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, 2024

Everybody 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
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Starting point is 00:00:00 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,
Starting point is 00:00:45 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,
Starting point is 00:01:23 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.
Starting point is 00:02:06 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
Starting point is 00:02:45 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
Starting point is 00:03:27 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.
Starting point is 00:03:54 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,
Starting point is 00:04:26 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
Starting point is 00:05:08 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
Starting point is 00:05:43 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.
Starting point is 00:06:25 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,
Starting point is 00:07:16 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
Starting point is 00:08:00 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
Starting point is 00:08:42 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.
Starting point is 00:09:16 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.
Starting point is 00:09:40 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
Starting point is 00:10:11 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.
Starting point is 00:10:56 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,
Starting point is 00:11:36 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.
Starting point is 00:11:57 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.
Starting point is 00:12:14 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
Starting point is 00:13:01 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
Starting point is 00:13:41 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
Starting point is 00:14:27 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
Starting point is 00:15:20 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,
Starting point is 00:16:02 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
Starting point is 00:16:51 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.
Starting point is 00:17:28 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.
Starting point is 00:17:59 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
Starting point is 00:18:25 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.
Starting point is 00:18:57 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
Starting point is 00:19:38 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.
Starting point is 00:20:07 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?
Starting point is 00:20:21 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?
Starting point is 00:20:48 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
Starting point is 00:21:14 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
Starting point is 00:22:05 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
Starting point is 00:22:51 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
Starting point is 00:23:16 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
Starting point is 00:23:36 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
Starting point is 00:24:16 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
Starting point is 00:24:42 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
Starting point is 00:25:14 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
Starting point is 00:25:51 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.
Starting point is 00:26:13 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
Starting point is 00:26:35 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
Starting point is 00:27:06 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.
Starting point is 00:27:57 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,
Starting point is 00:28:18 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.
Starting point is 00:28:46 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.
Starting point is 00:29:27 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.
Starting point is 00:30:17 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
Starting point is 00:30:50 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,
Starting point is 00:31:18 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
Starting point is 00:32:03 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
Starting point is 00:32:46 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.
Starting point is 00:33:10 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.
Starting point is 00:33:23 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.
Starting point is 00:33:49 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
Starting point is 00:34:09 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.
Starting point is 00:34:51 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.
Starting point is 00:35:24 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
Starting point is 00:35:51 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
Starting point is 00:36:40 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.
Starting point is 00:37:19 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.
Starting point is 00:37:44 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
Starting point is 00:38:22 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
Starting point is 00:39:10 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.
Starting point is 00:39:45 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,
Starting point is 00:40:02 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?
Starting point is 00:40:46 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
Starting point is 00:41:19 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
Starting point is 00:41:56 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
Starting point is 00:42:31 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
Starting point is 00:43:00 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
Starting point is 00:43:39 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
Starting point is 00:44:32 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
Starting point is 00:45:20 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.
Starting point is 00:45:58 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.
Starting point is 00:46:29 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.
Starting point is 00:46:52 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?
Starting point is 00:47:04 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
Starting point is 00:47:50 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,
Starting point is 00:48:48 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
Starting point is 00:49:17 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.
Starting point is 00:49:55 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.
Starting point is 00:50:29 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?
Starting point is 00:51:05 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
Starting point is 00:51:43 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.
Starting point is 00:52:41 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
Starting point is 00:53:33 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.
Starting point is 00:54:14 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.
Starting point is 00:55:09 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
Starting point is 00:55:53 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.
Starting point is 00:56:29 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
Starting point is 00:56:47 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
Starting point is 00:57:31 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,
Starting point is 00:58:03 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 this week's episode. And if you have, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. So you can join our email list. You can follow us on all the various social media. You can join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group where you can ask questions like this and get feedback from other people all the time.
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