Frequent Miler on the Air - Best cards for grocery, dining, gas, travel, Costco, and more | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep256 | 5-24-24
Episode Date: May 24, 2024Everybody loves a one-size-fits-all answer, but today we're discussing which cards are best for which kinds of purchases: grocery, dining, gas, travel, Costco... Sure you can just keep one card in you...r wallet and earn on that card exclusively, but many of us switch it up depending on what we're purchasing. That's what we'll discuss in today's episode. (01:45) - Datapoints about AA companion certificates (Mail Bag) (05:32) - Hertz charging people to refill Tesla gas tanks (Crazy Thing) (12:07) - Frontier and Spirit eliminate change fees (Award Talk) (13:41) - Cool Alaska trick (Award Talk) Read more here: https://thriftytraveler.com/news/airlines/book-business-class-less-alaska-miles/ (17:31) - Current Kimpton Hotel Secret Password May 24, 2024, to September 2, 2024. (Award Talk) Main Event: Best cards for grocery, dining, gas, travel, Costco, and more (18:54) - Best cards for grocery, dining, gas, travel, Costco, and more (19:45) - Big box stores including Costco, Sams Club, Target, etc Read more about the US Bank Altitude Reserve here: https://frequentmiler.com/USBAR/ (22:55) - Grocery Stores Read more about the Citi Custom Cash here: https://frequentmiler.com/CustomCash/ (23:44) - Read more about Amex Gold here: https://frequentmiler.com/AmxGoldCard/ (24:49) - Read more about the Citi Strata Premier here: https://frequentmiler.com/TYpremier/ Read more about the Capital One Savor card here (https://frequentmiler.com/C1SV/) and the SavorOne here (https://frequentmiler.com/C1SVO/) (25:28) - Read more about the Aeroplan card here: https://frequentmiler.com/Aeroplan/ (26:18) - Dining / Food Delivery (27:38) - Read more about the Amex Business Gold card here: https://frequentmiler.com/AmxGoldBiz/ (29:13) - Read more about the Bank of America Customized Cash Rewards card here: https://frequentmiler.com/boaCR/ (31:06) - Gas Read more about the Wyndham Rewards Earner Business Card here: https://frequentmiler.com/WyndhamEarnerBiz/ (33:36) - Read more about the Wyndham Rewards Earner Plus Card here: https://frequentmiler.com/WyndhamEarnerPlus/ (38:38) - Travel: Many cards offer enhanced rewards for travel booked through bank portal (39:03) - General Travel (39:50) - Read more about the Chase Sapphire Reserve here: https://frequentmiler.com/CSR/ Read more about the Chase Ink Business Preferred here: https://frequentmiler.com/CIBP/ (39:58) - Read more about the Amex Green Card here: https://frequentmiler.com/AmxGreen/ (40:00) - Read more about the Wells Fargo Autograph card here: https://frequentmiler.com/WellsFargoAutograph/ (41:37) - Airfare Read more about the Amex Platinum card here: https://frequentmiler.com/AmxPlat/ (43:33) - Hotels (43:44) - Read more about the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card here: https://frequentmiler.com/WellsFargoAutographJourney/ (45:44) - Read what Greg keeps in his wallet here (https://frequentmiler.com/whats-in-gregs-wallet-2024-edition/) and what Nick keeps in his wallet here (https://frequentmiler.com/whats-in-nicks-wallet-2024-edition/) (46:07) - See our Best Category Bonuses resource here: https://frequentmiler.com/best-category-bonuses/ (46:54) - Other notable category bonuses (47:08) - Read more about the Ink Business Cash card here: https://frequentmiler.com/CIC/ (47:58) - Read more about the Chase Freedom Flex card here (https://frequentmiler.com/CFF/) and the Freedom Unlimited here (https://frequentmiler.com/CFU/) (50:35) - One of our readers is interested in becoming a content creator and has questions about things to consider. If we were starting out today, what would we do differently? (Question of the Week) (54:20) - Check out our Coffee Break episode on the origin story of Frequent Miler here: https://listen.frequentmiler.com/coffee09
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for
Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the air
starts now. Today's main event, best credit cards for grocery, dining, gas, travel, Costco,
and more. We're going to be digging into what cards to use where because
they offer what we call category bonuses for certain types of spend. And there are some cards
that offer, you know, 3x, 4x, 5x. We even have some 8x, eight points per dollar situations that
we're going to talk about in today's main event. Yeah. And you know, this is important because
some people will say,
oh, just only use the card that you're working on a new card, welcome offer with,
and then you're always earning more than these multiples. And while that's true,
if you're going to constantly open new cards, not everybody's going to do that. Some people
want a strategy for how to spend. And then also some people have a specific thing or two that's
going to meet the spending requirements. We've talked about doing that before on new cards, and then I still want to earn the best I can everywhere else. So we're
going to discuss some of the best cards, some of our best picks anyway, in terms of transferable
points. It will by no means be an exhaustive list of every single card with a category bonus,
but we're going to discuss the ones that we find best anyway. But before we do all of that,
don't forget, you can always find links to the various timestamps in the show notes. So if you expand the show notes, you'll see the
timestamps so you can jump ahead, jump back, come back and listen to something again. And wherever
you're watching or listening to this, don't forget to like it. And I don't just mean like it, but
also like it. If you're not watching on video, you didn't see the thumb up there, but give us a
thumbs up, leave a little bit of feedback. We appreciate that stuff. Let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. All right. Today's giant mail is the M&M edition
because we've got mail from Mark and Matt. So the M&M crew. I love M&M's. In a recent-ish episode,
we talked about, I think this was under big spend bonuses. We were talking about how you can earn
American Airlines companion tickets.
And we had a bit of a discussion about, are they easy to use, hard to use? Can you get upgrades
when using them? Things like that. So Mark and Matt both weighed in with some information that
I think is helpful. So first let's start with Mark's giant mail. Mark says, Nick, I heard you
reference on last week's show that you are looking forward to
earning companion tickets to see how easy they are to use them. Just want to share my experience,
which was, it was very easy. There's a number to call to book the reservation for the eligible
paid flight. I told the very helpful and courteous rep that I wanted to pay for my wife and I and
have our two kids as the companions. She confirmed the fare code was available and
matched the exact flights I wanted round trip from Charlotte to San Diego direct added the
companions for $99 plus taxes and fees. And we were all booked. I did have to avoid embargo
slash blackout dates of travel, which would be the trickiest part. If you're saving these for
holiday or spring
break travel based on the dates, based on the blackout dates. I hope your experience and value
of the certificates are the same. All right. Well, thank you. There's good information there. Yeah,
it sounds like they were relatively easy to use. That's awesome. That's exactly what I was hoping
for in the pursuit of these certificates. So that's great. It does mention
the fare codes have to be available. So that's important, figuring out which fare codes and the
blackout dates are obviously going to be a potential issue for anyone confined by the school
calendar, which I feel your pain these days. So I understand what that's like. But overall,
it sounds like it was pretty easy to do. And that's great. Right, right.
Mark's full email included the list of bear codes as well as all the blackout dates and
everything.
But it'd be silly to read them here.
Yeah, yeah.
Matt says, I would like to provide a noteworthy data point to a comment you made about AA
companion certificates.
I received an AA companion cert through my Aviator Red.
And yes, I've been
contemplating an upgrade to Aviator Silver ever since Nick opened up that can of worms.
Anyways, I booked a flight and used the cert for my wife. Both of us were at least American Airlines
Gold at the time of booking. The time of flying, my wife was American Airlines Platinum Pro,
and I was Platinum. Prior to departure,
I was pleasantly surprised to see my wife and I in the number one and number two upgrade spots,
respectively, because we haven't received many upgrades as American Airlines elites.
Moreover, Philadelphia is our home airport, so there are presumably more American Airlines
elites flying out of Philadelphia. My wife got the sole upgrade available, but was so kind and gave it to me. So it seems that someone flying on a companionship certificate can get
bumped up. That's great. That's very good news. I like to hear that. So I, it's not going to be
particularly relevant for me flying with a family of four, because I think you can only get two
people upgraded, but it's good to know that it's possible because of my data point probably
wouldn't have proved that since I'll probably be flying with the whole family. So it's good to know that it's possible because of my data point probably wouldn't have proved that since I'll probably be flying with the whole family. So it's good to know that that
is possible because we didn't know for sure. So that's awesome. That's very good.
More relevant for my wife and I then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, that's great. It
makes me more interested in using the companion to tickets if I know that there's a chance of
the upgrade. So
that's really cool. Great. Awesome. All right. Well, we're going to skip over card talk this
week because we're going to talk about plenty of cards in the main event, but let's talk about
what crazy thing did Hertz do this week? I'm going to let you talk about that, Nick,
but I have to say, I'm going to weigh in that, that I think this is a brilliant business strategy
by Hertz, But go ahead
and tell us what. Well, because Hertz hurts. Hertz hurts. They're charging charged up charges
on the electric vehicle renters. So View from the Wing covered a story. And the original story that
I saw in View from the Wing was maybe a week ago or something like that, or a little bit more by
the time you listen to this. But so the first story that I read from View from the Wing was one person, President Circle member, who I think had the refuel option
checked for his rentals, his or her rentals. So when they return, it gets refueled for however
much. But they rented a Tesla, an electric vehicle. And so they drove around the electric
vehicle and brought it back.
I don't even remember whether it was mostly charged or not. But nonetheless, they got
charged a refueling fee of $277. $277 to put gas back in the tank of a Tesla. And then Gary updated,
I don't know, a week-ish later that there's a whole bunch of
people out there that have been running into this and the charges of $250, $350 to refuel a Tesla
with gas. And of course, if you're not familiar with Tesla, I guess you wouldn't be as surprised
as we are. But at the very least, you must know that a gas tank does not hold on any like passenger car, regular passenger car
doesn't hold 250 or $350 worth of gas. So I mean, that would be wild if it were a car that had
gasoline, but it doesn't. I mean, these are electric vehicles and they cost, I don't know,
I understand 35, 40 bucks or something to charge up a Tesla. I think, I don't know,
I'm not a Tesla owner. So Tesla owners, feel free to correct me in the comments.
But at any rate, it's nowhere near that. And of course,
you expect to pay more if you return the vehicle not on whatever it's supposed to be on in order to avoid getting charges. But $277 to refill the gas in the tank. And so of course, the person that he
first reported this with followed up with Hertz again and again and was told by customer service,
sorry, it was on your contract. Nothing we can do about it. See you later. Bye bye now.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is why I just think it's brilliant business, you know, is that,
you know, they have they have these terms in their contract that are just impossible for people to
fulfill. And so people, you know, agree to this contract and then they bring the car back. And so it's an easy 270 bucks for Hertz for with every single rental.
It is, you know, that's nuts. It blew my mind that there were a whole bunch of reports of this,
of people getting charged and Hertz not backing down. Also, it's not even like they're fixing it
after the fact and saying, oh, OK, you're right. It's one thing if they make a mistake, which this
seems like a wild mistake. I don't even get how that can happen. But one thing if
they make a mistake and later they realize when you bring it to their attention and say, oh,
sorry, we'll take care of that. And they refund you for it. But they're not doing that. They're
digging their heels in and saying, nope, too bad. You have to pay the $277. And that puts the
customer in a terrible position because if you dispute the charge,
it's pretty well known that if you dispute a charge with a rental company, they're probably
going to ban you from ever renting again. And if Hertz bans you, it's not just Hertz, of course,
it's Hertz and Dollar and I don't know, what do they own? What is it? Alamo or Thrifty?
Or I don't know. Thrifty, I think. Alamo is national, I think. So it's like all three of
their budget. I can't remember what Hertz owns, but Hertz owns something, you know, budget savers, whatever it is, they own two or three
different rental companies. So you're going to be banned potentially from renting with any of them.
If you stand up for yourself and file a charge back on it, which is just nuts.
All right. So here's what you have to do. If you rent a Tesla from Hertz,
get one of those portable gas cans that, you know, are used to refill your tank if you don't have your car nearby.
Fill it up and leave it in the trunk or the back seat.
And when you turn in the car, make sure to point out the gas tank, which is in the car.
Is full.
Yeah.
It's full.
Yeah.
And then you just get hit with a cleaning fee for getting rid of the smell.
That's all.
Hurts will get you one way or another, Greg. One way or another. Yeah. Yeah. And then you just get hit with a cleaning fee for getting rid of the smell. That's all. Hertz will get you one way or another, Greg. One way or another. Yeah.
All right. Time to sing. Or maybe our editor can put in some music and violate some copyright
protections. Hopefully not. Hopefully not. But yeah. So anyway, moral of the story, I don't know,
would you rent from Hertz? Because obviously there's been a lot of negative stories, right?
There were the people that got arrested for returning their cars or arrested for presumably Hertz not realizing they returned their cars, even though they did.
So there were some of those stories and Hertz ended up paying millions of dollars in settlement
on that already. And now we got this, like, is it time to just drop Hertz or what? Would you
rent from them? I mean, you know, most of the time things go fine. And so for me, I mean, if it was between, you know, national or Hertz or
Avis national Hertz and all the prices were the same, I mean, I wouldn't pick Hertz.
But often there's a reason that, you know, you'd want to go with Hertz because they're the cheapest,
you know, maybe you've got some big like like Capital One Shopping sometimes has like 35%
back on Hertz, things like that. They're the cheapest until you get charged $277 for returning
your electrical vehicle without enough gas. And they're not the cheapest anymore.
Well, they're not 35% of that back, so that's great.
True, true. Maybe, maybe if you can. I don't know if that's how the portal cash works. But yeah,
I mean, I have a coming reservation with Hertz, so wish me luck because yeah, I mean, they were the most reasonably priced for what I needed. So like you
said, there's tons of rentals that happen every day and most of them have no problems. But I think
the moral of the story for me is that if there is a problem, there is not going to be any customer
service from Hertz to help that. So I know that that's a gamble. And so I'm gambling saying,
okay, am I going to save
more than $277 over the course of the time until they hit me with some ridiculous unfounded charge
like that? And as long as I save more than the $277 over the course of however many rentals,
I guess it'll be okay the day that I get hit. Don't quote me on that, Hertz. It's not okay.
It's not okay. Yeah. I mean, one thing I would say is I wouldn't rent a Tesla from them.
Well, no.
You know?
No.
I'll take a chance of getting thrown in jail.
If you get thrown in jail, Nick, don't worry.
As long as the jail takes Apple Pay, I'll come with my Altitude Reserve card and tap you out of there.
I'm going to hold you to it.
I'm going to hold you to it.
When that call comes in, that call comes in, Greg, better answer.
All right.
We're going to skip over Mattress Running the the numbers this week and talk about award talk.
So for award talk, we have an exciting development from Frontier and Spirit.
Greg, tell me about that.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know a lot about this, except that they are both eliminating change fees.
So, you know, they've been both of these airlines have been sort of notorious for
making it difficult to, or expensive to make changes. And the fact that they have finally
followed the lead of, you know, the other major U.S. airlines in eliminating those change fees
is fantastic news. Frontier has gone further. They now allow, you know how they used to nickel and dime you for every little
thing. Like if you want a carry-on bag, you have to pay. If you want to check a bag, you have to
pay. If you want to select your seat, you've got to pay for that. All of that now is included with
your fare. So at least on all non-basic fares, I guess there's sort of a basic equivalent or
something. Yeah. Great news. I think so too. If you're going to fly
Frontier Spirit, that makes it a little bit easier to choose them. Although on the flip side,
it makes it a little bit more difficult to claim your Ritz Carlton airline fee credits if they
figure out that all those things are included. But yeah, anyway, so yeah, good news. Good news
for most people, I'm sure. I haven't
flown Frontier in many, many years and Spirit only a couple of times just because they haven't
worked out to be convenient for me. But I have run into this issue where I've noticed that the
changes weren't free. And so great to have that now. So good news there. All right, let's talk
about a cool Alaska Airlines mileage plan track. Alaska mileage
plan. And I don't even know who was it that reported this. Thrifty Traveler is the one who
seems to have uncovered this. So you probably already know now that Alaska has moved to this
distance split based award chart, there are some good deals in general without a trick involved, like flying from the East Coast to Western Europe can be as low as 45,000 Alaska miles.
So that's a really good deal.
I'm sorry, in business class is the important part there.
And that's one way, by the way.
But still, that's a really good deal. And what Thrifty Traveler found was that longer itineraries that would normally cost
more than $45,000 sometimes drop back to $45,000 when you add a connecting flight that's in economy.
So you might fly to Europe and add a connection that's in economy to somewhere else, like fly to
Dublin and then connect onward to London or something, or Paris in economy, that last segment. And it drops the
price down to 45, even though you're flying from somewhere further away than the East Coast of the
US. So it doesn't seem predictable. At first glance, when I first saw what they were writing
about, I thought, oh, this is like mixed cabin award pricing, like what Avianca LifeMiles does. That doesn't seem to be the case because sometimes this works,
sometimes it doesn't. I doubt very much this. I don't think, unlike LifeMiles, I don't think this
is one that's going to last forever. I think this is one, if you have a trip coming up, you want to
play around with it, see if you can get it to work and grab it, because pretty
sure this is not intended. And so at some point, Alaska will probably get around to fixing it.
Yeah, unfortunately, they probably will. So if especially if you're not East Coast based,
you know, if you're East Coast based, then it's 45,000 to Dublin from New York or Boston or I
think D.C. anyway. But if you're based in the Midwest or even out west,
this adding the economy class like can save you a nice little chunk of miles. I mean,
not that it wouldn't also potentially save you a little bit from the East Coast, too. It's just I
think this is an even more exciting trick for those in the Midwest or on the West Coast, because,
of course, folks in those regions did not make out
as well with the Alaska Airlines award chart changes. And so this gives access to a very
reasonably priced transatlantic flight, especially on the longer routes.
Yeah. I'm going to throw in another trick here, which is that, you know how flying out of London
back to the States in business class costs a lot because the UK has this departure tax that's
especially bad on premium cabins. One thing you could do because Alaska allows free stopovers
is you could book London to Dublin and stop over, see Ireland for a couple of days,
and then fly on. And as long as your stopover, I think it has to be at least a day, then you're not charged those departure taxes at all. So you get a really cheap flight back and
you could still, if you're going to the East Coast US, get it for 45K. Maybe you could use
this trick to get it for 45K even by tagging on an economy flight in the US. I'm not sure.
Probably not actually in that example, because right now Alaska still
only allows you to do one partner. So, uh, so it'd be hard. So that would be like
Aer Lingus in that example. And so unless, unless you, that last leg could be on Alaska's own
metal, you'd, you'd have a hard time putting that together as things stand now,
they are supposed to allow mixed airline awards soon, but it hasn't happened yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.
All right.
That's the second piece of award talk.
The third piece of this week's award talk is that there is a new Kempton secret password from May 24th to September 2nd.
If you give the passphrase good for the soul at the check-in desk, you'll get some sort of a surprise.
Good for the soul, in this case, the sun in Spanish, S-O-L.
But they won't know which way you're spelling it when you say it.
So you just say good for the soul and hopefully you'll get some sort of a surprise.
Now, I haven't stayed at very many Kemptons before.
And the one time I used the secret password, I can't remember what it was that I got.
It was maybe an extra credit for mini bar type stuff.
What are some of the things that either you've gotten or that you know you could get when you use the secret password?
I mean, it's all over the map, things people get.
And I don't remember all the examples.
I feel like Stephen's written about some good things he's gotten in time.
I think I got a dumb hat that I didn't
even want last time I went or, you know, and then another time I think I got something like decent,
like a drink at the bar or something, but yeah, I've seen that. Yeah. Free parking. I heard once
or twice. And so that'd be great. That would be, yeah. Yeah. Driving anyway. Yeah. So, all right.
So that's one to keep in mind. If you got any Kempton stays coming up between next week, essentially, and September, then
you want to say good for the soul at the desk when you're checking in.
All right.
That's the end of Ward Talk.
Let's get into this week's main event.
Today's main event, best cards for grocery, dining, gas, travel, Costco, and more.
All right.
So as we said at the outset,
we're going to be talking about some of our favorite cards to use for different types of
purchases. In general, we prefer to earn lots of transferable points because of how valuable they
can be to transfer to different airline and hotel programs and get outsized value from your points. But sometimes the best
deal is, is earning a lot of points that are sort of cashback equivalent or, or, or hotel or,
you know, specific hotel or airline points. But most of the examples we'll give are going to be
transferable points, but we're going to start off with one that's more like a cashback, even though
it's not exactly.
So I'll jump into this one. If you're shopping at any big box store, Costco, Sam's Club, Target, Walmart, whatever, you generally can use your tap to pay.
And if you have the U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve card, that card gives you three points per dollar for all tap to pay.
Let's be clear. If you tap your card, you won points per dollar for all tap to pay. Let's be clear.
Yeah.
If you tap your card, you won't get it.
Yeah.
When you're tapping with your phone, that's when you get the three X with that card.
Yeah.
Yeah.
With your phone or with your smartwatch, whatever device you've got.
Yeah.
And so why is the three X special?
What are they worth?
What are the points worth?
Yeah.
So if you use your points, if you just want like cash back
or they're only worth one cent each, so that's only 3%, which is still not bad, but it's not
like amazing, but you can get one and a half percent value from the card by either. One and
a half cents per point. One and a half cents per point. This is the Nick corrects Greg. Sorry. No,
I just said, I'm not talking about a 1.5% card here. Don't worry.
I just want to make sure.
You get 4.5% essentially, right?
Yeah, you get 1.5 cents per point.
So 4.5% back basically
when you're using your mobile wallet
and getting 3X
and that results in 4.5% cash-ish back.
And what I mean by cash-ish is
you can get that 1 one half cents per point value
by using your points to book travel through the US Bank travel portal, or by signing up for
something called real-time mobile rewards and only using that for travel. So when you use your card to, let's say, pay for an Uber ride,
for example, the way that real-time mobile rewards works is you get a text saying,
do you want to pay for this with your points? And if you say redeem, then it uses your points
and you get one and a half cents per point value. So that's really cool because you actually also are earning points on that transaction. And so, yeah, I love using my
points that way. I feel like it's fun kind of getting these like free Uber rides or, you know,
miscellaneous travel that becomes free and a good value with that card.
Yeah, I've actually earmarked this to try to try anyway to make this my car rental card. So I'll
use it for car rentals and then use the points to erase to make this my car rental card. So I'll use it for
car rentals and then use the points to erase the cost of the car rental. And the sort of unintended
side effect there is that usually the car rental company takes a larger hold to begin with than the
cost of the rental. So usually the the text message you're going to get is going to be for an amount
that's more than the cost of the rental. But you can redeem your points for that and that'll work fine. Yeah. So even though that they will refund you the difference,
the U.S. Bank won't take back that redemption or anything. So it still works. And actually,
it's kind of good because for certain categories, U.S. Bank has a minimum. I think all categories,
you have to spend at least $10 for this to kick in at all but for car rentals and hotels they have like minimum spend
amounts and so the fact that the car rental company adds you know an extra deposit amount
helps you meet that threshold yep very good all right that's your big box stores and stuff
anywhere you can tap your phone to pay that's what i'm using these days is the us bank altitude
reserve but one of the places you could tap your phone, and I just said anywhere, but it's not true.
Not anywhere where I can tap my phone
do I use the Altitude Reserve
because at grocery stores,
I could tap my phone to use tap to pay,
but I'm not using the Altitude Reserve there
because we've got a bunch of different options
that are as good or better.
So what do we got for grocery stores?
Yeah, one of the things,
what I use is Citi Custom Cash,
which gives you 5X in
the category you spend the most each billing cycle, but only up to $500. So I actually have
several of these custom cash cards and rotate through them. But the point is you could get
five points per dollar at grocery stores and that's what I have MindTag to do. So I use them
only for that so that I don't get 1X anywhere. That's smart. That's smart. I make it a little bit easier not having to juggle which one I remember and keep track.
I use the Amex Gold Card instead, which offers four points per dollar at U.S. supermarkets
on up to $25,000 per year, then 1X after that.
So I like the Amex Gold Card because it's also transferable points.
I like Amex's transfer partners a little bit more
than I like Citi's partners. So I prefer earning the Forex Amex. And I obviously like the 25K cap,
not that I'm spending $25,000 in groceries, but I spend enough on groceries. And then there are
other things at grocery stores I can buy that fill in the gaps. But my kids certainly eat a
ton. I have a six-year-old that is just eating us out of house and home and a three-year-old
that basically only eats fruit.
And fruit is not cheap.
So I'm earning lots of points at the grocery store with my Amex Gold Card, which, by the
way, I do keep in my Google Pay.
So I don't have to carry it around in my wallet all the time.
I just do have to remember to switch from the default U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve to
the Gold Card before I tap my phone.
Right, right. But there are other tap my phone. Right, right, right.
But there are other options too.
Yep, yep.
There's a couple of transferable points options that are uncapped, three points per dollar.
So one of them is the Citi Strata Premier card, straight up 3X for grocery and you get
thank you points from that, which are transferable. The other option, Capital One Saver or the Saver
One card, both earn 3% back at grocery stores uncapped. But if you also have, or your player
two has, a Capital One Miles card, you can move that cash back to the Miles card and then it
becomes transferable. So those are some 3x uncapped transferable points
options. Lastly, if you like your aeroplane points, you can use your Chase Aeroplane card
and get 3x from that. Yep. Although, of course, if you like your aeroplane points,
you could alternatively use the MX Gold for 4x and transfer them to Aeroplane or to Citi.
Citi does not transfer to Aeroplane, right? No, I don't think so. But Capital One does, right?
Capital One does, yeah.
So you could use either of those and still have Aeroplan points or the option of transferring
to other things too.
Right, right.
So if you have an Aeroplan card because you want to spend your million dollars in order
to get the companion certificate, which by the way, Gary from View from the Wing makes
clear that there are people out there who have spent a million in order to get the unlimited companions.
That's right. You did tell us that.
So somebody's doing it.
And if you are, I guess at least get three points per dollar at the grocery store, please.
Okay.
All right.
Exactly.
So that's grocery.
Now, speaking of food, I'm getting a little hungry here, but I don't want to make anything to eat.
So let's talk about dining and food delivery.
Which cards are the best for dining and other restaurant delivery type stuff.
Yeah. As far as I know, all the cards that give a bonus for restaurants also give a bonus for
things like food delivery, the Uber Eats and so on, Grubhub. And let's see, so City Custom Cash,
that's the same story about 5X and it being capped to $500.
So that I don't use mine for restaurants in that way, cause it'd be too challenging to
keep track of that.
But again, we've got the Amex Gold card back with its 4X.
Now this one is not capped at $25,000 and it's not restricted to US.
So it's worldwide dining 4X.
That's probably the best option on the market that
has like no restrictions, except for the fact that it's an American Express card.
And not every place worldwide will accept that. Yeah. Yeah. Although I'm constantly surprised by
the places where I am able to use my Amex. Of course, it's not going to be everywhere. But
I've been surprised traveling overseas these last couple of years that some of the places where I wouldn't have expected to be able to use an American Express, but I've been able to.
So it can't be your only dining card that you're going to carry if you travel internationally, but it can be certainly a good option to have in your wallet.
Of course, the business gold is sort of similar in the sense that you earn Forex on the two categories in which you spend the most each
billing cycle, up to $150,000 in spend per year. So you can earn four points per dollar if
restaurants is one of your two, but keep in mind it's US only apparently on the business gold.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm surprised they didn't make that worldwide the way they did with the
consumer gold card. But if you want a worldwide 4X transferable points option
that's not an Amex,
probably your best bet is a Capital One Saver card.
Not the Saver One, but the Saver,
which gives you 4% cash back.
And as we mentioned before,
if you have a Capital One Miles card,
you can move that cash back to the Miles card
and it becomes transferable points.
So I really like that option.
If I didn't,
if I didn't have my old city prestige card, which gets five X at dining, I would be
tempted by that capital one saver. Plus if capital one didn't hate me as the other
important part of that small caveat there. Yeah. And it's worth a mention, depending on how much
you spend, the saver card may not be as good of an option for you as the saver one.
Now, I say that there's tons of cards out there that offer 3X.
So the saver one isn't the only one, but it's worth mentioning.
It's probably one of the few with, well, no, I'm going to take that back too, but it's 3X with no annual fee.
So if you liked the saver one for a grocery, then it could also come in handy for dining because it's 3x on that one. If you spend a lot on dining, then it's perhaps worth paying the annual fee for the extra
1% slash one point per dollar on the Safer card.
Right, right.
And then if you like cash back, Bank of America's customized cash rewards card offers 3% on
up to the first $2,500 in combined purchases for certain categories of spend.
And if you have $100,000 invested with the combination of Bank of America and or Merrill,
you would have platinum preferred honors, which would give you this 1.75% or 1.75 multiplier on
the cashback you've earned, which bumps up the cashback to five and a quarter
percent cashback. So the customized cash rewards can be an effective cashback card, but again,
it's only up to the first 2,500 in combined purchases per quarter, I think. So that's
pretty limited. Finally, with this dining category, there are too many cards that offer 3X to list them all.
You know, Nick mentioned the Saver One.
Almost all the consumer chase ultimate rewards cards, like the Freedom cards, earn 3X for dining.
The Sapphire Preferred earns 3X for dining.
So yeah, you've got a lot of options there.
That's right. That's right. One thing I guess maybe was worth mentioning here now that I think about it, if you prefer
cash back over points, which a number of these points can be cashed out for one cent or maybe
even better.
So I'm not sure that this makes sense.
But the U.S. Bank Altitude Go card offers 4% on dining, and that's worldwide.
And there's no foreign transaction fees and no annual fee on that card so that's another one worth considering if you want four percent dining without having to
jump through the hoops to get the 5.25 that greg just mentioned from the customized cash and you
know if capital one hates you too so you can't get the saver and or you just want no annual fee
then the altitude go is a good option for that. Just popped in my mind. Yeah, good to know. All right, gas.
If Hertz is going to charge you $277,
you want to fill up before you get back.
I don't know if you could do that with the Tesla.
But anyway, if you want to earn points on your gas,
if you're filling up a lot on gas,
the best card, I think, at least in my mind,
is the Wyndham Rewards earner business card, because that card
offers eight. That's eight, eight points per dollar at gas stations, which is a lot of points
per dollar. Now, of course, Wyndham Rewards points are not transferable points. These are points that
are tied to a specific hotel program. But still, 8X is pretty good right it's fantastic yeah i mean i don't even
know how they can afford to do this but but they do and there's no cap to it so you can you know
spend as much as you want and it's at gas stations it's not gas so there are some cards that only
bonus like actual what you pay at the pump but this is gas station so anything you buy at a
gas station counts so yeah 8x windham points. Remember you could use those for the cost of
vacation rentals as well as Wyndham hotels. And you can also move the points. There are some limits
to this and speed limits to this, but you can move them to Caesars and use them to redeem at
Caesars properties. Yeah, I actually just booked a Caesars property last night. And I did in part because I already had some points that had moved over
and some that I had earned on the Caesars side. But Travel with Grant had posted a tip that I
hadn't considered. And that's when you use your Caesars Rewards credits, your rewards, your points
that you moved over from Wyndham, that you don't pay tax on the cost of the room. So they're
actually, the points become worth a little bit more than one cent each in that
way.
So I booked two rooms, actually one with my points and one with my wife's just last night
because it did work out to be a pretty good redemption when you consider that there's
no no additional fees.
You would pay a resort fee if you didn't have Caesar's Diamond status, but you would have
Caesar's Diamond status if you had the Wyndham business card, because you can match your Wyndham status to Caesar status and then pay no resort fee,
no parking, you know, valets.
Right, right.
Works out pretty well.
If you spend a lot of nights at Caesar's properties, then you're sort of getting around,
what, 10% back, I guess, from 8X rewards.
It must work out about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's great.
That's just ridiculous.
If I had like a small towing company or something where we were filling up on gas a lot, man,
that's a card I would want to have.
Yeah. Yeah. A towing company that delivers cars to Vegas or something would be ideal.
Okay. So similar to the Wyndham business card, the earner plus card earns 6X. So if you don't,
I think you have a business, that's another option for Wyndham points.
The Citi Custom Cash, again,
same story we talked about before.
You can get 5x on gas up to $500 per billing cycle.
Oh, you know what?
Let's pause on that for a second though.
So we've talked about the Citi Customized
or Custom Cash card a number of times now,
but like you gotta pick,
you can only have one of these, right?
Only one category that you're in your 5x in. So is that true? You don't pick what it is that's the one you spend
the most on. And so what you want to do, if you're interested in going this route, is you want to get
a bunch of these cards. And the only way to get a bunch of them is to get other city cards,
other consumer city cards and product change to the custom cash. So you
could apply for one, you know, initially and get the welcome bonus for that. But for to get more
custom cash cards, you need to product change. And once you have a collection of them, you could,
you could like, for example, just write on one, gas, and only use it for gas.
Write another one, grocery, or write on three of them, grocery, whatever.
It fits your patterns.
Right, right.
And Citi, it's worth a mention, is the rare issuer that will allow you to switch from a co-branded card to one of their native points cards.
So you could, for instance, open a Citi American Airlines consumer card today, and a year from now, you could presumably product change that to a custom cash card.
And so you can open a few different types of cards like that today.
And then later on down the road, product change those to a custom cash card.
Yep. Yep.
All right.
So next up, if you prefer not having to, you don't want your Wyndham points.
You don't want to juggle a bunch of custom cash cards, which I totally get that.
Another good option, the Amex Business Gold.
One of its categories for Forex is gas or gas stations.
U.S. only, I believe.
Yeah.
And that's up to $150,000 spend per year on the two categories you spend the most each billing cycle.
So that'd be pretty
good. I wouldn't have to worry about checking my balance to see if I've spent more than 150k per
year. So for me, I've got a couple of business gold cards now, but for the one business gold
card, it was just dining and gas are the two things I use. Because those are the two categories
out of the ones that qualify where I was spending the most like natively like day to day. So and because we have more than one in our household, I could
have a different one that I'd use for like electronic stores because they electronic goods
retailers or software suppliers or something like that is one of the other options. And so like new
egg, for instance, counts for that. And so I get a different one that I'll use for that stuff. But you do have to choose which ones you want to make use of. And again, the business gold card
is just for US merchants in those various categories, I think.
Yeah. Then another really good one for gas stations is the City Strata Premier. Get 3X
for all your spend. And remember, they were also 3x for grocery. And I don't even know if
we explicitly mentioned, but also dining. They have so many 3x categories. So that's a good
option if you just want to keep things simple and get 3x in a whole bunch of categories.
And you get and these are transferable points. Yep. Very good. Bank of America customized cash
rewards card comes back again. I mentioned that before. If you've got platinum honors status with Bank of America, then you could get essentially
5.25% back on the first $2,500 in combined purchases each quarter.
So that's potentially a good option.
So gas and EV charging is one of the options for that.
It is capped at $2,500 a quarter.
So it does have that limitation.
Now, if you're somebody who spends a lot on gas, if you have that towing business and
you don't want the Wyndham earner business card, then one to consider very similar to
this, but on the business side is there is a business customized cash card.
And that card offers you 3% back on the category of your choice each month.
You can change it once a month.
And one of the options for that is gas.
Now, if you get platinum honor status on the business side, which requires having the 100K
in business accounts. So you'd have to have a business, presumably with some money,
some cash reserves. But if you do, and you can put 100K in investments and cash in Bank of America
and get platinum honor status, then you could be getting 5.25% back on the business customized
cash card. And the reason I mentioned that is because unlike the consumer card, the consumer card is limited
to $2,500 in purchases per quarter. The business card is limited to what is it? 50, 150?
50. I thought it was 50,000 a year.
It is 50. Yep. Double checked. $50,000 a year in purchases. So way more and it's not limited
by quarter. So you can get 5.25% back on significantly
more gas station spend with that card that has both of those, by the way, have no annual fee
than a customized cash card. So those could be good options. Yeah, for sure. Next up is travel,
right? Yeah. Yeah. First, let me say that lots of cards offer enhanced rewards for booking travel through
their bank's portal. We're not going to dig into those details, but what we want to talk about here
is where when you're purchasing travel directly with like an airline or hotel or through an online
travel agency, what kind of rewards will you get for that? And we have three categories. One is general
travel. And the idea is that you could use that card for just about any type of travel purchase
and you'll get this category bonus. Whereas there's others that are specifically just bonus
airfare or specifically bonus hotels and not other things like trains and boats and subways and
things. So, all right. So the general travel
category, we're not going to be talking about too many 5X options. There is that custom cash thing,
but I didn't put it here because I think that would be such a pain to use for travel.
So because of the $500 limit on earning 5X.
Exactly. And yeah, trying to juggle between things. I don't know. It just seems like too
much for me.
Anyway, so what we have are a bunch of cards
that earn 3X transferable points.
So you've got the Sapphire Reserve
for all travel purchases,
the Inc. Business Preferred, same thing.
3X for all travel purchases,
Amex Green card,
and the Wells Fargo Autograph card,
which I had forgotten all about this till I was digging in to outline the show today.
And now that used to be just like points that weren't transferable, but recently they've become transferable.
So this fee-free card is one that offers three extra general travel.
Another one that does the U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve offers three extra general travel, but those points are not transferable.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's an interesting collection of options there.
Now, it's worth mentioning that if you're going to book general travel, you want probably travel protections.
And so you have to consider that when you're deciding which of those cards to use, because some of them have better travel protections than others.
Any quick thoughts about that?
Well, I mean, we do know the Sapphire Reserve has the best collection of travel
protections of pretty much any card in the market.
The only one that is comparable is the Ritz-Carlton card because that has exactly the
same travel protections, but not as rewarding for travel spend.
Yep. Yep. Very good. That autograph card,
by the way, that Greg mentioned, they have transfer partners now. Wells Fargo has transfer
partners. We've reported on that. And it's just a few transfer partners. I'm actually kind of
surprised that they haven't announced another transfer partner yet. I kind of assumed that
they would trickle those out, you know, like every month or two. So I'm a little surprised.
I feel like we're due for a Wells Fargo announcement because there's got to be some more transfer partners coming.
I imagine maybe working out these deals is a long, arduous process.
Could be.
Could be, yeah.
All right. So that's general travel. But of course, if you're just going to spend on airfare,
for instance, then you have perhaps an option to do even better.
Yeah. So the Amex Platinum cards will get you 5x membership rewards points when booking travel directly with airlines. I don't think that counts for booking travel through an online travel
agency except for Amex Travel itself. The City Strata Premier, 3x for airfare and hotels, by the
way, and travel agencies. But I didn't include
them in the general travel because there's a lot of travel like trains and boats and things that
where you wouldn't get 3X with the Stratapremier. Yeah. And that's important if you're booking any
kind of travel beyond airlines and hotels to double check the details and make sure that
travel means general travel. Like if you're booking a cruise, for instance,
I've had a few people actually in recent times here,
tell me that they're in tons of points every year booking cruises because
they like to cruise and they cruise a lot and they cruise on lines that are
more expensive.
And you really want to be careful that you don't use a card that,
you know, bonuses, some types of travel.
You want to make sure that it's going to bonus cruises because that'd be a
good example of where the Strata Premier, I don't think offers 3x on cruises i
don't think except that it does offer 3x for travel agencies and often people book that's
true cruises through travel agencies and and so it's a little unclear what which travel agency
purchases exactly count like which travel agencies and so on but if you have a premier i'd
be interested in knowing because cruises for instance are usually usually the charge comes
directly from the cruise line even when you book through an agent i wouldn't think that it would
but i'd be curious to hear from somebody who has a premier card so leave us a comment wherever you're
watching or listening and let us know because i'd be i'd be happy to hear about that to be able to
share that next time so all right so amex platinum Amex Platinum cards for 5X, City Premier for 3X. Of course, obviously,
the general travel cards could also earn 3X on flights, but that's airfare. What about hotels?
Because there's a cool option for hotels too. Yeah. So hotels, until recently, we were looking
at 3X transferable points with a number of cards. But now the Wells Fargo autograph journey came
out not too long ago and offers 5x points. And as we talked about recently, Wells Fargo now has added
the ability to transfer points from their autograph cards. So 5x points for hotels. So
that is the top option for getting a lot of transferable points when you're spending directly with hotels.
Yeah. And it really makes me question the return on some hotel cards because the Marriott cards,
I think all of them offer just six points per dollar at Marriott properties. And that's six
Marriott points. This is five transferable points. I can't really imagine if you had this card,
I can't imagine using a Marriott card even at a marriott hotel yeah i mean just i i i think of marriott points like as being worth
you know half of a transferable point roughly you know just to make it easy to do the math in my
head so so marriott 6x is more like getting 3x transferable points so i'd say before it was comparable to what else was available
and it would be like you know do you do you get 6x marriott or 3x ultimate wards yeah whichever
it's fine either way but yeah with wells if i had that card i think i would rather you get 5x
points transfer points yeah i think so too i mean also, also for me, my hotel card, if I'm booking a
hotel, actually, generally speaking, my hotel card has often been the altitude reserve. I guess it
depends if it's a Hilton, I'm probably going to use the Hilton card or an IHG. I'll probably use
the IHG card, but for a number of hotel stays anyway, I've been using my altitude reserve for
three points per dollar. But if I had the Wells Fargo autograph journey, I would definitely value
the five transferable points more. So, so that's going to be interesting. I hope that they add more
transfer partners because I think that'll get even more exciting as a good hotel card to have.
Yeah. Yeah. And I was going to try to sum up which cards showed up multiple times here,
but it occurs to me that a better thing would be checkout. We did post recently of what's in our wallets.
And we talked about what we use for grocery and gas and everything.
And I think it'd be really cool to, if you want more information about these, except
for the Wells Fargo thing, because that's so new and we don't have that card.
But a lot of these best options would be listed in the what's in our wallets posts.
So we'll link to those.
Well, also worth noting is if you go to our Best Offers page, so if you go to frequentmiler.com
and you're anywhere on the site in the top bar, there's a link to the Best Offers page.
And right near the top on the Best Offers page, it mentions the Best Category Bonuses.
So you can click right through to that.
Or you can go to our Resources page and probably find a link to it.
Or if you just Google Frequent Miler Best Category Bonuses, I'm sure it'll come up in the Google search results.
You can find our page that has the best category bonuses for all these different categories.
And you can page through one page after another or search.
There are a bunch of searchable boxes.
It's a really good resource for figuring out which are your best options for various types of purchases.
And we might even be nice and link to that post as well.
In the show notes, for sure.
But if you forget in the future,
now you can hopefully also find it on your own.
Very good.
Check that out.
So what else?
Is there other cards that are worth a mention?
Because we're talking about the best category bonuses
sort of here for a bunch of different things.
What other cards have a notable return
in something that we haven't talked about?
Yeah, well, everybody who's big into this hobby needs
at least one, if not several, ink business cash cards from Chase because they offer five points
per dollar for office supply purchases, as well as cell phone, landline, and cable on up to 25k
spend per year. The reason it's so interesting is because
office supply stores sell a lot of things besides office supplies. Like you might find
gift cards, for example, in your favorite office supply store. And when you go in and buy those
gift cards, you'll get five points per dollar buying them with the Inc. Business Cash.
Yeah. Or if you just need lots of reams of of paper you can get five points per dollar on all of your paper and then staples and things like that so yeah that's a great card
to have for 5x you know in in that category and in your cellular and landline potentially also
other cards that are worth mentioning the chase freedom flex and freedom unlimited both offer
three exit drugstores and drugst of course, don't only carry drugs
also. They have a number of different items in the drugstore that may be of wide interest to people
who are buying various things. So yeah, that's another great unlimited, uncapped 3X category.
Whereas the previous one we were talking about there was capped each year, it's not capped at
drugstores. So Freedom Flex and Freedom Unlimited just offer a flat three points per dollar uncapped at your local Walgreens or CVS or whatever.
And finally, the Wyndham business card that we talked about before, which is so great for earning 8x at gas stations, also has an interesting category bonus of 5X for utilities. So there are some cashback cards that offer bonuses on utilities,
but earning 5X points here is really, really good.
And it's not just utilities.
It's 5X for marketing, advertising.
And their list of utilities are telecom, cable, satellite, electric, gas,
heating oil, and water.
So it's very broad.
It is, and very convenient that it bonuses those categories. Now, not everybody's utilities will
take a credit card easily, but it bonuses enough different ones that you may find that you have
one of those that'll accept a credit card. And so that's nice. Some people have found that they've
been able to prepay utilities pretty far in advance. It depends on your providers of the various utilities. But if you find that you
have one that is triggering the 5X, then you probably can pay in advance if you'd like to
earn some points today. We should mention that the Wyndham Rewards earner business card is a
business credit card. So you do have to apply as a business person of some sort. It can be a sole
proprietorship, though. And in fact, sole proprietors that I've known anecdotally have had an easier time getting
approved than those applying with an LLC.
But it's very easy to get approved in general for business credit cards.
You can have a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very small business that is only
going to earn a little bit or maybe not even earning anything yet and get approved for
business cards.
And so then you use your business cards as you use your business cards
and earn your 5x on utilities and 8x the gas station. So worth worth considering that card.
Absolutely. All right. I think that ties up the various best cards to use in our opinions anyway.
If you think we got it wrong or miss something or you want us to mention something else or you
have a suggestion or a piece of feedback, don't forget to leave that in the comments of this.
We'd love to hear from you.
So let us know what your favorites are and your favorite categories.
But let's get into this week's question of the week.
This week's question of the week was long, and I'm going to truncate it quite a bit.
So we had a question come in from Cindy, who short story is that Cindy has been enjoying our blog. And now that Cindy has built up a
knowledge base, she's interested in becoming a content creator herself. And so she has a
niche that she's interested in trying to reach. And so she had questions about how do you do this?
How do you get into this? And what are some things that you might consider?
And so I wanted to just call out of the questions she asked. And at some point,
Cindy, I'll try and give you a response with some helpful stuff. But out of the questions that she
asked, she had a whole bunch of questions. What I really wanted you to touch on here, Craig,
for somebody who's interested in becoming a content creator of some sort, if you were starting
all over today, where would you focus your energy to get the best return for your limited resources? How would you start things out if you were
starting out today as a blogger or other miles and points content creator? And are there any
mistakes that you made in the beginning in business model, strategy, whatever it may be
that you wish you could have done differently? I think those were the two pieces I really wanted
to call or any other thoughts for somebody who's interested in creating a career and creating, you know,
Instagram content or blog or podcast or whatever the case may be in this space.
Yeah. Okay. I'll have to think as I'm talking, but
something that I realized early on that I was doing wrong and switched almost immediately to was I wasn't intending originally
to be writing about what I was most interested in, but rather the plan was to write about what
I thought other people need to know in order to get started with this. And I pretty quickly switched
to, nah, I'm just going to write about what I'm passionate about.
And I think that's just so important.
If you're going to be a content creator, if you're writing about something you're passionate about or writing or talking, whatever the medium is, then that passion is going to show through and your audience is going to respond to that. And you might find you're not reaching the audience you expected,
but the people that will be attracted are the people who are also passionate or discover a
passion for this thing that you're telling them about. And so that to me is just the most important
piece of it overall is do what you're passionate about. As far as monetizing and all of that,
this is kind of hard to say because you might not be in a financial position to do this. But
I think worrying about if you can get away with worrying about monetizing later, instead try to
build up your audience, build up your content, and think about monetizing
later, I think is a better way to go. I realize, again, not everybody's in the position where
that's feasible. But if you're too focused on the trying to monetize, I promise you're not
going to be doing this stuff. You're not going to be talking about writing about whatever the stuff that you're passionate about. You're going to be instead directing people to,
you know, sign up for this card or whatever. And it's not necessarily what you really want
to be talking about. And so keep that for later. I feel like there's another piece to your question.
Were there any mistakes that you made in the beginning that you wish you could have done
differently? Is there anything that you've any, any big mistakes that you feel like, or even small mistakes, I guess, things that you,
that were learning experiences? I mean, I guess you kind of touched on that by saying,
trying to write about something you weren't particularly interested in.
Yeah. Well, I'll say another one, which is when I first, on another, on a coffee break episode,
I talked about the origins of Frequent Mile and talked about how I discovered the ability to buy these things called vanilla reload cards at office supply stores.
And that sort of transitioned in a while to something called the Bluebird card.
And even though I sort of owned that original topic, the ability to buy vanilla reload cards at office supply stores, people knew
that FrequentMiler was the place to get that information. When Bluebird came out,
which made it a lot easier to convert vanilla reload cards to cash, I wrote a little bit about
it, but not a lot. And I realized that a lot of other content creators were getting the most of the audience
from talking about the Bluebird card all the time.
And I think that when there's a topic that you are known for, it makes a lot of sense
to cover it every which way and stay known for that and be the authority on that.
And that'll draw a lot of eyeballs back to your content over
and over. I learned that lesson. And when Target came out with a similar card that we, it was
called the red card, but we named it the red bird in honor of Bluebird. I very deliberately decided
to own that topic and write a lot about it and give people every bit of information they would
need to know to make the most out of it so that was a good decision so that was
like a learning experience for me on how to go about that I mean I'm gonna tag in
a maybe another piece I know this is a long question of the week but I think
it's interesting I think other people will be interested in it too if you were
starting over today one of our parts of our questions where would you focus your
time and resources? And I
know what you're passionate about. We got that. But in terms of blog, email newsletter, YouTube,
Patreon, Instagram, you can't do it all, right? So where would you focus your time and energy?
Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. I mean, I would probably start with the podcast. I think it's something I really enjoy doing.
Not that I don't enjoy writing anymore.
I do, but there's something hanging out with Nick a couple of times a week is a lot of
fun.
So, you know, why not?
Why not do more of that?
And yeah, I think that's probably where I would start.
Very good.
All right.
So you have some thoughts there anyway about if you're interested in getting into the content creation game. Now, one of the things that you
noticed Greg didn't probably talk very much about, except for at the very beginning was the
monetizing piece. And, you know, like you said, I think that's because if you're interested in this,
hopefully you have something else that's stable that they can get you through until you build up
enough audience that this becomes a thing. Cause I agree with Greg. I think that if I were to start my own blog, knowing what I know now,
after having worked for Greg for as long as I have, I totally would have, like, I would go back
and do it the same way in the sense that I think that building up good content first, rather than
having to focus on how to monetize it first is a good strategy for building
up something that's going to last. I met a content creator at some point that said, I figure I've got
five years to be relevant in this space. And so I'm going to take advantage of it as much as I can
during that five years. And I could see that strategy and some people will follow that
strategy. And if that's what you want, you just want to hit big and score as much money as you
can in five years time and then move on to something else. Well, then I guess you'd
probably take a different strategy, but because Greg and I are kind of in this for the longterm,
I look at it a little bit differently and say, well, I, you know, I want to do what I enjoy
because I want to keep doing this for a long time. So, so I think that's a smart strategy.
If you're interested in starting out with content creation, you know, rather than jumping in,
I think it's difficult to jump into doing it full time, like cold turkey. I think that would be a tough transition.
For sure.
But obviously, you know, whether or not you have that option, it's going to vary from person to
person. But all right, that brings us to the end of this week's episode. I hope you've enjoyed
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