Frequent Miler on the Air - How would we spend 1 million dollars? | Ep204 | 5-27-23

Episode Date: May 27, 2023

Here are ways to maximize your return on high levels of spend with low levels of effort. 00:00 Intro 00:29 Giant Mailbag 01:56 Giant Mailbag #2 https://frequentmiler.com/cross-brand-amex-referrals-possible/ 04:25 Card Talk: Bank of America Premium Rewards card https://frequentmiler.com/boapr/ https://frequentmiler.com/bank-of-america-rewards/ 19:00 What crazy thing . . . did Choice Privileges do this week? 22:25 Mattress running the numbers: Wyndham summer promo https://frequentmiler.com/wyndham-promo-earn-5k-15k-bonus-points-when-staying-2-4-consecutive-nights/ 27:32 Award Talk 27:50 Nordic Choice rebrands as . . . Strawberry? 29:51 Using Wyndham points to book Vacasa https://frequentmiler.com/bargain-luxury-in-hawaii-gregs-wyndham-vacasa-experience/ 35:39 Avianca customer service success https://frequentmiler.com/an-avianca-lifemiles-success-story-thanks-to-screenshots/ 39:38 Frequent Miler Challenge Update https://frequentmiler.com/party-of-5-frequent-milers-2023-team-challenge/ 43:30 Main Event: How would we spend $1 million? 44:29 Bank of America Premium Rewards card with Platinum Honors 46:14 Citi Double Cash or Capital One Venture / Venture X / Spark Miles https://frequentmiler.com/dc/ https://frequentmiler.com/c1vr/ https://frequentmiler.com/venturex/ https://frequentmiler.com/c1smbiz/ 48:34 Multiple welcome bonuses 49:03 Business Platinums 51:36 Venture X for Business https://frequentmiler.com/capital-one-launches-spark-travel-elite-250000/ 54:32 Aeroplan Visa https://frequentmiler.com/Aeroplan/ 57:16 Delta Diamond for life https://frequentmiler.com/manufacturing-lifetime-delta-diamond-status/ 59:41 Get elite statuses 59:42 American Airlines elite status https://frequentmiler.com/american-airlines-aadvantage-complete-guide/ 1:01:45 Air Canada Aeroplan elite status 1:02:45 Hyatt elite status 1:04:51 Marriott elite status 1:06:09 IHG elite status 1:07:20 What would Greg do? 1:09:12 What would Nick do? 1:17:30 Question of the Week: Is it possible to get an Amex Business card with a low percentage of business owned? Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Mylar on the air starts now. Today's main event, how would we spend $1,000,000? $1,000,000.

I'm going to jump right into the mailbag instead of explaining this because the mailbag does explain this. Okay. Time for the giant mailbag. Right. Today's giant mail comes from several different contributors who had variations on the same-ish situation, which is they spend or are about to spend a tremendous amount of money using credit cards, and they want to know what credit cards should they use to maximize their rewards. And we've had people who are talking about spending like a million dollars in a year or more. It's not unusual to have business people spending hundreds of thousands in a month, for example. And so the question is, well, we can't answer for you, but we're going to talk about how would we spend $1 million? Well, I'd hit the beach and not look back. But no, I mean, from a rewards perspective, I guess, is what we're talking about here. How do we get the best bang for our buck in terms of spending on cards?

Well, very good. And we're going to discuss that more in the main event. But that is a question that comes up from time to time. Not always a million dollars, but sometimes people say, you know, I sold a know, inherited a home and sold it. Now I have a big tax bill, that sort of thing. So you never know when you may end up in a situation where you have to spend a large chunk at once. So we'll talk about how that should work today. Now I'm going to throw Greg for a loop and I'm going to do a giant mailbag double header. Oh, all right. Exciting. A different giant mailbag. In a loop. Well, there you go. In a loop. I threw all right. Exciting. A different giant mailbag. In a loop.

Well, there you go. In a loop. I threw him right into that loop. So this week's giant mailbag number two came in, and I thought this was worth reading when I looked back through mailbag stuff today. Paul wrote in and said, Dear Frequent Miler, I just wanted to say thank you. I've been a loyal listener for the last couple of years. And when the Amex Gold referral link became available to cardholders, was that became available to cardholders was better than the affiliate program link you had. I posted mine to Facebook following your directions. I was pleased to find today that my link was used and I received the maximum 100,000 points in referral bonuses when other readers use my link to get the card after Steven put it up for the day. I've signed up for many cards via your affiliate links. And this was such a nice unexpected bonus

for readers slash listeners. Thanks for giving back to your loyal readers and listeners. Best, Paul. Love getting an email like that. Yeah, I do too. I love those. And we get them pretty often. And I love it because people are excited. I mean, getting 100,000 points, it's pretty darn sweet. And so, yeah, it's a good thing. Good thing we do in that situation. It's nice that we're able to do it. Yeah. And I wrote a post this week about how to create your own referral links, how to find your referral links and share and refer across cards. But if you have one of those targeted offers, the Amex Platinum or Amex Gold offers, only certain people have the ability to refer to the best offer on those. And so we take links from readers in our Frequent Miler Insiders group,

readers who have a direct link to the best offer. Now, it's got to say in your Amex login, your friend is going to get the 150,000 points for the Platinum card or the 90,000 points for the gold card plus the $200 statement credit. Unfortunately, I wrote the post this week about how to create links from other cards. Those links won't always work for the best offer on those two specific cards. It's the most confusing thing ever. But anyway, if you see the post, you can read more about it. I'll put a link in the show notes anyway.

But yeah, it's been great. I mean, it's been nice that we've talked about it a few times before that readers have gotten lots of points. And I just thought it was nice to hear from somebody this week.

And I happen to notice that after I wrote the or updated the post about referral links, I thought that was timely. Yeah, it is very timely. Very cool. All right.

So that brings us, I think, to card talk. What have we got up for Card Talk this week, Greg? Today's Card Talk topic is the Bank of America Premium Rewards Card, which we mention fairly often on the show, but we've never really talked on the show about what the heck it is and why it's interesting. So here's the basics. And let me first say right off the bat, the basics are not all that interesting. This isn't going to be the part that draws you in,

but stay, stay for it. Yeah, that's right. Stay past intermission. $95 annual fee. That's pretty normal for a lot of cards. No foreign transaction fee. It earns two points per dollar for travel and dining and one and a half points per dollar everywhere else. So, you know, the earning rate doesn't sound that good, does it?

I mean, yeah. Anyway, $100 annual airline incidental fee reimbursement. So if you, for example, use the card to pay for the award booking fees or TSA fees when you're booking award flights or seat assignment fees, paying for check bags, all that kind of stuff, it'll reimburse it. And what's nice is it's unlike Amex. You don't have to pick a specific airline. So just use it for whatever and it'll reimburse. And it's automatic. And it's automatic. And that could pretty easily pay back the $95 annual fee and plus $5. And you'll also get your TSA pre-check or global entry fee repaid once every four years if you use it for that. And so points are worth just a penny each.

So you're basically talking about a card that earns a maximum of 2% back or 1.5% back everywhere else. You wouldn't want to pay for that right because i mean you get the double cash fee free and get two percent back or the fidelity cash back visa is two percent cash back fee free i mean there's plenty of other two percent options you wouldn't pay for a one and a half percent or sometimes two percent card right no you wouldn't and uh you know and these points don't transfer to airline or hotel partners. So if you're interested in getting one and a half points per dollar, you should be looking more at like a Freedom Unlimited type of card that gets one and a half everywhere and pair that with a Sapphire Preferred or an Ink Business Preferred so that you then could get better

rewards on things like travel and dining. And you could also then transfer points to travel partners with a combination like that. With this, you don't have that. Right. There's no, there is no combination, right? There's no card that can make them transfer. They're just a penny a piece. These are penny points.

So it doesn't sound exciting. Like everything we've said so far is like, probably a few people are like, okay, why am I listening to this segment? Before you skip to the next segment, don't skip ahead because it does get better. Yeah. Yeah. Good job staying for the next part. Yes.

All right. So Bank of America has its own, basically an elite program for their customers. And this is on their banking side more than their credit card side. It has to do with having money in savings with Bank of America or Merrill, which is Merrill Edge or Merrill Lynch. And you do need a Bank of America checking account to make this happen at all. But if you have a Bank of America checking account, then what they do is they look at the amount of money you have across Bank of America and Merrill, and they will give you elite status. And that will bump up your earnings on certain credit cards, including this one, the Bank of America premium rewards card.

So here's the tier. Here's the elite tiers. You get gold status if you have 20K in savings. You get platinum. Oh, and let me, gold status will give you a 25% bonus on your credit card earnings. So that'll turn your 1.5% cash back to 1.875%. So gold status, it's still not going to get you to where this card is worth considering. Platinum says so. $50,000 in savings or investments will get you a 50% bonus on rewards. And so your 1.5% cash back will become 2.25%.

And so suddenly this is outdoing most 2% cards, including having no foreign transaction fees. So you can use this abroad. Unlike things like the double cash, many of the 2% cards do have foreign transaction fees. So suddenly this is getting- We're warming up. We're warming up. Yeah, we're warming up, but we're not done yet if you get to a hundred thousand dollar balance you get platinum honors so that's distinguished from platinum which i talked about before this is platinum honors i don't know why they couldn't come up with another rare name let me call it something else titanium yeah you know something taken marriott ticket it was brilliant brilliant no i mean there's things they could

have done but anyway it's platinum honors and you need a hundred thousand dollars to get there uh you get a 75 bonus and that's that's the biggest bonus you could get 75 bonus on one and a half percent spent one on one and a half percent back becomes 2.62 percent back and that is now we're talking yeah now we're talking um that's that's like pretty much the best i'm sort of hedging a little bit because there's there are some ways you could maybe get three percent back for for all spend but these are are niche opportunities where they're not like national banks that you can get everywhere and they're not going to be unlimited spend opportunities like it is with Bank of America. So anyway, it's pretty much the best you can get for your

everyday everywhere spend. And it's a little better for travel and dining because you start from two points per dollar and you go up to 3.5% back on those. So it's not great compared to some other cards that have better travel and dining rewards, but for all your unbonus spend. It's not bad, for sure. But for all your other spend, it's excellent.

2.62%. Just for completeness, I'll say they do have another tier, which requires a million dollars in balances, but you get the same 75% bonus on your credit card rewards. You do get some other perks, but nothing seems too exciting there. So there you go. All you need, $100,000. Just 100 grand. That's all. Is there anyone listening who doesn't have 100,000 that could drop into a Bank of America checking account that earns no interest?

Well, so here's the thing. So yeah, we should talk about how, I mean, how can you do that, right? How can you meet that? Because it is a lot. And how do they measure it? So first of all, it's a rolling three-month average. So they look at your average balance for the previous three months. And if you're, you know,

averaged more than 100k for three months, then you bump up and then they reevaluate like, I don't know, a year later or something. So and so your money can fluctuate up and down a little bit. But if it stays down under 100 for long, and then eventually they're going to say, okay, now you're not here anymore. So how do you get that? Well, there's a lot of different ways. Obviously, if you've got the cash, great, but investments really could make this at least attainable, not easy, but attainable for more people because Merrill Edge is the discount brokerage arm of Merrill Lynch. So if you've heard of Merrill Lynch before and you're like, oh man, they have these high maintenance fees and blah, blah, blah, that's potentially true on the Merrill

Lynch side. The Merrill Edge side though is self-directed. So no fees to buy stocks and ETFs and stuff like that. And you could have an IRA. So if you have a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA, if you have it somewhere else, you can just move it over. You don't have to sell the investments or anything. You can move it to Merrill Edge. It costs you something maybe to close your account at the other brokerage, but usually Merrill Edge offers a bonus when you move your investments over. So the bonus will more than cover whatever fee you'll pay to transfer the account over. So again, you don't even have to sell your investments. You're just moving, it's like a change of custodian, I think is what they call it to Merrill Edge. So if you have an IRA somewhere that already has $100,000 in it, it could be worth moving it to Merrill Edge. We did that in my household because it was like, well, why not?

We could earn 2.62% cash back everywhere. Of course, it makes sense to move it there. It's the same investments we were investing in anyway, which obviously whether or not that's true for you may vary, but for a lot of people anyway, I think that's true. Preston Pyshko, Yeah. Yeah. And for some who listen to this say, why are you talking about cash back when we're all about points? Don't you more value rewards? And we're always talking about transferable points. Shouldn't you be getting, isn't it better to get 2X transferable points, which you could get a number of ways. You could get with the Citi Double Cash or you could get with Capital One Venture or Venture X, for example. Or the Amex Blue Business Plus gives you 2X everywhere.

So why the heck are we talking about cash back? I mean, all good points. However, I often struggle with it. I do use the 2X card some, but I often think about it because if I could be earning 2.62% cash back, but instead I earn points, it's costing me the opportunity to earn 1.3 cents for every one mile. So you could look at that and make the argument, Greg might argue against me with this, but make the argument that you're kind of paying 1.3 cents per point in the sense that you're giving up the chance to earn that 1.3 cents. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with that. That's, you know, yeah, there's a technical difference between actually buying and it being like buying.

It's absolutely like buying points for 1.31 cents each. And, you know, if you're short on points and you need them for high value redemptions, then that's a great deal. For people who are flush with points, it's not that great necessarily. And so, yeah, I think that once you get above certain balances of points, the cashback becomes more and more attractive, even for those of us who love our points. And I mentioned before, and I should mention again, it bears mentioning here, that I also look at those points to some extent as a pool of money that I can use to buy other points. So, you know, for instance, if Hilton puts their points on sale for half a cent each and I buy them at half a cent each earning 2.62% back, that's like more than five Hilton points per dollar, right? If it's half a cent for each one one two and a half would be five points so essentially i got five hilton points per dollar everywhere on the premium rewards card if i use

that cash back to buy hilton points and that beats any of the hilton cards right so so you know and everywhere i'll spend of course obviously there are some category bonuses that are higher on the hilton cards but so i look at it that way also that i could use that to buy points and have even more points than i would have had otherwise. Same can be true with airline miles, by the way. I mean, look at Avianca. They put miles on sale from 1.25 cents per mile just recently here. And so, again, this is essentially like a more than two Avianca miles.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. And Aeroplan, too. Occasionally the sales are around 1.3. Both of them are around 1.3. Both of them are around 1.3. So it's about two, you're earning sort of like two points per dollar, but only if you sort of redeem your cash for miles during these sales.

So there's that caveat. High enough to meet the top tier of the sale. Yeah. And another reason I'd say it's not really equivalent to a 2x Everywhere card is that most of these transferable points cards also sometimes have transfer bonuses. So those are like sales. So you end up, you could then say, you know, oh, there's often 30% transfer bonuses. So earning 2x is like earning, you know. Right, 2.6, right?

Yeah, it's like earning 2.6. So, yeah. Yep. Yep. I mean, certainly arguments to be had there, but I think the key point is sometimes for some people, anyway, you get to a high enough balance of points and then the cashback becomes more, more valuable to you because we've said before, when you have just a few points, every extra point you're earning is worth a lot to you as you build towards the next redemption. Once you have enough to redeem for whatever it is you want, then every extra point doesn't really add anything because it's a maybe I'll use it someday point. And that isn't worth as much. So then again, the cashback becomes a little bit better. And of course, obviously, you know, cash doesn't devalue as

fast as miles usually. So you've got something that's more flexible. So I think it's a good part of a strategy for a lot of people that have ways to generate a lot of points. If you have a lot of spend, like we're going to talk today about spending a lot on credit cards, if you've got a lot of spend, then it probably makes a lot of sense to supplement with something like this, because you can probably meet the welcome bonuses on the cards you want with your heavy spending and earn far more than two points per dollar on average on that spend. And then this is your, okay, I'm not working on a welcome bonus right now. Let me get 2.62%

back card. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So that's the Bank of America Primer Rewards card. What do we have next on the show? Well, you know, I want to mention one last thing that there's also the unlimited cash card, which earns 1.5% back. So that can also be a 2.62% cash back card. There's some differences, but that's probably worth talking about on another day, another show sometime down the road, that there is another similar-ish card. It doesn't have the dining and the travel bonuses. But it has no annual fee, so that's an advantage of it. Disadvantage, it does have a foreign transaction fee. So yeah. So either one is a great choice if you and you just need to think about whether that foreign transaction fee matters to you.

Yep. Okay. So let's talk about mattress. No, let's talk about what crazy thing did choice do this week? What crazy choices is Choice making? What are they choosing here, Greg? Well, news came out that Choice Hotels is reportedly looking to buy Wyndham Hotels. Make better choices, Choice. Make better choices. So that would be kind of devastating if it actually happened.

I mean, because, you know, there are some things, well, there's some things we like about both programs, but I think all the things we like about Wyndham would go away if that happened. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I do know. I mean, what we like about Wyndham is the ability to use them for Vacasa rentals. You wrote about your experiences in Hawaii this week. I mean, they're great on Vacasa there, right? They really are. And the, but, but that's not all right. There's the there's the Wyndham earner business card, which gives you eight points per dollar for gas and five x for utilities and

diamond status, which which matches to Caesars diamond, which then matches to a billion other things in 100,000 different cruise options that you can get for free. Right? And we don't want to see all those things go away right and they probably would they probably would because barclays already has the choice privileges card so they would probably convert people over to that i guess from the well no do they have the choice for this card anymore no no no no that that moved yeah that's with um uh i can't i don't even remember now.

I'd have to look at our best offers page to see who picked it up. But that's right. I forgot they sold that portfolio. But at any rate, I doubt that we would keep the Wyndham business card. I wouldn't hang around if there's no Wyndham and you're not going to get eight choice points per dollar at the gas station probably. So yeah. And even if you could, you wouldn't want them as much necessarily

because Wyndham has those sweet spots we mentioned. Also, of course, the club Wyndham properties that can be a good value on points for condos. So, yeah, I really hope that this doesn't happen. I'm rooting against it. In the meantime, I'm going to certainly take a look for opportunities to use my Wyndham points while I can for the things that I want. But this will be very, very disappointing if it goes through, I think. Yeah. Wells Fargo. I just remembered that's the bank that has the Choice cards now. There you go. Yeah. So it's just a crazy notion too, because Choice has talked about wanting to move into more upscale brands. But Wyndham has almost the exact same low end type of footprint that choice has. It wouldn't, it would not be the solution to that if that's what they're looking for. So,

yeah, yeah, no, I mean, no, clearly not at the same time, I guess they have like the Wyndham garden in and the, you know,

the Wyndham brands, which I guess are nicer than most. They have some, but choices, some. I mean, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, equally excited probably about those two. But so, yeah, let's hope not. Let's hope not choice because I'd rather see you go after something

a little bit more upscale, a little bit less dear to my heart, something other than Wyndham. Well, the stock market reacted disfavorably to the idea and choice went down. So let's hope that they're paying attention to that. Take notice.

Yeah, but we can hope. All right. So that's the crazy thing for this week. Let's talk about mattress running the number since we're on the topic of Wyndham and you're going to want to earn Wyndham points and use Wyndham points while you can in case choice takes them over. By the way, I say that and I'm being somewhat facetious. These things take time. So, you know, when choice and Radisson merged, it took quite a while. It was faster than we thought, but it took quite a while to be able to sort of connect the programs and they're still separate, right? It didn't really change anything yet. So.

And there's no indication that Wyndham's interested in being bought and. Right, right. Yeah. So. So don't panic. Don't, don't panic. Don't get magazines for your points because you're like, oh my goodness, I'm going to have choice. Don't get silly. All right. So mattress running the numbers. You want to earn some Wyndham points now and use them to good value while you can and right now windham is out with a new promotion you can register for it now stays i think go through august 31st ish uh if i remember correctly so the promo you'll have to check the link that's going to be in the description here

but you stay two consecutive nights you earn 5 bonus points. You stay three consecutive nights, you earn 10,000 points. You stay four consecutive nights, you earn 15,000 bonus Wyndham rewards points. And supposedly, supposedly cardholders will earn, Wyndham cardholders will earn an additional 5,000 bonus points after their first

day. Eh, wouldn't count on that too hard. Wyndham seems to not be good at awarding that part of the promotion. So I don't know whether, and it's not clear whether that was really intended to be part of it. So that's kind of a little bonus. If you get lucky, you might get an extra 5,000 points, but let's look at it from the perspective of you stay two nights to get 5k points, three nights, 10k, four nights, 15k. What do you think, Greg? Would you do one of these? Which one would you do? Do you have to pick what's going on um don't think you have to pick i i'm not sure but you don't but but

whichever happens first after you register you only get to do it one time so you don't exactly have to pick but if you've got like multiple multi-night stays you gotta register only before the long one right that's right that right. That's right. It gets more interesting as you get above two stays. I mean, two nights, because a three-night stay adds 5,000 points, and you get another 5,000 question with our mattress running the numbers is, is it mattress one run worthy? Meaning would it make sense to book, let's say a three nights day to get 10,000 bonus points? What do you think so you gotta ask yourself how much would i pay for the points and the points are on sale now still i think for a little less than a penny a point so those 10 000 points you'd pay a hundred dollars for those actually a little bit less but we'll call it a hundred anyway on sale right now so your three nights would have to be less or or maybe you have to have maxed out the ability

to purchase points and you're like, OK, I still need more. Yeah, we're probably going to want to pay more than a penny a point. Right. So not more than a hundred dollars for those three nights. Right. That seems. Yeah, it it does seem tough. Yeah, I see this as like it's a decent promo. You know, if you're going to be staying at Wyndham properties or if you're equally interested in this property or that other and Wyndham is one of them, it might be enough to change your mind about which one to stay at. But I definitely wouldn't mattress run this one. It's just not quite there.

It's not quite there. And I'm pretty sure you'll have to check and see if this is in the terms in Stephen's post. I'm pretty sure Wyndham has a minimum of a 30 a night uh charge so i don't think you could actually book one that's less than 30 anyway um so you know it's going to be like basically very similar to the cost of buying the points so then it only becomes worth it if you want to stay i mean if you want to stay great but yeah otherwise it's not much and it is a good rebate. I mean, there are plenty of Wyndham properties that are 60, 70 bucks a night, right? So if you do three nights of that for $210-ish, $200, let's call it,

you get $100 worth of points back. That's a terrific rebate. And that's bonus points. So that should be on top of your regular earnings too, I think. So that's a good rebate on a stay. It's just not worth checking in only for the points yeah i was just laughing because i suddenly realized that if choice took over then it might go to choice's way of doing these bonuses where in in choice's world you get your normal points and then they they fill in the difference between that and the bonus that's promised and anyway it doesn't end up to as many points. Again, let's hope that doesn't happen.

Anyway. All right. So eventually you could, if you got a Wyndham stay coming up, then don't forget to register for this. Okay. Because you do want the points if you've got a stay coming. And watch for overlapping promos. Wyndham sometimes has multiple different promos that you could register for that you could

qualify for each one. So this feels to me like potential for a good sort of base promo and then stack on top of it a couple other promos and you might get you might get something very interesting out of it. You never know. You never know. All right. So that was Mattress Running the Numbers. Let's talk about award talk. So speaking of choice and Wyndham and weirdness, let's get weird here, choice. So choice this week. Well, I don't know if it was this week, but recently. It's not choice really. All right. So we've talked sometimes about Nordic choice properties, which are hotels in the Nordic countries that you can book with choice points, but they're not really part of choice hotels. They more have like some kind of weird partnership. And in fact, they have some of the same brands. So they do use like Clarion and

it's very strange and weird. It's very confusing. But now they've said, no, enough of this Nordic choice stuff. We are now strawberry. Because that tells me a lot about your hotel. Strawberry. Nordic at least told me where it was. What is strawberry? What does that tell me about the hotel?

Delicious? Maybe they're branching out past the Nordic countries. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe that's what it is but the the fear uh when this happened was that it meant that the sweet spot of using choice points for nordic choice properties was gone which is technically true because there are no more nordic choice properties but no no no greg it got sweeter it's stronger it got sweeter oh boy um we reached out to a choice privileges contact to ask,

will we still be able to book strawberry properties with choice privileges points? And the answer was yes, or at least that nothing was expected to change. I can't promise that they were 100% right. But at least as things stand right now, the official word is things should stay the same. So that's good. That is good. And I circled back after that with another email to inquire as to whether we can get shortcake at strawberry hotels. No word yet. No word. Oh, boy. I hope so. Oh, my goodness. All right. So it's weird. So you can still book them with choice points for now. But who knows? All right. So that was that. What about you, Greg? Didn't you book some really cool stuff recently that you haven't talked about on the show really yet?

Yeah, we're not done talking about choice and Wyndham. This time Wyndham. I used my Wyndham points to book two different Vacasa vacation rentals in Hawaii. Now, I did mention that on the show a while ago that I booked them, but I just now finally stayed at them and had an amazing time. These were amazing properties. One of them, there were two couples. And so we really only needed a two bedroom. And you know that Wyndham charges more per bedroom. So they charge per bedroom, 15,000 points per bedroom per night. And so I was looking initially only at two bedroom units, but then I came across this three bedroom unit right on the ocean. Two stories, amazing, amazing oceanfront views.

The balcony on each story, you sit out there, the waves are crashing against the shore. You're looking at the beautiful sunsets. One time we saw a dolphin jump up and flip over it it was really magical the place is luxurious it's uh brand new and uh terrific um i can't say enough about it uh we we had a fantastic fantastic time it was absolutely worth spending the extra points in order to get a third bedroom that we didn't even need. And interestingly, a person who I talked to about this, who had also booked this unit, mentioned that if it had been available, if it was only advertised as a two-bedroom, but they still charge as much as a cash rate, we would not have been able to book it with points. And that's because the way this works, the way you can use window points to book for

costification rentals is the price per night after taxes and fees needs to be under $500 per bedroom per night. And so if there were only two bedrooms, it's likely this property, which was more like, which with three bedrooms was around 450 per night per bedroom. It would have been over $500 per bedroom if there were only two, would not have been able to book it. So it was actually lucky that it was advertised as three. The third bedroom was really more like a den, but I mean, it had a full bathroom and closet and it was just set up as a den. So I wouldn't have been too thrilled if that was my bedroom but uh i got the i got the master bedroom which was absolutely huge had a big sunken tub had a sauna in it uh that's crazy

yeah yeah it was it was it was insane so i really enjoyed that it looked and i was really glad that you stayed someplace like that to because that really showcases how wild these window points can be right and three bedrooms so you're talking would be 45,000 points per night for that property. But if you've got the Wyndham, well, one of the Wyndham cards, right. Does it have to be the business card? Any of the Wyndham cards, right. The Wyndham earner card. Yeah. There's three different Wyndham earner cards. So as long as you have one of them, you get a 10% discount. It's not a rebate. It's straight off the top discount. So instead of 45,000, it's 40,500 points for a three bedroom per night.

And so if you go ahead. Yep. Points are on sale for a tiny bit under a penny each, and they're frequently on sale for that. It's $400 a night for this insane three-bedroom on the oceanfront unit that would normally be a fortune. And so, wow, what a deal. Right. I mean, or $5,000 worth of gas purchases or gas station purchases would give you enough points for that room or in utilities what eight thousand dollars worth of utility payments would get you there so i mean that's obviously not a small amount but also at the same time it's you know i think a pretty fantastic rebate if you're getting a room that sells for thirteen hundred dollars a night for those levels of spend that's's a pretty terrific deal. So awesome. So you did that and you had two of them, right? You stayed in another Vicasa also? Yeah. So another one was near

Volcanoes National Park. It was literally in a rainforest and it was delightful. It's like you drive through in the driveway. It's like going into this dark forest almost. And the house is beautiful. It was a two bedroom. So we paid, you know, what, 27,000 points per night, thanks to our 10% discount. And like it wasn't like an amazing value for our points. So I got about one and a half cents per point value compared to around three cents per point value at the other place. But it's still still I mean, getting getting one and a half getting one and a half cents per point value when you could buy the points for one cent straight up is kind of a ridiculous discount right there. It really is. It really is. Yeah, that's a fantastic partnership. Use it while it lasts because it probably won't be there forever. But, you know, we've told you that. So be sure that you use it while you can. All right. Quickly, I had a small success with Avianca Life Miles this last week. I found four seats in business class on Lufthansa from Europe to the United States for a date that I needed this summer. It was exactly the right type of

itinerary. So that worked out really well. That was a lucky find to begin with. And then I found it through Avianca LifeMiles. So I felt extra lucky because it was easily bookable on the website until I got to the confirmation screen. I hit submit on the payment and then it just spun and spun and spun and spun and spun on the, you know, we're processing your reservation screen. And eventually it gave me an error and said, oops, sorry, something went wrong. If it continues to happen, call customer service and select number three.

And luckily I had known to take a screenshot because as soon as you hit submit on the payment for a LifeMiles booking, it gives you a PNR, a confirmation code. And it says it hit submit on the payment for a LifeMiles booking, it gives you a PNR, a confirmation code, and it says it's working on the reservation, but it gives you the six-digit reservation code. And I've noticed that in the past. So I always take a screenshot of it just in case something goes wrong. So I have it. And in this case, I was glad I did because obviously something did go wrong. The seats were gone. I checked Air Canada and Avianca. They were

gone on the websites. So I called LifeMiles with very low gone. I checked Air Canada and Avianca. They were gone on the websites. So I called LifeMiles with very low expectations. I thought for sure this just wasn't going to work. Maybe the seats would eventually go back into inventory. But much to my surprise, it wasn't exactly pressing number three first. But eventually I navigated the menu, got to a human being pretty quickly, explained what happened. And she asked for that six digit code and I had it. So I gave it to her. She was able to pull up the reservation, saw it, said she just needed to take payment for the taxes. And not only that, but she was able to do it over the phone. They were, they had to transfer me to an automated system. And it was a little nutty in the sense

that I had to verify my pin a couple of times and get transferred over and type in my information. And it was a slow process. It took probably at least 30 minutes to do something that in my mind should take like three call and give them a credit card number and get off the phone. Right. But but that said, it was relatively easy. She knew exactly what was going on the whole way. Great service, I thought. And actually, what surprised me even more than that is that I posted about it and quite a few readers commented with the exact same recent experience that it aired out like that and that they were shocked with the customer service. The fact that they were able to get it ticketed over the phone really pretty easily. Yeah, that that's such great news. I mean, obviously, it's not great news that it errors out when you try to book online, but, you know, LifeMiles, one of the reasons I've been hesitant to go to into LifeMiles all this time is all the horror stories we used to hear about their customer service, that calling was kind of useless, we'd hear.

And so hearing that competent agents are answering the phone and getting it it done whatever needs to get done that's fantastic it is it makes that makes life miles points more valuable in my mind and if you're a bit of a gambler several people commented or reached out in private messages and tell me that they had the same kind of thing happen and they just waited and eventually it automatically went through so maybe it would have just automatically gone through if i hadn't called it might worked. So I don't know, but I probably wouldn't chance it like that if it was award availability that mattered to me, but, but yeah, it worked for several people. So again, I was very surprised. So maybe give LifeMiles another chance. Keep in mind, of course, the high cancellation fees. I knew that going in, I was locked in on the date on this and,

you know, was willing to gamble with the fact that the trip won't get canceled because otherwise it'll cost me $200 a passenger to cancel and redeposit. So I wouldn't be excited about that, but I was excited that it worked out. And again, four seats, middle of the summer, business class between Europe and the United States, which is frequently tough, but I always say not impossible. If you keep looking and you look from different airports and, you know, two different airports, you kind of cast a wide net. It can be found. It's not, you know, not going to be easy necessarily, but, but I found it. So there you have it. There you have it. That's a word talk challenge update. We've got a challenge coming, Greg. It's happening. We do party of five frequent mil Frequent Milers 2023 challenge. We have two teams. Carrie and Stephen will be handling all of our plans for when we arrive in Asia. And when we get back from Asia, Team San Francisco will be handling, which is Nick and Tim will be handling

all our plans, uh, there. And I will be the judge. I'm going to be, uh, judging them on, on the, uh, quality, the, the comfort, the value, uh, hopefully they'll, they'll get some great value from points and, and other types of rewards. And, uh, we're going to have a lot of fun. And it all kicks off. Drum roll, please. I can't even hear it. The silent drum roll just happened. Hopefully you heard it because it came through on my mic at least.

June 1st. June 1st. June 1st. Whoa. That's Thursday, I think. That's just like in a few days from when this podcast gets released, right? A couple days. It's happening and it's happening soon. I can't wait.

Our first flight, we're going to be meeting up in San Francisco, flying out on Japan Airlines business class, all on the same flight. And six-ish days later, we're going to be returning on ANA first class. And if you want to keep up with everything that's going on in between and afterwards, you'll want to follow us on Instagram because we're going to have all kinds of fun stories and reels posting pretty much all the time through there. So I'm looking forward to that. We also think, we're pretty sure actually, that we're going to be able to do our Ask Us Anything live at the usual time. So our usual schedule is the first Wednesday of every month at 9 p.m 9 PM Eastern. We will be live from wherever we are. And you'll only know where that is in advance if you've been following along on our Instagram stories. So you're gonna want to check, like Greg said, you're gonna want to follow us there. That

is just the easiest medium for telling these stories. We will of course put things on the blog, but Instagram lends itself so much better to telling a live travel story as it's happening. So totally recommend you follow us there. That's, that's the way you're going to catch, I think the most fun parts. Cause I feel like the video on these things is, is really where it's at. Right. And it's just so much easier to put together a cohesive story in that format, uh, that, that kind of, you know, flows. So check it out there. All right. All right. Next team is team, is team San Francisco feeling confident or you have all the ducks in a row. I don't. Well, I'm not even going to say that. I don't know what it is that Stephen and Carrie are planning. I know that they are very confident. And I can't imagine what it could be that's going to top what Tim and I have planned. So like their confidence excites me because I look forward to a couple of great days and then crushing them. So so best of luck to Stephen and Carrie.

I look forward to some fun days because they seem very highly confident and we're not even all buttoned up yet. And I'm feeling pretty good, Greg. I think it's it's going to be pretty, pretty good few days with Tim and I. So we'll see. Oh, that's exciting. I can't wait. I can't wait. All right. So let's get into the main event. Main event.

How would you do it, Greg? How would we spend $1 million? If you caught this live, if you're listening to this in podcast form, you're missing, hopefully you're imagining the whole Austin powers thing, right? Is that where it comes from? That's what, that's what we're trying to do.

Yeah. The Austin powers, a pinky. Okay. Oh, so, so as we said, um,

various, um, people have reached out to us at different times saying they spend a tremendous amount are going to be spending a tremendous amount on credit cards. What do we recommend? And we decided a way to frame this, a fun way to frame it is to say, you've got a million dollars to spend on credit cards. What should you do? And so we're going to just lay out some different options and discuss what would we do of these types of options. So

first, we have to cover the basic sort of obvious thing, cash back. What would you do if you just want cash back? If I had a million dollars worth of spend, I think it's reasonable to assume that I've got $100,000 to invest or save with Merrill Lynch or Merrill Edge or Bank of America. So the top choice, or we'll argue about whether that's the top choice. The top choice from a cashback standpoint would probably be the Bank of America premium rewards card that we just spent all that time talking about. 2.62% cashback.

That's $26,200, real dollars and cents, back on $1 million spent. Now I say real dollars and cents, it's actually Bank of America points that you have to redeem for the dollars and cents, but let's not split hairs. $26,200 you could earn back on a million dollars spent on that one single card because there's no cap, right? There's no limit as to how much you can earn on that card. So- Exactly, exactly. And this is, of course, this is assuming that there's not like bonus categories that you're spending in, you know, because we might have different advice otherwise. So we're just simplifying that way.

And we're simplifying in the sense that you probably, it'd be hard to spend a million on a Bank of America card, right? I mean, you have to have a really high limit to get away with spending a million dollars over the course of the year. I mean, I've heard of Bank of America limits approaching 100 before when people combine things. I don't know whether that still exists anymore, but I think it might be tough for a lot of people to have a high enough limit to spend a million over the course of the year. But if you can accomplish that, then I think that would be your top cashback choice for unbonused purchases. But

of course, we like the miles and points, Craig. So if you weren't going to do cashback, what could you do for like a base point earning sort of a strategy? Yeah. You know, I mean, the best you could do for spend that's not within a category bonus, two points per dollar. And you've got two options there. You've got Citibank, use the double cash card, which it would seem kind of funny to me, like this no annual fee card that's kind of targeted to lower income people to some degree, getting a million dollar spend on there, but there's no stated cap on it. I don't think they'd have any problem necessarily with that. And then Capital One, there's actually quite a few options there if you want to earn two Capital One miles per dollar. in both these cases we're

talking about earning transferable points so you could transfer to different airline and hotel partners so capital one like venture venture x you've got or you got this with spark miles um so so you've got some some good options in either case um and then so but what about the business plus card greg why is that not in here yeah so blue blue blue business plus card from american express does earn two points per dollar has no annual fee but the two points per dollar is as capped at fifty thousand dollars spend per year so they're gonna get to a million that, I mean, I guess you could get a lot of them. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't think you get that many of them. Probably not. You only have so many credit cards on the MX side. So you can get enough credit card. You get what? Five of them or something. Maybe some, maybe 250 a year. Maybe if you maximize, who knows, but it's not going to probably happen.

So, all right. So yeah, city and capital One are your two choices there. Two million points. Either one. Yeah. Either way, a million-dollar spend. Two million points. Transferable points, too.

Yeah, right? Two million transferable points. You could certainly get a lot more than $26,200 in value out of two million transferable points. Whether that's right for you, I mean, kind of depends. But that's not the end of our options, is it? It's not. It's not. So what about if you chase after welcome bonuses, right? Because I'm sure that there are a lot of people here that say million dollar spend, you could earn like all the welcome bonuses you want with a million dollar spend. And that's true. You could earn tons of welcome bonuses. How many welcome bonuses do you think you could earn?

You sure could. The problem is it's probably not practical for most people to fill up that million dollar spend with signup bonuses, but let's play it out. Let's you you want to go for the the business platinum card which has 150 000 point bonus after 15 000 spend and amex does often offer like the same offer again after you've already gotten it so it's not unreasonable that you could keep doing it several times. You could do it. If there was no end to how many times you could do it, you'd have enough spend to do 66. 66 of these offers. And you'd end up with about 11 million points. 11 million.

I mean, that's a lot of points. That's a heck of a lot of points. A lot of points. I mean, it's a lot of points. That's a heck of a lot of points. I mean, it's even a heck of a lot of money if you also get the Schwab platinum card and cash out those points for 1.1 cent each. And go 120 grand, I think, right? So, I mean, that would be a significant chunk of change. Of course, also significant would be the fact that you'd have to pay the $695 annual fee 66 times. So $45,870 in annual fee. That's just details, though.

Did you just do that off the top of your head or you have a calculator? Yes, I did that off the top of my head. I'm just a savant like that, Greg. No, yes, I use the calculator on my desktop here. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a lot. That's a lot in annual fees. So obviously, it's kind of unrealistic.

But not only is it unrealistic, you'd certainly be on the hook for a lot in annual fees. But I mean, 11 million points, like we said, you could theoretically cash that out for over $100,000. So, you know, a little more realistically is, is that you could, you could easily chase all this, all the signup bonuses that are available to you to, you know, sign up for, especially with business cards, uh, on the table that adds a lot of options, but it means juggling a lot of cards, a lot of annual fees, making sure to cancel the cards you don't want at the end of the year. And we're talking about a lot of cards. So yeah, I mean, so even if you did like

$100,000 spend on these signup offers, you'd earn a lot of points that way, but you still have like $900,000 to spend. So we're back to the cashback or the 2x rewards for the rest of it. What about, there are some welcome offers that require a huge spend. Could we go with those instead? So the VentureX for Business is a good example of that, right? Because that requires a bunch. I don't even know how much. It was 50?

How much spend are you going to do on that thing? So to get the full bonus. know how many it was 50 50 how much spend you got to do on that thing so it's your business to to get the to get the full bonus so a good part of the bonus happens like with a reasonable amount of spend but to get the full bonus you have to spend um half a million dollars half a million dollars what yeah what what you talking about well that's because half a million so what do you get for your half a million you must get tons of points you only get 300 000 points above what you earn from the spend so so most of most of your earning is from getting two extra rewards flat out right um but anyway um after you know you have the 300k bonus uh it's earning two x rewards on the 500k spend so you got 1.3 million um miles basically after 500 000 spend if there

was some way to do two of these cards i don't't know if there is then, you know, 2.6 million on a million dollar spend. But it seems almost silly, given that you could just straight up get two million with, you know, with this card, like the signing bonus. It is adding a significant number of points, but it's not as many as it should for that level of spend. Right. Yeah, it's weak, especially when you also consider the fact that we sometimes see the spark miles and the spark cash cards offer 300 000 on 50 000 spent so

adding a zero on the spend and not adding anything on the welcome bonus to the to the high offer on those that is the i don't think those offers are out right now. And who knows whether or not they'll come back again. But yeah, it does seem kind of nutty in the sense that it's not a ton. But from the other perspective, you say, okay, well, let's say you did do two of those. You'd end up with 2.6 million points, which coincidentally is worth $26,000 worth of travel reimbursed, right? Because you get the venture card. So that's awfully close to the cash back total before $26,000 worth of travel reimbursed, right? Because you get the venture card.

So that's awfully close to the cash back total before $26,200. Or you can transfer the points on to partners and potentially get even more value. So while I slammed this strategy initially, it may not be crazy. It would end up pretty good if you could do it. Yeah.

And definitely, there's an argument to be made for it. If you're going to spend a lot on travel anyway, there's an argument to be made for it. If you're going to spend a lot on travel anyway, there's an argument to be made for it, I think. Right, right, right. Or do a half million with this and do the other half million with whether you prefer the two extra rewards or the cash back for the rest of it is a reasonable option. All right. So those are the sort of reasonable options. The reasonable option. All right. So those are the sort of... Reasonable options. The reasonable options. Now let's get a little more, let's have a little more fun with this.

Aeroplan. The Aeroplan credit card. It has some perks for different levels of spend, but they're not terribly exciting until you get to a million dollar spend. So you could, you could put a million dollars spend on your chase aeroplane card and you'll get a companion award thing, which is, which will give you a free companion on all your award flights for the rest of that calendar year and all of the next calendar year, which I mean, Hey,

you're going to have a million aeroplan miles or more, depending on how you spend it on the card, I guess, to use. So you're going to have some aeroplan to use. So, yeah, I mean, that's interesting-ish. It depends on how often you're going to travel and how often you're going to travel with a companion. But that could be an interesting strategy, no, Greg? I mean, couldn't that maybe even yield more value?

I mean, you could potentially double the value of whatever you earn on the card, right? Oh, I mean, yes, you could potentially double it. But first of all, there's limitations. One, you can't change your companion. So you're stuck with that one person for the whole year and a half or however long it is and um when you compare it you're so unless you're spending in in category bonuses you're only earning one point per dollar um you could have instead used like the venture x card and earn two points per dollar which are transferable Aeroplan, and book the same flights and not been limited to who's your companion, not be limited to transferring to Aeroplan. You can

transfer to any program. So it's sort of getting 2 million points instead of 1 million points is sort of like having a companion for those million points that you'll spend of your choice on any airline. So no, it makes no sense at all, but it's just fun to think about. That particular comparison makes it look really ridiculous. So yeah, I think that's a great, great point. I think that maybe if you were going to do a significant chunk of that spend at grocery stores, because I think it was 3X grocery stores on that card. And I don't think there's a cap. So if there was a significant amount of that million dollars, I mean, if you're really hungry, then maybe it would be more worth it. But even still, you know, like you could have done the VentureX card for business

that we just talked about. If you do two of those, you end up with 2.6 million. So you'd have to do a lot of grocery shopping in order to make the era plan card worth more. So the era plan card, yeah, it's an option. It's a bad option probably for most people. So throw that out. Don't get crazy on that one. How about, what if I want Delta diamond status for the rest of my life, Greg? What do I need to do just get delta forever you can do that now the the details are complicated how on how to do it uh but i do have a post on that so you know hopefully nick will remember to put that in the show notes but um basically what it comes down to is with just 12 million dollars of spend on delta cards you will have or can get um delta diamond status not just for this year but for the rest of your life that's all that's all it's 12 years of a

million bucks a year that's it that's just a dozen that's all but just yeah that's all you need to do um you could do it all in one year potentially but you need you'd need about a hundred friends who are going to be playing along with you uh signing up for cards um which you're they're going to let you uh handle not very practical yeah um so so but fun to think about anyway that potentially you could spend towards that anyway. You can spend towards getting yourself Delta Diamond status and if you want to be a lifer, then you can work your way towards it with your million dollars worth of spend. All right. All right.

So maybe, maybe you have a business and you've got 100 employees and what you want to do is give them each club access when they're flying Delta. So you get them all a Delta reserve card and the business card. And the, the only, um, stipulation is that they have to let, let you, um, they have to gift you all the MQMs, which is the Delta lead earnings that are earned from the spend on those cards. So if you have 100 employees and they're all spending $100,000, $20,000, I think, per year on their business cards for legitimate business spend, then this could work for you. There's like one person out there going, yes, this will work. Doyle, if you're listening, that's the strategy for you

right there. So, all right. So Delta, maybe. American Airlines. Well, no, I'm sorry. That's Delta Life. Let's talk about status. We're on status. So let's talk about status. You can earn elite status through spend on cards. There's a lot of different programs where you have an ability to earn elite status through spend so this this could be more fun if you're into the elite status game then this could be where it's at in terms of spreading your spend around in a few different programs you get up with top tier like everywhere right not quite everywhere but there are quite a few programs where you could get quite a lot now Now, Delta and American Airlines are both where you can get top tier. So Delta, it'll cost you about, take about 250,000 of your spend to get to diamond status just for the year.

And you need to distribute that across different cards. Greg has a post again. It's more complicated than with American Airlines. American Airlines, you know what? I have my notes 200,000, but it's actually more than that now. I forget what executive platinum is exactly, but 200 and something thousand. So it's pretty similar, actually, the amount of spend.

But with American, you could just do it with one card. Right. You could spend it all, one loyalty point per dollar spent so put that quarter of a million ish on your american airlines card or cards you could have more than one american airlines card earn a couple of welcome bonuses while you're at it and there you go you'll have it top tier american airlines lease status the problem of course keep in mind is that you're not going to get those system-wide upgrades unless you also do 30 segments on american Airlines. So there's still that requirement if you want kind of the best of the perks that come with high-level status. But-

No, they took away that requirement. Oh, did they? Oh. Yeah. Because that's why they increased the number of- They increased loyalty point requirements, but- And they got rid of it, I'm sorry. They added those system-wide upgrades at different levels now.

So you can get them at multiple loyalty point levels. You can get those. I should read my own guide to American Airlines Advantage before we talk about them. All right. So those are two options. Yep. So I think all the ones we're going to talk about right now, you could fit into your million-dollar spend if you want to go for all of them. Air Canada, you can't actually go that far with spend alone.

What you get is at 50K spend, you get a bump up from whatever level of status you attained. And with the first 15K spend, you obtain their 25K status. So the 50K basically will bump you up to 35K status, which is not really worth much of anything. So I would only look at that if you are already flying Air Canada or already allocating your travel to Air Canada. If you were earning enough with Air Canada to get, I can't remember their elite levels, but close to top tier, then spending 50,000 will get you to top tier. So that would be worth doing then. Let's talk hotels though. There's some interesting things you could do with hotels. You've got Hyatt, which is our favorite elite program by far. And with Hyatt, the regular consumer card, you get five nights, elite nights automatically, and you get two nights with every, uh, 5k spend with the business high business card.

You get five elite Knights with every 10 K spend. Um, so with, uh, 120 K spend, like if you don't have the consumer card at all, 120 K spend, we'll get you the 60 nights required for globalist status. So we always talk about how great high globalist status is. And in that case, you'd be earning the elite nights. So you would get the milestone benefits. So you'd also get the sweet upgrade awards. You'd get a category one to four, you'd get a category one to seven for your certificate. So, you know, you'd get all of those various other benefits along the way too. And then if you're actually continuing to stay

at higher properties every 10 nights thereafter, you're going to earn an either another sweet upgrade, or I think 10,000 points, maybe something like that. I can't remember exactly, but you get a choice like that. So you'll be able to keep earning stuff. So that's, I think that's pretty interesting. We've got a million dollars spent. The problem of course, is that you're sacrificing because you're only going to be earning one X points on that card. So, you know, it's costing you something to do that. Yeah. And that's, that's true with, with almost all of these that, that you're basically, it's costing you in two ways.

One, you're earning points with a specific program instead of transferable points that are more valuable because they're transferable to multiple things, but also you're just getting one instead of two. And so you, yeah, it's worth thinking about that. And realistically, what you probably would want to do is mix and match and say, oh, I'm interested in this or these two elite statuses. So I'm going to spend a portion of my million dollar spend on these two and the rest of it to earn cash back or two extra rewards everywhere. No, far more sense, I think for most people. Yeah. Yeah. Next after Hyatt,

you've got Marriott, which with the Bonvoy boundless, I think you get one elite knight with every $5,000 spend. This card does earn two points per dollar everywhere, but these are Marriott points. They're not worth as much as like airline miles and certainly not worth as much as transferable points. So just keep that in mind. But anyway, if you have both a personal and a business Marriott card, you're probably starting at 30 nights per year, and you could get all the way to titanium status then with around $200,000 spend or less if you're earning nights naturally as well, which is also true with Hyatt, of course. If you're earning nights naturally, you don't have to spend that full amount to get to the top tier. I should say Marriott titanium

is not actually top tier, but it's close to top tier, and you can't really get to top tier. I should say Marriott Titanium is not actually top tier, but it's close to top tier, and you can't really get to top tier without a lot of Marriott spend. And what I mean by that, not spend on the credit card, but spend at Marriott hotels. So we're talking about just what you can achieve with credit cards, and that's titanium status. That, by the way, will also give you United Silver status. so you get two for one there sort of and lastly IHG $40,000 spend

but when you're done you get your diamond status you get your free breakfast and what not not bad and those cards now give you three points per dollar for all your spend so you also would have 120,000 I,000 points when you're done with that. So actually, you could collect quite a few top tier or near top tier statuses with your million dollar spend.

And if I'm doing the math right in my head, you still have some money left over, I think, you know actually earn valuable points you sure what i mean not to say that any of those points are not valuable just more valuable rewards than 1x on those cards because that's the downside you know 1x on cards like that like we said it's costing you the very least the opportunity to earn 2x transferable points right so you're giving up one you know you think about it as one transferable point. If you valued whatever currency you're earning as much as a transferable point anyway, it's costing you one transferable point per dollar spent. You know, is that a price that you're okay with? Think about how you would use those points and whether or not you would want to do it. So which would you actually do out of all of that, Greg? Like if you had a million

dollars to spend. I was just about to ask you. All right. Yeah. So, okay. So, let's say I'm in that situation. I know there's a million dollar spend coming up. I've got to make a decision now. I think what I would do is I would spend, I think I would spend half of it with that VentureX for business deal. So half of it would be at the, what, 2.3 or 2.6X, I think, after the welcome bonus. Whatever. Yeah, it's because it comes out to 1.3. Yeah. Yep. That's correct.

Yeah. So I'm earning 2.6 transferable points per dollar for half a million dollars spend. And then I would, now this is assuming that I don't already have elite status in these things. I mean, I would go for, I would certainly go for Hyatt. I would probably do IHG just because it's such a small percentage of the total here. Why not? Now, Delta or AA, maybe I would do one of those. Again, I'm saying if I don't already have status or whatever, what would i do um i you know if i if i'm likely to be flying one or the other yeah i i i enjoy i enjoy elite status and the benefits that come with it i'd probably go for one of those there you go and so it'd be a really hybrid hybrid strategy out of you here yeah and and not cash back you know so i i think i've got some left over after all this so maybe the maybe the last bit would be the 2.62 percent I don't know last bit interesting now what about you well so you know if I'm really being honest to goodness truthful I'm thinking that if I have to spend

a million dollars on cards am I gonna travel enough to justify taking the points? I really honest to goodness might take the cash back. The $26,000 and change that I could invest or put away, I could spend 10,000 of it and probably travel almost as much as I am now. And maybe it wouldn't exactly be the same, but it'd be pretty close and i could probably put 16 away for a rainy day i would i'd really have a hard time i think spending a huge portion of this on rewards cards i think i'd be really tempted by the 26 grand uh if i'm totally honest but but that said i think an interesting strategy would be either your VentureX business, or maybe if you're willing to do a couple more. I think what I like a little bit better is,

let's say you do your half million on the VentureX business card, which I still think is a little suspect because they have offered the 300,000 points on far less spend before. But let's say you did that. I would put the other 500,000, if I wasn't going to do it on Bank of America, I think an interesting strategy would be to put that other 500,000 spend on a Spark Cash card. Because the Spark Cash card earns 2% back that I could take as cash, right? Straight up cash it out if I want the cash. Or if I run into situations where the miles are more valuable, then I could move those to the VentureX card because we've written before about how you can move cash back with Capital One from cash back

cards to miles cards. So now I've kind of got a hybrid going on in the sense that I'd have a little bit less cash if I took it as cash, but I could transfer it over and use it as miles if I want. So I like that because then I have the ability to use the miles potentially for far more value, but I'm not locked into using them only for travel. So I think certainly if I saw a 50K or one of the offers on the Spark miles cards, that's 300,000 points for 50K spend, I would do that and put the rest of it on a spark cash and then have the option you know you're essentially buying yourself the option to transfer them over to the spark miles card and use them as miles or keep them as cash back cash them

out little by little as you want you know and put them in an investment or whatever here or there yeah can't you also go the other way like so if you have a cash back card you can't move the miles over to it to cash them out no you cannot cash out back card, you can't move the miles over to it to cash them out? No, you cannot cash out the miles. No, you can't move them in that direction. It won't let you move from miles to cash back and only let you move from cash back to miles. So that's why I say I would more heavily load the cash back spend if that 300k offer was available for 50,000 spend, I wouldn't do 500,000 spend, I would just do the 50 because the rest of it can go on the cash back card, it's going to be the same, you know, two miles per dollar spent, so to speak, or or I have the option to take them as pennies. And again, that's more valuable to me than venture miles, because, yes, you can use the venture miles to reimburse travel expenses.

But you can use the cash back to reimburse whatever you want. Doesn't have to be exactly. Exactly. Yeah. No, that that that makes total sense. I guess I want to amend my story a little bit and say, I would also be chasing welcome bonuses, you know, whatever looks, looks good. I mean, it'd be really hard to pass up getting several of those business platinum offers and, and you know, other things like that. So I would have very, very hybrid approach, I guess, is what it comes down to.

And I'd have to agree with that because I do far less than a million dollars spend and I have a few business platinum cards already. So I probably would also try to do some of that if, you know, again, if I'm realistic in that I'm willing to open multiple cards. Okay. That's, that is a different story than I think. And you should then want to earn a few of those bonuses because that's going to way outpace potentially the $26,000 you'd earn on one card. So yeah, I mean, I think there's

definitely value in that strategy and opening multiple cards for multiple bonuses, if you can split the spend over, you know, multiple different cards. And then of course, you run into the issues of which cards can you use for which types of spend depending on what your business expenses are. So there are certainly some ins and outs and what have you is there, but that would be, I think, another sound strategy if you're able to open even just a few of the business cards, particularly with big bonuses, then I think that would certainly be attractive and that would draw me back in. A footnote I feel like I need to mention is some people are listening saying, wait, wait, wait, the cash back

option, you're going to have to pay taxes on that cash back. And so isn't that disadvantaged to, you know, compared to earning points? And what you need to understand is no. Whenever you're earning rewards from spend on credit cards, whether it's a welcome bonus that requires a spend or just the normal earnings from spend, whether it's a welcome bonus that requires a spend or just the normal earnings from spend, whether it's cash back or points, you're not taxed on that, on those rewards. You get taxed on rewards when there's some kind of bonus that does not require spend, such as referring a friend. So your friend may have to do spend, but it's what you get for referring a friend that gets taxed. And that's true, whether it's cash back or points, you will get taxed on

that. And the referral bonus is either way. Yeah. But otherwise it's viewed as a rebate on spend and rebates are not considered income. So that's where that theory comes from anyway. So yeah, I think that's a great point to make too. And that's why I feel like the cash would be particularly attractive to me. Although I say that and I would probably rather earn the cash through a few business platinum bonuses or those types of things. Now, the other thing that I think is kind of interesting, by the way, is I said I'd probably take the 26, right? But then I look at my own spending patterns and I've earned a lot of miles. And just over the last couple of years, I've both earned and used more than 2 million, not maybe in one year, maybe in one year. I don't know whether or not I've earned or used 2 million points in one year, but it's got to have been close. Certainly over two years, I've earned and redeemed more than two million miles uh so i'm a little hypocritical because i have not put all that on the bank of america cash back card i have

done it on miles cards but i have also spread it over multiple welcome bonuses so there's that for what that's yeah yeah um but you know it does come back to the fact that if you are someone who's likely to spend a lot of points, hopefully you're doing it wisely and you're getting a lot more than one cent per point value. And so you're probably going to end up with much better off if you spend them all than with the cash back. On the other hand, if they just sit there for a long time, your cash back is hopefully earning some good interest or you could invest it in the stock market or whatever. Can't do that with your points. So, yeah. And I think that's why I'm kind of like, ah, man, I'd be really tempted to

pick cash back on that if I had a million dollars worth of spend out of nowhere. I mean, assuming that I'm not going to be barred from doing further spending in future years also i mean if my regular spending right now my regular spending or the ways that i spend anyway meet my points needs so i feel like that extra boon i would probably rather fix cash i think but uh anyway so that i think that was an interesting discussion though and i'll be interested to hear from readers what would you do okay the million. I think that's really something I look forward to reading about in the comments. So wherever you're listening to this, if you're listening to it on, you know, podcast platform or on YouTube or whatever, make sure you like and thumbs up, you know, leave us some feedback, but let us know in the comments, what would you do with your million dollars spent?

How would you spend it? What would you do differently? What do you think we got wrong? I'm curious about all of those things. All right. Yeah. By the way, by the way, on a, on a, on a past episode, we asked people if you could only have one card, what would it be? And I believe most of the responses were like venture X to get like just two points per dollar everywhere. So that kind of plays into this too. It does. It does. Yeah. I mean, it follows along with

the strategy that you're talking about anyway, or one of the basic strategies here that I think is potentially sound anyway. Okay. So I think that brings us to this week's question of the week. And the question of the week this week, I don't know the answer to, so I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping that you do. It was a good question that came in on the referral post. So again, I mentioned earlier that I republished, did an extensive update and republished a post about how to do cross-brand referrals. Because we get emails, I just got several emails in the last week from people who didn't seem to know that you could have, for instance, an Amex Platinum card and refer somebody else to a Hilton card or to a Delta card or to the Amex gold card. And so I republished a post about how to do that from all the various cards, because you can also have a consumer card

and refer someone to a business card or have a business card and refer someone to a consumer card. Amex is a lot different than most other card issuers, or at least has been different in that way for several years now. And it's really generous. If you've got an Amex card, it's pretty easy to find somebody probably that's willing to or interested in one of the Amex cards. It doesn't have to be the one you got. So a question came in on that and said, question on referring the business platinum card. I own 97% of a business and player two, my spouse, owns 3%. Can we refer to each other or will it not work because it's the same LLC with the same EIN? So if player one owns 97% of the business and player two owns 3%, can player two that owns 3%, essentially the question boils down to,

can player two that owns 3% open a credit card in that business name? Do you know what percentage of them? Yeah, I mean, I think that's really the crux of the question. I don't know the answer either, but really the question comes down to not can you refer to one or the other, but can the second person open a card for the same business and get, you know, and get the, the, the welcome bonus offer and everything, uh, would, would they, would they be eligible for it? But it's, it's a two, I thought that was the crux of the question too, when I just said it, but now that I think about it more, it's, it's a two-parter. So there's that. And then there's

also the, is that going to be a self-referral? Like, because we've learned over the years that Amex doesn't seem to like it if you refer yourself. So if I refer myself for the card, that's a no-no and Amex might take away my ability to refer people. So I think that's another piece of this here. If the second person is going to apply under the same business, is that going to be treated like a self-referral? So I obviously don't know this for sure, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be considered a self-referral because amex tracks the the card ownership um based on your your ssn or you know whatever your your individual ideas and and not your business and so i don't think they would see it that way again that's just my educated guess yeah i couldn't say for sure um what i'm less sure about is is like if you uh you have two people applying under the same business for the same card

are they going to try to apply that like lifetime rule across people because the same business probably it probably would be fine. I think this person's good to go. Probably. That's my guess. I think you'd be safest referring them for a different card. So if you have the business platinum card- It would certainly be safer, sure. It would be safer referring them to a business gold or something like that.

To another business platinum, okay, Greg says he thinks maybe, and we don't know. So that's interesting that neither one of us knew the answer. I thought it was a good question because I'm surprised that I haven't heard that question before. Nobody's asked me that question about essentially, if you own a very small percentage of the business, can you get the card and get referred by the person who owns the majority? Because we talk all the time about referrals within a household, right? My wife refers me to cards and I refer her to cards. So that type of activity seems to be fine. And it has been for years and years. We've done it that way. I know you've done it that way in your household. Lots of other people do. So that seems fine with Amex. I mean, yeah, maybe that's a good guess that why would this be treated significantly differently,

as long as they're willing to approve a card for someone who only owns 3% of the business and that part I don't know anything about. So I'm not sure whether or not they would do that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That brings us to the end of this week's episode. If you enjoyed the episode and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox

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