Frequent Miler on the Air - Growing Points via Transfer Bonuses | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep266 | 8-2-24

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

We love points that are transferable because we love the optionality of transferring to different hotel and airline partners, but also because there are sometimes transfer bonuses that you can take advantage of to maximize that value - just another reason to love transferable points. (01:33) - Conflicting reports on the ability to transfer IHG points for FREE (01:39) - Find How to gift free hotel nights - Ep265 here (09:20) - Huge Amex Membership Rewards offers (10:25) - Read more about the Amex Business Gold card here (11:07) - Read more about the Amex Platinum card here  (11:19) - Read more about the Amex Gold card here (13:40) - If you get the Amex refer-a-friend error message: try using a different browser (15:43) - How do American Express Hilton credits work at SLH & AutoCamp? (19:15) - New blog resource: How to maximize your Hilton cards (with upgrades and downgrades) (19:47) - Chase Ink Business card 120K offer See: How to apply for Chase Ink cards here (21:04) - Bilt torpedoes Rent Day doubling, initially hiding the news in terms & conditions (26:02) - Current notable transfer bonuses...  (27:22) - Which current transfer bonuses are worth (many people) considering even without a plan? Main Event: Growing Points via Transfer Bonuses (32:00) - What makes transferable points great? (35:08) - Transferring your points goes one direction so you can't transfer them back if you change your mind... so when is it an obvious idea, even if you don't have a known use in mind? (42:26) - Things to consider before transferring your points (if it's not obvious because of known uses) (47:21) - See expired transfer bonuses here (56:33) - Which programs should you avoid transferring to if you don't already have a specific plan for how to use them? (59:35) - Which programs are more or less safe to transfer to, even if you don't already have a plan for how to use them? (1:05:23) - One reader got the Chase Freedom Unlimited card, then got denied for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card for being at max exposure, despite reducing the limit on the Freedom card. What can they do? This post again could be useful. Subscribe and Follow

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did Citi do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, growing points via transfer bonuses. So we love points that are transferable. So these are like points from Amex and Chase and Citi and Capital One and others where you can transfer to airline and hotel programs because sometimes that means you can get rewards that are much cheaper that you could get even better value by transferring, doing those transfers when there's a transfer bonus in place where you get even more points than you normally would by transferring to an airline or hotel program. So our main event will be all about how best to do that pile, your pile of points, then you should probably consider subscribing to our email list. That's at frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. And of course, wherever you're watching this show, don't forget to give it a like or a thumbs up. We always appreciate that. And don't forget that if you listen to this show and you say, Oh, I want to go back and listen to a segment again, or you'd like to skip ahead to a

different segment, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So just expand the description box in order to find those timestamps and click your way around. So let's click right forward to this week's Giant Mailbag. All right. Today's Giant Mail is in reference

to our podcast episode 265 called How to Gift Free Hotel Nights. In that show, we talked about how you can transfer IHG points to someone else for free if you either have diamond status or you join IHG's business rewards program. And the giant mail we're going to talk about now is in relation to that. First, I want to mention someone sent in a piece of mail related to it that I couldn't find before the show. But I remember the basics of it, which was that he had listened to what we said. He had logged into his IHG account,

couldn't find the button anywhere to join the business rewards program. So he just Googled it and found the button that way. And it was very easy to join that way. So maybe save you some effort there. Anyway, Tyler writes in, said, I wanted to make you aware that a majority of commenters have not been able to achieve a free IHG transfer after enrolling in IHG business rewards, even after waiting over a month. Looking at comments to posts on both your site and Doctor of Credit, it seems just one user, the same person on both sites was successful and he was transferring to someone with diamond status. Many other posters, including I, have been unsuccessful in recent weeks and months, and many report calling into IHG without finding anyone who is even aware of this feature or

ability. Your mileage may vary on many things in this hobby, of course, but I thought it might be worth pointing this out to your listeners after so blithely recommending it on last week's episode. As others may spend the hour or two I spent a couple of weeks ago trying to figure this out with similar frustration. Uh-oh. Did we steer people wrong, Greg?

Did we give people bad advice on signing up for the IHG business rewards program? Maybe, maybe, but let's, let's read the next piece of giant mail and then we'll come back. We'll circle back to that question. Okay. So Andrew writes in, Andrew says, I want to say, that was Andrew the first time, wasn't it? Oh, nevermind. Tyler was the first one. Tyler, you're right. I apologize. Okay. Thank you, Nick. Andrew writes in and says, I wanted to send a quick thank you to the FM team specifically for your latest podcast on gifting free hotel nights. I was mowing the lawn on Saturday morning when you discussed the ability to transfer IHD points for free if you have an IHD for business account. I've been sweating

the posting of the last tranche of IHG points from the recent two-stage Chase IHG business card offer, which was $140K after $4K spend in four months, plus an additional $30K after $7K spend in six months. So presumably Andrew was waiting for that extra $30K to come in, in order to book the Kempton Seafire for next spring break. But your podcast reminded me that I had signed up for an IHG for business account months ago in case I ever wanted to take advantage of the free points transfer. I immediately quit mowing and ran inside to transfer 70k points from my wife's account to mine to top off the award. About 36 hours later, the points posted to my account and I was able to

book a four-night stay for next March, for which I received the fourth night free and I'll get the old IHG card 10% rebate. I couldn't be more excited to take my family to this bucket list resort. Thank you again for all you do for your listeners and readers. Oh boy, oh boy. What do we got going on here? So should we circle back to Tyler now. Yeah, let's circle back to Tyler. So I did look at the comments in reply to our post on this topic. And there were a couple people who said they weren't able to do it. And there was just one person who said they did. Now, that said, I know there are people, there are other people, probably many, many, many people who were successful, not just Andrew, but me. I didn't have any problem with it. My only problem with it was when first signing up, like it took some number of weeks.

Someone posted that it takes 30 days typically before the free transfers kick in. So I think what I don't know why some people are having trouble even after waiting the 30 days but my my guess is that it's working for most people and they're just not writing in because most people don't something just works as we describe it they don't normally write in and so so again yeah uh doesn't surprise me that something's wrong with IHD's website with regards to this feature, but I don't think, you know, and I'm sorry, Tyler had so much trouble, but I don't think it's probably as widespread of a problem as Tyler described, but that's just my guess, really. I don't have a scientific way of analyzing that. Well, I mean, it is a guess,

but someone who was mowing the lawn listening to the show last weekend who ran inside to do it and did it right away and it worked is a pretty good indication that it probably works more often than that, like you said. So I think it's very possible that IHG just like their computer system doesn't work well for this. I mean, I don't have any trouble believing that there are plenty of people who've had trouble with it. On the flip side, I think Greg's point is an important one that it can sometimes be easy to get stuck in the echo chamber of like what you see and thinking that that represents the greater whole when it doesn't in most cases, especially when it comes to those things. Like when things just work, then nobody comments to say they work because they expect them to work. So I would expect the only comments to come in to be from people who aren't finding it to be working rather than,

for the most part, people who have been able to do it thinking about coming back to Frequent Miler and tell everybody else, hey, what you said works actually works. So yeah, and that applies in other realms too. It's funny. That was top of mind when you said it because I had responded to somebody in Frequent Mailer Insiders the other day who made an offhanded comment in a discussion about built rewards about the absurdly low limits that people report getting when they get instantly approved. And I was thinking, first off, when my wife was instantly approved, her credit limit was like 19 grand. It wasn't absurdly low.

And then I thought to myself, well, yeah, but of course, who's going to comment somewhere on the internet about their built credit card limit that they got? Only people who got a really low one are probably going to comment, right? So you're going to get a big selection bias of people that are like, oh man, you know, this is terrible. And that applies to so many different things. IHG, that was just, like I said, an offhanded example of one where, again, you're going to hear those

negative experiences more often. Same thing with reviews. I always figure when I look at reviews of a hotel or an airline flight or whatever, the people most likely to leave a review are the people who are unhappy. And so that helps me then sift through, well, why were they unhappy? And is that something that's likely to apply to me or not? Because I assume that most people, if they stay at a hotel and it was a good stay, they leave and move on with their lives and probably don't fill out the review. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, sometimes when you look at a hotel review, like the negative one-star comment is about a bad drink at the bar or something. And you're like, oh, well, I'm not going to drink at the bar. Yeah.

Or they had tried to make a reservation at the restaurant and were, you know, unable to get a table or something. And it's like, right. Right. And, you know, the same thing goes for podcast reviews. I mean, how many of you out there are listening right now that have not yet left us a five star review somewhere? This is your call.

Leave us that review. All right. Okay. All right. Moving. So yeah, definitely. We feel bad for you, Tyler. And I don't know why it's not working for some folks, but try and try again.

And hopefully eventually it will. Let's move forward though, to our next segment, which is this week's card news. What do we got? That's new in card news. Big news this week, right? Great? A lot of stuff to cover. First up, huge Amex membership rewards offers for their cards. First, let me say this, though. We record a day or two before the show drops, and who knows when you're actually listening to it. And these offers, especially the ones I'm about to describe,

change frequently. So the ones I'm going to describe are special offers that are available only from certain referral links. So that means like refer a friend links. Some people get the ability to refer others to really great signup offers. And these links seem to die quickly.

It's really bizarre. So anyway, so that was a big caution saying, I don't know by the time you listen to this, if these offers will be in place or have gotten worse or better. Who knows? But anyway, what we're seeing as of the time of the recording the business gold card 200 000 points 200 000 points uh it does require a big 15 000 spend in three months but that's like so by far the biggest offer we've seen for the business gold card we have seen similar offers in the past for the business platinum card, but that's a $695 card. This one is like, what, half that?

Yeah, 375, I think, 375. Something like that. And plus it has a lot of great Forex category bonus potential. So you might be able to earn four points per dollar while spending that 15K and pick up a lot more points that way as well. Another great one, the Platinum card. This is the consumer Platinum card. 175K points after 8K spend is out there. Now that spend can be done in over six months. So that should be pretty doable for most people. Then we've got the consumer gold card. That's out with a 100K offer. Now that sounds pretty small compared to the 200K business gold, but it's close to, you know, the normal big offer we see for this is around 90K. So this is more and it only requires compared to the business gold.

It only requires 6K spend in six months. So very easy to achieve. And it also gives you up to a hundred dollars back by giving you 20% back at restaurants for spend in six months. So very easy to achieve. And it also gives you up to a hundred dollars back by giving you 20% back at restaurants for the first six months. So some pretty, really good stuff out there. If, uh, if you don't have these cards already, if you're eligible for, um, signing up, you can get raking a lot of points quickly. You sure could. You sure could. Yeah. And again, these are massive offers. I mean, to be talking about the gold card offer at 100,000 points as being like, I know it sounds kind of small. It's just kind of funny. It's easiest for us to laugh at because

we've said before that just a few years ago, people used to get super excited if they were targeted for a 100K offer on the MX Platinum card. And now I know inflation has gone up, but my goodness, these offers have certainly pepped up, it seems, because 100K on the Gold card now, 175K on the Platinum, and 200,000 points on the Business Gold. I mean, that's just an insane number of points from one card bonus.

Now, I know there's probably a couple of people out there that'll say, yeah, but it requires 15K spend in three months. A, yeah, absolutely. That's a good point. It's a lot of spend in three months. Not everybody can meet that. But then the next thing will be some folks will say, well, but you could open two or three cards with that amount of spend and earn two or three welcome bonuses, which is true. Those two or three welcome bonuses may or may not add up to the 200,000 points that you'll get from this one card. So that's pretty amazing that you can open just one and end up with that kind of a bonus. And like you said, a card with good Forex categories.

And in that card, remember, you earn four points per dollar on the two categories in which you spend the most each billing cycle out of a number of different categories. So it's not even just one, right? You get two different Forex categories each month on that. So that's a pretty good card to have in your wallet if you have the capacity for a lot of spend. So if you've got a business, then that card, I think, certainly can make sense. It can make sense for sure. Okay. They're not coming up all the time though, right? I mean, isn't that the big issue that sometimes I've had this happen. I've clicked on a link that somebody has shared and I get an error message saying this offer is no longer available, but then somebody else starts reporting, oh, you know, they

got this offer. So I know it's still out there, but the link's not working. What's up with that? Yeah. Well, I wish we knew, but yeah, there's something flaky about Amex's system with these referral links. We, you know, when we have the ability to get these referral links. We, you know, when we have the ability to get these referral links that offer, you know, the best public offer available anywhere, we post them

on our blog and weirdly they don't always work a hundred percent of the time. And sometimes when you get an error, in fact, I'd say frequently when you click on one and you get an error, it might say something like that, that there was something wrong with the URL or something like that. Now this is, I find this so weird, but sometimes just copying that URL and pasting it into a different browser or go incognito or put your browser on private mode, whatever it is for your browser and then paste it there. Then it works. And I find that so strange because either URL is constructed correctly or it's not, you know, so obviously the error message is wrong. But anyway, that's something just to keep in mind. Don't get too frustrated when you get an error.

Keep trying. If nothing works, do comment on the card page on our blog so that we know that it's not working and we'll try to fix it. Yep. Yep. And if you see comments from other people saying, yes, it is working, then like Greg said, try a different browser or something, try something else because we've run into that where sometimes I'll do one, the one browser I use most often, I'll just hit one error after another, after another, and then I'll open the same exact links in a totally different browser. And then it works fine. So it's just so weird.

We don't, we don't understand why, but, but for some reason that's happening. So be aware of that. And those offers again are out there and we keep offers like those on our best offers page usually. So you can usually find those on our best offers page if they're available. Yep. All right. Next up, how Hilton credits work at SLH

and AutoCamp. So Hilton, of course, now has partnerships with SLH, Small Luxury Hotels of the World, that is, and AutoCamp, which is like a few different places where you can essentially get a, like an airstream that you can sleep in at a campground using your Hilton points. But the question that many have had is this one, Greg, what happens when I use one of my Hilton credit cards there? Like the Aspire card comes with a $200 resort credit twice a year. And I see some of those SLH properties are on the list of resorts. Am I going to get my Aspire card credit? All right. So there's good news and bad news here. The bad news for Aspire credit card holders is no.

The resort credit will not work even if the SLH property is listed as a resort. But there's good news for Hilton Surpass and Hilton Business card holders because your quarterly credits, which are just Hilton credits, not specific to resorts, we are told those will work when you've, as long as you've booked your, now this is what they say, and I don't know how they would know this, but they say as long as you've booked your stay through Hilton and you're, you're paying, you know, at an SLH property or at a, an auto camp property, theoretically you, that spend should qualify.

So let's say even if you book with points theoretically anything you charge your room at these properties if you pay with that your hilton card it should work so that's pretty cool if assuming that's true now i'm saying that because it's radically yeah so so this is like you know i went through official channels with with hilton to ask about this. That was the answer that came back after investigation. That said, the people, you know, the powers that be don't always understand all the detailed mechanics of everything that goes on behind the scenes. So, so we'll see. Let us know if you try this out, let us know if it works or it doesn't. To be clear, our skepticism

on this is because, so SLH properties aren't really, they aren't owned by Hilton, they aren't managed by Hilton. So a charge from an SLH property is going to come up as that SLH property, like the MCC, the merchant category code. I just, I can't imagine that it's going to be set up to look like a Hilton charge and automatically trigger a Hilton credit. That just seems wildly impossible to me, but then, you know, stranger things have happened. We'll see. Yeah. You know, here's, here's, here's why I, that was my first reaction too. And that's why I'm so skeptical, but here's a flip side. Hilton has their Curio collection and their Tapestry collection, which are really independent hotels that are just market through Hilton.

Now, they're more integrated than SLH and AutoCamp, but they're still very loosely. And so probably however they've been charging credit cards before is probably still how they do it before they became part of Hilton. So maybe, yeah. And so somehow those work theoretically. Anyway. So maybe what, maybe however they solved that, they solved this as well. Could be. All right. That's the official word. And let us know if you have that experience or not. Probably more likely you'll let us know if you don't have the experience, because if it works, you probably just won't, won't let us know if you have that experience or not. Probably more likely you'll let us know if you don't have the experience because if it works, you probably just won't let us know. But we'd love to hear from you. Please let us know if it works. Yeah, we would definitely.

All right. Speaking of Hilton cards, I just wanted to mention a new resource we have on the blog. Tim wrote a great post, how to maximize your Hilton cards with upgrades and downgrades. And you can really do really well with, you know, getting a surpass card and knowing when's the right time to upgrade it to an aspire card or when's the right time to downgrade your aspire card to a surpass card, for example. So check out that resource. And again, a link to it will be in our show notes. Yep. And speaking of resources about

specific cards, we should also mention that the Inc. Business Preferred card at the time that we're recording has a great offer out was 120,000 points now available on that card. That's insane. Again, big, big jump there. Now, not as insane as a 200k offer on the business called necessarily, though, if you like chase points, then this is about as good as you 200 K offer on the business called necessarily, though, if you like chase points, then this is about as good as you're going to do. So 120 K points on the ink business preferred. We have a post about how to apply for chase ink cards. So if you're not familiar about how to do that or what you need in order to be able to do that, then you should check that post out and we'll have that linked in the notes as well. Yeah. And one thing I should say is it might be better than the business gold offer because

Amex is going to try to prevent you from getting a new welcome offer if you've had this card before, or if I don't, you know, I guess there's no rules with this one yet, but anyway, if you've had the business gold card before, you might not be eligible for a new bonus. The ink cards don't have any such restrictions in fact even if you currently have the same card if you get approved you can still get the the welcome bonus so um that's that's a reason that the ink uh offer may be even better great for you for you that's right all right good. Let's talk about what crazy thing. What crazy thing did Built do this week? Built, Built, Built, Built, Built, Built.

So the thing they did, which is not necessarily crazy, but it's more disappointing, is that they really torpedoed their rent day doubling. So every first of the month, the built credit card offers double points. And so normally they earn 3X for dining and 2X for travel and 1X everywhere else. On the first of the month, you earn 6X and 4X and 2X, which great but like and it's it's been limited to earning 10 000 bonus points per month which wasn't a terrible limitation like you could do really well with that but now starting october 1st uh they're limiting it to a thousand bonus points per per month um so now suddenly you know uh that might be plenty big enough for like a regular spender, but if you were, if you were pushing like a lot of spend towards the first or each month, it's probably not going to work for you.

And so I find that to be a real big bummer. It changes how I'm going to approach, uh, the bill card going forward, but that wasn't really the crazy thing. Nick, can you? No. Yeah. That wasn't, that wasn't the crazy thing. It was disappointing, of course. Like Greg said, it's a bummer. It definitely stinks that they've done that. It changes things going forward for

most people. And what is hidden sort of in there and what Greg said is that since credit card spend counts towards elite status with Bilt, it's a huge bummer for anybody who was pushing all of their bills on the first of the month in order to reach elite status through spend and get double points on all of that spend. So huge bummer, definitely a downside, but it's not crazy. Programs do things like that all the time and we get disappointed, but we don't put them in what crazy thing every time a program devalues. What makes this crazy is that Bill buried this news in the link to terms and conditions at the bottom of a Friday afternoon email to members where you never would have found it if it weren't for somebody out there finding it and pointing it out to somebody else. I don't know, readers started to comment pretty quickly that had found it, but man, you had to have dug through it in order to find it.

I got that email and I didn't see that link to the terms and conditions at the bottom of it. No less click the terms and conditions link because I had no reason to think anything important had changed since it didn't say anything about anything changing like this in the email. And then to have then read through that terms and conditions to find this change. That's what's crazy to me. That's just, I don't know. I find that in very poor taste because Bilt later has framed this as being a change that doesn't affect very many of their cardholders, which I believe. I imagine there probably are very few people who are spending enough to be anywhere near maxing this

out. So I could totally believe that it doesn't affect a huge percentage of cardholders. But then if that's the case, why wouldn't you just put it out there then? Because most people then won't care about it, right? Just the people who do care about it, though, will find out about it in advance instead of being surprised later on when they don't get double points, which is exactly what would have happened if somebody hadn't found this through that little tiny link and told everybody else about it. So, so that's the crazy thing. I think that that's really a huge bummer. And, and you know, today as we're recording this, this morning, I get another email that looks similar to the one from last week. And now they did put this information in there but it's it's down

near where the terms and conditions are in small print like okay that's better i mean it's better than than hiding it behind a link that you wouldn't know to click but it's not a lot better because i don't know how many people scroll down to read the small print you know that's just that's just crazy just make it a big thing, you know, let people know, do the right thing and let people know. Don't, don't try to hide it. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. It's crazy that it got hidden like that. And, uh, you know, and we didn't know about it either. So it's not like it's something that we knew about and we're expecting to communicate to you. We didn't. So it's just, it's kind of crazy and crazy that they would go, in the body of the email somewhere, not usually, you know, off in the corner.

So yeah, that's, that was the bummer. That was a crazy thing. It's crazy, crazy built, crazy, crazy. Hopefully we don't have that sort of thing in the future when they have other big changes. All right, let's talk next about this week's Mattress Running the Numbers. So for Mattress Running the Numbers, we've got a whole bunch of transfer bonuses out so what do we got which are the transfer bonuses greg who's transferring to where to how many and who and what and blah blah blah okay first of all uh we have a current point transfer bonuses page that you can go to to see

all the latest information on both current and expired transfer bonuses. And the reason having the expired ones there is useful is because you get an idea of what might be coming in the future by looking at patterns through there. So, all right, here's the transfer bonuses that are available at the time of recording. You've got Chase has a 70% transfer bonus to Marriott. Citi has a 20% transfer bonus to Wyndham. Citi also has a 25% transfer bonus to Air France, K-Line, Flying Blue. And Capital One has a 20% transfer bonus to Qantas. So that's a one-world program. So you could use their points to book like American Airlines, British Airways, and other things that are in that program. American Express has a 20% transfer bonus to

Hawaiian, and Amex has a 30% transfer bonus to all the, well, most of the Avios programs, British Airways, Aer Lingus, and Iberia Avios. So, Nick, of all these, which are these are worth most people at least considering if they have the transferable points? I'm not saying, don't tell me that they should do it. And don't tell me like, you know, well, there's 10 people who should consider transferring to YN because of this or that. Just what are the ones that are like, you think that everyone should at least look at it and say, does this, is this good or bad? And, and, and do the math themselves. Yeah. Marriott surprisingly never would have thought I would say this, but a chase transfer bonus to Marriott has finally gotten good enough that I think it's potentially worth a look at 70%.

I mean, our reasonable redemption value for Marriott points, Greg, do you have that number queued up or do I have to make it up? And what is it? 0.7. 0.7. So 70% transfer bonus on that, then if I'm doing the math, right? 49. So it's like a one, about 1.2 cents per point you're getting. Is that about right? And somewhere in that range altogether. So that's not great, but it's not terrible. And if you've got a particularly good use of Marriott points in mind, or you really like your Marriott points, that's suddenly at least not terrible. Flying Blue, Air France Flying Blue, 25% from Citi. That's always worth considering. Flying Blue has a pretty reasonable award chart for their own. Well, they don't really have an award chart. They have a pretty reasonable award scheme for their own flights, I guess you'd say.

They have relatively reasonable award prices and relatively reasonable availability, uh, oftentimes for decent prices. So that's one that can be worth it though. We do see 25% transformers as to flying blue pretty frequently from all of the different programs. So if you're somebody who has city points, but you really like transferring them to choice or front to choice from city to choice, and you're like, Oh, man, I don't know if I want to send these to flying blue. Well, then maybe hang tight because probably you'll see a 25% transfer bonus from Amex or Capital One at some point in the not so distant future because they do tend to have transfer bonuses from all the major currencies. And they are usually 25%. That's pretty typical for them.

Amex 30% to Avios. That one is one we should mention that not only do you get whichever ones they have, British Airways, Niberia, and whatever else it is they have on the list,

but of course you can move your Avios to all the Avios programs. So a 30% transfer bonus to any one Avios program is the same thing as a 30% transfer bonus to all of the Avios programs because you can move

your British Airways Avios to Qatar or to Finnair or back and forth and what have you. So that's one that at 30%, again, there are a lot of good uses of Avios, especially because there's about five different airlines, I think now that use Avios as their currencies and they all have some slightly different sweet spots. There are some things that are kind of similar, but they all have their own sweet spots. So at 30%, that's potentially pretty good. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll say that the nice thing with that obvious one, it lasts till September 30th. So you have a lot of time to decide with that. The chase

one to Marriott though expires August 14th and the city to flying blue expires August 17th. So not a lot of time to make a decision on those two. But luckily, if you stay tuned for our main event, you'll have some ideas of how to make the decision of whether to do the transfer. Okay, but quick prediction to toss in here. So that transfer bonus from Chase to Marriott is really short.

It's only two weeks. So I'm going to make a little prediction here, a bold prediction, that we're going to also see a transfer bonus from Chase to Marriott is really short. It's only two weeks. So I'm going to make a little prediction here, a bold prediction that we're going to also see a transfer bonus from Amex to Marriott. I don't know if I'm right, but I'm going to predict that that's going to happen because that seems like a really short window that feels to me like it's been cut, like maybe cut in half because they expect another half to get picked up there. So I think maybe we're going to see an end of the month transfer bonus to Marriott from Amex.

We have no way to know for sure, but that's my prediction. That's a much happier prediction than what I thought you were going to say. I thought you were going to predict that Marriott was going to announce some sort of new devaluation of their points after the transfer bonus was over. I'm not sure how they could though, because they don't have an overcharge anymore. Right. There's no devaluation to announce in advance. No, I mean, I've been pretty happy with Marriott lately in terms of Marriott points. As we record this, I'm using Marriott points to great value. The hotel I'm at right now, I paid 39,000 points a

night and cash rates were like six or 700 bucks a night. So, uh, you know, I've done pretty well with Marriott points as of late. So 70% bonus, I say, ah, that's kind of interesting, but I doubt I'm going to make a decision on it within the next two weeks. However, if you're out there and you're like, but I do want to make a decision within the next two weeks, well, then we've got the main event for you. So Greg, it's time for this week's main event. This week's main event growing points via transfer bonuses. So transferable points. We love them because you can use those points either the way the bank wants you to.

That is like you can cash them out at a bad rate or maybe not a bad rate, but some of them let you cash out for one cent per point, which makes your credit cards where you're earning these points like cash back cards. And that's OK. But even better, you could use them often for better value by booking travel through the bank's portal. Maybe you'll get one point two, five cents per point or even one point five cents per point, depending on where it is. But where the real action is, where the real opportunity is, is what is with transferring to the right airline and hotel partners. If you don't already like have an idea of like how great that can be. I'll just give a couple examples off the top of my head. Like Air France Flying Blue, they make business class awards

available between North America and Europe for as low as 50,000 points one way. That's business class. So if you transfer your points from one of these transferable points programs to Flying Blue and then book one of these flights for 50,000 points, that's instead of cashing out for $500. So you're basically booking a business class one-way flight for $500 plus some taxes and fees. And the actual flight might have been $3,000 one way or even more. It depends greatly on the circumstances, but you get incredible value for your points by doing that sort of thing.

Other example, actually, let's use the one that Nick just said, which is sometimes hotel points can be extremely valuable. Sometimes the point cost is way less than the cash cost. And the way you compare is by thinking of the cash price as like pennies. So like if it's a $500 hotel stay, think of it as like 50,000 pennies, and then compare that to how many points it costs. Well, if it costs 25,000 points, then you'd be getting two cents per point value by booking with points. And you're not always going to see that, especially, you know, depending on the program, but sometimes you will, and you can get really great outsized value. So that's about transferable points. And then where you could get even better value is when, when these programs, transferable points programs frequently have transfer bonuses.

And that's when, instead of transferring your points one-to-one to, you know, from the bank to an airline program, you transfer maybe, maybe it's a 30% transfer bonus. So you, you are transferring, let's say 10,000 points and it becomes 13,000 airline miles, for example, because of the 30% transfer bonus. So that's great. The downside is these transfer bonuses are always limited time. So you have to make up your mind within a window of time. And once you transfer, those points are stuck in that program. You're not going to transfer them back. You're not going to transfer them out to some other unrelated program somewhere else. So you're committed at that point. And that's the downside.

All the things that make transferable points great are not necessarily true once you've done the transfer, then you're stuck in that program. So we're going to be talking about when is it a good idea to make that transfer? And first, let me start with the obvious, just because it has to be stated that if you're ready to book an award, you know, it's going to give you a good value. Like, like you see that Marriott stay that like Nick was describing for I forget what his example was 30,000 points for a $700 stay or something like that. Then and you don't already have the Marriott points and by all means, make the transfer, book the thing and, and be very happy that you got great value. What we're going to be talking

through is what, what do you do when that's not the case? When, you know, time's running out, you think it might be a good deal to make the transfer. How do you decide? So we'll dig into that. Yeah. And it's not always so clear cut and easy. It can be a little challenging, but let's start with like the easy one where you, you know, okay, figure, yeah, this is obvious. I would go for a transfer bonus. And that is if you wanted to cancel all of your cards with a particular bank. If you say, okay, I'm going to get rid of all of my chase cards tomorrow. What do I do with the points? Where do I transfer them? Well, then yeah, it would make the most sense to look at a place where you're going to get a transfer

bonus. Still, you need to make sure that it's a program you're going to actually use. But you know, if you were going to close all of your chase cards, then yeah, transferring to Avios or to Marriott would probably make sense. Yeah. But in that example, you might be better off just getting a fee-free card and canceling all of your cards that have annual fees or product change to a card with no annual fee, just to keep the points alive. Depending on the bank, your points might not then be, your points might not be transferable at that point. But you probably could later upgrade to a card that would make those points transferable again, or sign up for a new card that would make them transferable depending on the bank. So yeah, so that's one example. But moving on from that, let's say that's not the case you're not looking to just get rid of those points altogether um yeah i mean obviously if you use the target points enough then you know you'll

use them for good value like if you're like oh yeah i use obvious all the time or i use air france all the time and you know that you're going to consistently use them then yeah it would make sense to take advantage of a transfer bonus potentially. You know, if you're like, okay, well, I book awards through Air France at least twice a year, and I don't have a ton of Air France miles right now. So I know I'm probably going to book some more sometime in the next few months, then it might make sense to take advantage of a transfer bonus like that. By the same token, I guess it kind of depends. You could change up whether or not you want to based on what the balance is that you have, but people often ask how many points is enough, how many is too many. And so that comes

into your strategy some, right? Yeah. So, so like with these transferable points programs, when you get over a certain number of them and that what that certain number is, is going to vary by person, but you probably have more points than you're going to use anytime soon, especially if you're still earning lots of points. And so the points that are above whatever that threshold is, however many you want to keep around, I think are good candidates for potentially transferring during a transfer bonus, because then you can sort of, you know, pre- set up getting good value from those extra points. Just as an example, I like to have at least 400,000 Amex membership rewards points available. But I have like lots more than that. Now, I also like to have around 200,000

Avios available in case. So in case there's an award that I want to book, I book with Avios often enough that, you know, I don't feel like it'd be a waste to transfer them during a transfer bonus because I think they will get used. And so I might as well do it then rather than waiting until I specifically need them and not having a transfer bonus, which would be the flip side. But that's only because I use the Avios program enough that I feel comfortable with that. Yeah. And in my case, I don't use Avios all that much. So I look at that and I say, hi, I don't use them very often. So I'd be hesitant to transfer over to Avios speculatively. Now on the flip side, I use Avianca LifeMiles most years, multiple times, and I know Greg doesn't, but I do. So if I saw a great transfer bonus to Avianca LifeMiles,

I would be more likely to consider that because it lines up with my redemption patterns a little bit more. Air France is another good example of one that I use quite a bit now because they have a discount for child tickets. They often have four seats available in business class, whereas other programs don't. So that's another program where maybe I would be more likely to do a speculative transfer these days. So that just goes to show that it's going to vary person to person in terms of what makes sense for you in that case. Maybe Avios is one you need to consider. Maybe one of these other ones is, but that does depend on what you like to have available. Now, just out of curiosity though, why do you like to have 200,000 Avios lying around? I mean, can't you just transfer

to Avios when you want the Avios? Well, yeah. So this is something I've kind of come to over time, which is that like these programs, Avios, Flying Blue, Air Canada Aeroplan are ones that I'm turning to often enough that like, I think I will eventually transfer. And so I'd rather transfer while there's a transfer bonus. And so it's like, I'm preparing for my award well before I actually book the award, but only because there's two factors in play. One, I have more transferable points than I think I'll ever need. So that is, I'm not locking myself out of other transfers in the future, right? And two, I know I'm likely to use that program.

And we're going to talk about more factors that are important to consider a little further on. So actually, one more thing. One other time that it might make sense to just go for it is when a transfer bonus is too good to ignore. So we've pretty much only seen that with the built card where you're looking at up to 100% or 150% transfer bonus. just like so good that like, even if, even if the target program doesn't have the best price awards, if you're turning your, your transferable points, each transferable point into two and a half airline miles, let's say, which is what 150% transfer bonus would do. It would have to be a really bad program for that not to be a good deal. So that's another time you might want to just, just go ahead and go for it. But let's

go through a list. I made a list of things to consider before transferring your points if you don't already have a specific award to book. And first up, and Nick, feel free to say, wait, why did you have this? Or did you forget that? First first up do you understand how to get good value from the target program like so if if you heard greg saying oh i like to transfer to obvious but you have no idea what to do with obvious then don't do it it's not a good yeah it's not a good move for you does the target program have a flexible expiration policy and what i mean by that is like can you know almost all of them have points that expire after two or three years, but usually some sort of activity in the count

is easy to do and makes it makes those points renew so that they don't expire. But there are programs where after three years, they just expire full stop. And there's nothing you could do about it if you haven't used them yet. So I would hesitate and hesitate is way too weak of a term before doing any kind of perspective transfer to a program that has a hard expiration policy. Which this really goes back to, do you understand the target program? Well, because if you understand the target program, well, then you'll know about that in advance and what you're getting yourself into. And if you don't, then you should before you make that prospective transfer, because that's a huge difference. A program that makes your points expire, whether or not you have activity in three years, totally different than most programs, which allow you to renew.

But then even then, I mentioned Avianca LifeMiles before, and they have an abnormally short expiration policy. They have a 12-month activity rule where if you have no activity for 12 months, all your Avianca LifeMiles expire. And that's tough. You may have to remind yourself to make another transfer, and then you would extend the points another year, but that is different than other programs. So you got to know the ins and outs and what have you. And I brought up Avianca LifeMiles a couple of times, even though they're not one of the programs that has a transfer bonus right now, because they're one that does frequently have them. But okay, yeah.

So you got to know your target program. You got to know how to get good value out of the points. Don't like come asking later on, okay, I took advantage of the 30% transfer bonus. Now what? If that's your boat, then this is not the ship for you. Wait until you either, A, do know it or a program that you use a lot comes around or take some time to read about it and figure out, okay, what would I do with these? And am I likely to do that or not? Absolutely. Next thing is, will you have enough transferable points left over for other

opportunities? So for example, maybe you decide that transferring to Chase to Marriott is a good, it works for you. It's going to be a good, good idea. But now you find that there's, there's a great Air France award where you could have transferred your Chase points to Air France Flying Blue and booked, you know, that business class flight. And you're like, oh, darn, I don't have enough Chase points or any points to do that with. I think when you're limited on transferable points like that, there's a much bigger potential downside to making a prospective transfer because you might miss out on even better other things going on. And let me give another example where you might even be competing for just a hotel stay. Let's say you see a hotel, a Marriott hotel stay costs 80,000 points. So you transfer about

47,000 chase points using with a 70% transfer bonus that's in play at the time we're recording this. Then, well, maybe you would see, oh, there's an even nicer Hyatt that costs 30,000 Hyatt points. And no, there's no transfer bonus, but you could just transfer chase points one-to-one to Hyatt. And darn it, you've already used up your chase points to transfer to Marriott. And you could have actually spent fewer points by going to another program. So yeah, it's tough. I mean, when you don't have a lot of transferable points, it's going to be really tough to make those kind of decisions.

Yeah, yeah. I definitely think that speculative transfers make less sense the fewer points you have, because you want to be able to keep those. The whole power of a transferable currency is that they are transferable. As soon as you transfer them to a single program, you've taken away the superpower. And so if you've taken that away, hopefully you've taken it away because you have plenty of superpower left over for whatever you might need, or you know that you're going to use that really, really well. So yeah, I would have a hard time parting with points on a transfer bonus without having plenty left over that if tomorrow there was an amazing deal, I could jump on it. I like to have at least enough points lying around that if that amazing deal comes around the corner, I can take advantage of whatever it might be. Yeah. All right. Next, next up, how does this transfer bonus compare to likely future transfer bonuses?

So for example, I'm going to pick on this Marriott 70% transfer bonus from Chase again. It's only going on for two weeks, ends mid-August. Nick is guessing that Amex is going to come out with a similar one after that sometime. Maybe you have more Amex points and you'd rather transfer from Amex. Maybe you want to preserve your Chase points for Hyatt, for example. That would be totally legitimate. And so how can you find out? Well, you can't know for sure. But what you could do is go to our current point transfer bonuses page on the blog and go down to the expired transfer bonuses section. And in this example, you could in the search box, just type Marriott and that'll filter to all of

the expired transfer bonuses that were to Marriott. And you'll be able to see there that both Chase and Amex about once a year, if I recall, have transfer bonuses. And then you could see, has Amex had one this year yet? If not, I would bet that one is coming. And so that's pretty telling. But the other thing you go like, do they vary a lot? Does Amex tend to have a smaller transfer bonus than Chase? If so, well well maybe there is one

coming but maybe it won't be as good as the current one so that's the type of thing that you can do uh using that that page as a tool yeah and i mean going back to the flying blue example i gave before i'm sure you'll see that there have been a bunch of flying glue transfer bonuses of 25 from different currencies and so that might give you the idea oh well i'll probably see that again and maybe you'll look at obvious and see oh well the last capital one transfer bonus to obvious was only 25 percent this one's 30 percent family or you know whatever the case might be you can make some comparisons so yeah that's pretty good so uh all right so you use our current point transfer bonuses to get an idea of whether or not that's likely to happen again. But then what about

hashing out versus taking advantage of a transfer bonus? I mean, should you just cash out instead and buy points on sale? And how would you know whether that's the right play or the transfer bonus is the right play? Yeah, I think that's something you definitely have to consider with certain programs. So for example, both IHG and Hilton frequently, or at least occasionally, have sales where they sell points for half a cent each. And so let's use IHG as an example. Earlier this year,

Chase had a 60% transfer bonus to IHG. So one Chase point became 1.6 IHG points. But if you consider that IHG points are sometimes on sale for half a cent each and that you can easily cash out your chase points for one cent each, that means you can, anytime IHD has a half cent each sale, you can build your own 100% transfer bonus by cashing out your chase points for one cent each and buying IHD points at half a cent. So you're getting two IHD points for each penny. And so if that, if in that kind of situation, I just wouldn't transfer to IHD even with that transfer bonus because there's better

ways of doing it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think it's also worth considering too, that you would earn points on buying the points too. So it would be even a little bit better potentially. That's a good point. Although one caution that most of these point sales go through points.com and that does not code as like travel. So you, if you're hoping to get, you know, if you're hoping to buy ISGG points with your IHG credit card and earn like 10 points per dollar, you're probably not going to earn that. But yes, you'll earn whatever the credit card earns for like the everywhere else type of category. Another example here. So the Chase 70% transfer bonus to Marriott, which expires August 14th. Marriott points are sometimes on sale for around

0.9 cents each, sometimes a little bit less than that. So if we take that 0.9 number, then if you do what I talked about before, cash out your Chase points for one cent per point and buy Marriott points, that's like an 11% transfer bonus. You're getting 1.11 Marriott points for every one chase point you cash out. So obviously a 70% transfer bonus is much bigger than 11%. So at least in that example, cashing out in order to buy Marriott points is not nearly as good as the transfer bonus. That doesn't mean that the transfer bonus is something you should do. It's just one of the many factors and that's not a good alternative. Ultimately, I think the biggest decider,

it's probably the hardest for most people to figure out, but it's just this. Will you likely get good value for your points? So with transferable points, just as a gross rule of thumb, I generally want to get about one and a half cents per point value or more and often get much more. So let's work through this chase to Marriott 70% transfer bonus. Our reasonable redemption value for Marriott points is 0.7 cents per point. And reasonable redemption value means

that we've looked at a bunch of properties in the United States and found that the median cents per point value, the median value of your points is 0.7 cents. So if you were going to book Marriott stays with your points that were transferred from Chase, and if you were only going to get the median value, the middle point value, then with that 70% transfer bonus, you would get about 1.2 cents per point value from your Chase points. That's not that good, right? I mean, it's better than cashing out for one cent each, but consider that the Chase Sapphire preferred card, you can book travel through their travel portal and get 1.25 cents per point. If you have the Sapphire Reserve, you could book travel and get 1.5 cents per point. You can transfer points with either card to, let's go back to Hyatt. And the median RRV there is 1.7. So just by chance, you're likely to get 1.7 cents per point value

or better by transferring to Hyatt instead of doing this Marriott transfer bonus. So if you're not sort of cherry picking the better value awards, that tells me that don't do that transfer bonus because you're not going to get great value. You're not likely to get great value. But if you do cherry pick awards, meaning you do look at the award possibilities and say, oh, Marriott's, you know, maybe Hyatt's not offering good value here, but Marriott is. And, you know, so I want to go with Marriott this time. I want to use my Marriott points in this example. Maybe you'll do very well. Like it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of listeners will average one cent per point or better with their Marriott points. Nick is at a hotel right

now where he got around two cents per point. So it's out there. These good values are out there. So if you're going to average that high, then this transfer bonus is giving you 1.7 cents per point value for your chase points or better. And so that is now on par with what you get with Hyatt, but Marriott has a much bigger footprint of hotels. So that could be a really good choice for you. But again, only if you cherry pick awards enough that you're going to be getting one cent or better value from your Marriott points. do very well with that cherry picking hotels, or they want to travel at really peak times when rates are high, you know, or for events, I mentioned being at a hotel, it's very expensive, it's expensive right now, because there's a Taylor Swift concert in town. And so, you know, if you're gonna want to go to something like that, where, you know, rates are going to be artificially high, then yeah, getting a transfer bonus like this could be great. You know, some

people love to travel around to those types of events, Olympics or, you know, other major sporting events and concerts and whatnot. And so if that's your jam, then you might be able to do pretty well with this. You know, again, it depends. I'm not sure I would run out and transfer to Marriott, but it's out there. It's possible if you're going to cherry pick the right awards. Yep. Yeah. I would be, I have enough Marriott points personally it's out there. It's possible if you're going to cherry pick the right awards. Yeah. I have enough Marriott points personally right now that I'm not going to do it, but if I was short, I would think very hard about this. Yeah, that's true. I mean, yes, I generally get much better value with Hyatt points, but as I said earlier,

Marriott's footprint is just so much bigger. There's so many more hotels. So wherever I'm traveling, there's probably a highly rated Marriott that I would be happy to stay at if I could get good value. So yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. All right. So what about programs that we should avoid? Yeah.

Are there any programs that if they offered a big transfer bonus, you'd be like, yeah, but. Yeah. If you don't have a plan, a specific plan for how to use the points like you're ready to book an award there are some programs i think you want to avoid and here's why we talked before programs with unavoidable expirations they have hard expiration dates programs like ana singapore turkish there's plenty others, but their points just expire. If you don't have a plan for them, I wouldn't do it. Programs with poor award rates. Like why transfer, if you don't know

what you're going to do with the points, why transfer to programs like Aeromexico or Hawaiian Airlines or Delta when you're probably not going to get great value? You could in all those programs, there are circumstances where you could, but chances aren't good that you would. And another one I would hesitate with are programs that are just known to devalue overnight, that they don't give you any warning. Now, Virgin Atlantic has been guilty of this

several times recently, where we wake up in the morning and all of a sudden things are worse. For a long time, we could book 50,000 points to fly Delta One business class between North America and Europe, and that just disappeared overnight. And they had huge surcharges on top. So that's one I would avoid. I don't know, Nick, are there any others that you would think of off the top of your head that you'd be like, I wouldn't trust this one? No, that's the one that's been most likely to devalue.

Although I say that like Delta, I guess, you have no idea what's going to happen with Delta or when. So I'd be hesitant to transfer speculatively to Delta. But yeah, no, I think Virgin Atlantic is the one that's really proved the propensity for overnight unannounced evaluations that they just hope you're not going to notice. I mean, I guess the same sort of thing is true with a lot of the hotel programs in the sense that they have no award charts anymore. So, you know, apart from Hyatt anyway, and Wyndham, I guess, you don't know exactly what to expect.

So it makes it harder to plan, you know, with a transfer bonus. But no, I think my hard stop would mostly be Virgin Atlantic. And as you were saying that I asked myself, you know, did so we mentioned Virgin Atlantic had devalued a few different types of awards lately, but they also had had problems with Air France and KLM. And supposedly that was going to be back in early August. And now we're recording this in early August and, or the start of August is what they said. And it still says we expect them to be available again at the start of August. And here we are at the start of August and apparently didn't work out yet. Who knows by the time this publishes, maybe there'll be back. But, but anyway, yeah, no, that, that would probably be my, my big hesitation. I think everything else

you pointed out makes sense. All right. So what, what programs would you feel good about? Like there's a big transfer bonus. They, they have, there's ways of extending the points to keep them from expiring. They generally have a lot of good uses. So even if one particular sweet spot went away, there's probably other ones you can jump on. Yeah. I mean, Air Canada Aeroplan comes to mind, and I know at least six West Coast-based readers just groaned when they heard me say that. And I say that because Aeroplan has both a zone and distance-based award chart. So if you're on the West Coast and you're trying to go to Europe, then awards can be kind of expensive with Air Canada Aeroplan. But if you're on the East Coast and you're going to Europe, awards can be pretty competitively priced in many cases. And more importantly to me, if you're interested in

booking a more complicated award with a stopover, then Aeroplan can be great for that. It also is great for the fact that it has so many partners, more airline partners than anybody else. So chances are very good that if you want to go somewhere, an Aeroplan partner can probably get you there to most corners of the world. So that's one that I think I would consider for good award prices and also being very in touch with the award travel community. I feel like Air Canada Aeroplane tends to make decisions with fans of award programs in mind. So I'm also not at all concerned and knock on wood, who knows, but I'm not concerned at this point that they're going to devalue

anything without giving some notice in advance because I think they get that that's important. So so yeah, that'd be one for me Air France KLM flying blue I mentioned before, big for me because they often have award availability for multiple passengers. They also have a 25% discount on long haul flights for kids ages two to 12. So that means when I book an Air France award for my family of four, my two kids are getting 25% off right off the bat on long haul flights that is. So that's nice. And even on the short hauls, they still get a discount of some sort. I can't remember exactly what it is, but, but at any rate, that's one that I would consider the obvious programs. I know you would consider I'm less, uh, less enamored with a speculative transfer to the obvious programs because I don't use them much, but you do. So

like, what kind of things do you use your obvious for? Well, you know, I've written a lot about, um, using Qatar for a short distance American airlines flights, super cheap, even for American airlines, first class, you know, I haven't used them as much for this, but, but, uh, for, uh, longer distance business class flights, you can fly Qatar itself for like 70,000 points to get from North America to Doha, for example. cheapest program overall to do that. But because, you know, if you if you factor in, if the competitors are things like American Airlines, where there are no, no way to transfer to the those points, and so you're never gonna have a transfer bonus to it, then you're comparing the American Airlines price to, well, how many, you know, Amex or Citi or, you know, Chase points did it cost me when i took advantage of a 30 transfer bonus

to avios maybe it costs less with avios uh than than with for example american airlines um so uh yeah so there's all kinds of things you can yeah there's a wide range right you got iberia business class to to from the east coast to europe for like 34 000 points during off-peak dates i haven't done that one yet but yeah qatar for jet blue i just flew jet blue business class to europe really nice uh using qatar obvious which isn't the best price these days but it's decently available anyway or jet blue business class to the caribbean main class to the caribbean and some of those routes can be a deal too so a lot of different uses of Avios. Avianca Life Miles is one that I would consider even with a no plan transfer because, again, it's a Star Alliance program. So lots of airline programs or lots of airline partners, not as many as Aeroplan, but quite a few and slightly better award pricing than Aeroplan.

No surcharges and awards apart from their like $25 booking fee or whatever that is. But none of the quote unquote fuel surcharges that other programs charge. So that makes it particularly good. Now, of course you can subscribe to Life Miles Plus and for, I don't know, I can't remember 20, 30, 40, $50 a month, something, some relatively reasonable about 50, I think is what it is a month. You can, you can end up having free changes and cancellations, which is nice and enables you to be able to book speculative awards. And even at their cheapest level, which is $20 a month, you get 10% back on your awards.

So that can make them even better when they're already the best price. In some cases, that makes them even better. With hotel programs, I think either one of us transfer to Hyatt, even without a transfer bonus sometimes, right? I mean, just when I feel like I need more Hyatt points when they're getting low, I tend to transfer off. For sure. I use so many Hyatt points that it's, yeah, I'll do that at times. Yep. And then other times when the transfer bonus leads to some particularly good value redemption, then I obviously will consider that

also. So how do you figure that out? Well, you look at our reasonable redemption values. Our reasonable redemption values are meant to give you an idea of what you can reasonably expect to get without hunting to cherry pick for a great value. Yeah. So again, we worked through earlier in the show how you could do that with Marriott and you could apply that to a transfer bonus to any program. So that's a way to see, will it, if you don't know how much value you're going to get, you can get an idea using our reasonable redemption values that way. There you go. All right.

I think that wraps up our transfer bonus main event and brings us to this week's question of the week. So this week's question of the week came in via email from Keith. Keith says, I signed up for the Chase Freedom Unlimited during the double points for the first year. Through paying my estimated taxes and things like that, I have a sizable number of points and I want to make them transferable. In June, I applied for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card so I could receive the transferable component so you could transfer those points to airline and hotel partners. Unfortunately, they declined me saying that they've extended as much credit as they are able to already. I actually had them reduce my credit

limit on the Freedom Unlimited, but they still declined me going the reconsideration route. I also believe I'm under the 524 rule. My question is, should I just wait a few months and apply for a Sapphire card again? Or should I go for the Chase Inc. business preferred to go get transferability from that? My wife is self-employed and is an authorized user on the Freedom Unlimited, but I can't say I have a business myself. Thanks, Keith. So what's your advice to Keith? What should he do? Oh, there's so many things here. First of all, just because one reconsideration agent didn't approve you, Keith, calling again and again, you might be able to get approved. So depending on how long it's been, you might be able to just go through reconsideration

again. The question about the applying for the Sapphires preferred later or the Inc. Business preferred. I mean, I think business preferred is such, it has such a good offer right now. I would absolutely recommend it if you can meet the spend on it. Take a look at our post on how to sign up for Chase Ink Cards or how to apply for Chase Ink Cards and look through the section on like, do I have a business for examples of the type of things that can qualify as businesses? Because you might actually have something that qualifies

without realizing it. And a lot of us have been successful signing up for ink cards. And again, it's just such a good bonus. I would do it. If you really can't get approved for a new card at all, and you just need your points to become transferable, the other option is to just ask Chase if you can upgrade. Once you've had your Freedom card for a full year, ask them if you could upgrade to the Sapphire Preferred or the Sapphire Reserve if you prefer that one. That will automatically make those points transferable. You can transfer them later if you want to. You could downgrade back to the Freedom card. It will not stop you from getting a future Sapphire Preferred or Sapphire Reserve welcome bonus. The way Chase does their

rule on whether you could get a welcome bonus again, it has to do with when you last got a welcome bonus for that card or a similar card. So when you apply for a Sapphire Preferred or Sapphire Reserve, the rule is if you're approved, you can get a welcome bonus as long as it's been at least 48 months since you previously got a welcome bonus for the Sapphire Preferred or Sapphire Reserve. If you're just upgrading, you will have no welcome bonus for the Sapphire Preferred. So signing up later for the same card would be possible. You would just first downgrade back to the Freedom, then apply. So again, to summarize, my recommendation is try to get the ink business preferred just because it's a great offer. If that doesn't work, consider just upgrading when you need to, to make your points transferable for now. Yeah. I concur with everything that Greg just said. I'm going to add a couple more small pieces. Now you mentioned in your email,

Keith, Keith mentioned that you got declined because they've already extended as much credit as they care to at this point. So that's what we call being at the max exposure, the maximum amount that they want to extend you in credit. And it was interesting to me the way that the email was worded, because you said you actually had them reduce the credit limit on your Freedom Unlimited, but then they still denied you on the reconsideration call. And so I'm wondering, when did you reduce the credit limit on the Freedom Unlimited versus when you applied? Because if you did that, and then you applied like the same day or the next day, the system may not realize you've done that. And I always tell people, I don't know, you'll read in

credit card enthusiast forums about people reducing their credit limit to increase their odds of getting instantly approved because they think they're already at the max exposure. And so they want to increase the odds of getting instantly approved. But I don't usually recommend that to people. I mean, unless you like, you'll know when you're in the position where you need to do that. I think for the majority of people, I would not have reduced the credit limit and you can't go back and this is Monday morning quarterbacking here. You can't go back and undo that. But, but I wouldn't have done that instead. I would call and say, Hey, listen, when they tell you, Oh no, you're already at our, at the maximum exposure. We can't extend any more credit

rather than reducing credit limit on anything. At that point, the step there is on that call to say, Oh, well I have the Unlimited and I've got a $20,000 limit on that. Can you take $10,000 of the limit on that card and give me a Sapphire Preferred? I don't actually need any more credit. I just want the Sapphire Preferred card. And usually if you would otherwise meet the approval criteria, if you're under 524, you've got good credit and good income, et cetera, et cetera, then usually Chase will do that. And with the Sapphire Preferred, you only need $5,000, so you don't need even quite as much as the example I just made up off the top of my head in order to move that credit limit over and potentially get approved on that reconsideration call. And certainly, like Greg said, it's worth more than one reconsideration call.

Sometimes Chase does usually keep pretty good notes, so probably they're going to see you've called before. But I mean, what's the worst that's going to happen? They're going to tell you no again. So you might as well call again and try if you were still within the 30 days since you applied or whatever, or keep that in mind for the future. But all that said, if your wife is self-employed and applies for the Chase Inc. Business Preferred, keep in mind, of course, also that if you're in the same household, you could move your Freedom Unlimited points to her Chase Inc. business preferred. So even if you're not comfortable opening your own Chase Inc. business preferred, if your wife opens one, then you would still essentially have transferability, though. Transferring on to partners, it's going to be on to her partner programs, I suppose, from Chase. Although maybe, I guess with Chase, you can also transfer perhaps

to an authorized users program. Yeah, I think you're supposed to be able to, but I'm not sure how well it works. Yeah, I haven't ever tried because instead we just, with my wife and I, we'll just move the points over to her Chase account or my Chase account and onto the partners. Yeah, yeah.

So anyway, big picture, Nick just added two extremely valuable things to the overall picture here. Both of which I should have, I should have caught too, but there was so many. There's a lot. There's a lot in there. That's why I picked this for the, yeah, for the question of the week. I knew that there was a lot to unpack in there. Yeah, there sure was.

All right. Very good. Well, unfortunately that brings us to the end of this week's show. If you've enjoyed it 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 to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group where you can ask questions like this one and get lots of help from other readers and listeners.

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