chase freedom flex for instance, but you can product change and have two of them. Yeah, that's a really good point. It used to be really easy to get like multiple Sapphire cards like over and over. And so I have like four Freedom cards because of all the product changing. Now they have that 48 month rule that makes it a much longer process, but

it's still possible if you can wait out the 48 months between applications or welcome bonuses. Okay, so that was preamble. Now to read some giant mail. First is from Jenna. She says, I just wanted to thank you for your recent podcast all about the Chase Sapphire Preferred card. I almost didn't listen because I've had the card for years and I think I know how to use

it. But it was a good reminder that life changes and it's always good to have a refresher. As an example, I've never paid for streaming, but just in the last month started to pay for Netflix and YouTube TV. I would have never gone back on my own and learned I could be getting 3X by paying with the Sapphire Preferred. So that's cool. Very cool. Actually, my favorite part of that wasn't even that pointer. It was the fact that she said she almost didn't listen and then did and picked up something really good. And the reason that made me smile a little bit is because my introduction to Miles and points. I went to a conference early on and I almost

didn't go to Greg's presentation because I thought I knew everything about what he was talking about. This was well before I became a blogger and I was like, oh no, I think I know everything about that topic already. But but I sat in it anyway, thinking, Oh, you know, I'll listen and blew my mind. There were like so many things that I didn't know about what I thought I knew everything about. It's like, Oh wow, I was only scratching the surface. Like Greg was so much deeper into this than I had ever imagined. And that totally blew up my world. And here I am now a blogger. So there's I found so many of those types of things that happen in life where you're like,

I think I got all that already. And then you do pick up something new. I mean, we pick up new tips from readers all the time too. It will give us a tip that we're like, I didn't think of that. That's a great idea. So I think it's always good to, whether it's listening to the podcast

or connecting with other people and discussing this stuff, always good to listen in and find out what you might have missed. Right, right. Okay. But going back to that idea of using your Sapphire Preferred to pay for streaming, Casey wrote in and Casey said, in the recent show on the Sapphire Preferred, it was stated that this is a good card to set and forget for streaming services at 3x. card to set and forget for streaming services at 3x. I wanted to point out that despite it saying cable for 5x on the ink business cash card, I can attest to the fact that services such as Netflix and Disney Plus trigger the 5x. When I heard both hosts saying that they use the Sapphire or will, I know that

they have business cash. So I figured I should reach out with this data point, suggesting the ink business cash to set to pay for streaming TV ish services like these way to step in there Casey and make my point for me. See, we learn all the time. I didn't know that. I didn't know those triggered the five X. Yeah, I actually did know that, but I forgot about it.

And there's a reason I forgot about that. So I used to have my YouTube TV as my most expensive streaming service. And the ink cards were not consistently giving me 5X for that. Like I think they sometimes did, but sometimes didn't. Google services are weird like that, I feel like. Google Fi also similar, you know,

like sometimes they code one way, sometimes they go another way, right? Google services are weird. So yeah, so at some point I changed, you know, I changed it to some other card and then just kind of forgot all about it. But yeah, for any of the other ones, or maybe it's working now with YouTube TV,

it's been a long time since I tried, getting 5X with the Ink Business Cash Card is a great idea. Yeah, definitely, for sure. And anybody subscribing to YouTube TV, I mean, that could be a decent chunk of points over the course of the year. So that's a great tip. I don't subscribe to many streaming services

that I'm paying for anyway. There's the ones that get reimbursed by the Platinum card, so I don't. I don't subscribe to YouTube TV for instance, so my subs, my excuse me, my streaming services spend is really small, so I don't typically think very hard about the earnings on that, but I have an altitude go card

and that reimburses X amount every year after you put a streaming service on it so many times. So I put my Spotify on that card. Just reimbursed for one month a year. But I guess I should do the math and figure out if the points would be worth it more. I gotta think about it. Yeah, that's like a less than a 10% earning,

but that's not bad. Okay, next up is Anna. So before I read Anna's, I want to kind of mention that one of the things we talked about on last week's show was that the Sapphire Preferred gives you free DoorDash and that DoorDash has for, I'm sorry. It gives you free dash pass with door dash. That's their subscription service to door dash. Um, and if you have dash pass, you get the ability to buy gift cards for 10% off.

And there's these certain gift cards called Zift. And some of those Zift cards allow you to convert that credit to amazon.com. So we've talked about that you could convert that credit to Amazon.com. So we talked about that you could save 10% at Amazon by buying these cards. So I needed to say that because, um, Anna wrote in saying, I was very excited about the opportunity to get a discounted Amazon gift card, but unfortunately, after purchasing, purchasing it in door dash app and going to the Zift to choose the gift card, no Amazon card was available. I settled on a Home Depot gift card.

Also, it's important to mention that it's only worth to buy a gift card of up to $200 as the max discount is $20. So I don't know, I haven't tried buying one of these, so I don't know if you have to get a certain Zift card in order to do the Amazon. Maybe she bought the wrong one, or if it changes what's available once you go to redeem your ZIF card.

I'm not really sure, but just something to watch out for. Yep. Good tip. I assumed based that, so I didn't do this. This was something that we talked about last week, but I haven't actually bought the ZIF card. So this bit was new to me, but I had assumed based on the way you worded it actually, when we talked about it,

that there are different Zift cards. So I wonder if that is it. That was my assumption anyway. When you took us. Yeah, and that was my impression, but I haven't actually gone through the process of buying one yet. I do know that in some of the pictures that you see,

like one of them shows Amazon as a redemption option, others don't. So that's why I said it that way. That makes sense. That makes sense. All right, so good safety tip there to check on that if you're going to be buying one of those. Yeah.

But Anna goes on to say, in addition, I got curious about built rewards. So we talked about that. It's a good idea with your software, I prefer it to still sign up about built rewards. So we talked about that. It's a good idea with your Sapphire Preferred to still sign up for built rewards and add your Sapphire Preferred card to the built wallet because you can earn extra points at Walgreens, at restaurants and other things.

She said, I don't have the built credit card and don't pay rent. Decided to give it a go for dining and Lyft, which is another place where you can earn built points. Immediately got an email that my Sapphire Reserve uncoupled from Advantage Dining. Bilt seems to have less relevant restaurants in my area than Advantage Dining.

And she goes on to say, Bilt offers two to three points per dollar on dining, whereas the Advantage Dining always gives three points per dollar on dining, whereas the advantage dining always gives three miles per dollar. And yeah, anyway, so I want to stop there. So a few things here, which restaurants are available through built varies by your location. And so for some people, you know, you're going to have better options through built and for other people, you might have better options

through something like Advantage Dining or, you know, any of the other airline dining programs that are out there. Yeah, apparently you can only be enrolled in one of those dining things. So that's something to think about. The other thing that I wanna mention is that the BILT earnings vary based on the restaurant,

the time of year, what kind of promotions the restaurant has going on. They could decide that they like you as a customer and want you to come back, so they might offer you a special 5X or more to get you to come back or other perks. So it's not a set thing the way that you might think when you first glance at it. Yeah, and my impression is that over time that will probably get tailored more and more and there will probably be different types of offers. A new restaurant in the neighborhood

might offer more points per dollar on their slow days per week. And so we may see different, like Greg said, promotions and opportunities there that I think might make built more interesting if it were the same experience in terms of the restaurants. Now, obviously, like Greg said, if you've got better restaurant options on Advantage Dining, definitely go with Advantage Dining for now, but keep your

eye on the built app and see if more restaurants are added over time because they certainly could be. I think they probably will be in most large cities anyway. And then the other interesting thing here to me is this, I want to ask you, Greg. So let's say that built was offering two to three points per dollar. And we know you and I know that that's not going to be a flat rate thing all the time. But let's pretend for a second that it was and let's pretend that the restaurants are equal. Would you rather earn three American Airlines miles per dollar?

Or chance it that you might get two built points and you might get three built points. So yeah, I mean, in general, I value built points more than American Airlines miles, because built has a number of transfer, really good transfer partners. And so it gives you more flexibility to how to use your miles. But it's not a slam dunk because the American Airlines option also gives you loyalty points. If you're hunting American Airlines elite status, then every little bit counts towards that. And American Airlines miles, at

least until Citi, makes American Airlines a transfer partner. American Airlines miles are tough to get. There's not a huge number of ways. There are no good transfer options to get American Airlines miles. So again, every little bit can help because American has some really great sweet spot awards, especially on partners. And so I think it really depends on your situation. And you know, in my personal situation, I think I have enough American Airlines miles now, I would choose built, but it's not obvious. Yeah, so you know, you're right.

Definitely it's gonna depend on all of those factors that Greg just mentioned. For me though, the variable that comes to mind immediately is if I had the choice between three American Airlines miles and two or three Hyatt points, which one would I pick? And I would probably take the Hyatt points because I value Hyatt points a lot and I can't seem to get enough of them. Now some will say, oh there's a lot of ways to earn those through various chase cards and you're right there, but but the ability to transfer a high or a bunch of other programs, I would generally pick the transferable

points. American, like you said, if you're chasing lead status, they are hard to earn. There's a lot of reasons to go that route. So I wouldn't tell you you're wrong for picking American, but I think I would rather have two or three built points per dollar than than the three American Airlines miles. At least that's my, I had my initial thought about it. When I read this, I thought I'd take the built points per dollar than the three American Airlines miles. At least that's my, I don't know, my initial thought about it. When I read this, I thought,

I'd take the built points, but I would take the better restaurants for sure. If there are better restaurants, that would be the larger concern. Yeah, no, that, and that makes a lot of sense, absolutely. Might be worth, you know, just keeping an eye on keeping a different card linked. If you've got another card that earns a decent dining,

I mean, if you've got a Sapphire Reserve, maybe you also have a Freedom Unlimited, you got another card that earns a decent dining, I mean, if you got a Sapphire Reserve, maybe you also have a Freedom Unlimited or that earns three points per dollar on dining and you could link one to each. That's a really good point. Should have your Freedom Unlimited linked to built anyway so that you earn extra points at Walgreens. Walgreens.

Yeah, because. Then you get three points per dollar from the Freedom, because the Freedom cards earn three points per dollar at all drug stores, and then built adds some extra rewards on top at Walgreens. So that's a really nice combo. Okay. Next up, I'm sorry, I'm gonna butcher your name,

Jungbum Kim, something like that, I guess. I wrote in saying, thanks for the tip on the DoorDash and Lyft benefits to get up to 10% off on some Lyft rides. Definitely a newer benefit that I was unaware of, so thanks for pointing it out. I just want to share some clarification for a different thing, the Chase DoorDash DashPass benefit. Like you mentioned, the wording of the benefit

is a bit confusing. Get a minimum of one year of free dashpass when you activate by December 31st, 2027. And you stated, meaning we stated, that this would mean you would probably get free dashpass through the end of 2028 if you activate now. But I read their agreement a little, and it seems like the end date is December 31st, 2027, if you activate before December 31st, 2026. Anyway, yeah, it goes on to basically show the details of Chase's terms show that, yeah,

I had interpreted it incorrectly. Basically, for most people, this benefit is going to end by December 31, 2027, not not 2028. The only reason it would go later than that is if you sign up in what 2026, I guess. No, if you sign up in 2027, then? 2026, I guess. No, if you sign up in 2027, then it would go into 2028 because you get a minimum of you. Oh, 2027. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I think this rings a bell now. Now I remember this is the way it was the last time that, uh, you know, when they first started offering this, it was for a limited amount of time. And now I remember you're absolutely right. That's exactly the way the terms were written

before. So yeah, our culpa on that one for not catching that. There you go. Alright, that brings us next up to this week's card news out in card news this week. We last or on a recent coffee break episode we discussed the Venturex business offer and whether or not you should get it. But there's an even bigger offer available on the Venturex business card. Yeah, bigger, but not necessarily better. So, yeah, just as a reminder, the public offer that we discussed on our coffee break and I think on last week's show too, is that

it's a two tiered bonus if you sign up for the Venturex business card, get 150,000 bonus points with $30,000 spend in three months, and another 200,000 bonus points after spending $200,000 in six months. Okay. Well, if you have a Capital One private banker, you can get a bigger offer, where the first part's the same, 150,000 bonus after 30,000 spend. But the second part,

instead of only getting 200,000 bonus points, you could get 250,000 bonus points, but that requires $300,000 spend instead of $200,000 spend. So to sum it up, you could get an extra 50,000 bonus miles, but it requires $100,000 more spend than the one we discussed.

So I mean, yeah, if you spend a ridiculous amount of money, then this one's better. But if you're not sure you're gonna complete, if you're sure you're gonna complete $200,000 spend in six months but aren't so sure about 300,000 then the Regular offer is better. Yeah, you know this yeah Definitely I would probably be a little bit nervous about going after it because the incremental Benefit is small. It's good

I mean if you got a business where you're spending a lot of money Then it does seem to make sense if you've got a business where you're spending a lot of money, then it does seem to make sense if you're only gonna have one credit card anyway, or you're spending so much that you can do this plus a bunch of other stuff, which is the case for some people, then it seems almost like a no-brainer.

But I would wonder if the friction point might not be how much Capital One will let you spend each month. Because, I mean, this is a card that I think that has a flexible spending limit. Is that right? And then ventricle business stories have a credit. Yeah, I can't recall off. Stop my habit. At any rate, it'll be a function of how much capital one actually lets you spend, which is going to change over time with your history. But

I would, I might be nervous. Are they going to let you spend the 50 K a month? I mean, maybe they will, maybe they won't. I guess it depends on what kind of credit lines you have in your credit, in your business, and all the rest of that. But I don't know if I would gamble. I have to assume that if they approve you through a private banker for this offer, then they're gonna be expecting, you know,

$300,000 spend in six months. Yeah, maybe. Hopefully. I mean, we've seen issuers sometimes like regular credit cards issue comically low credit limits now and then as compared to the spending requirements. So I don't know. It's not don't get me wrong. That's not the common thing that happens,

but I would wonder anyway because I don't know. But I guess if you got a lot to spend, it might not hurt to try I guess all right let's uh so there's there's there's that let's talk about something else let's talk about being Bonvoit who has Bonvoit us this week yeah we've got a number of contenders here for the Bonvoit of the week award so Citibank has um sent emails to some people about how the Thank You Rewards program is going to be changing the transfer ratio for certain programs. And the one that most of them that are changing that we're aware of at the time of this recording are for the no fee cards, where there's a handful of transfer partners that transfer at poor ratios anyway. So those are getting a little bit worse. I'm not worried about that one because I don't recommend doing that anyway in general.

But for those who have the, one of the premium cards, the Citi Strata Premier, the old Prestige card, the old Access More card, where most transfers are one-to-one starting July 27th, transfers from thank you points to Emirates is going down to one to 0.8. So a thousand Citi points become 800 Emirates points. Bummer, that stinks. Yeah.

That's too bad. Although, go ahead, what are you gonna say? I was gonna say this almost ought to be under what crazy thing. Well, yeah. Because everybody transfers one to one toates like and like so city has like other transfer partners where they have like better than others. You know, transfer ratios.

But but with this, they're taking the one where like virtually everyone transfers one to one and saying, now we're going to give you less. All right. I'm going to have I have a different take on it. So and this is really this is fresh in mind because I wrote a post about getting going all in with Hawaiian Airlines miles and in response a commenter commented basically saying they don't trust Alaska ever since their overnight devaluation of Emirates awards and then a Japan Airlines devaluation that was without notice either.

And those were things like the Emirates devaluation was probably 10 years ago. They haven't partnered with Emirates in a long time now. But when I read that comment, my thought was at the time I was upset with Alaska for doing that overnight. But now with the benefit of hindsight, I imagine that that was probably precipitated by Emirates in some way because we've seen Emirates basically make it impossible to use partner miles to book first class over the course of time or then finally now you can with Air Canada aeroplan but they had to create an entirely separate award chart because obviously Emirates wants so much

for those awards that they needed to create this outlandish award chart they've increased surcharges on so many of their routes. So there's very few routes where you're going to pay a reasonable number of surcharges anymore. It really seems like Emirates is just not all that interested in playing ball with anybody. So I'm going to make a prediction that city is the first to do this, but might not be the last. I'm thinking that Emirates is probably the driver here rather than Citi. That would make sense. That would make sense. And yeah, that would be a shame. I mean, you know, wow. I don't know that like, if it stays just Citi, it's probably not a big deal because

Stay is just city. It's probably not a big deal because so many of us have a lot more points with MX or Chase. But if it happens to others, that's going to be a real problem. Yeah. Yeah. Especially for those of us with a bunch of Emirates miles sitting in an account waiting to find a use someday. Anyway, so yes, bad news there though. All right.

But that's not the only Bonvoid event this week. We also got Bonvoid by one key cash, which as you'll remember, is the rewards program of Expedia and Hotels.com. Or maybe you won't remember that because it's not very memorable ever since they kind of torpedoed the program anyway. But in addition to Expedia and and hotels.com, they also have Verbo and it's unfortunately getting worse. The rewards program that is, is getting worse for Verbo stays, right?

Right, right. So the one key program, as Nick said, is already pretty unrewarding as it is. But one of the advantages of it is that you can earn rewards, the same type of rewards across these different sites. So you earn the one key cash, which can be used for bookings. And so with VRBO, you now won't earn anything unless you have elite status with one key.

And then you'll learn a little bit if you have first tier and a little bit more if you have second tier. It shouldn't, you know, it was already so low. I don't think it ought to move the needle for anyone as to whether they pick to book through VRBO. I mean, you should have other things in mind about like the total price,

maybe what other rewards you can get clicking through a portal or whatever, but it's just such a small rewards thing anyway. I don't really care. Yeah, so to put this in perspective for anybody who's like, well, you know, I still want to earn something. I don't care how low it is. It's fresh in mind because I made it a very expensive hotel

reservation for a hotel that's not a chain or anything for late this year. And so the reservation was around $3,900. And I'm due to earn $64 in one key cash on that. So yeah, if they cut that to $30 or whatever on a similar spend with Verbo or $20, it's really not going to make any noticeable difference for me. It's such a small return on huge amounts of spend. And maybe that's not a huge amount of spend to everybody, but on on that amount

of spend, it's such a small amount of return that I don't think hard about this. The only time that one key cash comes into mind is the fact that you can earn one key cash with a price guarantee. And I did successfully get a price guarantee last year. So I've got a handful of one key cash from that. So you could do that and get some one key not through Verbo of course. And then the other thing is they said you earn more with Elite status and that's true. And Elite status is actually pretty easy to earn if you book like your rental cars if the price is the same anyway through

Expedia or whatever you can earn status relatively quickly with just a few booking elements. So there you have it. Best of luck on that. All right. I my least favorite piece of Bonvoit News this week is coming up next. And that is that there is a new priority pass lounge option in Los Angeles. The Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse is on priority pass. It looks really nice. But not only do you have to use a priority pass visit, but you have to pay a thirty five dollar top up fee to get into the lounge.

Right, right. Uh, yeah, I mean, so that's new, right? So normally, if you have a pass card and a club takes priority pass, that's it. You could get in. Um, I guess you can argue, well, there's a bright side, which, which is maybe they wouldn't have accepted priority pass at all without this. And so at least gives you the option to go somewhere you couldn't have gone.

Right. Right. That's optimistic. But then of course the dark side of that is that if I were a lounge operator and I saw that the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse is getting away with charging not only priority pass but also the guest how long would it be before I start charging guests a top-up fee too and I just don't like where this is going at all I can imagine lots of other priority pass lounges out there charging more,

especially if they're as nice or even nicer than the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse or just at least as greedy as the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse is in terms of just wanting more, which I imagine there's a lot of them out there that would if they could. And if they can, they probably will. So hopefully this is an isolated thing,

but I don't feel real optimistic that it is. Yeah. You know what it feels like to me? It feels like hotel resort fees. In fact, even the price point feels like it. It's so common for the resort fees to be $35 and the same thing happened. Like at first it was just a few hotels that were real resorts that had real benefits to these resort fees. few hotels that were real resorts that had real benefits to these resort fees.

And then other hotels said, wait, we can charge extra money that's not even advertised as a cost and require everybody to pay it. I'm an, and they, they, so many have copied that in so many markets. And so, yeah, I think that's a real, uh, real valid concern. Yeah. But I guess, no, this is not a bright side at all. If you have a Ritz card, I guess, probably paying that fee with your Ritz card should be reimbursable as an airline incidental expense. But that said, I'm, I'm really unhappy about this because of the precedent it sets. It's not about this specific lounge, I probably won't be at Los Angeles Airport using this lounge anytime soon

because I'm based on the East Coast. So I'm not particularly concerned about that lounge. I'm just particularly concerned about the awful precedent that this set. So right, right. Too bad. Too bad. I hope priority pass doesn't go down that road priority pass. If you're listening, you're gonna become totally irrelevant if you allow the resort fee model to spread elsewhere. It's true. That's true All right, don't do that priority pass. Okay, but that's not the only Bonvoy to word this week

Finally, we've got Japan Airlines is out with a devaluation Reducing the value of your miles by increasing the cost of various redemptions starting I believe on June 10th, right? June 10th is the date. So just some examples between, if you wanna fly between the US and Japan using your ANA miles, no. Nope, it's miles, Craig. Slow down, slow down.

The ANA devaluation is a whole different thing. Different thing, different airlines, Craig, different airlines. If you wanna use your Japan Airlines miles, then if you want to fly economy, it just goes up a little bit from 25,000 points one way to 27,000 points, no big deal. Premium economy jumps up quite a bit

from 32.5K to 40K one way. A business class, pretty small bump, 50K to 55k, which that's still, that's a fantastic deal. Business class for 55k between the US and Japan. And first class, that's where things get really icky. First class prices are jumping anywhere from 40% to 57%. They price first class based on seasonality, they have peak and off peak pricing. And so the current range of award prices for first class is from 70,000 miles one way to 100,000.

But that range jumps up to starting at 110,000 and going to 140,000. You know, I would almost like that one is definitely the worst of the bunch, though. I got to say the Japan Airlines first class experience is pretty good. So even though at those prices, if you had Japan Airlines miles, it may very well still be worth it to enjoy the Japan Airlines first class experience. That said, who has Japan Airlines miles, Greg? Who cares? I don't have Japan Airlines miles.

You don't have Japan Airlines miles. Nobody has Japan Airlines miles unless you've got the old Barclays arrival premier that was available for all of like six months and has Japan Airlines. Or you had the Japan Airlines card itself and spent on that, right? Right, right.

So I know a lot of people have that card. But well, I don't know if a lot of people's the right person. I was gonna say,? So I know a lot of people have that card, but well, I don't know if a lot of people's the right person. I was gonna say, I don't know a lot of people have it. There's a few people here and there. All right. Yeah, but yes, Japan Airlines First Class is fantabulous. I had so much fun flying it at the end of our million mile madness trip.

That was my last big flight was Japan to Chicago. And I know you've flown it before as well. And even though it wasn't on their new fancier airplanes, it was just the best service, the best food, the best drinks, you know, it was really such a treat. And so, yeah, it's not unreasonable to ask to spend that much. Also, this doesn't affect how much booking Japan Airlines

with partner miles will cost. This is talking about booking with Japan Airlines miles itself. That's right, that's right. But speaking of who in the world has Japan Airlines miles, of course, the reason we're saying that is because they aren't partners with any of the major transferable currencies yet.

So let's talk about awards, points and more. Why did I say yet? Because some people noticed that built was kind of randomly showing an option to transfer one to one built points to Japan Airlines. That's been taken down, but you can, it seems like a good bet that, you know, that that page wasn't designed in error. Like, it'd be pretty tough to accidentally create a page if, if there wasn't a partnership in the works where this is going to be possible. So

we're all assuming that we are going to be able to transfer built points to Japan Airlines sometime soon. Hopefully. Yeah. We don't know anything more about that than anybody else does apart from the fact that some people saw it. So hopefully it wasn't just a test, but hopefully a test for something that's going to come. So fingers crossed on that, because that would be cool. You know, even though it's relatively hard to collect huge numbers of built points, as Greg just said, you can fly business class to Japan for 55,000 miles one way. For a lot of people, that'll be the points

they earn just from the rent over the course of a year or so. So it'll be interesting if you'll be able to. I think it'll be exciting. Hopefully, we can cross our fingers. But we don't have to hope to be able to use miles to book Japan Airlines with something new because this week JetBlue and Japan Airlines launched the ability to use their miles to book awards with either program.

So you can now use your JetBlue True Blue Points is relevant for most listeners to the show to book Japan Airlines flights. Is a good value? Yeah, as we record this, or at least as, as, uh, last we noticed what the prices were, um, they had very good pricing, uh, for especially like business class, for example, to fly, um, Japan Airlines with JetBlue points. But I But the reason I phrase it all that way is we've seen this happen before where they've come out with a partner,

the award pricing looks great and we rave about it, and then guess what happens? They destroy it. Yeah. So, yeah. So that's a bummer that we don't know what the pricing is gonna be long-term. But how about the availability? We'll see. It's kind of tough to get Japan Airlines business class availability, right? Yeah, it really is. And if you can find it, you can also book with

other one world, you can book with one world partners. JetBlue is not a one world partner, they're just a sort of a separate partner. So there's a lot of options for booking Japan Airlines when it's available to partners. I don't think that they're more available to JetBlue than to other partners. I don't know that for sure, though. I don't know that for sure. Yeah, either. So if they were, then obviously, that would be more interesting. But if they're not, then you can still book Japan Airlines business class

for a good number of American Airlines miles, you know, do a good deal there or Alaska miles for a good deal. So you've got some options right now anyway. So I wasn't blown away by this, but it's really good news for people who have a lot of JetBlue points because for years JetBlue points had a more or less fixed

value and as they continue to expand these partnerships and you're able to book awards on other carriers online, I think that really increases the value of having JetBlue points. Even if the Redemptions aren't great, you've at least got more options than you did for a long time with your JetBlue True Blue Points. Yeah, you really do. They have quite a few partners now. And so that's pretty exciting. I mean, because, you know, if you're, especially like, like me, if you signed up

for a jet blue card when they had a big welcome bonus and you've had points sitting around, not knowing what to do with, you know, suddenly there's quite a few partners that you can use them on and seats that arrow is really good at showing availability of those flights. So it makes it really easy to find where you could use your Jet Blue points. Very good. Speaking of new uses of points, and back to BILT here.

BILT has launched a new partnership this week, not with Japan Airlines, but rather with Southwest. BILT rewards points can now be transferred one to one to Southwest Airlines. Yay or nay, exciting or not. I almost feel like they did this to tease us because they, they knew we saw the, the rumor about the Japan airlines transfer from built. And so then we get an email from belt saying, we have a new transfer partner.

And I almost didn't read it because I'm like, Hey, Japan airlines. No, it's Southwest. No, not quite the same. Well, I mean, you know more about this than me. You looked into the value of Southwest points now that Southwest no longer has a, previously they had a sort of fixed scheme for how much points were worth.

It varied based on taxes of flights, but other than that, it was fixed. Now that's off, you know, that's gone, replaced with some magic formula behind the scenes. So what did you find there? Yeah, well I found that on average, of course the value of points had dropped some, though it's perhaps interesting

because you can get better value now if you're willing to fly at an off peak time or time of year anyway, because when demand is low, you can get better value now if you're willing to fly at an off peak time or time of year anyway because when demand is low you can get better value than in the past from your southwest points. Of course the inverse of that is true if you want to fly at a peak time then you're going to get worse value so it's not a great transfer for booking flights at peak times but you know there are definitely times when you can get one and a half cents per southwest point

or even more I think I got up to 1.8 something, uh, looking at various options. So, so when flights are cheap, you can get really good value out of your Southwest points and probably do pretty well transferring bill to Southwest or at least reasonably well, not as well as you'll do with an international fancy flight that you could book through a, some sort of a partner airline. Oftentimes, so if you're looking to travel domestically, what I really like about this more than the ability to get incredible value is

that it's really user friendly and easy. And a lot of built user base is probably people that are young and in apartments and just getting into rewards. And so it gives them another familiar option to use their miles and points. And what I like about that is once people get to that step of transferring to a partner and booking a flight and feeling like they've gotten it for free, then they can expand and learn more. And they say, oh, this is kind of interesting. What else can I learn? So it's kind of like a gateway drug. So I like that built has good gateway drugs. So I think that

Southwest is a good ad. It makes a lot of sense. It fits with what is presumably a younger customer base for for built. So I like it. It's not wild and crazy exciting. It's not going to be thrilling for many people, but I think it's a positive ad. Totally. Yeah. Do you think you're likely to do it? No, I don't think I would ever transfer points to Southwest. I mean, especially not now because now it's variable. You know, there are times like, yeah, if I was looking to book a flight, and I needed the points right away, and especially if I thought I might cancel the

flight, then I might transfer and I you know, I should back up the truck on what I just said, because I have oftentimes said I've never transferred to Southwest and wouldn't consider it because it wouldn't have made a lot of sense. That's going to change, I think a little bit when things change in late May, because here's the deal. If you book a flight with money starting on May 27th, I think, 2025, and you later have to cancel, you're going to end up with a credit that expires,

and it may expire in six months or a year, depending on the type of fare you bought. Whereas if you book using your Southwest points and you cancel those points, they'll just go back in your account, there's no expiration or anything to worry about, super easy. So that makes them a little bit more valuable than face value as compared to using cash.

So maybe, maybe there'll be times to transfer. I can't imagine I'll transfer many, but in the right situation, I wouldn't throw it away as a possibility. Yeah, yeah. It's also worth noting that, you know, built clearly is trying to to make themselves a good alternative to chase ultimate awards points. They have a number of the same

transfer partners and all the the big ones now are covered like so all the all the American programs, they have the same hotel transfer partners, I think, including Hyatt. They have United. They have, well, yeah, and now they have Southwest. I think they're missing JetBlue, I guess, still, as a transfer partner.

But the point is, for most US members who, especially those who aren't as much looking at what the foreign program options are, you're going to be seeing the same transfer partners that you would have considered with Chase with BILT. And that to me is actually, means even more than what I said last week, which is that earning both built points and chase points makes a lot of sense because when you go to use them, you know, if you don't have enough chase points to transfer to Southwest or whoever it is you want to transfer to, you maybe you have built points that can top off the transfer. And so you can do

both to the same program, and then use those points that way. And so they're there. I think of them as complimentary, even though in each of their own camps, they're looking at rivals. Right. Right. I think it's a really good point. All right. But that's not all the built news also out in built news this week is that you can now pay your student loan using your built points.

What kind of value do you get? And is it a good deal? It's a fixed one cent per point value, which compared to paying your rent, which gives you something like 0.6 cents per point value. It's a great deal compared to that, but no, I wouldn't recommend this for most people because you can get 1.25 cents using it to pay for travel.

You get 1.5 with paying your mortgage, I think it is. And I forget what that whole deal was, but and then of course you could get much better value when transferring to select partners when you have a really good value award. Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt. There's better ways to use your points with built on the flip side. If you would have considered using them to pay your rent or to pay for Amazon purchases,

or to buy the chess set, then you'd be better off using them at one cent each to redeem against your student loans. It's not a great use at the same time. If you're earning most of your built points at three points per dollar, let's say, then you're essentially turning them into 3% back on those categories or types of purchases, which if you're using built dining and you're like, that's an extra 3% back. I don't know. I think it could be a not horrible use, but it's obviously not the best use by any stretch of the imagination. So it's not one I would recommend as a first or second or third option like Greg said.

Yeah. All right. Next up United United Mileage Plus is showing more awards after you change your settings to a foreign country. This is interesting. So people started reporting that you would see more availability of partner awards including business class on some partners like Singapore Airlines that doesn't typically release space to partners if you changed your settings from US dollars or from being located in the US to what is it Canada right in Canadian dollars.

That's the example we saw online. Yeah. So at the top of your screen when you're in a browser on a computer you see the default for most of us. So it'll say English-US dollar. If you click there, you can change it to English-Canadian dollar. And then you'll see different results. I haven't played around with this much, but it's worth noting that it goes both ways. So before the show, I looked up one example. I searched for one Lufthansa flight, and I saw it available with US dollars,

but not Canadian dollars. So yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Well, and I also saw a comment from at least one person saying that they tried to book some of the Singapore seats and that it appeared to be Phantom Space, at least the ones that they had tried.

So I don't know what kind of issues you may run into there, but I think this is a good tip in general that sometimes you'll see different results if you try to adjust website settings. Now, I wasn't aware of this particular thing, but I have seen at times in the past different prices on cash tickets changing the country or using different versions of the hotels.com website, different countries, different currencies. Sometimes the prices can come out better. So it's a good tip to play around a little bit sometimes if you're looking for a slightly better deal or maybe expanded award availability. I don't know how well that's going to work, but it's an interesting tip nonetheless. Yeah. This just, and I'm backing up to our built conversation. You can't pay your mortgage yet

with built points, but you can make a down payment on your home and get 1.5 cents per point value doing that. I think I said that in the background while you were talking, but I said it pretty low. I was like, I think it's down payment actually, not a, not mortgage, but I'm glad you highlighted that so that people don't say, Whoa, Freakle Myler said, uh, good, good catch. Right. Um, going back to the United thing, do you find this? So like how, how does this really help us in practice? Cause like, I can't see myself like running search after search trying different countries like that seems like a lot of work

No, you're right. I mean not every day But I think if I'm in a situation where I have a specific day and I need to find availability on that specific day Or I'm pretty specific about the routes not even or I think in that type of a situation where I'm like, okay I can only travel on this day or I already have some plans and something fell through it now I need to find something here and I can't find anything Then I might go to looking around and clicking around like that and that's top of mind for me right now Because I'm kind of in that sort of a situation I'm a very specific need and so I haven't been able to find anything to fit that need and so maybe that's something I

Would do out of desperation. It's not something I'm going to do day to day I don't think that makes sense that makes sense all right then finally uh no not finally but windham points you can now use fewer windham points than before for your cash and points bookings in the past it was 3 000 points plus some cash component if you were going to book a points and cash reservation now it could be as few as 750 points in some amount of cash. Yeah, but it's definitely worth comparing to the complete cash rate, whether it makes sense at all to do that, because I've seen cases where, you know, switching to points and cash, the cash component can be as much or more

than the straight up cash rate. So just be careful about that before you do it. But yeah, if you have a small number of Wyndham points, it might be worth, you know, you may be able to save some money that way. Well, and on the flip side, I know in the past anyway, Stevens pointed out a few times, and I've noticed a few times that the opposite of what Craig said too, that sometimes that the points version of that, the, the, the points component of the points in cash is saving you more money than you would typically get out of Wyndham points, more than one cent per point,

sometimes two cents per point or, or in that range anyway, maybe even a little bit more. So I don't know, I haven't played around with this very much, but it's interesting to know either whether you have a small number of Wy of winning points or you're just looking to really eke out as much value as you can. You can kind of hunt out those types of redemptions. Yep. Yep. And then last but not least in this category, you wrote a post this week about Gondola and AI sort of a hotel award booking tool. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a new tool that lets you search for hotels

and shows you both the point prices and the cash prices. And there's a number of things that I really like about this program. And there's a number of things I really dislike about it. But the main thing that kind of got me interested in it is that it's the only tool I know of right now where when you sort by point value, well that lets you sort by point value as opposed to just number of points or cents per point. And the reason that matters is that I just found this really frustrating. So I'll be looking for a weekend stay in Nashville and show me all the hotels and the point prices.

That's great. There's several tools that'll do that. When you sort by cents per point or by number of points required and you want to see the lowest number of points or the greatest to see the lowest, you know, number of points or the greatest, or the greatest sense per point. You, the Hyatt hotels all float to the top, regardless of whether they're actually good value at all. And they do that because Hyatt point prices are on a different scale from the other programs. So like, each Hyatt point is worth three to four Hilton points, for example.

And so Hilton points are all gonna float to the bottom of that kind of sort, even if they're a good value for the points. And so I found that very frustrating. It'd be an easy fix for any of these programs to do, but this is the first one I know of that's actually done it where they, when you sort by point value, it's basing that on what's the average value of Hyatt points or Hilton points, and it takes that into account in its calculations and then

sorts appropriately. So you really do get the best value options at the top, which is really useful. It also has other really cool features, like when you click into a hotel, it shows you the typical point ranges for this hotel, typical cash ranges, and so you could get an idea whether the state you're looking at is a good deal. Supposedly will automatically alert you

if point prices go down of a hotel you booked or cash rates go down of a hotel you booked, automatically without having to set an alert. All that said, there's some big downsides to this as well. And the biggest downside is that it wants you to allow your email address to give it access to all of your emails. I can't recommend to anyone to do that

because that's such a big security concern. I don't think Gondola is gonna do anything bad with your data, but they could. And so if you're gonna use Gondola, it's annoying but I really think you should set up a, like a dummy email address that is not your primary one that you use to log into your loyalty accounts and your bank accounts and things. Yeah, yeah, I don't like that at all.

That's the thing that turned me off from the tool initially when I first saw it. It's been out for a bit now and it's, I've played with it some and I like saw it. It's been out for a bit now and it's, you know, I've played with it some and I like the interface. It definitely has its pluses. Like you mentioned, I think, you know, the ability to sort, as you said, by value as compared to the average value of that particular currency is interesting because, you know, if you're getting one cent per Hilton point and one and a half cents per Hyatt point, the one cent per Hilton point and one and a half cents per Hyatt point

The one cent per Hilton point is more interesting because that's way above what you would normally get for a Hilton point Whereas one and a half cents per Hyatt point is pretty ho-hum. It's not a you know, not a particularly exciting redemption So it's cool to be able to do that and some of the AI work They're doing to try to predict the types of hotels that you will like based on the places that you usually stay I also think is interesting because in a big city to try to predict the types of hotels that you will like based on the places that you usually stay. I also think is interesting because in a big city I often don't know where is it that I want to stay and you know which hotel would be the best fit for what I like and so it's kind of interesting having an AI tool that can kind of get to know me and figure that out over time. Unfortunately, it really creeps me out that if the AI tool is any good at that if they have access to all of my email

What else are they gonna figure out about me and who else is gonna get access to that? Not only who else are they gonna give access to her? What are they gonna do with it? But like if somebody gets into their system how much data is given up there? I don't like that idea and I just I wouldn't allow something to crawl through my primary email So I didn't love that very much. And they, they tout the ability to earn gondola rewards and hotel rewards to book through them essentially and still earn your hotel rewards and earn rewards through gondola. And initially I was excited

about that until somebody pointed out to me that, well, actually you could just go through a shopping portal and do better probably than the two to 3% pack that they give. So there's not even really an advantage there. So yeah, I mean, I think the tool is interesting in its ability to sort. I think they'll probably continue to improve it. Hopefully one of the improvements that they make is some other way to do it than crawling your email. I think if you were able to just forward the emails

you want to, kind of like trip it, then it would be a totally different story. Yeah, yeah. I think they should offer the ability to do that as well as to maybe connect to your award wallet account if you have that set up. And you know, I think those two options should both, you know, give them what they need to give,

to make the service useful without the security concerns. So. Yeah, yep. Very good. All right, that's gondola. All right. Let's get into this week's main event. We had like a full show already and we haven't even gotten to this week's main event, main event time, a world-class Wells Fargo wallet. Wells Fargo has some interesting stuff going on with their cards and it's

possible to build a really compelling wallet out of their cards. Now, I'm not saying that I'm going to do it necessarily. We'll talk about that at the end. But we're going to talk about what Wells Fargo has available, how you can build an incredible wallet, and then we'll debate whether it's worth us doing. All right. So the reason we're talking about this,

if you've kind of not paid much attention to Wells Fargo for a while, which is fair is because they do have a transferable points program and it doesn't get a lot of press, but it's kind of interesting cause they do have some airline transfer partners that are pretty useful. So you can transfer one to one to air France, KLM flying blue avianca life miles, the obvious programs, which as you know, Avios covers British Airways Avios, Iberia Avios, Aer Lingus Avios,

Qatar Airways Avios, FinAir Avios. So you got a whole bunch of different options there, and Virgin Atlantic. So you've got four programs that are pretty widely, I shouldn't say widely useful necessarily, because after I say the words Virgin Atlantic. It's hard to say widely useful They have very nice uses but but they're good when they're good. So So they're useful programs anyway for useful airline transfer programs

And then of course, they also have choice privileges at one to two very similar to city Thank you rewards You can take your points and transfer them one to two and get double the choice privileges points. So that's all pretty cool It is you know, it would be better if they had more transfer partners This is a very small collection compared to the competing transferable points programs, but you know, they have They have a number they have most I guess of the main airline programs you'd want but there's there's quite a few, you know, I don't know there's quite a few that Sometimes come in handy that are not there that that you would want you don't have Air Canada arrow plan is is probably the biggest Missing link of the big ones and of course they're they're having only one hotel transfer partner is weak

Same time the ability to do one to two to choice is pretty valuable. All right, so what cards can you earn the rewards with? Let's run down those real quick. So first up is the autograph card. The autograph card has no annual fee, no foreign transaction fees, and it offers three points per dollar on travel and transit, gas and phone plans, wireless

and landline, and streaming services as well. Yep, and that's pretty good for no annual fee. And so Citi cannot say that. So Citi, they have no annual fee cards that earn thank you points, but in order to make them transferable to most of their programs or at the good rates, you have to have a premium card.

And so that ability to transfer one to two to, to choice privileges, for example. Citi can't do that without an annual fee. So Wells Fargo can. Um, the, the other transferable points card you could get, uh, is Autograph Journey. So the, Nick talked about the Autograph card. The Autograph Journey has an annual fee, $95, also has no foreign transaction fees. It'll give you a $50 annual statement credit

with $50 or more spent on airfare. So that's super easy to get $50 back. So you can almost think of it as a $45 card if you're gonna use it for travel. And it'll give you five points per dollar at hotels. That alone is great. Four points per dollar for airlines, three for restaurants and other travel.

So you're getting a minimum of three points per dollar for travel, more than that for airlines and hotels. And then one point per dollar for travel, more than that for airlines and hotels, and then one point per dollar everywhere else. So those are the cards that directly offer transferable points, but they also have some cash back cards and they give you the ability, just like Capital One does, you can move your cash rewards to a card that earns transferable points and that way they become transferable. Yeah, so you get access to a number of additional cards. The cash back cards, none of them have an annual fee, right?

Yeah, so none of them have an annual fee, that's a good thing. They all do have foreign transaction fees, that's a bad thing, so you're going to want to leave these at home when you travel internationally. There are two options for getting 2% cash back everywhere. There's the Signify Business Cash Card and the Active Cash Card. So, you know, which is better really depends on whether you want a business card or a personal card. And the nice thing there, you're getting, you know, if you also have one of the autograph cards, you are getting basically two transferable points per dollar for all your spend. Then they have the attune card. What can you tell us about the attune card? The attune card offers four points per dollar in some really random places and one X everywhere else. And when I say really random places, it's interesting because you don't know what's

going to code exactly. Under the four X categories, there are things like self-care, which could be your gym membership, could maybe be a spa, place for you to go for a massage, barber shop, et cetera. Four X Sports, Recreation and Entertainment, which again can really encompass a lot of different things. So between the self care and those things can really be a ton of different stuff. I mean, what might categorize as entertainment, that's gonna be a pretty broad one there.

And recreation, if you do, well, I think I looked up in there somewhere like paying for your marina fees for your boat would count under recreation. So I mean, if you've got a yacht, you should be using the attune card to pay for your Marina fees probably and Forex on planet friendly purchases, whatever that means. Apparently it includes EV charging stations, public transportation, buying secondhand items and vintage items, I guess,

if you're going to like a secondhand shop, you'll get 4X. It's really kind of a weird thing. But when I dug through this in a post and I found things like Disney tickets should count as entertainment, for instance, and earn 4X on this. And if your kid does like dance entertainment, for instance, and earn 4x on this. And if your kid does like dance lessons, for instance, that was something dance studios was covered under. I can't remember which one, whether it was self care or sports and recreation.

But there were a number of those types of things where I said, wow, there's probably some people, some families out there with pretty big expenses that would otherwise go on bonus that could potentially earn 4x on this card. Yeah, yeah, it's it's really astounding how big the list is. And so what we're going to do is at the end of the show, after we've done the question of the week is Nick is going to read through all of the details of what is supposed to count for 4x as fast as he can. And that'll be sort of our swan song for today's show. But moving on for within the main event, we're not gonna do that right at this moment.

Now let's put it all together. So here's how you can build your compelling Wells Fargo, no, your world's class Wells Fargo wallet. Yeah, I can't miss that alliteration opportunity. Wait, we need a word that starts with A, that means opportunity instead of saying alliteration opportunity, alliteration, something, anyway.

All right. Opportunity, no, that doesn't work. Okay, back to the wallet. So here All right. Opportunity. There you go. No, that doesn't work. Okay, back to the wallet. So here's what you could do. You could get the Autograph Journey card to get anywhere from three to five X for travel and three X for restaurants. You could get the, also get the Autograph card

to get additionally get three X for gas and phone plans. Then you could get the Attune cash back card to get 4X just about everywhere-ish else, sort of. And for the places where the Attune card is not giving you 4X, you could use either the active cash or the business cash card to get 2X in all those remaining places. So you're getting a minimum of 2X

everywhere up to 5X and 4X in many, many, many random places. For a total, now none of these have annual fees except for the autographed journey card for this wallet. So you're just paying that $95, but remember you're getting $50 back as long as you spend at least $50 on airfare each year. $45 for a pretty much world-class wallet. You know, that is the compelling thing to me, how cheap this is. Yeah. Because, you know, Citi has long had probably arguably the best cheap wallet. I say that with a little hesitation because I guess

capital one, you know, you could you could go no annual fee at all and have transferable points, but you wouldn't be able to have this 2X base earning. And I think the thing is here, like as compared to Citi, when you take out the fewer transfer partners angle, this is really good. I mean, it's 2X minimum and you're going to earn three or 4x in or even five in a lot of popular categories. Now there's a little asterisk

there because the attune card, you know, if you don't know that you're going to earn 4x, you might earn 1x and so that's a little tricky in terms of making sure that your your whatever your chosen uses is going to actually code it for X. That might do a test purchase of some sort if it's going to be a very large expense to make sure you earn for X and not one X. In which case you'd rather use your active cash or whatever it may be you're using for two X there. So yeah, I think it's interesting because for the cost, that's a pretty robust amount of points. And then when you consider if you like choice privileges and preferred hotels that you can book through choice,

when you consider that all of those are really double the number of choice points, I don't know, this is interesting. However, world-class, Greg, with only like four airlines, is that world-class? That's the problem. So yeah, I mean, just to restate some of the issues that Nick just mentioned, I mean, yeah,

with the active cash card, that's amazing, but how are you gonna know that you're gonna earn? The attune, you mean? The attune, sorry, the attune card. How are you gonna know that you're gonna earn 4X on whatever you're about to purchase and are you gonna risk getting 1X? The transfer partner list is so small

and so it's gonna be a real bummer if you wanna transfer to some program that's commonly available through other transfer roll points but not through this one. And then there's one, I don't know how to measure this one but I don't have any personal negative experience with Wells Fargo, but a lot of

people do. I just like run into people a lot who say, well, I'll never Wells Fargo. And, and so if you're in that camp, then that's obviously a negative for this kind of wallet. But aside from those things, I mean, but aside from those things, this is, this is, this is an awesome wallet otherwise. No, I mean, the truth is it could be a very good wallet. There's no doubt. And if you're someone advanced enough to know that you'll be able to get great value

out of these particular programs and or you're collecting a lot of other transferable points but you really want this to be your everyday wallet and then you'll earn some points through welcome bonuses through other programs or referral bonuses or whatever it might be that you use to earn some points and others. I could see the use for this. I'm really disappointed that Wells hasn't added more transfer partners and really surprised frankly. I thought for sure that we'd see a new transfer partner like every other month out of Wells when this thing launched because

I figured A, they're not going to realistically try to compete with just four airline programs. I figured they were just trying to test the waters and make sure that everything went smoothly before they added more that they already had worked out behind the scenes. And since they were issuing the built card, I figured, well, they've got access to get in the door and get those meetings with the right people and you know because they obviously built has built connections no pun intended with lots of different loyalty programs so i thought that part of the reason wells wanted to be involved there was to learn from that experience a little bit and expand into a transfer a competitive transferable points

program at this point if you were going to recommend a single transferable points program. At this point, if you were gonna recommend a single transferable points currency to somebody, I just can't see how it would be Wells. This is a great wallet, but I wouldn't tell somebody to only collect Wells Fargo points. So what if Wells Fargo came to you and said, I'll give you $10,000 to get rid of all your other cards and just use this handful of cards?

No way, no way. Absolutely not. Like it would take way more than that. That was a joke. What if they came to Freakle Myler and they're like, we'll give you $10,000 to do an episode on the world-class Wells Fargo. No, we wouldn't do that.

It's not, it wouldn't buy me getting rid of my other miles and points. It wouldn't buy a positive one. Obviously you can't do it because of your job. But imagine you didn't have this job and they said $100,000. I'm gonna give you $100,000, but you gotta, you and your wife have to get rid of all your other cards.

This is it. And you can't then go behind our back and start signing up for cards again. I mean, I guess there's a price for everything. I don't know that even 100 would do it though, because like, well, I don't know. Like I probably took $100,000 worth of trips last year if you were to take the cash prices of everything. And it wasn't all with those four airline programs, you know, and not that I mean, I guess I could continue to earn some miles and points too, like the American airline shopping portal or whatever. But yeah, I don't know if that was, though that would be enough for me long-term

to give up everything else. Yeah, I mean, it'd be great for a year or two, but after a couple of years, I don't know. Cause I don't know, when's Avianca LifeMile is gonna destroy their program? I don't know. When they do, Wells doesn't have any other Star Alliance partners.

And you know, same thing with obvious like I know You like obvious a lot. I'm I'm not as enthusiastic because I don't very often find Amazing uses for my obvious sometimes but it's pretty rare for me I don't end up using many obvious most of the time so it's not my preferred one world program So I'm like, it's good. I think you're crazy. $100,000. That's a lot of money. You take it. You could take the hundred. You could. You could. You could for the for other programs that you care about, you could wait till their points are on sale. You could buy a lot of points with $100,000. Can you cash out these points at one cent each? Can you move points to

cash? You move cash to points, but can you move the points to make them cash? Don't know. I'm guessing not, but I'm not sure about that. I don't actually know for sure either, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It would be pretty tough though, I admit to. That's a lot of money though. I think you're talking tough.

I think you're talking tough. Like how many, like you're gonna wanna fly something that you can't fly with your Wells Fargo points. Like within a year, I would think. I mean, it's a good set of partners to start. And I was enthusiastic about it in the beginning because I was like, oh, they're paying attention.

They know that these are good programs for people who are enthusiastic about miles and points. They're trying to appeal to us and they're gonna expand to get the masses later on. They never did. Like get with it Wells, expand. Then I'd be way more excited about this. What do you think about their transfer bonuses that they run?

The transfer bonuses? Yeah, I don't remember any. Yeah. I was looking around here for my hint from somewhere because I haven't heard of one. And yeah, I mean, it's just- I'm going to look it up just to be sure. I'm going to check our page on that. I don't recall a well as far as transfer old points partners, we have, we keep a history table. Um, oops, I went to the wrong one. Oops. I will say this.

I will say that as you were talking about this, as we were talking about this, I thought to myself, maybe I should get an autographed journey card, because I do sometimes pay for hotel stays. Not a lot, but I do sometimes. And 5X Wells Fargo points, I think I would rather have that than have the six Marriott points per dollar with one of my Marriott cards, or even the four Hyatt points per dollar with one of my Hyatt

with a Hyatt card. So there was part of me that was like, that's that card is a good deal to have for those types of things. So I'm not anti Wells Fargo or against this. It's just not a well, I can't picture the person to whom I would recommend this as their primary thing. I think it's only going to be a wallet for somebody who is also maximizing other stuff until Wells expands the program.

I actually think it could be a primary wallet, but as long as you're earning welcome bonuses, refer friend bonuses, and so on from the other programs, right? Yes. Agreed. Then yes, absolutely. Then I think it's a really good wallet and it's keeping your annual fees down to very close to zero. Yeah, no, so I misspoke before, I didn't look at our current partner,

current transfer partners page, that's a different thing. I looked at our current transfer bonuses page and looked at the expired transfer bonuses, Wells does not show up at all. Yeah, Well, I mean, well, no wells. All right. Well, yeah. So you're right. World class wallet for somebody who's also collecting a bunch of miles and points through welcome bonuses. Then yes, then I think this is potentially a wallet that Greg the Frequent M mileage should be carrying around. Yeah, as things stand now though, I'm still in the city camp for, not that I don't restrict my wallet to one thing, but if I wanted to, I think it'd be more likely

to be the city ecosystem, especially because I have that old rewards plus card that gives me an extra bonus. Anyway, that's neither here nor there because I'm not actually doing it anyway. There you go. But you could if you wanted to. And that's the point today's show. I would not. You could put together a world class wallet. And I would not feel particularly like I'm losing out on a lot if this was my wallet,

as long as I can earn points other ways too. Until one of those like four airlines do values and then you'd be like my walls and i'm stuck with choice right right okay all right well that there you have it interesting stuff let us know in the comments what you think and if a hundred thousand dollars would be enough for you to give up everything else for your world-class wells fargo wallet let us know let us know all right let's get to this week's question of the week this week's question of the week is about collecting miles and points and it's one that I don't think we'll answer in full by any stretch But it's one that I thought was interesting So Paul wrote in and said you often say how you accrued millions of points more than you can spend

For a normal person even going even opening eight plus cards a, getting to this level of miles of cruel sounds so difficult. So I wonder where the gap is. I'd be curious to know these things. Number one, how many of your millions of miles come from signup bonuses or introductory bonuses versus spending a rough percentage? And two, what are your main sources of credit card spent? Is it your business expenses, reimbursement through work, genuine organic spending as part of your lifestyle or other methods? I started playing the game,

open three to five cards a year and have about $50,000 of credit card spend a year. I put everything on my card, including rent, but it's highly discouraging. I cannot imagine reaching a balance that'll allow this kind of careless flexibility. Thanks, Paul. So Greg, where do the majority of your miles

and points come from? How you doing it? Yeah well It's a really good question. So I'd say probably the majority are still from Welcome bonuses. I'm kind of guessing here because I haven't like an inventory but but you know I look for that there's often opportunities to get even with Amex like the same card you've had before because sometimes they have these like special offers that don't have language saying if you've had

this card before you can't get it now. Sometimes they don't even even if that language is there sometimes it doesn't apply if you if the last time you had the card was like six years ago. So I tend to sign up for Amex cards quite a bit, and other cards too. I think the difference is I don't worry about how much organic spend I have each year so much in that I look for other ways to increase spend and either get the money back. Like I used to do reselling,

like so there's buying groups where you can buy, buy things and sell them and basically get your money back, but increase your credit card spend that way. I tend to this date these days, put a lot of spend towards quarterly estimated taxes for my business. And I use a whole variety of credit cards to pay that. So I'm willing to pay the fee, you know, the round 1.8 at 8% ish fee. Because welcome bonuses are worth so much more than that fee. And plus you're getting the value of the spend itself, the rewards from the spend itself. So I tend to look more at those kind of things and I don't mind at all paying a fee even

up to 3% if it means getting a big welcome bonus. Yeah that's a good point and one thing like that but on a smaller scale for me because I don't have Greg's quarterly estimated tax payments to make that I did recently was my Blue Business Plus or my wife's Blue Business Blue, one of our Blue Business Plus cards was offering 15,000 points when you add an employee card and spend $4,000 on the employee card. That's a targeted offer. Not everybody's going to have it, but it was on my cards

or my wife's cards for up to five employees on the Blue Business Plus. And so $4,000 spent on a Blue Business Plus would ordinarily earn 8,000 points. Plus this was a 15,000 point bonus. Then on top of that, there was also an Amex offer on that card for spend 23,000, get 6,000 more points. And so if I did five employee cards,

then that'd be $20,000 in spend. And so another 3,000 would get me that 6,000 bonus as well. So if I did the math right, 23K spend would get me to 127,000 total points, I think if I did the math, right? I just did it quickly in my head but one thing I did was so first of all I added the five employee cards and and I went and I made payments for my taxes, so I overpaid my taxes and

I hit the four thousand spend on each one of a couple of those authorized user or employee card cards in order to earn the bonuses. Because I knew that I would likely get the refund for that overpayment in about three weeks anyway. And so essentially, I'd earn the $15K and the $8K and then get myself closer to that $6K bonus. So that's an opportunity that was relatively easy

to earn a decent chunk of points there that would represent like half of the annual spend that you were talking about potentially, you know, how much you're gonna overpay your taxes and blah, blah, that's a whole nother thing. But I look for opportunities like that too. And it really brings me back to, I remember a time years ago, I was in Ecuador

and we met somebody local who was showing us around, it was kind of a random thing. And our Spanish wasn't very good. And we were trying to, for some reason, we needed the word pride. And I didn't know the word for pride in Spanish. And so we were like, I kept thinking, oh man, I don't know the word to say this.

And we had to use the Spanish words that we did know in order to try to explain the concept of pride. And eventually, it took a while, but eventually the guy we were talking to figured out, he was like, oh, and he said the Spanish word for it. And we were like, Oh, it's great. And I take away from that moment for me for a long time after that, I have no idea where this is going,

not to focus on what you can't do because when you're focusing on that word, you don't know, you still don't know it. It's not going to help you. Like if I sat there saying, I don't know the word for pride, I don't know the word for pride. I don't know where, then I'm still not going to know the word for pride. Instead, I focused on the things that don't know the word for pride, I don't know the word for pride, I don't know where, then I'm still not gonna know the word for pride. Instead, I focused on the things that I do know and said, okay, well, how can I creatively explain, oh, the feeling when you're a parent

and your kid does something really good? Like that was, I think, how we got to pride. And so my point and the connection here is that people often look at it and say, I only have 50K of spend a year, I don't know how you're doing it. And what I would say to that is, well, you have to look for opportunities and get creative about how can I increase my spend because you're not

going to earn millions and millions of points probably with 50k spend a year. Now I say you're not going to earn millions and millions. You might earn more than you think though, because 50k spend, I mean, that'd probably be six or eight different welcome bonuses. And you might get yourself pretty close, particularly if you have a player too too and you're referring them and they're referring you as you open new cards. You might get yourself close to a million points by sort of timing that out just right. Be surprised if you were to try and maximize it how well you could do but you got to look for the other opportunities and say okay well what else is going on I just recently

opened a new Amex business gold card because a family member is doing a renovation. And I knew they were going to be spending a bunch of money on the renovation. I said, hey, can I pay some of that and you'll pay me back? And we earned a welcome bonus in one shot making a purchase for somebody else in the family. Now your family might not be doing a renovation. Don't focus on, oh, well, I don't have that.

Focus on, well, okay, what other opportunities like that might exist where I can pay for something and get paid back for it. So I would tell you that most of my points still come from welcome bonuses, like Greg said, or from those authorized user bonuses, or from referral bonuses. And that's not just from being a blogger.

Obviously, some of it is in terms of referral bonuses. But my wife and I refer each other and earn a bunch of points that way each year as well. So if I'm going to open an Amex card My wife refers me so she can earn 20 or 30 thousand points depending on the card from what she's referring me So so there are a lot of different ways to do it and instead of focusing on I only have this and I can't do that Focus on okay. Well, where can I find an opportunity to spend a little bit more and that's not always easy But you know if you look around and see well

What can I do to spend a little more money then you might find those buying groups and things like that recently I've been buying gold and reselling it that's something that a lot of people have been doing from Costco as of late and that's you know one of the many different ways to increase spend now there's a whole list of risks that come with buying groups and buying and reselling things so that's not the answer for everybody. But the point is there are opportunities to increase your spending. We do have a post about ways to increase your spend in an entire show where we talked about ways to increase your spend. And I should have had the episode number ready for that specific show. Hopefully it'll be in the show notes where we'll

have a link to that show. We talked about ways to increase your spend in order to earn more and more rewards so that you can earn those welcome bonuses that you want to earn. Because with five or six or eight welcome bonuses a year, I bet most people could take the one or two trips that most people probably take per year and cover them pretty well with their miles and points. Obviously, Greg and I have to focus on earning even more miles and points so that we can demonstrate all the various uses. So we look for even more opportunities than the average person probably needs to,

because the average person probably needs a smaller pile of miles and points. And really with that 50K spend, you might earn enough to be able to take the trips that you want to take. I think that that is an amount of spend that could generate the right number of miles and points, depending on the travel that you want to do. Yeah, okay, two things first.

Okay. The episode number is 197. 13 ways to increase credit card spend and get most of it back. Second thing, it's real easy. Get a million points a year by using your attune card to Wells Fargo attune card to lease a your yacht. I just saw that that boat leases are one of the categories. So there you go. Forex on that and boom, you've got a million points a year. There it is.

There it is. Everybody could do everybody. Everybody lease your yacht. Pay for it with the attuned card. Done. That's a great example. Speaking of the attuned card, thanks for bringing us back to that because I think it's probably oh no. Before we even get to that

I guess first up I gotta say if you've enjoyed today's 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 join our email list follow us on all the various social media join our frequentmiler insiders Facebook group where you can ask questions like these all the time and get them answered and Wherever you're watching or listening Don't forget to give this show a thumbs up And if you have a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a future Mailbag

or for a question of the week, you can send that too. Send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Now, stay tuned to listen to Nick Reed, the full list of Forex categories for the Wells Fargo Attune card. Too much buildup here because I have not practiced this at all. So, so this is not like something that I, this is my first look at it.

So I don't know how this is going to go. We'll see. Let's do it. The attune list. Here we go. The various things you can earn for accent self care, which includes beauty and barbershops, gym memberships, fitness studios, health and beauty spas, massage parlors, sports recreation, entertainment, which includes artists, supply and craft shops,

camera and photography, supply stores, hobby toy and game shops, photo finishing laboratories and photo developing. Who's doing that these days? Saving networking, fabric and peace, good stores. Wow, I got tripped up there. Gardening and floral, including florists, florist supplies, nursery stock and flowers,

nurseries and lawn and garden supply stores. Other recreation and leisure activities, including aquariums, aquariums, delphariums, zoos, amusement parks, billiards and establishments, bowling alleys, cruises, carnivals, and fortune tellers, dance halls, studios and schools, public golf courses, recreation services, and elsewhere classified, sporting and recreational camps, tourist attractions and exhibits, trailer parks and campgrounds. Under pet care we've got pet shops, pet foods and supply stores, other miscellaneous services, sports and recreational equipment include bicycle shops, sales and service,

boat rentals and leasing, marinas, marine services and supplies, motor home and recreational vehicle rentals, sports and riding apparel stores, sports and riding apparel stores, sporting goods stores, sports and live entertainment tickets, including bands, orchestras, miscellaneous entertainers, commercial sports, professional sports clubs, athletic fields and sports promoters, ticket agencies and theatrical producers, streaming music, movies and books,

which includes bookstores, cable and cable and other pay television, digital goods, media, books, movies, digital artwork, images, music, DVD, video, tape rental stores. What? What blockbusters been gone a long time. Large digital goods merchant, motion picture theaters, music stores, musical instruments, pianos and sheet music, record stores, and planet friendly purchases, which includes antique shops, used merchandise and second hand stores, bus lines, EV charging stations, local and suburban commuter passenger transportation, including ferries, passenger rail merchandise in second hand stores, bus lines, EV charging stations, local and suburban commuter passenger transportation, including ferries, passenger railways, Amtrak, Brightline, et cetera,

and other transportation services, including City Bike Line, Uber, Zipcar, et cetera. Wow. Good job. For anyone still listening, have a great day. Okay. There we have it.