Frequent Miler on the Air - Estate planning for miles and points? | Question of the Week Ep17 | 10-5-26

Episode Date: October 5, 2026

This podcast episode is sponsored by Saily. Saily is an ESIM service app created by the security experts behind NordVPN. Instead of paying absurd daily rates to your home carrier or swapping SIM cards on arrival, Saily gives you flexible prepaid data plans in over 200 destinations worldwide. Download Saily from your app store and use our code FREQUENTMILER at checkout to get 15% off your first purchase. https://saily.com/frequentmilerWhat should you keep in mind when Estate planning for miles and points? Reader John wrote in with this question, asking:I’m working through estate planning right now and one thing keeps bothering me: what happens to a meaningful stash of points and miles when you die?Have you ever thought through your own points-and-miles estate planning? What would you do if your heirs weren’t hobbyists? Transfer where possible, redeem in advance, leave detailed instructions, designate one knowledgeable person to handle it, something else?I’d be interested in how you would approach it.See our post about this here.(01:11) - If you are planning for an imminent situation:(01:25) - Combine points where possible(05:06) - Cash out points(05:44) - Planning an "in case" scenario(08:43) - Take things slowlySubscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderCheck out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of the Voyascape Network, a collection of some of the world’s best travel podcasts. Explore more at Voyascape.com. For advertising or sponsorship opportunities on this show and across the network, email [e-mail] or you can find more information at Voyascape.com/advertsing.

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. This podcast episode is sponsored by Sayley. Saly is an e-sim service app created by the security experts behind NordVPN. Instead of paying absurd daily rates to your home carrier or swapping SIM cards on arrival, Saly gives you flexible prepaid data plans and over 200 destinations worldwide. Setup takes just a couple of minutes on your phone before you leave. your data activates automatically when you touch down.

Plus, in order to reduce your data consumption, Saly actually blocks malicious sites, trackers, and annoying ads while you browse. Whether you need a quick gigabyte for a weekend away or unlimited data for a longer adventure, Saly keeps you connected without any surprise bills waiting for you at home. Ready to upgrade your international roaming? Download Saly from your app store and use our code Frequent Miler at checkout to get 15% off your first purchase. Details are in the show notes. On this week's question of the week, estate planning for miles and points?

John writes in, I'm working through estate planning right now, and one thing keeps bothering me. What happens to a meaningful stash of points and miles when you die? Have you ever thought through your own points and miles of state planning? What would you do if your heirs weren't hobbyists? Transfer where possible, redeem in advance, leave detailed instructions, designate one knowledgeable person to handle it, something else, I'd be interested to know how you would approach it. Yeah, that's a great question, John. It's one that we get from time to time. I wrote a post years ago called Planning for Miles and Points Afterlife or something like that, where I kind of

address some of this. So you can look up that post. It's several years old now, so some pieces of it are maybe not up to date anymore. But I figured we could talk this through and through a couple of different scenarios. So first of all, you know, what happens to your points of miles when you die? They could just evaporate. And you obviously want to avoid that. So let's talk about what we can do. If you're planning for an imminent situation, like if you knew that you were ill and you're trying to plan so that this is taken care of and not a burden for your family, then there are a few things you could do in that scenario. And we'll start there. So first of all, combine points where it's possible. It's really easy to do with some issuers. Like,

with Chase, for instance. You can easily combine points with one other member of your household or a business co-owner. So if you have somebody else in your household, you can just move all of your chase points to their cards so that when you're gone, they will have all of the points there. You could move to loyalty programs with an issuer like Amex. Amex will allow you to move your points to the loyalty program of someone who has been an authorized user for a minimum of 90 days. So as long as you have things set up so that your player two or player three, however many players you have, potentially in your family, is an authorized user on one of your membership rewards earning cards. You could just go ahead and preemptively transfer points to their loyalty accounts so that they'll have them if you're not intending to use them. Maybe you know that you're not going to be able to use all the points you have.

So you might want to do that up front. And of course, they could always redeem their miles or points for you. So if you are still traveling, you could still do that. if whoever it is you're transferring to is then just going to redeem out of their account for the flights that you need. Capital One makes it easy to move points over the phone so you can easily just call Capital One and move as many of your Capital One miles as you want to anyone else with a Capital One miles earning card. It doesn't have to be someone you live with. So that's another option. There's not really an easy solution anymore with Wells Fargo or City because you can't combine

points easily in those programs anymore, unfortunately. But there are some programs that make points easy to pool. For instance, JetBlue allows you to pool with, I think, I want to say up to 10 people. Hilton, it's definitely up to 10 people in a pool. So there are some individual programs like that where you might consider transferring to JetBlue and joining a pool with your family. And then, of course, after you're gone, I assume they could probably just remove you from the pool, but your points should stay in the pool. So that's a potential. option for programs like that. Hyatt is another program that's pretty easy to deal with in the sense that you could easily just move your Hyatt points to someone else. You can move Hyatt points to anyone else who's

a member of World of Hyatt. You can only move points in or out once every 30 days. So you want to kind of choose carefully because once you've moved points to someone, not only can you not move to someone else, they also can't move points to someone else or receive points from someone else. So you really do have to kind of plan that out. But again, if you're in the planning phase now, you could plan that. And again, I mentioned points pooling. There are other programs, depending on which miles and points you have, United, makes it easy to create a pool, and then you could, you know, leave the pool and dissolve the pool, and the points will end up in somebody else's account. Aeroplan has family pooling. So there are a number of programs out there that allow for that.

Now, in all of that, you can also consider your strategy as you reach that point of your life in terms of simplifying it to focus on those programs that are particularly easy. I know I in heard a number of times over the years from a reader who said that their kids asked them to simplify because their kids were not interested in learning about miles and points and didn't want to have a million things to deal with. So they really narrowed things down to one or two key programs that they knew they could use and be happy with. And that would be easy to pass along to their kids when they were gone. So, you know, that's another thing you can consider in your planning. Do I really need to have my toes in every pool out there, or can I narrow this down and make it simpler?

Again, if you've got other family members who are going to be left behind who aren't interested in earning, you know, Cathay Pacific miles, then maybe you want to make things simpler and focus on a major transferable currency, whatever that might be. Another thing, if that's the case, if your family is not interested in the Miles and Points hobby, then consider cashing out. You know, if nobody else is interested in learning how to max chase ultimate rewards points, then maybe consider cashing out your chase ultimate rewards points at one cent per point because then that gives you money that you can pass on to your family instead of having points that might just disappear. So most of the transferable currencies on the market

can be redeemed in some way at one cent per point. So you could again proactively do some of that if again, you know that you're going to be passing this on sooner rather than later. So that's all probably fairly obvious, I would think, for most enthusiasts if you were able to plan in advance. But of course, if you're doing estate planning, you're probably also planning for, well, what happens if something suddenly happens to me? And then there's all these miles and points. So just in case scenario, and I think that's a little bit harder to plan for because you do have to kind of have in mind what's going to happen and have some instructions. So I think the first thing is you want to make sure that somebody knows what to do. In my family, my wife,

knows that she should reach out to Greg and find out what to do with all my miles and points. And my wife knows to reach out to Nick. Right, right. So that's convenient. But, but you know, I have another good friend who when he was doing his estate planning. You know, he had someone in mind as an executor. But he called me and asked, hey, listen, I was thinking that I want to put you down as a point person to handle miles and points questions for my executor. Is that okay? And yeah, that was obviously fine in that case. So if you can find somebody you're friends with who is interested in this hobby, that would probably be helpful so that there is a point person who, A, knows that they're the

point person and B, who your family knows they can contact for help in getting that stuff figured out. Consider having some instructions for access. You know, you want to make sure that that whoever it is, that is your emergency sort of contact person or executor, whatever it may be, has a way to access the accounts, some instructions to figure out how to do that. I mentioned downsizing already before, but a thing that I hadn't thought of until I heard someone else speaking about it at a conference was to make sure everybody knows not to disconnect your phone line right away, because that's going to be necessary for a lot of two-factor authentication. So you want to keep that phone line open and ready to go so that they can access whatever it is that they need to access. I mean,

I think that's probably something. Along those lines, I just want to talk. about that briefly that once someone dies, eventually all their credit cards will be shut down automatically by the bank once the banks find out and everything. But there's definitely a lag there. And so if you have bank points, you've got transferable points from one of the banks, you know, if someone knows how to log into your account and so might need that two-factor authentication to get in, then they might be able to initiate a transfer to, you know, to your own rewards program without you having to go through a laborious process of trying to contact the bank and send them the death certificate and all that stuff that would be required to do it more officially. So it

really depends whether, you know, if you're going to go this route, whether you trust, well, I'm not sure why you would care. trust the other people in your household to have your access to your login information so that you can do that. Yeah, and along those lines, you want to take things slowly. My wife knows to take things slowly. There's no hurry to notify everybody of my passing immediately because once you do, you know, as Greg said, your bank accounts will be closed. Access will probably be locked out. So make sure that you're ready for that when you make that call to the bank to let them know that your loved one has passed away or make sure your family knows that when they make that call, they're probably not going to be able to

access those things anymore. So if there is anything you want done with your miles or points, then it needs to be done sooner rather than later and take your time on notifications. Recognize that there's no guarantee that you're going to be able to access those things once they get closed out. Officially, your miles and points don't actually belong to you in most cases. Most rewards programs have a clause that the points have no cash value and can be forfeited at any time. And officially, they probably may lean toward taking the points away and just zeroing them out. However, unofficially, we've certainly heard reports from folks before who have contacted a loyalty program of some sort, whether that's a bank program or a hotel or airline program and gotten some sympathy and been able to move the points to a surviving family members account. that's not always the case. It's not official policy, to my knowledge, from anyone, but it's certainly

worth asking rather than forfeiting the points. And so, again, you want to make sure that whoever it is that's in charge of this stuff when you're gone knows to ask and to be persistent about asking to get the best solution possible, because obviously you've spent your time and effort collecting these rewards. And so you want them to be worth more than nothing when you're gone. So hopefully if everybody's aware, then you can at least have a plan in place as to how to handle that. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media.

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