Frequent Miler on the Air - Frequent Miler origin story: Nick’s story | Coffee Break Ep16 | 6-25-24

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

On a previous Coffee Break episode, we talked about the Frequent Miler origin story – Greg’s story. This week, we'll learn about Nick's origin story with the Frequent Miler team. (00:47) -Super quick recap of next 5 years from the start of the blog Greg posted a "Help Wanted" for full time employee, which you can read here (02:21) - How Nick got into miles and points (12:09) - Nick discovers Frequent Miler at an FTU (13:58) - Greg and Nick meet in person at another FTU (16:37) - Nick's wife convinces him to apply for the Frequent Miler position (17:10) - More details about Greg's help wanted post and the hiring process (20:42) - Greg was hoping to find someone who knew more about redemption than he did Visit here to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Here we go. This is not your typical Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Today's Coffee Break is Frequent Milers origin story, Nick's story. You may remember that we did Greg's story, my story, back in April. That was Coffee Break episode nine. And where we left off then was how I started the blog and became a full-time blogger.

And really quick, I'm going to catch you up over five years before Nick got hired, which was during that time, I introduced quick deals as a new component to the blog, which were like just short little posts about deals. And that became really popular. I was often speaking at frequent flyer conferences during those five years. I even met some really nice people along the way, including I remember a couple that I talked to about diving because I had just got my diving certificate. So that was really fun. And let's see, during that time, I had invited some guest authors to help out because I was a little overwhelmed by all the work to do with the blog. And I hired Sean Coomer, who you may know as the

author of Miles to Memories. He worked part-time for me for a few years and was an incredible help. He handled almost every quick deal that we published. Overall, blog was doing well, but not a lot of growth. And at the end of 2016, Sean gave notice he wanted to work full-time on his own blog, which I don't blame him. He was a little overwhelmed. So I posted a help wanted sign on the blog. I post, I, you know, actually published a post saying I want to hire someone full-time who will be voted entirely to frequent miler.

So now I'm going to turn it over to Nick to talk about his origin story. All right. Well, so we'll get to that help wanted ad, but I guess if we're going to talk about my origin story, we got to back up a little bit. So how did I get into miles and points to begin with? So I grew up in a household where my parents had like one credit card and everything went on that one card. And they were always insistent with me that I should never pay an annual fee to use my own money. So if I were ever going to get a credit card, it should have no annual fee. And I went years without a credit card. My wife and I have been together for almost, not quite, but almost 20 years now. And so long, long, long, long, long ago, closer to the beginning end of that, we had taken a trip abroad. And the short version of the story is we got robbed and we

only had debit cards with us. And so they got my wife's debit card, which had most of our money in it at the time, and were able to spend, of course, most of the money off of the debit card. And thankfully, it was a small local bank that was really good. We were able to get the money back into the account while they did an investigation. And so life worked out okay, but it became apparent that maybe just debit cards isn't a great idea for the long run. So we decided, OK, it's time to get a credit card. And we started with what was a Venture One card, because that's what my parents had had. They always had the Capital One card that earned 1.25 points per dollar spent with no annual fee.

At some point, with some customer service complaint, they ended up getting a card that is essentially the venture card with no annual fee. Like their card doesn't say venture on it, but they earn two miles per dollar and have no annual fee. It's really weird. But so anyway, that aside, we went with the venture one that had the 1.25 miles per dollar spent. And so we were using that a bunch. And my wife's sister really wanted to go on a cruise. And we really didn't want to pay for a cruise because we weren't particularly interested in a cruise. And so we were able to use the points we had accumulated over time to pay for the cruise. And so we didn't have to pay for that. And that felt pretty good. We liked that. And so that was kind of our first points redemption. That was the only card we had. And so we'd been using that card. And I think I've told the story before that I saw

a tablet on sale that I really wanted to buy myself. It was an HTC Flyer. It had like a pen. This was early on in the whole tablet craze. And so I knew she would think, my wife would think that would be a waste of money. And she was probably right. I didn't use it all that much in the end, I guess. But anyway, I wanted it and I saw it on sale. I frequented sites like Slick Deals and things like that. Because even though my parents were pretty conservative with their money, my mom was a big time shopper and that rubbed off on me. So I liked to shop. And so I was often looking at things on sale on Slick Deals and sites like that before Slick Deals was, I don't know, Fat Wallet and Brad's Deals and whatever other deal sites there were out there at the time.

Deal news. And so I had come across this HTC Flyer deal. And I said, well, that's cheap enough that if I buy three of them and I sell two of them, I might be able to make enough money to pay for the one that I want to keep. And then they'll still have to let me keep it. Right. So that's exactly what I did. And of course, she did say, wow, that's great. And she said, maybe we should buy 10 more of those. And so I did. And we bought those and resold them on eBay, wow, that's great. And she said, maybe we should buy 10 more of those. And so I did. And we bought those and resold them on eBay, Amazon, whatever it was at the time, and said, wow, that was pretty cool. And we earned some points. And so we said, well, let's see what else we can do with that.

And we started buying and selling other things. At some point in that early journey, we realized, well, we're only earning 1.25 points per dollar spent. And Capital One has this card that earns two miles per dollar spent. And maybe that makes sense because we're spending enough on buying and reselling stuff that maybe my parents are wrong and the annual fee is worth paying in order to get two points. And so she called because somehow I had around the same time landed on a website called creditboards.com that has lots of different forums about building credit and rebuilding credit and things like that. And so I'd been spending a lot of time in there and I read about product changes at some point. And so I had her call and see if she could product change her Venture One to a Venture card so that we could earn two points per dollar. Still far away from anything about welcome bonuses or anything like that. I wasn't even on my mind at

that point. And so she called to see if she could product change and they told her no, she couldn't product change her Venture One to a Venture Card. Now I think in hindsight, it was probably that our Venture One didn't have a high enough credit limit, but they told her they could help her apply over the phone for a Venture Card. So she got the two miles per dollar spent and she did it. So we got the Vent venture card and we started buying and selling more and more stuff. And so reading deal sites led me to discover shopping portals. And so I had started in with shopping portals and earning cash back and saying, oh, well, if I can earn five or 6% cash back on this purchase, maybe I can sell it. Even if I break even on the purchase, I'm ahead to five or 6% or whatever. And so that's better than I was doing

in a savings account. So we figured, well,% or 6% or whatever. And so that's better than I was doing in a savings account. So we figured, well, let's just keep doing that. And so we did. And as we did that, eventually, I fell into reading a little bit more about frequent flyer miles. Actually, really, the true story on that is that we decided finally we were going to settle down. My wife and I spent a number of years traveling around.

We lived in Ecuador for a bit, and we went to Europe for a while and a bunch of different things like that, sort of backpackery style. And when we decided we wanted to settle down and get married, we said, well, we want to have one last hurrah and take a big trip around the world and see all the places that we think we want to see before we get married and have kids and can't do any of that stuff anymore. And we figured that this was the last chance to extend our youth, so to speak, and see something. So we started looking around and we had heard people talk about round the world tickets, cash tickets, not even talking mileage. I wasn't at that point yet. And so I started Googling round the world tickets and I stumbled on an article from Million Mile Secrets or the Points

Guy or one of the bigger blogs at the time like that and started reading about mileage and how you could use airline miles for that kind of thing for around the world ticket. And I was like, well, that's interesting. And so then I started reading some more about airline miles. And so once I started doing that, I started reading more about credit cards, of course,

because I was looking at blogs that had a lot of stuff about credit cards, of course. And so, and then I started wanting those credit cards and thinking, oh, well, maybe I could do this. Maybe I could do that. Maybe we could pay for some of these flights using miles and points. So I spent about a year reading everything I could about that, like about frequent flyer miles and how to use them to book flights and all that before I even started with credit cards. I spent about a year just reading and learning and reading and learning and figuring out what it was that I thought I wanted. And so then we started opening some cards and I was using some shopping portals and opening a few cards. So this was

probably about 2014 now. I think I spent 2013 to 2014 just reading. And then in 2014, I started collecting points. I opened my first few rewards credit cards and I started pretty small with, again, like a venture one card, I think. And then I six or seven months later, I did like a little mini apparema and I got the Starwood card and I got the the Sapphire Preferred and I got a United card. And, you know, so a few like four or five cards at once. And I was like, wow, this is amazing.

I look at all these sign up on a little classics. Yeah. Oh was like, wow, this is amazing. Look at all these signup bonuses. And again, yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I was buying and selling stuff. So the spending requirements seemed super simple because, you know, all I had to do is find 2000, $3,000 worth of stuff that I could break even on. And I'm coming out way ahead because I've got this big bonus. So at the time I had done enough buying and selling, we'd gotten to the point where we were, I don't know, I mean, in a year maybe buying and selling $80,000, $90,000, $100,000 worth of stuff. So, I had enough spend anyway that the spending requirements weren't a problem at all. Yeah. And I realized I'd been wasting those for years. Right, right. You know, like a few years before that, like, wow, I wasted a lot of spend on, you know, a card that I was only earning two miles per dollar.

But and at that time, Capital One miles, of course, weren't transferable. So I was only earning those in order to erase the cost of travel, thinking I was going to erase, you know, hotels and and flights and stuff. So so anyway, I got into that for quite a while. And then I I thought I knew everything I needed to know, sort of. And I was I ran the marathon in 20, uh, 2014. Yeah. In 2014, I ran the marathon, the Chicago marathon. And when I went out there, I have a good friend that lives in Chicago, very close friend of mine. And he said he had a friend who knew something about miles and points and we'd probably like each other. We should meet up. And so I met his friend Lance and,

and Lance was a lot of fun, great guy, very good friend to this day. And so Lance knew a fair amount about miles and points, at least as much as I did, I think. And he said his father was really like an OG in the game. He'd been playing since the early 80s when all this stuff kind of started and had millions and millions of miles and points. And so after the marathon, we had like an after party of sorts at our mutual friend's place. And Lance's dad happened to be in town because he was at the Chicago seminars, which I knew nothing about. I had never even heard of. But Lance's dad happened to be in Chicago. So he came to the after party at the marathon. And so we start up a conversation and he started showing me some notes on his iPad from the Chicago seminars about things that I had no idea existed, things in a word, sweet spots in a word charts that I

was like, oh my goodness, you can do this and that and a stopover and this, you know, and I had no idea because I was very basic and very simple in learning about miles and points. And so he really kind of blew my mind. And then a month or two later, Lance sent me a message and said, hey, you know, there's a conference coming up that's kind of like that Chicago seminars. You should go check this out. So I said, well, let's let's give it a shot, because I was pretty impressed with some of the notes I saw. So my wife and I went to an FTU in Washington, D.C. at the end of 2014, I think. And so that was, I think, the Crystal Hyatt Regency for anybody who remembers that.

And we went and I sat through one of Greg's presentations. And at that point I was aware of frequent miler. I had read it some, I wasn't like a daily reader. I don't think at that point, but he was talking about shopping portals and extreme stacking. And I was like, well, I got this. I already know about shopping portals. You know, I'm doing that. I'm buying and selling stuff, but there wasn't something else at that time that I was more interested in listening to. And I said, well, let me listen in anyway and see what he has to say. And of course, that was one of the best decisions I ever made because my mind was totally blown. I had no idea about double dipping and triple dipping. And some of the spreadsheets that Greg

used during that presentation, I was just like, oh, my goodness, I have not been I've been leaving so many points on the table. I had no idea how much I had been missing out. I was so we left that conference so excited about the things that we learned because we really were at a base level. And at that point, we were only ever thinking about traveling and economy class, I should mention, didn't have business class in our mind at all. I didn't even know what it looked like. I'd never seen a flatbed seat. So when people talked about flying business, I was like, the front of the plane gets there at the same time as the back, right? I just want to fly as much as I can. And we wanted to do this one round the world trip. I had no intentions of ongoing stuff with this. This was like a big last

hurrah, right? So anyway, then I became a daily frequent miler reader and my wife too, we read everything that frequent miler published, uh, over most of the next year. And a few months later, there was another FTU in, in Las Vegas. And Greg spoke at that one too. And so we were so excited about the first one. As soon as we heard about the Las Vegas one, we said, yeah, we'll go. We bought tickets, bought plane tickets, obviously hotel. So it wasn't free by any stretch of the imagination. We spent quite a bit, but we felt like we had gotten at least that much value out of the first one. So what else is there to learn? So we went to Las Vegas and we were really excited we met you at that conference. And I think you remembered meeting us.

I did. So I'm going to talk about that a little bit more when you talk about when you applied for the job. Okay. All right. Sounds good. So we introduced ourselves. We talked to Greg. We got to hear a little bit of his story. And it was like meeting a celebrity, right? Because it was somebody that we'd been reading for a while now. And we had this image of what he was like. And of course, getting a chance to actually talk to him was really exciting for both of us. So that was really cool. And then, you know, obviously, we attended a whole bunch of seminars that weekend learned a lot more. And so we got married, and we did a honeymoon. And by the time we got married in mid 2015,

I had amassed enough points and miles, we were able to do a four month honeymoon, we visited like 18 different countries flew around the world. Our first award redemption was Etihad First Class from Cairo to Abu Dhabi to Tokyo. I just can't even describe what it felt like to walk on the plane and see what the first class seat looked like. I had seen some pictures, but I was not prepared. How'd you get to Cairo if that was your first? So we bought a cheap ticket on Wow to get to Europe. So Wow is like a discount carrier. So it was like just over 100 bucks to get to London from New York. So we didn't redeem points for that end of things. And then we traveled around Europe.

So those were cash tickets, probably mostly erased with the venture points. I can't remember all the details in hindsight, but we went a number of places in Europe and then we ended up in Greece and we flew, bought a cash ticket from Athens to Cairo specifically because I had read about this sweet spot with American Airlines miles. It still exists. It's a few thousand more now than it was at the time. I think it was 40,000, 50,000. No, it's 45,000 in first then. And now it's 50,000 in first from the Middle East to Asia. It's still a great deal.

Yeah, it is. It's still a great deal. So anyway, that was wild. And of course, then we flew Cathay Pacific in business class on that trip, and we flew Lufthansa, and we flew Emirates first class from the Maldives to Dubai and did a stopover and went to South Africa from there, came back to Dubai and flew Emirates first from Dubai to New York. And so a bunch of wild stuff on that trip. So it was very, very cool. I had a great time. And so then we came back and we were still doing buying and selling and saying,

oh, well, OK, we can still earn some points and maybe we can take a couple more trips. We again, I still at that point don't know. Like I knew we were excited about it and we were wowed by it. I don't think we thought it would be realistic to do forever. I'm not sure why in hindsight, but we kept buying and selling stuff and reading blogs and we had jobs that we were reasonably happy with. And then one day I saw this Help Wanted ad on Frequent Miler and I was like, oh, I thought about it, but I wasn't sure I could really do it. And my wife, she saw it and she said, well, you're going to apply, right? And I said,

I don't know. I'm not sure if I can do it. And she said, what do you mean you don't know? This is perfect. This is exactly what you want to do. You'd be good at it. You would enjoy it. You should absolutely apply for this job. She was adamant about it. And like most things, she was right. And so I applied for the job and I won the employment lottery and the rest is history. Yeah. So from my end, when I published that blog post, Help Wanted, I received something like close to 100 applicants. And the application wasn't easy.

It was like, write this quick deal about this tell me which of these three cards can transfer to you know this or that program and and tell me how you would you know stack this deal to make it better things like that it was really you had to know your stuff to fill this out and we had uh dozens and dozens of excellent applications. I whittled it down to 12 and then I sent them more questions and then I whittled it down to four. And it wasn't Zoom at the time. I got on Skype at the time with each of the applicants and Nick was the first and i i knew within a minute like our rapport was like so good like instantly um i was like oh i'm hiring this guy he's great uh he's fantastic and and um and we just had a great conversation is how i remember it um that pulled the wool right over his eyes

yeah and and so i'm gonna turn off our timer We have a timer to make sure that we go under 20 minutes for these, but we're just going to pay everybody back if we go a little longer on this. So yeah. So, so somewhere along the line, when I'm talking to Nick, having this great conversation, I realized he looks kind of familiar. Then I was like, wait, have I, have we met? And, and, uh, and then I don't know if you had to remind me about, um, Las Vegas or if I remembered it, but, uh, uh, then, then I clearly remembered the conversation with you and your wife and it was a great conversation. And, um, and it was so cool to sort of connect the dots in that way. It was, you know, and I thought about, of course, obviously mentioning it at some point in the application process. But then I thought, like, I want him to like we had a good conversation, but I didn't know that that would help me necessarily or hurt me because I was obviously relatively new still to this whole world. And on the flip side, of course, I wanted to be chosen because I was what he wanted if I was going to be chosen for the job, if I was going to get the job. And I was still very much not sure. So I'm eternally grateful that Greg took a chance on

somebody who had no blogging experience. I had written a little bit. I kind of started trying to put together a little bit of a blog of my own. I hadn't told anybody about it because I wanted to build up some pages and posts and things before I kind of put it out in the wild. So I had very, very, very basically started. But when I say that, you're not imagining as small and insignificant as it was still at that time. So there was almost nothing there. And so I had no experience in this world. I didn't know anything about WordPress, the program that we use to do this. I knew spreadsheets, but I say that with such hesitation because I knew the very basics of a spreadsheet. And if you saw some of Greg's spreadsheets, you would understand how I say I knew very little about

spreadsheets at the time. Well, Nick likes to say that he won the employment lottery, but I won the employee lottery, getting the best pick possible in the world, I think. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. That's proven not only in how it's turned out over time, but also like I was looking, I was hoping to find someone who knew more about the redeeming side than I did. So I, up until then frequent miler was mostly about earning points in miles. And so I had all kinds of content about stacking, triple dipping and all that stuff to earn lots of points in miles. I, I was, uh, well-versed in all of that, but I was less, uh, confident at that time about my ability to understand how best to take advantage of,

of miles and points for award flights. I mean, I had done my fair share, but not a ton. And, and, um, Nick, hey man, even though it was, uh, fairly recent experience, it was an in-depth experience flying around the world. He had also just booked. In fact, you were just about to take off when we talked on another huge trip that you had booked with Points and Miles, right? Yeah. And in fact, yeah, so on the way home from the honeymoon, we were on our way to the last stop and trying to figure out, you know, people are going to ask us what our favorite stop was. And we didn't have an answer yet. And we were on our way to South Africa. And that turned out to by far be our favorite experience doing safari and, you know, in Kruger National Park. We loved it so much that we booked a trip to go back about 15 months later. So we continued earning miles and points.

And that was the next big trip. We were like, okay, we're going to do this now before we have kids and settle down in the real world begins. And so, um, so we were on, like literally I got off the flight and into the lounge in Johannesburg. And that's when I got, or maybe it was in Frankfurt on the way, somewhere along the way there, I got the email from Greg, like in an airport lounge that, uh, that I had the job and that was amazing. Like, I mean, we were already heading off on an amazing adventure and that made it even more exciting. Yeah. I think, I think Nick wrote his first like quick deal from the car, like using a hotspot or something. I did. Yes. As best I could with the, uh, the hotspot in Kruger national park, which did not work particularly well, but, but, but we hung in there. We made it so funny. Yeah, no, that's awesome. And now,

you know, both of us get to hang out with each other, uh, twice a week now, um, doing the podcast and, and of course we're at work together daily, um, uh, behind the scenes as well. So it's been, it's been awesome. So I'm so glad that you applied, uh, many thanks to Sam for forcing you to apply. I do thank her frequently for that piece of advice. So if you've enjoyed listening to today's episode, uh, you can apply for your refund at refunds at frequent miler.com. Uh, and don't expect to get a response other than the fact that the email address doesn't exist. But if you'd like to get more of this stuff in your inbox each day or each week as a consolation prize, you can go to frequent miler dot com slash subscribe again.

That's frequent miler dot com slash subscribe. Check out our email list and join us. Follow us on social media. Join our frequent miler insiders and check out our frequent miler on the air. Full length episodes dropping every Friday. Bye, everybody.