Frequent Miler on the Air - Getting started with points & miles | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep298 | 3-21-25

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Winning the game doesn't have to be hard. Points & miles is like complicated board game -- seems overwhelming at first. But the rewards for winning are incredible. In today's main event we'll show you how to get started. (02:09) - Tyler writes in about success with Chase travel insurance Read more about Chase Sapphire Reserve & Ritz-Carlton cards' excellent travel protections here. (03:58) - Bilt rent payment method is changing - read more about it here. (07:27) - Chase biz cards: Pre-approved offers showing when logged in - read more about it here. (09:43) - Wyndham launches debit card, which you can read about here. (12:24) - Amtrak Guest Rewards Preferred Mastercard increased to 40k points, which you can read about here. (14:17) - Citi Rewards+ card may be discontinued soon (16:47) - Read more about the Wyndham point sale here. (17:53) - A listener writes in to say, "I feel like I Bonvoyed Marriott last month" by using a 35K cert for a Marriott in Guyana worth $675/night! (21:09) - Expires April 15, 2025.Hyatt Homes & Hideaways 3x promo (23:04) - Delta eliminates surcharges from Europe (25:07) - Frontier offering free Economy Bundle + free checked bag with promo code FREEBAG, which you can read about here. (26:45) - Get GigSky 15 day international data plan free w/ Visa Infinite & Signature cards + 10% off plans with a promo code, which you can read more about here. (28:50) - Redeem 2,000 Wyndham Rewards points for 2 Minor League Baseball tickets (Book by 3/26/25) - read more about it here. (30:35) - Use Hilton for Business for better cancellation terms and no deposits, which you can read more about here. (32:12) - Savewise: compare portals + find stacks - read more about it here. (41:05) - Earn credit card rewards (big picture) (42:47) - Check out Episode 214 about how to earn millions of points from credit card welcome offers here: https://frequentmiler.com/how-to-earn-millions-of-points-from-credit-card-welcome-offers/ (43:43) - Visit our Best Offers resource here: https://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-offers/ (44:08) - Check out Greg's picks for the best current credit card bonuses here: https://frequentmiler.com/top-current-credit-card-offers/ (45:45) - Don't do this unless you pay in full monthly (48:35) - What about credit score? (51:33) - Three types of cards, welcome bonus only, "sock drawer" cards, wallet cards (55:44) - Consider Travel Freely (which you can learn more about here: frequentmiler.com/travelfreely ) (1:01:09) - Learn ways to increase your spend (without really increasing your spend) Listen to this "13 ways to increase credit card spend" podcast Episode197 for more: https://frequentmiler.com/13-ways-to-increase-credit-card-spend-and-get-most-of-it-back/ (1:03:40) - More rewards with Shopping Portals and bank offers (e.g. Amex Offers, Chase Offers)\ (1:06:03) - Spend your points for travel! (1:09:58) - Use tools to find valuable ways to use your points - read this post for which award search tool is best: https://frequentmiler.com/which-award-search-tool-is-best/ (1:14:53) - Check out our post about which hotel award tool is best: https://frequentmiler.com/which-hotel-award-search-tool-is-best/ (1:15:27) - Keep track of your points with AwardWallet, which you can read more about here: https://frequentmiler.com/awardwallet/ (1:18:38) - Multi-Player Listen to podcast episode 292 "Points & Miles 2 Player Mode" here: https://frequentmiler.com/points-miles-2-player-mode-frequent-miler-on-the-air-ep292-1-31-25-podcast/ (1:20:55) - Greg did a long weekend trip to London using points (flying Delta One) which sounded like a lot of effort (and points) for such a short trip. Is there an ideal? Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder

Today's main event, getting started with Points and Miles. Frequent Mylar on the air starts now. Winning the Points and Miles game does not have to be hard. Do you ever like start with a complicated board game and it just seems overwhelming when you first unbox the thing and there's like a million instructions and you have no idea where to start? I feel like the Points and miles game is a lot like that, but the difference here is when you win you get incredible rewards. You get to fly around the world, you get to stay in amazing places, and the other thing that's different is

there's not just one winner. Like everyone who plays the game right or even like reasonably well can be a winner in this particular game. But I get it. If you're just starting out, you have no idea where to start. That's what we're going to try to provide in today's main event. That's such a good analogy. You know, like we've actually been saying lately, my wife and I've been saying we've just entered our games era with the kids. Our kids are pretty young, but they're just starting now to enjoy games. So we've been learning different card games and we've been playing board games like Clue.

And there's a bunch of cool kids games out now. starting now to enjoy games. So we've been learning different card games and we've been playing board games like Clue and there's a bunch of cool kids games out now. If you got young kids, you know what I'm talking about with like taco cat goat cheese pizza or whatever it is. There's all these like fun games but my least favorite part is listening to my wife read. Like we sit down to play it and she starts reading the instructions

and I just totally zone out and half the time she's like and you're not even listening, are you? And I'm like, not really, let's just start playing and tell me what I have to do because I can't stand that part and so I totally empathize with people out there who are like wow this is crazy because as soon as we start talking about stuff I know some people's eyes glaze over and they're like well this is too complicated and I think that was a perfect example doesn't have to be anybody can learn how to play a game right right? You just need to start playing it. And that's exactly, you know, what the secret is here. You just have to start playing it and don't play to win the first time. Just play to have fun and learn the game and you'll win in the long run. Don't worry, but don't forget wherever you're listening to this or watching, don't forget to like this, give us a thumbs up, leave us some feedback. And remember, if you want to come back to something and listen to it again later,

you can always go to the timestamps, expand the show description, and we always have the timestamps there. Let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Tyler. Tyler says, in a previous show, you were discussing the changes to the chase travel insurance. And it sparked a thought in my mind. Earlier this month, my wife and I were supposed to go to Iceland on economy cash tickets from Icelandair. Unfortunately, my wife became ill, she's better now, and we had to cancel the vacation. We got everything back but the cost of the tickets. Your discussion reminded me that I bought the tickets with my Chase Ritz-Carlton card. I immediately filed the claim when I got home,

and today I received notice that my claim was approved. Thank you so much for all the work you do. Well done. You know, as soon as you said I bought my tickets with my Chase Ritz Carlton card, there was like a round of applause that went off in my head like, whoa, nice job. Well done. Because yeah, I mean, you want to use a card like that, that or the Sapphire Reserve maybe that has really good travel protections because that trip cancellation insurance can really come in handy in a case like this. I'm glad that you heard it on the show and thought to file the claim and even happier to hear that it went through successfully because it's easy to talk about those benefits,

but until you use them, they're kind of meaningless, right? And you don't know, are they going to work? Are they not going to work? And it's great to be able to tell other people listening to the show and reading the site that, yeah, look, this worked for Tyler and it will probably work for you if you run into a similar situation.

So all the more reason to use a card that's got good travel protections. I have such a hard time considering putting travel on any card that doesn't offer great travel protections because there are a bunch that do offer incredible travel protections like this. Yeah, and we have a blog post that summarizes the best travel protection cards and so you can check it out. We'll have the link to that post in the show notes.

All right, let's talk about card news. There's some card news out this week. First of all, this is not really card news, but it falls best under card news I suppose and that is that the built rent payment method is changing and I say it's not really card news because it is and It isn't depending on whether you're a built card holder, I suppose but but tell us what's going on here What's changing about the way you pay rent? Can you still pay with your credit card? Can you still earn points? What's going on? Yeah, so, so built is became famous for being a rewards program that lets you earn rewards for paying rent and let you pay rent with your built credit card if you have one or with a, with a Alaska Airlines card is another way you can pay your rent.

And hopefully it'll expand to other cards in the future. But anyway, they have two ways of letting you pay rent with a credit card. One is if your landlord is part of the built network, then you can just sort of pay directly and there's nothing special happening. If your landlord is not part of the built network, then you can pay through the built app and then what happens is either a check gets sent to the landlord or they get paid through an ACH like bank transfer.

There's different ways of making that actually happen. It doesn't cost you anything to do that unless you're paying with a non-Built card. And it doesn't cost the landlord anything. But anyway, if you're in that situation where they have to send a check or an ACH, then just the process for how you do it is changing. And so you need to make sure if you've been paying that other way, make sure you pay attention to the emails you've gotten from BILT about it and get ready to make those changes for your next payment and thereafter. The reason I wanted to bring this up, this is so specific, but the reason I want to bring this up is the communication from BILT to their members

specifically said that they were changing how things worked in preparation for mortgage rewards program launching this year and other future bill types. So they've long kind of hinted that the ability to pay mortgages this way and earn rewards was coming. What they hadn't, to my knowledge, hinted about before is other things too So I'm very intrigued by that like what other things are we gonna be able to pay and earn rewards for that's kind of Exciting if it if it's done well, but so we'll have to wait and see I mean clearly they've built a payment platform That a lot of landlords are happy with and it's got to be a hard sell for a landlord to change things Sorry to rock the boat and when I say a landlord, I'm not talking a small landlord. I'm talking like the large buildings

that they've gotten to buy into this system. I mean, there has to be enough benefit for the people running the building. They need to see a much better system in order to probably switch from whatever they were using before, I imagine. So it seems like they have the payment platform thing down. So I'll be really interested to see where they disrupt things. And because I imagine that it probably would be appealing for other sectors. And so we'll see where that goes. That is an exciting little hint that they threw in that email that more is coming. So we'll see what that means. Hopefully

it means opportunities to earn credit card rewards for bills that you weren't previously. So that's great if it so happens. All right, next up, we got Chase Business Cards. You just brought in a haul of points thanks to some pre-approved offers, huh? Yeah. So I thought this was worth mentioning here because of the way this came about. Everybody in my immediate family has Chase Inc. business cards of one type or another. There are like four different types of Chase Inc. business cards and it's possible to get

welcome bonuses for all of them. Anyway, my wife, son, and I each have Chase Inc. business cards and for my son and my wife, when they logged into their Chase accounts recently they saw sort of an ad saying they are pre-approved for different kinds of ink cards that they didn't already have. Now I have all the like the main three not there's a fourth one that the the premier or something that is treated very differently so I I don't have that one. But anyway, I have the main three and I didn't get this pre-approved thing, but my wife and son did. And it was basically sign up for one of these other ink cards

and you get the usual welcome bonus and you're pre-approved. So, you know, they both did that and got pre-approved for these big bonuses. And so that's awesome. Main point here is not to brag, but to basically say, if you have a chase business card of any sort, make sure you log in to your chase account through your business login, like you might have if you also have personal cards, you might

have both a personal login and a business login, make sure to go through your business login and see if you're pre approved for anything. Yeah, I mean, that's a great tip because people might not always think to look. And you know, it gets a little confusing because sometimes you'll get a mailer saying you've been pre-selected, you know, or you've been, you know, they'd like to invite you to apply for a card. And those are typically pretty meaningless in terms of they're not going to necessarily

you're not necessarily going to get approved. They're going to bypass 524 things like that. Whereas these pre approved offers that you can find in your account now and then typically are I think really pre approved so so good to hear that you have had success with that and a great tip for people to look for that if you got a chase card. All right. Next up, Wyndham has launched a debit card. That sounds exciting. Okay. Let's move on. Wyndham has launched a debit card and this card, I don't know.

It might be kind of interesting because it offers one point per dollar on Wyndham properties, gas stations and grocery, and then it offers one point per $2 spent everywhere else. On the one hand, this is, is I guess marginally interesting for like the Dave Ramsey crowd that doesn't want to have any credit cards and will only have debit cards. Well good at least you're going to earn some sort of a reward for your spend. So on the one hand that looks kind of good and it might be appealing to people listening to this show because the one point per dollar on a debit card at the grocery store that sounds kind of interesting to me and I wonder how long that's going to last but um,

but That said the card itself requires well first of all it either has a six dollar monthly fee Or requires you to leave or have an average collected balance of twenty five hundred dollars a month collected balance of $2,500 a month. And so leaving $2,500 a month in this account over the course of a year is probably costing you around $100 worth of interest. So believe it or not, mathematically, it probably makes more sense to pay the monthly fee,

the $6 monthly fee and pay $72 a year. And I say that knowing that $72 a year for a debit card sounds kind of crazy to me. There's lots of credit cards with no annual fee that offer 2% cash back. So you could be doing much better with a card like that. But you know, I wouldn't be using this as an everywhere type of a card. If you are open to credit cards, you can do a lot better. But if you have very specific use cases for it, and you know, maybe it will work out to be really good. I don't know how tolerant they will be for quantity of purchases,

but I guess we'll find out. Yeah. Do you know what bank is issuing this? Is this the same as? Sunrise. Sorry? Sunrise Bank. Sunrise Bank.

So it's not the same as their credit card issuer. No, it is not. It is not. Sunrise Bank and it's powered by something that I hadn't heard of before that runs on SoFi's platform. So I assume the app for it will look very SoFi-esque, but the underlying bank is Sunrise. So again, whether that's going to be good or bad and how much people will be able to use it, I don't yet know, but it's out right now.

You can, I think, earn 2,500 points if you get two direct deposits and spend a hundred dollars in the first 90 days. I think it is. And that's fine. I guess it's a pretty low checking account bonus. It's not, not anything I would sign up for just for the points. But if you got a lot of grocery spend that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do with a credit card, then maybe there you go. Next up Amtrak.rak. The Amtrak card is back out with an increased offer. The Amtrak Guest Awards Preferred Mastercard now offers a welcome bonus of 40,000 points again.

So this is an offer we've seen come and go and it has come again. Why should people care about 40,000 Amtrak points? Yeah, I mean Amtrak points, if're actually gonna spend them on Amtrak rides They can be really valuable. They're worth up to two point nine cents each and I think having this card gives you like a 5% or 10% discount on the points 5% rebate so so you're getting a little bit better value even By having this card and so the the welcome bonus is really valuable. You're talking about over $1,000 in Amtrak travel. Obviously, a lot of people don't ride Amtrak. And so if you're one of those people that don't ride it,

this doesn't make any sense for you to get. But if you do ride it or want to ride it, then I think this is a really good option. Yeah, you know, I'm somewhat tempted by this, because Amtrak points are bizarrely valuable when you actually need a train. You can do really well, like Craig said, they're almost three cents a point. And if you're getting the 5% rebate, all the better. And I don't write Amtrak very often, but now and then I'll be in a situation where I say oh Amtrak could be convenient or useful but oh man it's cost more than I want it to cost I wish I had those points and so I

so I find it tempting and interesting mostly to have a reserve of Amtrak points remember that Amtrak long ago used to be a transfer partner Chase Ultimate Rewards that ended years and years ago. So there's no other easy way to get Amtrak points besides their shopping portal or riding the train. So interesting for folks who are located somewhere where a train is a good option. Yeah, totally. All right.

Next up, the City Rewards Plus card may be discontinued soon. Doctor of Credit reported that they heard this was gonna be happening sometime soon, maybe even by the time this goes live, the show. The reason you should care is if it's not too late, you might wanna consider either applying for it or product changing another Citi card to it. This card, when combined with other cards

that earn thank you rewards points, means that when you redeem your thank you rewards points for anything, whether it's transferring to a airline or hotel partner, redeeming for cash back, or paying for travel or whatever, you get 10% of those rewards back as like a rebate up to 10,000 points back each year. And so that's pretty darn valuable just for having this fee free card.

So if you're interested at all in getting into the city, thank you point sort of ecosystem, having a rewards plus card is a good idea. In the past, now, you know, there's no guarantee that they'll keep that benefit alive and keep it as a rewards plus card, but in the past when Cydia's discontinued cards, they've usually kept them alive almost indefinitely. I mean, there have been cases where they've gone away, like the Cydia forward card eventually went away, but usually they stick around for a long time. So anyway it may be worth it's worth at least considering whether you can

find a way to grab this card before it's too late. Yeah yeah you know that's interesting actually the because there's a couple of issuers that tend to do that or the old cards tend to hang around forever if you have one and keep it. And then there's other issuers where when they get rid of a card, they'll just product change you to something else. So it varies from issuer to issuer, but Citi is one of the couple that tends to keep those old cards for the most part around for like ever, even though you can't get them anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't understand why a bank would want to do that. I guess, except maybe they don't want to risk losing those customers.

I mean, it just seems like a lot of work to maintain a card. I mean, right. Right. Right. That isn't available. So it's not constantly bringing in new. Yeah, I don't know. Don't question it, Greg. Let's not give city any ideas here. They're not the only ones that do this. So let's move on.

Let's talk about this week's mattress running the numbers. Mattress running the numbers this week, Wyndham rewards is out with a sale on points. It looks like it might be a pretty good deal. Yeah. So the way it works is you get up to an 80% bonus on the purchase of Wyndham rewards points. And the way it works is it depends on

your elite status with Windham. If you don't have any status, you get a 70% bonus, but that's still a good deal. You're buying points for 0.76 cents each, so about three quarters of a penny each, which, you know, if you need Windham points and you're buying them that cheap, that's a great deal. If you need window points and you're buying them that cheap, that's a great deal. Platinum and diamond members, though, get an 80% bonus, which lowers the cost a little bit to 0.72 cents per point. We like this promotion a lot, but we have so much to say about it that we decided to create another show. We're going to do a coffee break about this deal very soon. So stay tuned for that.

Suffice it to say you could do pretty well with this point sale. So stay tuned. All right, let's talk about being bonvoyed next or anti bonvoyed. Yeah, you know, we talked so much about how Marriott in particular but other other programs too, like to ruin our fun, bonvoy us from day to day. What we don't spend a lot of time on is when things work out particularly well in our favor. So I decided it would be worth sort of dragging out my giant mailbag again and reading a piece

of mail from M. M says, absolutely love, love, love your podcast. I'm a long time listener and your podcast is one of my highlights every week. Also love the addition of the weekly coffee break as it's something to look forward to midweek. I feel like I bonvoid Marriott last month when I traveled to the South American country of Guyana. Marriott is pretty much the only game in town in terms of new hotels and also the points game. They have a beautiful new property that includes an amazing free breakfast in their lounge that overlooks the ocean.

The rooms are typically over $600 a night and at the time I was booking they were running at $675. $100 a night and that time I was booking they're running at 675 to my surprise the 35k certs So these are Marriott search you get with various merit credit cards To my surprise the 35k certs were applicable I was able to use three 35k certs to book three nights giving me over two thousand dollars in value for me This is one of the best redemptions I've ever received for a Marriott free night certificate Well done fantastic. That's exciting. You know, it's nice when it works out like that. And I've now and then find those 35k certs can be really valuable for the right property. It's, you know,

it's great when you run into that. And Guyana is an interesting example, because that's a place that I have looked at on a couple of our challenges where I've, I've wanted to somehow work in South America. And a couple of times now in challenges, I've, I've looked at flights to Guyana because it's a place that was never on my radar otherwise. And so sometimes I'll just look at the map and look for places that I say, I don't know much about that. I've never been there. I don't know people who've been there. And of course, that's not true because Stefan from Rapid Travel Chi has been to every country. So I guess I do always know someone who's been there. But anyway, so it's a place I've very kind of on a surface level looked at before, but not a place that we often hear much about. So great to hear that Marriott was a good option. And if anybody is looking to go there, that that's one to look for.

Yeah. I also wanted to mention it because Marriott just is randomly very valuable. You know, like, yes, you often run into like ridiculous point prices for hotels, uh, that return bad value, but every now and then there's, there's a hotel that is, um, you that is sort of capped at a point price that is way below what it sort of should be if you think about the usual value of Marriott points. Anyway, so if you're just kind of fed up with Marriott

because of all the other things going on, I mean, if you have Marriott points or free night certificates, just remember that there are places out there where you could potentially get some great value. Great. Very good. All right. Awards, points and more is up next.

First up, we've got a promotion out from Hyatt Homes and Hideaways through April 15th, I believe you can get three, is it three times three X points here? Three times your points. So whatever the usual earning rate is for this, for That's what I was trying to recall off the top of my head for homes and highways. Three times, three times of the points. So that's pretty good.

I mean, because high points are, are so valuable. So if you're going to be booking a, basically a vacation rental type of property, I think it's worth checking out the prices through Hyatt Homes and Hyatt Aways. And if it's competitive with other booking platforms, then this could be very much worth doing. It's gotten really interesting, though, because then you'd have to compare and see, okay, well, which of those places might be on another vacation rental platform, too, right? And kind of compare between or the Hyatt Homes and Hy compare between or are the Hyatt Homes and Hyatt Aways only on Hyatt Homes and Hyatt Aways?

I haven't really looked at those very much. Yeah, you know what? I haven't looked that much, but my assumption is that it works similar to how Marriott's Homes and Villas works, which is basically that a lot of them are on multiple platforms and so you can book through Airbnb which is basically that a lot of them are on multiple platforms. And so you can book, you know, through Airbnb or VRBO or Marriott homes and villas, things like that. So then you have to, yeah, well, that's what I assumed too. And so it just creates, you know, this is creating too much work for me because it's true.

I got to look at Marriott homes and villas and see what promos they're running and how many points I can earn and what percentage I can get off and then I got to see okay do the properties I like from there and Hyatt you know also exist on VRBO or Airbnb too much work to book a vacation rental I'm out forget doing a vacation rental unless he's booking no vacation that's right that's that's the only vacation role I want to see all right so that's that's Hyatt homes and Hyattaways next Delta eliminates their surcharges from Europe Wait Delta had surcharges coming back from Europe. Yeah, it was really weird So Delta when you're booking awards like round trip to Europe from the US you didn't have surcharges added on

You do have to pay any airport taxes and fees that are required. So it's not that there's no fees when you do that, but there's no extra surcharges added. But what it used to be is if you booked a flight starting in Europe and going to the US, for example, then they did tack on a couple hundred dollars to each ticket on top of the airport fees. And so that was annoying, but they've eliminated that. And so that's a little bit of good news there. Bad news is they haven't changed the value of their points. So you're still gonna get pretty poor value for your points when when flying in that direction unless there's a special sale going on

Yeah, and since today's topic is sort of a one that would appeal to newcomers It's probably worth a mention that Greg said, you know You're still gonna pay whatever airport taxes there are and if you're primarily used to traveling within the United States Then you might think of airport taxes as being five or ten dollars or maybe even $20 paying how you're booking and who you're booking through but but in Europe or most countries you're gonna incur It varies but anywhere between 50 and a hundred maybe a hundred and fifty dollars in taxes that just everybody pays It doesn't matter how you book your ticket or what program you book your ticket through. If you're departing from Germany or France, for instance, the taxes add up to somewhere between 150 and $200.

Whereas if you're departing from Finland, it's about $65. And so it varies from country to country in terms of the like bare bones taxes that you pay through every program. What Greg's talking about is Delta was adding a couple hundred bucks on top of that. Right now they've taken that away. Yeah. So that's good news. Yep. All right. Very good. Frontier Frontier is trying to throw some shade at Southwest. They are. So they're offering a free economy bundle plus free check bag with a promo going on right now. This is for summer travel. Basically, they're advertising that, you know,

come over to us because Southwest is going to start tacking on all these fees. And they actually have the, you know, the travel window starting the day that Southwest starts imposing their own bag fees. They've hinted that it might be the start of them eliminating bag fees altogether, but it's unclear. The main thing you need to know right now is that you need to book by March 24th, which is just in a few days, if you're hopefully you're listening to this in time if you're interested. You need to book by then in order to get in on this deal. At least for now, it wouldn't be surprised me if they extend it. But anyway, that's, that's the current news with that.

Someone wrote in saying that it looked like they've actually increased their airfare in order to accommodate these free check bags, which is entirely possible. But there you go. There you go. Smart marketing probably on Frontier's part to go after the crowd who are upset about that. Unfortunately, Frontier doesn't have the network that I would need for it to be a replacement for Southwest.

But if you live somewhere with a lot of Frontier service, worth taking a look. Speaking of things that are worthwhile and probably a good deal in the right situation, you can get GIGSKY now with any Visa Infinite or Visa Signature Card. You can get a 15-day international data plan for free. So if you're going to travel abroad for 15 days or less and you have a Visa Infinite or a Visa signature card, you get free internet with a, I think you can get either physical or an eSIM, right? And get free internet. But it was just eSIM, but I'm not sure. Is it just eSIM?

It might just be eSIM. So but most modern smartphones support eSIM, so that's not a huge limitation. And then you can get 10% off of longer term plans if you want a bigger plan or, you know, a plan with more data with our code. Yeah. Uh, and the cool thing is like, you know, if you're, if you're playing this game, you almost certainly have visa signature card, if not also visa infinite cards. And, uh, if you try this on one trip and you like it, um, you could

pull out another one of your visa cards to sign up for another 15 day free. And the people who run this program told us that was okay. So it's not like I'm telling you how to cheat the system. They expect that possibility. So that's kind of nice. I haven't tried it though, so I can't say how good the service is. Yeah, I mean, I haven't either,

but I'm interested and we'll give it a shot on my next trip. Now I've got T-Mobile and I've got free international roaming. I've got five gigs for free a month abroad but I always run out of that and I end up buying more because I'm like probably a lot of people. I'm taking a lot of pictures not uploading them to Instagram and a lot of videos. I shouldn't say I'm like most people. I guess everybody's doing that. Maybe I'm doing more of that Because I work for the blog here So I'm often buying more data when I travel abroad But now maybe I'll grab the one or two of these my wife and I'll each grab one We each got visa signature cards. It's one gigabyte for visa signature three gigabytes for Visa infinite

So if we get a couple of those at six gigabytes between the two of us, you know, that might work out pretty well. So I'm interested in trying that out the next time I travel abroad in a couple of months. All right. Next up, Windom has a promotion where you can redeem just 2000 Windom rewards points for two minor league baseball tickets. So I think their normal price is what 2500 points. So it's a it's a discount off their normal price for minor league baseball tickets. So book by March 26 if you want to get in on that deal.

Yeah, and in some markets that might not be a deal compared to just buying tickets or I know growing up next to a minor league team that there were frequently promotions where it was free to go see the game depending on which level of minor league you're at. This may not be a particularly good deal, but there are some experiences also that you can't otherwise buy. I got so there's one of them that's to be the play ball announcer for a game and I got that as a gift for a big like sports fan family member who loves to go to all the various ballparks and football

stadiums and everything else. And so I thought, you know what, this will be fun. I'll get the play ball announcer thing, even though it's probably meant for a kid. I got it for a grown adult to be the play ball announcer and she loved it. So there's some of those throughout the first pitch, stuff like that, that could be a lot of fun for either you or a family member or maybe a kid. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

You know, when you say how cheap the tickets sometimes are for these, I haven't gone to a lot of these, but what I do remember is the vending not being cheap. And what would be really cool is if they included, you know Hot dog hot dog. Yeah Dollar hot dog is part of part of the package. Well, you know the guy gotta pay the players somehow here All right. Very good. That's Wyndham rewards next up Hilton for business So Hilton for business is Hilton's business booking platform If you have a business of any size or sort you can sign up it's really easy to do free doesn't cost you anything and

Tim actually found that the Cancellation policy and the deposit terms are much better if you're booking through Hilton for business and when I say deposit terms are better Yeah, there are no deposits I think when you're booking through Hilton for business or often no deposits at least and And better cancellation policy which is good to know because oftentimes the rate when booking through Hilton for business or often no deposits at least and better cancellation policy, which is good to know because oftentimes the rate when booking through Hilton for Business is as good or better than what you probably would have access to otherwise unless you've got some sort of a corporate deal going on.

So yeah, that's a great tip that I hadn't paid a lot of attention to, but very good to know. Yeah, and you might have forgotten if you have, for example, a Amex business platinum card, and you enroll in the $50 off at Hilton each quarter, or $50 back for Hilton spend each quarter, it will automatically enroll you in this Hilton for Business program. And so a lot of listeners may already be enrolled

and not even realize it or remember it. And you get discounts off of paid Hilton stays as well as better terms. So that's cool to know. Yeah, yeah, excellent. That's good stuff and one that I'll have to take a closer look at because sometimes I've wanted to use that rate or I have actually booked that rate before.

So, and if you're new to Hilton for Business, your first you can earn a bunch of points too so it's worth checking out the post that we'll have linked in the show notes last but not least here in this section of the show savewise I wrote a post this week about save wise which is a tool for comparing shopping portals and also finding stacks through card linked offers so I wrote a post about it and I was actually really impressed. Now I tend to avoid anything where I have to install an extension and I say that and then probably some readers were like, ah but I know you use points bath, it's true I use points bath and they're like, oh I know you use Capital One shopping and I use that in a different browser instance. I tend to

avoid them. So when I first saw save wise it didn't stand out at me that this would be something I'd want to use and then I was like you know what we should write about it people want to know about it and so I went ahead and installed it and started using it and wow I've become a big fan of save wise so what it does is there's a couple different ways you can use it with a totally free account if you don't want the extension you can just go to the website sign up for a free account and you can search for a store. And it's going to show you a portal comparison, much like Cashback Monitor, but actually with some more portals that I didn't even realize British Airways had a portal because they're

not on Cashback Monitor. And so I didn't even realize it until they came up as the top rated store I was looking at. So there were some other portals in there that I hadn't used before. Whether or not I will use them, I don't know. But my point is it had a lot of portals. So you can view a whole bunch of portals and you can view the individual rate history

for each portal, whereas like cashback monitor will show you the best rate history over the last 15 months. Savewise shows you the rate history for each individual portal if you wanna see it. So that might be handy if you're trying to track when something might happen, but probably what makes this more interesting is that it will also display card linked offers chase offers and

Amex offers right now. I think they're going to expand that in the future So right now it's Amex offers and chase offers so you can choose to either view the publicly Discovered offers that you know some people have found on their various cards or you can link it up to your Amex Login your chase login where it will search for the offers on your cards. And so you can have it set to show the offers that are on your cards and it'll let you know which of your cards they're on. So you can choose to sync up all the offers if you want through the the SafeWise extension, or you can just let it look at the offers and it'll just know which ones you have.

So that's useful, but then it gets better yet if you install the extension. What I love about the extension is that when you're just browsing the internet, you're on a site where you could be buying something, it'll pop up and it'll let you know, okay, here are the various portals and show you the best portal rates. And you can expand it and see the top five or six different portals. So you can see right there at a glance without leaving the site you're on. You're looking at something on Macy's and without leaving Macy's, you can see what the portal rates are for Macy's and then it'll say that there are or are not card linked offers. And then you can click through and go to the SafeWise

website and see which card linked offers they are if you wanna see that. Otherwise, you'll just know at a glance which shopping portal you wanna use. So go to that shopping portal site to start your purchase. Or like just earlier today, I was looking for something from a store and I saw the portal rates were like 1% and in that case I wasn't making a big enough purchase. I was like ah it's not even worth the time to go log into a portal. I'm just going to go ahead and buy this but I liked

being able to see that without having to leave the site that I was on. So I'm a fan and it has they've got a they've offered a discount code for frequent mylar readers, 20% off of either the monthly or annual plan and then they later extended that to also work on the lifetime plan and in the lifetime plan you'll get all the features that they add over time whereas I'm sure if you sign up for the monthly or annual plans they'll continue to add features and then probably different tiers of plans over the long haul, I assume, is their plan. So that would be the advantage of signing up for the lifetime. But I think honestly, a lot of people will benefit from the free version and be happy

enough with the free version. There's some bells and whistles on the paid versions like adding alerts for specific portals and whatnot that you may or may not need. And so the free version might work fine for you. Yeah. So if you're signing up, make sure to check out Nick's post that's going to be in the show notes of the show. If you don't have ready access to that for some reason, frequentmiler20 I think is the

discount code you can use if you decide to pay for this tool. Nick, you barely talked about probably one of the most popular features is the ability to automatically load all of your the Amex offers and Chase offers to all your cards because so normally what happens is when you know you're you're you're going to be booking a You know, you're gonna be booking a, I don't know, a Hyatt stay and there might be on one of your chase cards an offer for 10% off a Hyatt stay, but you have to go, like click around and find it and then add it to your card before you make the purchase.

Card, sorry, SaveWise will automatically have loaded all those offers, including that one. Yeah, yeah, yes. And that's a great feature. You're right. I did barely touch on that. Um, in my case, I don't like to do that because I want to see when the new ones come out. And if it's automatically adding the offers, I'm not going to see the new ones, right?

Because they're just going to get added. Um, right. But but at the same time, since this is presumably alerting you that there are offers available whenever you're on a relevant website that should hopefully take care of that, but you're right. You wouldn't necessarily be alerted so that you might normally when you discover there's a great new offer for a Hyatt stay, be like, oh, I better book my Hyatt stay now, and now that we have that offer,

whereas you might've let it go for a few months until you actually needed that stay. Or maybe I was going to stay at a Marriott, and then, oh, well, actually there's a Hyatt offer that works out perfectly for that stay that just came out. And so that's my hesitation with auto editing. Gotcha, gotcha. I'll miss those things.

I wanted to particularly bring that up because that feature is kind of duplicates what another tool that we've talked about before called Card Pointers does. Card Pointers will automatically load all your Amex and Chase offers, but also all your offers from Bank of America, US Bank, Citi, and probably others that I'm not thinking of. And so people have asked, well, okay,

so what's the difference in these tools? Because card pointers will also, when you're browsing websites, tell you, oh, there's a card-linked offer for this shop. So for example, if you're browsing macys.com and you happen to have an Amex offer on your account. That's get $20 back on $50 spend, whatever it is, it'll pop up and tell you that. So, so you know, and, and so that seems just like save wise.

What card pointers does not do that save wise does is show you the shopping portal rates. So, um, you know, just to back up way, way back for people who are brand new to this, there's two different ways to earn extra rewards when shopping online. One way is to start your shopping at a rewards shopping portal, one that gives you rewards just by, just for clicking through their site, going to the store you would have shopped at anyway and buying something. Those are our portals. The other way is when you go to pay,

sometimes there are offers that are linked to your credit card that notice, oh, I just made a purchase at, for example, Macy's, so I'm gonna give you some reward for that. And so those are two different types of rewards that you could get and they're stackable, meaning you could potentially get both. Savewise does a good job of showing you

when you can get both of those rewards at once, which is really awesome. Yeah, and they actually have a whole section on the site so you can look for stackable offers specifically, and you can kind of browse through the stackable offers between Rakuten and AmEx or Rakuten and Chase, for instance. And so that's kind of nice. And then they've got this beta version of a product search that, you know, surely is still they very clearly market as like a beta version. So it's

probably not perfect at this point. But what I liked about it was that I could look for a product and it showed me various stores and portal rewards and card linked offers. And I find that handy because I oftentimes get the best deals on stuff by finding them at stores that I wouldn't have thought or I think most people wouldn't have thought to buy them at because sometimes there are stores that frequently get great portal rewards that carry products that otherwise aren't discounted and you know you won't know about those unless you know about them

and this is a tool where you can find some of those stores that you may not have known about so I think it's pretty cool. I'm actually pretty excited about it and using it more and going to install it on my wife's computer so that she can, she's oftentimes on a site, she's like, I'm going to buy XYZ, are there any card linked offers for that? And then I got to go and look through everything and try to figure it out. What's the best portal? And so now I can eliminate all of that. That's great. Right. 100%. All right. That means it's time for today's main event.

Main event time. Getting started with points and miles. Winning the game doesn't have to be hard. I know it's confusing if you're just getting started, but points and miles have so much to offer. If you play the game even reasonably well, you don't have to be great at it, but just a little bit, you can earn amazing rewards and use them for amazing trips. And so we're going to talk about the big picture. How, how does this work? How do you get started? Yeah.

You know, I think about this like any other game, you know, if you want to be a golfer, you don't have to win the PGA tour to enjoy playing golf, right? But at the same time, you know, you're going to have to learn the skills to swing the club and hit the ball. And then once you do, it probably becomes fun pretty quickly, but it can also be frustrating. So let's talk about where to start. So first up, you got to earn credit card rewards, right? I mean, that's that's the main idea here. You're going to have to earn some credit card rewards. Yeah, it all starts with credit card rewards

because if you're looking at earning points and miles from travel, you're not gonna get anywhere. It sounds crazy, like it should be that travel rewards come from travel, but you get such a small sort of rebate on your travel spend that that's not the place to look for playing this game. Instead, look to earn rewards starting with credit cards and then you spend those rewards with travel. So we did a whole show on how to earn millions of points

from credit card welcome offers that that's episode 214 so check that out for an in depth look at this but we're going to just touch some high points here yeah so i mean you can earn a lot of points through credit cards through welcome bonuses so when you open a new card and you meet a minimum spending requirement you're in a whole ton of points that's one great way to earn a lot of points quickly fastest way to earn them quickly. But you can also earn points from referral bonuses. My wife and I will frequently refer each other for cards, or now and then I'll refer a friend

for a card and earn more points that way. And then at the end of a year if you decide, I don't know if I really want to keep this card, sometimes you'll get a retention offer. The bank will say, okay, well if you do keep it, we'll give you X, Y, or Z. And that sometimes is well worth keeping the card. And so those are some easy ways to earn lots and lots of points. So how do you figure out where the best offers are, how to get the best credit card bonuses? Yeah. So check out our website, frequentmiler.com slash best offers. And we list all of the best rewards cards on there, sorted in a number of different ways,

but at the very top, you'll see them sorted by what we call first year value, which means how valuable is the welcome bonus, subtracting out things like the first year annual fee. And if that is too overwhelming for you, check out Greg's pick. So I maintain another page, which is my sort of curated look at what I think the current best offers are. I limit it to five consumer cards and five small business cards. And that gives you like a nice easy look at what are the best options available right at this moment.

Yeah, I think it's really important to know the difference or notice the difference between the two things that Greg just told you about there. Because I think what separates us from a lot of sites you'll see on the internet is that we have what's a fairly objective listing of cards based on first year value on our best offers page. Go to our best offers page. We're not, we're not manually choosing the card that's at the top.

That's all based on mathematical calculations of how much the points are worth, how much you have to spend in order to earn the points, blah, blah, blah. It's kind of a complicated formula. I won't bore you with all the details, but the bottom line is that we're not manually choosing that list of the best offers and our policy unlike a lot of sites out there is to only list the best available publicly available offers and so even if the offer doesn't earn us any commission which is the case for most of the links on our best offers page then we're still listing the best

available offer for each card and that curated list is a totally separate thing. And if you want to see what Greg's opinion is about the best cards, that's something separate that you can go and check out. And I think it's valuable because Greg's got a good opinion. But it's important to know that the the the order you see them on the best offers page is not an opinion. That's a fairly objective ranking of cards. Well said. All right, we gotta say this, don't play this game unless you can pay your bills

in full monthly. And this really is something that needs to be driven home and it's an important piece of this because if you're paying interest on your purchases, the rewards, there's no way your rewards are going to be worth more than the cost that you're paying in interest fees.

So you definitely don't want to play this game. This game is not for you if you're going to purchase beyond your means. And you know, I oddly, you'd probably find it odd if you listen to a lot of frequent Myler. I watch a lot of Dave Ramsey clips and I listen to a lot of Dave Ramsey clips and I don't agree with a lot of Dave Ramsey's advice, of course. But what I recognize and realize is that he's cautioning people from getting into debt. And playing this game, the credit card rewards game, is not a debt game.

This is not like we're going to spend our way into debt and owe this money and have to pay interest on it. We are looking to play the game smartly, right? To do better than the average person would with a credit card and get outsized rewards by being responsible. And so you have to be able to be responsible. If you're not sure if you can do that, then probably just turn this show off now

because the rest of this is not relevant to you if you can't afford to pay off the credit card bill every month or if you think you're gonna be in danger of spending more than what you have, which is certainly a danger to be aware of. So another way of looking at this, let's take that game metaphor that I brought up earlier. The banks game, the way they're trying to win this game is to get you, entice you to sign up for credit cards by giving you these amazing big offers in the hopes that you will incur fees,

lots of fees over time. And that's how the bank wins. When they encourage you to sign up, you do, you end up paying fees. The way you win is by signing up, getting that big bonus, not incurring fees, and often canceling or downgrading the card when the next year's annual fee comes due so that you don't end up paying even annual fees going forward. You would pay the first year fee often, but that's more than offset by the welcome bonus when it's a big bonus. But you don't necessarily have to pay it

then on out after that. Yep, so if you can be responsible with it, you can win at this game, hands down. But if you're paying interest and you're paying high fees, then you won't. So you do need to do some math. And so that will become part of the game, but that'll become a fun part of the game

when you start to see the stuff that you can do without having to spend money that you didn't otherwise want to spend. Okay. Won't this hurt my credit score, Greg? Yeah, I was about to turn it over to you, but people are out there asking, but wait a minute. If this is the first time you've heard about this, you're probably saying, isn't this going to hurt my credit score? If I sign up for a bunch of credit cards in order to earn these big bonuses, I've heard that having lots of cards will hurt my credit score. Let me tell you how it actually works in real life.

Short term, yes, there will be a minor hit because when you go to sign up for a card, there's a inquiry on your credit report which has a very small, very, very small negative impact on your credit score. And that negative impact goes away pretty quickly. So that's a short time, small hit. Conversely, what happens to most people when they start doing this is they find after a few months that their credit score has actually gone up, not down. And the reason that

happens has to do with something called credit utilization ratio. What that basically means is that your credit score is hurt. If you routinely spend close to the total amount of credit that's available to you by signing up for more cards, you have more total credit available to you. So it's less likely that you're gonna spend up to the amount of credit available to you because you've gotten more from signing up for more cards. That has a very positive effect on your credit score by having those more cards there's other things about having new cards

that will decrease your score a little bit but the benefit to the credit utilization ratio more than overcomes those negative factors and so that's why people who start playing this game usually see their score go up. Yeah. And you know, I think that if you look around, there's plenty of folks like us that write about this stuff and do this stuff regularly. And, and if it, if it were something that hurt you in the long run, we'd stop getting approved for carts, right? I mean, you know, you wouldn't continue to get approved and Greg and I probably both have far more credit cards than, than you would ever consider probably opening and are still able to get approved and Greg and I probably both have far more credit cards than than you would ever consider

Probably opening and are still able to get approved for more. So it's not It's not something that it probably needs to keep you up at night. There is some again short-term negative impact But long-term probably positive impact overall for you as long as you're paying your bills as long as you're paying your bills This is a game you can play and and you know when Greg mentions for instance that when you apply initially There's a small hit maybe five or ten points that lasts for about six months You know that that is true And so when you see something on the news they're going for a ten-second sound bite and so they're gonna tell you all applying for a card hurts your credit score because

Technically it does but it's a very small impact and it's very short-term And it's hard to explain all the detail that Greg just did in a few seconds. And so that's why you might have gotten that impression over the years, even though it's not quite correct. Yeah. Yeah. And now the next thing you might be wondering about is like, do I have to carry like a dozen, two dozen credit cards in my wallet all the time?

What are you, are you insane? Um, and so what I want you to do first, the answer is no. credit cards in my wallet all the time? Are you insane? And so what I want you to do, first, the answer is no. But what I want you to do is think about credit cards differently. When you're talking about playing this game, don't think about all these cards as cards that are gonna end up in your wallet

and stay there indefinitely. That's not the way to think about it. I think of cards in sort of three buckets. The welcome bonus only cards, the sock drawer cards, and then the wallet cards. So welcome bonus only, that's what it sounds like. You're signing up for a card just to earn the welcome bonus. You have no intention of keeping that card long-term.

So you apply for the card if you're approved. You use the card enough to earn the welcome bonus because it's gonna require some minimum spend amount. And then you put the card away until the next year's annual fee comes due, and then you cancel the card or you downgrade it to a no-fee card. You know, and that's it. Then you're done with that card. Those are welcome bonus

only cards. Sock drawer cards. There's a bunch of cards that are useful not just for their intro welcome bonus but also because they have perks that long-term are valuable. Like so cards, for example, a lot of them give you a free night each year just for paying the annual fee. And often that annual fee is small enough that it's well worth paying each year to get a free hotel night. Same thing with airline cards.

So a lot of airline cards will give you free check bags, some other perks when flying that airline. And so those perks could, depending on the card, outweigh the annual fee and be worth it for you to keep that card. I call these Sock Drawer cards because they typically aren't very valuable for spend. So I'm not going to use my, you know, my Marriott card anywhere, but at a Marriott hotel. And basically it stays in the sock drawer. And I keep it there and I pay the annual fee because it gives me that free night each year. That's a sock drawer card. Finally, you have wallet cards.

These are the cards where they actually earn great rewards for spend. You have cards that earn 3X or 4X at grocery stores. You have cards that earn great multiples at gas stations. You have cards that earn great rewards everywhere. And those are the cards. You need sort of a small set. I have three typically,

physically in my wallet that to handle those kind of everyday spend purchases and then maybe also a card that's really good for travel payments that you might not have in your everyday wallet but have ready to take when you're traveling

or to pay for travel. That sort of thing is what I'm talking about for wallet cards. Yeah, yeah. I noticed that Greg did not mention like low interest cards for instance. Like, okay, and this kind of goes back to the whole paying off everything that you're that you're spending point that most of these rewards cards have high interest rates but I couldn't even tell you what they are in any of the cards in my wallet because I'm not planning on paying any of that interest. So these are all cards that again, you get them for the welcome bonus, buy your stuff,

pay for it and earn your big bonus, sock drawer them. If you just wanna hang on to it and have and hold it and then wallet to spend and earn rewards, but then of course also be able to pay those off, have that all planned out. And so, yeah, those are definitely your three categories. So you got to start thinking about cards that way. And that way is really the way to do it, to win at the game.

But it can get a little confusing. You know, if you're talking about holding cards that you earn the welcome bonus on and having cards that are going to sit in the sock drawer and having cards that are going to be in your wallet, it starts to sound like a lot of cards and it gets a little confusing and maybe a little overwhelming. That's absolutely true. That's why I recommend considering a free tool called Travel Freely because it's basic, it's designed from the ground up to help you with exactly this process. The process of signing up for cards in order to earn welcome bonuses, canceling them. Like it's actually mainly geared towards the welcome bonus only

scenario, but of course it works with any cards where you're trying to earn a welcome bonus. Basically, so what Travel Freely will do is it will recommend cards to you, so if you don't know where to start, you could look at its recommendations. And like us, Travel Freely will only show the best public offers, even if it means they don't earn a commission on the card. So that's great. When you apply for a card, you just tell Travel Freely,

hey, I applied for this particular, let's say Marriott card, whatever. And it will send you email reminders saying, you know, don't forget that you'll have to have spent, let's say $5,000 in the first three months in order to earn the welcome bonus. You know, it'll remind you as it gets close to the three months.

When the year is up, it'll send you a reminder, hey, you might want to cancel this card to avoid the next year annual fee. Now, I recommend not canceling until the second year annual fee actually appears on your credit card statement, and then call and cancel, and then they will waive that fee, just to be sure, because some banks don't like it when you cancel after having received a welcome bonus if you cancel in less than a year. And then it will also send you messages

about sort of more complicated things, like you're now eligible for a new card. It'll tell you, you'll start hearing about things like the Chase 524 rule, which I'm not gonna explain right now, but the point is it'll keep track of that for you and tell you whether or not you're eligible for a new card despite that rule.

And then, yeah, so anyway, so I use it personally because I manage all the cards just, not just for me, but from my wife and son as well. And it's a great tool to keep track of all that for my family. Yeah, you know, keeping track of things is a huge part of winning at this game because there can become more and more to keep track of, even in just what we've talked about so far.

If you're opening a new card, you have to meet the minimum spending requirement in such and such amount of time. And then down the road, it's gonna to matter to you when did I open that card and when did I earn the welcome bonus, and keeping track of everything. And then of course also keeping track of you're going to have multiple cards, multiple due dates maybe if you're using different cards for different types of spend. So keeping track of all of that is really important.

And so I find increasing value in tools that keep track of things for me, because there's only so much that can stay in my brain at once. And so that's why a tool like this, I think it'd be really useful for someone getting started out. Even if you don't think you need it yet,

you may get to a point in a year or two or three where you're like, oh yeah, I did need that and I should have started it two or three years ago. So it's probably worth it now. Yeah, and just to give a couple quick examples. So like, let's say you've had a card before, you've had the Sapphire Preferred card before, now you see there's, but it was a while ago.

Now you see there's a new, better, you know, welcome bonus for that card. You wonder, well, can I get this card again? You can, and it makes sense to look at the application and see what the rules are there, but Travel Freely will just tell you you're eligible or not based on what it knows, assuming you've been keeping track of it. You know, assuming you kept track of that card that when you signed up for it back when or you put it in

retroactively a similar thing Marriott cards there's there's Marriott cards issued by Chase and by American Express and if you've had You need kind of a PhD in in cardi cardiology, but credit cardiology in order to love it in order to understand whether you're eligible for a new Marriott card because the rules are so ridiculously complicated. And so, you know, you could let Travel Freely try to figure that out for you rather than try to figure it out yourself. Question for you.

If I learn those rules by heart, will I become a cardiologist? 100%, but you're not operating on me. Okay, all right. Good to know. Good to know. Life goals. Okay, so Travel Freely, and we have a link to sign up for Travel Freely. You can go to frequentmiler.com slash travel freely to find more information about that. Yeah, and I will point out that we will earn a commission. And I will point out that we will earn a commission. If you sign up for Travel Freely, the free service through our link, we will earn a commission every time you sign up

for a card through Travel Freely, which is great for us. So thank you in advance if you do that. There you go. All right, I mean, I'm kicking myself for not having done that for my wife sooner because there's so many things I just can't remember now. I wish I had done it, so I can't emphasize enough. Do it before you regret it. All right. Now, you might have heard Greg a few minutes ago talk about just an example card, and he made one up about having to spend

$5,000 over the course of three months. And maybe you heard that amount and you were like, I don't spend $5,000 over the course of three months, or maybe you heard it and thought it was easy. Either way, how can you do that? So if you're somebody in that boat, and that was one example, there are other examples of varying degrees where you may have to spend X amount and that X gets bigger and bigger

with different card offers. And so you might ask yourself, or you might say, you might be sitting there thinking, well, you just told me a minute ago not to spend more than I can afford to spend, so how am I gonna earn all these points without spending a lot of money that I didn't plan on spending?

Yeah. So that's such a big topic. We're not gonna cover that all here. We did a whole show on it. It's called 13 Ways to Increase Credit Card Spend and Get Most of It Back, Episode 197. Definitely check that out. But to give you an idea,

just two examples that are top of mind, paying federal taxes, you can pay with a credit card. Yes, you'll pay a small fee, but it's well worth it if in the end what you're getting is a huge welcome bonus that could be worth $500, $1,000 or more in travel. Another example is being able to pay other bills such as rent, tuition, and other things. There are services like Plastic with a Q at the end or Melio that lets you pay with a credit card.

They, again, they'll charge a small fee, but it can be worth it when you're talking about earning big bonuses. Yeah, yeah. So that's a big key to what we do is finding ways to spend money that we're not really spending more money. We're spending the same money that we would have spent otherwise, or finding ways to increase our spend and get some of it back, etc. So definitely worth listening to that show because a big part of the winning is being able to earn these welcome bonuses

And if you don't naturally have the spend for that That's not necessarily a big barrier because there are ways that you probably haven't considered I'm guessing if you're new to this you probably haven't considered paying your taxes with a credit card before and that those are just two things He just mentioned and that one show we covered 13 and those aren't even all of the ways. So there's lots of ways to think outside the box and find ways to increase your spend in order to meet card bonuses without actually spending more money than you want to spend. Yep. All right.

So that's earning through credit cards. I'll talk about some other things. So another big way of earning rewards is with shopping portals and bank offers. We mentioned this earlier in the show before the main event, but what am I talking about here, Nick? Well, so lots of different credit cards offer card linked offers. And so Amex offers are really well known. If you have an Amex card and you log in, you scroll to the bottom, you'll find a bunch of different offers for different stores like, you know, maybe spend $100, get $20 back at one store or another. Sometimes they're bigger, smaller

than that, but they can be really useful to earn something back on money you were going to spend anyway. And then you can use tools like the ones we talked about earlier. We talked about save wise and card pointers that can help make that process easy in terms of finding opportunities to use card linked offers and then you've got lots of shopping portals and we briefly discussed that before the shopping portal is a site you may have heard of some popular ones on TV commercials rack it in or top cash back. You go to one of those sites, let's say Rakuten, for example, you go to Rakuten and you click their link and their link takes you to whatever site it is you want to spend money on. Let's say you're ultimately going to spend money on Skechers shoes.

And so you click through Rakuten's link for Skechers.com and you go and you buy your shoes. Well, Rakuten will earn a commission on that. Since you clicked their link to go to the Skechers website and they'll give some of that back to you in the form of cash back, which starts as a cash percentage. However, Rakuten specifically also gives you the opportunity to choose to instead of cash back earn Amex membership rewards points. So if you link up your Amex account, you can be earning points.

So if you see a 10% cash back, let's say that could alternatively be 10 membership rewards points per dollar AMX is transferable currency and those points can then turn into airline miles with a whole range of different airline programs. So we like to look for opportunities like that where you might be able to earn points through a shopping portal and then maybe stack that with a card linked offer using you know tool like I said like save wise to find some of those opportunities where you'll click through Rakuten's link to go to Skechers.com and then pay using your Amex card because you found that you have an offer for $10 back on 50 when you

buy something from Skechers and so you look for opportunities like that to stack to increase your rewards on things you are going to buy anyway. You know, I think that that's an important point of this. Hopefully it's not causing you to spend money that you wouldn't have otherwise spent. But I frequently find opportunities to get a good return on things I'm going to buy anyway. And in fact, anytime we're thinking about making any sort of a purchase, my first thought is, okay, well, how can I maximize what I'm going to earn from that purchase? Because it's not just the credit card rewards, It's the shopping portal, it's the card linked offers, et cetera, that add up to make for a nice return

and increase my rewards. Yep, yep. All right, now let's get into spending the points. You've earned them. Now what are some easy ways to get started with spending them? First, big tip is spend your points for travel. This is true 99% of the rewards that You'll find playing this game

You'll get better value using your points for travel than you will for other things. I'll give a couple examples Chase Sapphire preferred card it earns ultimate rewards points card. It earns ultimate rewards points. You could cash those points out for a penny each. You could buy gift cards and you get one cent per point value, things like that. But let's say you have if you have the Sapphire Preferred card and you book travel through the Chase Travel Portal, you get 25% more value. So if you have a hundred thousand points, yeah you could cash it out for a thousand dollars or you could get one thousand two hundred fifty dollars worth of travel. Gets even better with the Sapphire Reserve card where you get 1.5 cents per point value from travel. So that same

hundred thousand points is worth fifteen hundred dollars in travel. And then, gets even better when you get good at transferring points to hotel or airline partners in order to book really valuable rewards. So for example, you could transfer your chase points to Hyatt, and Hyatt, it's really common to get, let's say, two cents per point value or more when you're using your Hyatt points to book a Hyatt stay. So let's say you're getting two cents per point value because you transferred your points to Hyatt and then you booked a Hyatt hotel. That same hundred thousand points is now worth $2,000 in travel. So that's the way I like to

think about travel rewards specifically, but almost all of these rewards are travel rewards that when you get into this. Yeah, and it pays to learn about the transfer partners because Greg gave a base level example with Hyatt there, but it's worth mentioning that not all credit card rewards programs offer great value for booking travel with your points. Chase is a good example of one that does. But like Amex, for instance, if you go to the Amex travel site and you go to use your Amex points to book travel, you're not going to necessarily get good value using your points that way. Instead, you need to learn how to use their transfer partners and you can pay many fewer points.

I've had family members come to me and say, oh, I went to Amex and they told me it would cost me 2 million points to book this trip that I want to book and I'll say, oh, well, learning the transfer partners, we can book that same trip for maybe 200,000 points or three or four or 500,000, many fewer than whatever it was that Amex Travel told them. So it varies from one credit card program to another in terms of your best use cases. Although I say that and really your best use cases in general, once you get into the game and you start to learn the rules is going to be transferring them to airline and hotel programs to book flights and hotels through those airline and hotel programs.

But that's where it really starts to get intimidating because it seems like, oh, there's a lot I gotta learn. I gotta figure all this stuff out. I gotta know how to search and where to search and what points I can use for what flights. So how can we simplify that some for a beginner? Yeah, so there are luckily some great tools out there that can help a lot with this.

Let's start with if you're looking for flights. I highly recommend a tool called Points Path, which it's a browser extension that works with Google Flights. So Google Flights is a great tool for searching for cash fares. To find out how much does it cost to get from point A to point B on flights. Google Flights is always my go-to. That shows you the cash rate. What PointsPath does is it integrates with it

and shows you how many airline miles the same flights cost. And not only that, it will tell you in its judgment whether paying cash or paying with airline miles is the better deal. So I think that's great for beginners. But you know what? I find it great just myself because I might not have thought to do the searches both ways. So just to have it all in one display is awesome. Base level points path is just free to install as well. And so if you use that and let's say you're searching for flight and you see that it recommends cash instead of airline miles that doesn't mean you can't use points. So, you know, I mentioned before how like, if you have Chase Altimer Awards points

and certain credit cards, you can get better value booking through the Chase portal. If PointsPath tells you cash is the better way to go, then consider, do I wanna get 1.5 cents per point value using my Sapphire Reserve card and booking through the chase portal to book that flight. But if it said that miles were the better deal, you're probably better off if you can transfer your transferable points, chase points, Amex points, city points, capital

one points, built points to an airline program in order to book that flight directly with the airline. Yeah. Yeah. And points path is a great beginner tool because it just works in the background And so it'll just show you the points prices right next to the cash prices that you're presumably already looking up if you're looking up flights But then I think when you step a little bit beyond that you start to learn Well, there's even more transfer partners points path offers a number of really popular ones But not all of them and if you're looking for more complicated awards Or you want to be able to search a broader range of programs, then there are some great award search tools for that use case Yeah, and you'll want to check out my post on which award search tool is best

But one I'm gonna point out that I I think is just a really useful tool all around is called Points Yeah, and there's a free version of that that's very capable, and it'll let you do a range of dates. It'll let you set alerts so that if you don't see the flight you want, you could have it email you if or when that flight becomes available to book for a reasonable number of points. You could set what the maximum points you want to pay is and it'll email you.

Yep, and that's a tool that both of us use frequently because we like it, but you can see other tools that are better for one use case or another or equal perhaps depending on the situation in that post, which award search tool is best and remember we're gonna have links in the show notes for all this stuff but if you think about it sometime and you're not in front of the show or you don't remember which episode it was you can also just use Google and

we've mentioned that a couple times on the show before if you Google frequent Mylar which award search tool is best you're gonna find the post so you know if you just put frequent Mylar in front of whatever it is you're searching for you'll probably find the post that we wrote you know, if you just put frequent miler in front of whatever it is you're searching for, you'll probably find the post that we wrote about it. Yep. Yep. All right. Let's talk about hotels now. When you're getting started, if you just have like one type of hotel points, you've got Marriott points or just Hyatt points, it's easy enough to, when you're ready to book a hotel, to go to that hotel's website and search for what's available

and see what the cash rates are versus the point rates. But once you start accumulating more and more points from different programs and you have transferable points that can transfer to different hotel programs, it can get overwhelming. You don't want to, you know, recently went to London, I didn't want to go to every points program to see what kind of deal is available in London that would have been just taking me all day. Luckily, there are tools that aggregate all that.

One, Points Yeah, which we mentioned before, also does hotels. So if you're using that anyway for flights, might as well try that out for hotels. And another one that's very capable is called Aways, with a Z at the end. So if you're using that anyway for flights might as well try that out for hotels and Another one very capable is called a ways with a Z at the end But anyway check out our post on which hotel award search tool is best to get more information about that Totally worth looking into as you get into the points game You're gonna want to know which out of the many options you have available to you is the best deal

So definitely very helpful. And this is these are tools that again we use. And just the other day I was able to book a hotel award for a hotel that I wanted that wasn't available using my points, but I was able to set up an alert with one of these tools to let me know when that hotel became available. And so I got an email and boom, I went and booked it and got the hotel that I wanted. So they're really useful tools for a variety of different use cases. All right.

So now you've got all these points. You've got a bunch of credit cards that you picked up for the welcome bonus or to sock drawer or whatever. You've done all your shopping portal shenanigans. And so you've earned a bunch of points and you know they're valuable for different use cases. But how do you keep track of it all? Because you might have points in different piles and you also might have different expiration

policies. We haven't mentioned that at all. The points on your credit cards generally don't expire as long as you keep a credit card open. And there's some complicated rules to know about there as you get further into this. But if you're a beginner, you probably don't have to worry about any of that for now. For now, your points on your credit card don't expire. But if you have points in a specific airline

or hotel program, they might, depending on the airline or hotel program. So how do you keep track of all the points you got and when they might expire and all that type of stuff? Yeah, so I use AwardWallet. It's a free tool. There is a paid tier as well, but the free version is very capable.

And what I do is every time I set up an account with any loyalty program, I add the login information to award wallet and then award wallet from then on keeps track of it. It'll tell me my point balance, but more importantly, as Nick alluded to, more importantly, it's going to alert me when points or free night certificates or other types of rewards are about to expire

and that I should use them before they do or find some way to extend the life of them in some cases. I just find this invaluable because, again, this is sort of like what I said with hotels before. When you start off, if you just have like points in one program or two, you could probably manage it yourself. But once you have like points in a dozen programs or more, you're not going to want to try to track it yourself.

And so having a tool that's in the background checking for you and alerting you is really valuable. So check that out. Again, we'll have a link to more about that in the show notes, including a code that you can use to get, I think it's six months of free premium, whatever the premium tier is called for with award wallet. Very good. So, yeah, super valuable tool that I've been using for, wow, since 2011, I think is when

I first signed up for the tool. So it's been, it's been a long time. Yeah, yeah. Well, and you know, I think that the point you make is really important that it might seem easy if you only got a couple and you think, I'm only ever gonna have a couple, but if you're married, for instance, or you start doing this with a partner of some sort, before you know it, there's gonna be enough different stuff that you'll think it's easy until the day something expires

and you lose something valuable, and then you'll be like, oh no, I thought I had it all. If you just sign up for this now and start with it now and make it a habit, then you won't have to worry about it I thought I had it all. If you just sign up for this now and start with it now and make it a habit, then you won't have to worry about it later on. So it's worth checking that out early. Speaking of doing this with significant others

or parents or children or whatever, we're now in the part of the show that I'm calling the multiplayer mode. This is where you have other family members or maybe close friend that you're kind of playing this game with them collaboratively and doing things like referring each other. So you each get not just welcome bonuses, but you get referral bonuses as well for the same applications. And so we have a whole show on this where we called it Points and Miles Two-Player Mode.

That was episode 292. So you could check that out. But one small detail I just wanted to point out is, because we get asked this a lot, is, you know, my spouse signed up for the Sapphire Preferred card, just to throw out an example, and added me as an authorized user. Can I apply for the Sapphire Preferred

and get a welcome bonus too, even though I'm an authorized user on their card? Yes, you can. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I'm not aware of, in all the years of doing this, of any card that you can't get because you are an authorized user on someone else.

You can always get it as a primary. I shouldn't say always. I mean, there's certainly credit card rules. But being an authorized user is not something that's gonna stop you from getting the welcome bonus as a primary account holder. So don't worry about that. Yep, yep.

Yeah, so that's all I really wanna say about the multiplayer mode is that you can do really well working together. You can do better than the sort of sum of the parts of you working separately. It does very quickly multiply things. I mean, by two at the very least and sometimes by more than two, because as Greg mentioned, there are oftentimes referral bonuses. So when I see a great offer and there's some sort of a referral involved, I often adding that up and saying oh that's twice as good if not more for me so so that's certainly worth thinking about and keeping your mind on alright so there you go there you have it a whole bunch of different ways to do very well at this game if

you're starting out and hopefully that's a good starting point Greg mentioned a lot of different episodes that you should check out if this stuff interests you and you say I want to be able to do more of this and travel more travel more comfortably or to different places that were on my bucket list that I didn't think I could afford and luckily points and miles can make that a lot more accessible. Alright let's talk about this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week is kind of somewhat relevant I feel like not not really relevant to the topic, but maybe relevant in

terms of how points and miles have caused us to look at things differently than we did before. And this is something we've kind of addressed before, but I think this is worth a revisit. So David writes in and says, Greg's recent long weekend to London on Delta One using points made me think about the hobby a bit. Now, for some context here, Greg recently went to London and I think it was maybe four, four days or so. We left my wife and I left on Wednesday, came back Sunday. Yeah. So it's a short trip to London, short, long weekend in London.

So David says, since I retired relatively early, about 10 years ago, we've generally been spending 90 to 120 days per year traveling with at least 90% of that on points. We've made separate trips to Paris and Tenerife and Cape Town with only four nights in hotels. I'm beginning to think that with all the time spent in airports and transportation between airports and hotels as well as five to six hours of time change from the East Coast and more from the Midwest or West Coast maybe four nights on land for a trip to Europe or Africa is a bit too short and a minimum of at least five nights would

be more appropriate. What do each of you think should be your minimum comfortable trip length for an opportunistic transatlantic pleasure trip on points? Regarding Greg's long weekend in London, did that feel too short? I'm assuming flying Delta One wasn't a bucket list item for Greg. And even though it was a great price, it was still a lot of points and several thousand dollars worth of points for a long weekend, which at least to me is not insignificant and that's signed by David. So, so what do you think about this?

I mean, is there a minimum trip length you think of and how has miles and points kind of perhaps impacted that? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, at Ohio, I think it's so individual, you know, as far as how that goes. But I do want to point out that Miles and Points has changed my perspective on the answer to that over time. I'm not in a situation, my wife and I are not in a situation where we're retired. And years ago, when our son was very young,

we used to kind of dream about trips to go to Hawaii or, you know, Europe, go to Australia, go to even like US West Coast, we would look at those things and say, well, we need more than a week to be able to do all that. And then because of our different jobs, like we so rarely ever had more than a week to spend, we ended up doing shorter distance trips over and over.

And then one day, this had nothing to do with points and miles, but my wife found a great sale to Australia. And we had one week available. And so we did it. And yeah, it's a horribly long flight. This was a flu economy. But you know what, we loved it. And it totally changed our perspective because we had a great six days in the Sydney, Australia area. We saw a ton of stuff, we did a ton of stuff. And basically, you know, it made us rethink this whole idea that you shouldn't go really far unless you can spend a lot of time there.

Because the old perspective was like, oh, it's so far you have to have enough time to do everything that you can do. The new perspective that we gained after that trip was like, no, you know, do what you can in the amount of time you have and then think about going back. And then where Points and Miles comes in is this idea of going back becomes so much easier. So then it's like, yeah, of course we don't have to do everything in Australia or everything in New Zealand

or wherever we're going, we'll just go multiple times. And that has made, that's just opened up so dramatically And that has made, that's just opened up so dramatically, a world of travel to us by changing that perspective. The ultimate culmination of that for me was when there was a mistake fair. American Airlines had a flight to China for $400 round trip in business class. It was supposed to be like $4,000, but they mispriced it.

I booked it quickly, because the deal was dying as I was working. And I didn't really think about it too much. The fact that leaving Tuesday and coming home on Friday meant I had only Thursday in China. I did one day, because I'd arrive in China and Beijing on a Wednesday night and I leave Friday morning, so I had Thursday. And so I turned to my friend, Stefan, who has been everywhere and been to China many, many times, I said, what things do I need to see? And then I booked a private tour guide

to come take me all day to everything. And I swear, I saw everything that people who spend five days in Beijing see. In one day, I had a great time. And I totally, while I wouldn't necessarily recommend you purposely design a trip to China to go for just one day, I wouldn't, you know, give up those memories for anything. And, you know, it was, it was totally worth it.

So very long way of saying, I think you can do really short things and still do really well. I don't know if I answered his question though. Well, I think that you did at the beginning and saying that obviously it's going to vary a lot from person to person as to your own personal tolerance of these things. But I think that the things that stand out to me out

of what you said are number one, miles and points eliminates the pressure to do it all because no trip to me now looks like a once in a lifetime trip. And some of the travel I do probably for somebody on the outside looks like a once in a lifetime sort of a trip. but it doesn't feel that way to me because I know that I have opportunities to earn lots more miles and points and that I can turn those miles and points into these trips that would

be inaccessible if I were spending cash. And if I were spending the cash, I probably would do some of them one time and one time only and not want to spend that cash again, but because I have lots of ways to earn points, because I've learned how to play this game well, I don't look at it that way. I can go back and go see something else next time. So that definitely decreases the amount of time that I feel like I need in a place. If I can go to a place for a day or two that I'm interested in, then great,

because I can make the points back, uh more easily than money and it feels less painful than spending the money, right? So that's definitely, I think, an important factor in all of this. And then something else that was kind of you really quickly touched on, but I think is worth highlighting in terms of miles and points is because I can travel a lot

and use my miles to pay for the flights and pay for the hotels, I'm not spending nearly as much money on travel as I would be if I were paying cash, obviously. And so that frees up cash for other things. And sometimes those other things are investing more in my retirement or buying stuff that we need around the house or whatever. But sometimes those things are a private tour guide for a day that I might not have spent the money on if I were paying cash for everything else. But when when I'm not then I might have the extra money to pay for a

tour guide and go see something that I wouldn't have planned on doing you know if it weren't for the miles and points so that definitely is an additional piece that really changes and then the final piece that I think is worth it is obviously well not obviously let me back up when you're using miles and points the difference between flying and business class in a flat bed seat where you can recline all the way and go to sleep and the cost of an economy class ticket, at least if you're hunting around for the best values can sometimes be not a lot or not nearly as different as the difference would be with cash.

And so I'm often flying more comfortably than I would have before. And so if I'm flying to Europe, I'm sleeping on the plane on the way to Europe. Now, if I'm flying to California, I'm usually not sleeping on the plane. And for me, being based in New York, it's about equally distant. If I fly to Los Angeles or I fly to London, it's about the same distance.

And when I'm flying to London, I'm usually using points to fly in a flat bed seat where I'm gonna sleep overnight and arrive rested and ready to go Which also reduces the amount of time I feel like I need there So, you know, I think it'll vary and there'll be a day when a four-day trip to Europe doesn't seem like something I could do But I totally do feel like it is something I could do thanks to the miles and points and and again that's both from the fact that I don't have to spend as much money to do thanks to the miles and points. And again, that's both from the fact that I don't have to spend as much money to do it to the fact that I'm able to do it more comfortably.

And one last thing on this topic, I think it also takes some stress out of the planning. So you're getting recommendations for all these different things to do when you're in wherever it is, and it's impossible to do them all. And there's like a stress of like scheduling, like, do we really wanna schedule that much stuff

back to back? And you could just say, no, let's make it more relaxed. Just do the things that we know we wanna do. Maybe do this one wild thing that Greg really recommended, but other than that, we'll keep it easy. And we can always go back and try those other things that people recommend it. Yeah, and I think it decreases the disappointment factor

if you find something that you don't like and that you don't enjoy. Because, you know, if I spent a lot of my own money on something and then I was disappointed, I'd be like, oh man, that wasn't worth it. But you know, if I spend a lot of points that I'm gonna replace, I know I have a strategy for replacing those relatively easily,

more easily than I could replace the amount of money required for that, right? So then it's not as big of a deal. for replacing those relatively easily, more easily than I could replace the amount of money required for that, right? So then it's not as big of a deal. If I don't like A or B, well, whatever, then I'll just see you next time. Or if I find that I didn't like this aspect of A, maybe I should go back there

and try some other aspect next time, because I can and there's less buyer's remorse for me. Yep. All right, that brings us to the end of today's show. If you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe, join our email list, follow us on all the various social media, join our frequentmiler insiders Facebook group where you can ask questions about this stuff anytime of day, all the days of the week.

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