Frequent Miler on the Air - Life after Citi | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep361 | 6-5-26

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

In today's episode, Greg shares the story of how Citi shut down his accounts and what's next for him. (What will he do without his beloved Prestige card?) Read more about Greg's situation with Cit here.Giant Mailbag(01:06) - Russel discusses how Barclays American Airlines card is not a way back to Citi(02:57) - Flyguy talks about also being shutdown by Citi for paying the bill from multiple checking accounts in a single cycleBonvoyed(04:53) - American Airlines blocking close-in domestic award availability to partners here(07:58) - Alaska Airlines: Increased partner award fees & no points or status points on saver fares here(13:36) - What are Hilton points worth? Find out here(21:00) - Hyatt reasonable redemption value previewAwards, Points, and More(23:26) - Vacations by Marriott here(28:42) - World of Hyatt to launch early access bookings for elites and cardholders June 30th.(30:01) - Credit card referral offers(32:53) - Learning to love Instacart credits hereMain Event: Life after Citi(37:25) - Greg's shutdown storyRead more about Greg's situation with Cit here(52:12) - There was a brief window to transfer points(58:40) - Globe Card (from Aviator Silver) opened shortly after shutdown(1:03:41) - What's lost and what to do about it(1:07:51) - Citi's unique transfer partners(1:11:42) - AA status: Will pursue AK status instead(1:14:38) - Priority Pass restaurants: US Bank Altitude Connect(1:16:58) - Grocery(1:23:44) - DiningSubscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast NetworkFrequent Miler Beginner's Guidehttps://frequentmiler.com/start-here/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyscape.com. On today's show, we're going to discuss the plummeting value of Hilton points. We took a look at Vacations by Marriott, and it's looking interesting. And city shut down all of my accounts. Why? And what's next? Frequent Milo on the air starts now. Today's main event, life after city.

Citibank shut down my accounts. In today's main event, I'm going to tell the story and we'll discuss what's next for me. What am I going to do without my beloved city prestige card? Yeah, ouch, my heart hurts for you in that scenario. Greg published a post about it this week. We'll talk more about it in just a little bit. But I want to remind you, if you want to jump ahead to that topic or you want to come back to something later on, just check the show notes for the full description with the timestamps.

And wherever you're watching or listening to this, please don't forget to give us a like, a thumbs up, leave us a review, leave us some stars, subscribe to our channels. We appreciate that. Thank you very much for that. Let's drag out this week's Giant Mailbank. In today's Giant Mail, I'm not the only one who had been shut down by Citibank. So I have a couple of data points submitted by readers and listeners that I think are worth sharing. One came from Russell before I posted about my shutdown.

Russell had reached out via email to say the following. A data point for you. I was shut down by City in 2016 after a long run of spend and paying off using debit by phone. With the transfer of cards from Barclays, I was curious if this might be a backdoor way in. And it appeared so as they issued the new card. but on activating the card and registering online, I immediately got a your account is closed email and the red banner when logging in. Bummer.

Okay. Well, thanks for that disappointing data point, Russell. You know, I heard a similar story from someone else to that had been shut down by City in the past and they received their globe card converted from the Barclays aviator silver, activated it, and boom, said the same thing. day later got shut down, which seemed so strange to me because there were some people, and it was like a pretty small percentage, just my perception, who were not converted to City, whose Berkeley cards stayed with Barclays.

My assumption, when we heard those data points, was that those were people that City knew they didn't want to do business with and was like, no, no, no, we don't even want that account. And Barclays kept it. I assumed that that was people who had been shut down by City for the most part. It seems weird to me. Why would City take the account just to close it as soon as you activate the card? It's such an odd thing. But luckily so far, I think that hasn't been your experience yet as we record this.

Yeah, we'll talk about that in the main event. But moving on, Fly Guy wrote in response to my post about my shutdown. And Fly Guy wrote, I was shut down by City in 2017, so a year later than Russell, for paying my bill from multiple checking accounts in a single cycle. I've since held a corporate city card, but never been able to get a new personal or business card. My transitioned aviator card was canceled several days after activating my profile with city. So very similar to what happened with Russell, but for Fly Guy, it happened several days later instead of immediately. Yeah, I think that's an interesting data point because I've heard that occasionally from people who've been shut down,

who have cited having paid for multiple checking accounts in a single billing cycle. which, you know, on the one hand, I guess you could say sound suspect. On the other hand, it was something I wouldn't have necessarily thought twice about doing before I heard somebody getting shut down for that. I would have thought, whether they get paid, they get paid. And if it comes out of my account, what difference does it make? And I think for the most part, for most people, it probably doesn't matter. I think a lot of those types of things is more so like once you get some eyes on the account or something that's flagged as being irregular than if other irregular flags go up to. then I think your your chances of getting shut down are higher.

And to be clear, like in a lot of these cases, we'll talk more about this probably during the main event. But I think people who have no reason to worry will hear stories like that and worry. And I think if you don't know that you have a reason to be worried, probably like paying from two accounts in one cycle is likely not to be such a problem for you. Or a lot of these other things are less likely. to be an issue, I think, anyway, for most folks. We'll talk more about that during the main event. I imagine interesting stuff. Thank you for sharing those data points, Russell and Fly Guy. All right. Let's move forward then to Bonvoid. So how has American Airlines bonvoid us this week? They started blocking close-in award availability from partners. So what that means is, you know, you can book American Airlines flights with Alaska Airlines,

miles with British Airways, miles with, you know, almost any of their partners. And all of a sudden, they started blocking those award bookings six days in advance for domestic nonstop flights. So, you know, it's possible that this is some kind of error, but it's consistent with things that other airlines do, that American Airlines dabbled in doing years ago. So I, you know, it's possible. do think this is probably intentional and it's also pretty exact. Like you could look at a flight that is 145 hours from now and book it with Alaska miles, but if you wait another hour and try to book that same flight, suddenly it'll become unavailable to book through that partner. So it's very programmatic and seems to be exactly at 144 hours where this occurs.

It does only seem to affect non-stops, as far as we can tell. So, for example, I looked at flights from Detroit to Charlotte, which are usually wide open for partner awards. And they were blocked, 144, up to 144 hours in advance. However, a one-stop, like through Philadelphia, for example, to Charlotte, I could book with Alaska Miles. So that's just one example of why it seems to be only non-stops and as far as we can tell, only domestic flights as well. Yeah, that's a bummer because obviously those shorter distance flights are a great value a lot of times through Alaska. And I love having that kind of thing in my back pocket for those unexpected situations where something gets canceled. You get stuck somewhere.

And then you're not booking 144 hours in advance, but rather than the last minute when prices are otherwise very expensive. And that can be a great value time to use miles. And so it's frustrating and disappointing that this change has happened. Yeah. Yeah. Now, of course, you can still book with American Airlines miles close in. But, you know, for those short flights like Detroit to Charlotte, if you could book with Alaska, it would only cost 4,500 miles in economy. American Airlines usually charges 10,000 miles for that same flight.

And so it's a pretty big difference in how much they charge. Yeah. And more so I think just overall a bummer that we've kind of seen this trend of programs becoming stingier and stingier with the space that they release to partners. And that's that's unfortunate. It's unfortunate to see. But if you're able to plan in advance, you can still score some terrific deals with Alaska miles on short distance American Airlines flights.

However, those deals might not be quite as good as they once were because Alaska has increased their partner award fees. And so for starters, that's the first piece of news here. whereas in the past, booking, let's start with the website, would cost $12.50 if you're booking it online and it's a partner award. So if you're using your Alaska Miles to fly American or Condor or Cathay Pacific or whoever, whatever partner airline, it costs you $12.50 per person as we record this, but it's increasing to $20 per person in July of 26. So that's an increase there. Call center, if you book via call center, it goes from 15. to now 30 starting in July 26. So yeah, yeah. Of course, you know, for most of us, it's the partner award online booking that's going to be the thing that affects us most. And it, you know, it's one of those things that makes the summit card more valuable because the summit card, when you pay with a summit card for an award booking fee, it, they don't charge

you that partner award fee. Yeah. And, you know, that's something that already, it was funny because we didn't ask us anything the day before we recorded this and somebody asked me about sort of backup flight bookings that I make sometimes and how much money I have tied up and taxes and fees. And this is one where a couple of times I've hesitated and not booked the backup flight through Alaska because $12.50 wouldn't bother me. But $12 and $50 times five people, then I'm like, oh, that's like I'm committing to losing $72 and $50 on this backup plan. And I don't like that as much. So, uh, you know, I say five people because I've lately been traveling with five pretty often. My mother-in-law comes on a lot of trips with us and that's nice. So, uh, but the

increase in fees here now, 20 a person. And then we're talking $100 of this five of us traveling. That's that that doesn't feel nice. And that does increase the appeal of the summit card, like you said. It does. Um, now a nifty trick you can do if you don't have the summit card and you travel with the same people regularly is when you have an award booked and that you're not going to fly instead of canceling it change it and by changing it it doesn't they don't charge you a new you know fee per person so if you book a you know a flight right now for you and the people you travel with for you know as far out in the schedule as as you can get and then you fix figure out, well, I can't actually, I'm not going to actually fly that route, but I have a new booking where I do want to book it. You could change to that new booking rather than canceling and rebooking.

Great tip. Great tip. Sadly, cue up the sad music here. Save or fares will no longer earn either redeemable points or status points. So bookings made after June 11, 2026 and flown on or after August 1st of 2026 won't earn Atmos rewards points or status points. if you're in essentially the basic economy fair. They call those Sabre on Alaska. Yeah, I see a lot of confusion about that because we typically talk about awards bookable on partners as saver award fairs. This is not about that at all. This is about Alaska's basic economy

that they call saver fairs. And yeah, so pretty, you know, basically they're doing what many other airlines do, which is for the equivalent of basic economy, they're going to no longer offer points or elite earnings. And that's too bad. But at the same time, it sort of brings them more in line with their competition than dropping them below it, I guess. Yeah, I guess.

As I've said in the past, I think it's short-sighted to not reward the people who are booking those fairs because the people booking those fairs are probably your opportunity to try to rope in a customer to make them loyal because they aren't yet. They're just loyal to price at this point. So this is your opportunity to take that person from a person who is lonely loyal to price to become loyal to your program. Like how much are you really saving in cost by not awarding miles on those? Because most of those people probably aren't redeeming the miles.

So it's breakage anyway for the most part. And the few who do, that means they became engaged in your program. That's good news, right? I don't know. I think it's really short-sighted. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the flip side would be if there were a lot of high-level elites that got there through booking these basic economy saver affairs, maybe Alaska would look at that and say, oh, it's costing us a lot because if they bought all those flights on regular economy, you know, we would have earned this much more. but I find it hard to believe that people who are that interested in elite status would be booking that many saver fares, you know, from the get-go because you're not

going to get your status benefits. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. You know, I assume that they ran the numbers and have a compelling case for it, but I don't know if that's true. Yeah, all right. Well, interesting. So it's worth knowing anyway that you're not going to earn. miles or status on those effectively basic economy fairs from Alaska.

All right. Next up in awards points and more Hilton points. What are they worth in 2026? So Tim recently redid all of our reasonable redemption value information for Hilton. And so I say that because our reasonable redemption values are based on a pretty complex set of data these days. And there's quite a few different components. So if you want to kind of hunt out what it,

really all means for you, you got a lot of different options for numbers in our post about reasonable redemption values, right? Yeah. So, you know, we use data from, there's a great hotel award search tool called Gondola. Gondola is a hotel search tool that shows you both prices and award prices for hotels. And they've made their data available to us. So they have data for hotels for, you know, over the next year for almost all hotels in each major program. And they've given us access to that data so that we can look at things like what was the median value of points across a whole year, across all the properties.

And so that's been a great source of data. And so Tim has been periodically looking at Gondola's data. to refresh our reasonable redemption values. And what's happened with Hilton, very sadly, is it keeps dropping. Two years ago, it was the RRV, reasonable redemption value for Hilton, was right around the half cent mark. And now it's dropped all the way to 0.35, so about a third of a cent. That's a, it was a 27% drop in just two years.

So that's ouchy. That means the average, the median price you're likely to pay if you're not cherry picking awards has dropped tremendously. And if you ever bought points at half a cent each, figuring, well, worst case, I'm going to get about that much value, that's no longer anywhere near worst case. You can actually lose quite a lot if you're not very careful. Um, is there good news in the dataset a little bit? Tim, Tim looked at different brands to see, you know, is the reasonable redemption value different by hotel brand? And it is. If you're looking at the LXR, the high end, that's one of Hilton's very high end brands, he saw a nearly 0.6, so 0.59 reasonable redemption value there or median value for your points. So you can still get,

very good value there. Walda Fristoria has 0.46, which is still worse than the RRV was two years ago, but it's very close to what it was. And it goes down from there as you look at different brands and the worst, Hilton Grand Vacations, 0.23. Yeah, that's rough. That's rough. Yeah.

And one, it's rough because that's considering it versus the cost. of cash bookings. And if you really want to stay at a Hilton Grand Vacations place, and you haven't done a timeshare presentation in a couple of years, you can probably get a much cheaper deal to stay there and earn a bunch of Hilton points. So it's even a worse value for Hilton Grand Vacations than it looks like for anybody who hasn't been to Hilton Grand Vacations in a while. So yeah, that's really a sad, sad valuation there. It really is. Now, of course, you can still get really good value cherry picking awards. I mean, there are still properties out there that, you know,

costs so much per night that even at a very high point rate, you're getting a good deal. Or now these are harder to find where the Hilton point price is so low that even with a low cash rate, you're still getting a really good deal. But at the 90th percentile, what we're saying is 0.52. So that's decent enough. as a, what you get if you, if you only look at the top 10%, top 10%, meaning best value 10% for your points. But even that, that's a, that's down from nearly 0.7 two years ago. So from 0.7 to around 0.5 at the 90th percentile, it again shows how drastic the drop has

been in value. It really has been. And, you know, kind of interestingly, this makes the hundred percent. hunt for Hilton free night certificates, I think more interesting, perhaps, because the free night certificates are still uncapped as of now. So if you can get a few of those, they can be really valuable because there are some really nice properties, especially with the SLH properties out there. There's some really nice places to stay that cost a lot of money with cash and now cost a lot of Hilton points, so they're not wildly exciting with Hilton points, but with free night

certificates, they can be a pretty screaming deal. So, you know, that's, yeah, the, yeah, no, that's true. Flipside is that the way to get those, there are some ways to get it by upgrading and downgrading cards and stuff, but most people, many people get them through Hilton card spend. And there's different cards that have different thresholds, like $15,000 or $1,000. $30,000 of spend that get you a free night certificate. And one of the, you know, one of the things that make the math work towards that spend is that you're not only getting the free night certificate, you're also getting the points earned along the way. And now that piece of it, the points earned along the way, is worth a lot less than it was a year ago and much less than two years ago.

Absolutely. And I have a hard time finding good uses of Hilton points these days. So I just put most of them into booking an extra night where we're using some free night certificates at an SLH place that I'm excited about hopefully staying at this summer. I found another place that hopefully will be pretty cool that's ordinarily, I don't know, somewhere around $2,000 a night. So we're using free night certificates for that. And so it'll be like a really outsized. But that must be like, you know, top 95th percentile type of a redemort. Although I'm just like. I say that, it's not, because with points, it's closer to that 90th percentile number. And that's, you know, that's where, yeah, yeah, this is a, I don't know, a conundrum. And I think I introduced this as being part of awards points and more, but it was really part of Bonvoid and clearly because these points just keep getting less and less valuable. And it makes the Hilton, collecting Hilton points just less and less interesting. Yeah. Our Bonvoid section of today's show has been really chock full. We had American Airlines blocking close in. domestic awards. We have from partner bookings. We have Alaska Airlines doing a few things with fees and their saver fares. And we've got Hilton dropping in value. We've got one more, sort of a preview. We don't yet know what's going to happen yet with Hyatt's reasonable redemption value. But Tim is working hard on creating, you know, weeding through the data and figuring out what the new RRV is for Hyatt after they've changed their award charts and his first reaction

to what data he's seen is it's grim. So he threw out a number like around 1.5 is what we're probably looking at, which compared to Hilton sounds great. I was going to say, come on, you say, grim. Grim is a little hyperbolic here. It's still the best of any of the hotel program. It's definitely going to drop. And so there's no doubt that it's disappointing.

But I actually take, if it turns out to be about 1.5 cents, I take that as reasonable news, not good news, not terrible news. But, you know, because I look at that and I say, well, that means I'm still, if that's the RRV, that's sort of like the median point, then half of all redemptions are still better than that. and you know, that's, that's where I want to be in that half. And that's usually where I'm looking to be is in that top half. And so it's not a huge change for me in the sense that I'll probably still redeem a lot of high at points. But we'll see because I'm interested in seeing all the data and where that comes from. Because if like the things in the top 50th, you know, the top half essentially of redemptions

are all like, you know, high at place. If that's what's drawing the outsized value, then I'll be probably less excited. because I mean, I'm happy to use my points for a high at place now and then, but that's not generally the property I'm looking for where I want to get super outsized value. I want to be able to get two cents per point or more at some of the luxury brands. And I'll be happy with one and a half at Hyatt Place or whatever. So we'll see how it all shakes out. I'll be curious to see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. And that's really good, good point that it's not necessarily like devastating news or anything. And in fact,

I think we guessed. I remember us having a conversation where we threw out 1.5 as a guess of where it would go. I don't remember if that was on this show or not. But that seems about right. So we'll see. We'll see. Hopefully it'll be that or higher, but we don't know yet. Hopefully.

All right. So now let's get away from the bad news for a second and just talk awards points and more after all. So first up in awards points and more, Vacations by Marriott has a promotion out where you can earn 20,000 bonus points for booking a vacation. package that includes a stay of five or more consecutive nights. You got a book by June 30th and travel between June 1st of this month and December 31st, 2026. So again, book by June 30th, travel by December 31st has to be five nights or more. Now, when I saw this, I thought probably a total snoozer because booking a vacation package through Marriott's probably not a good deal. But the very first one that I brought up, I ran the numbers and I was like,

actually if you wanted to go to the Bahamas for a few days and you were going to book a flight in a hotel, this is actually a really good deal. It was actually a few hundred dollars less than what you'd pay to book them separately. So, and actually I should also mention that I, well, we've talked in the past about how vacation packages can be a decent deal when you book via the airline sometimes. There are times where, I don't know, Greg's talked about, it's probably been a while, but you've talked about how sometimes you'd book a throwaway rental car as part of a event. vacation package because then the airline would drop the fare significantly because they can. You know, they don't want to advertise a lower fare publicly, but in a package deal, it's more opaque. And so they obviously have the ability to set the pricing for the airfare wherever they want. And so we've always assumed that they're cutting that off of the airfare end of things.

And probably they are. So with a Marriott vacation package, I would assume they could cut whatever they want off the hotel stay, but they're still going to have to pay American Airlines, whatever it is that American Airlines wants for the flight or whatever. airline it might be. And that probably is true, but a piece that I found interesting here is not only was it much cheaper to book the vacation package via Marriott than it was to book the hotel and the flight separately, but even the upgrade from basic economy to Maine Cabin was significantly cheaper through Marriott. So, you know, when you added that on, it did add some costs, but not nearly as much as it, as the difference between basically economy and Maine Cabin booking directly through

Americans. So I found that kind of surprising that. I guess they're cutting even more off the hotel when you upgrade to me. No, I don't think so. I think what's happening is, you know, when I've had success with vacation packages in the past, it wasn't always with vacation packages sold by the airline. I think that the vacation package websites have access to special like consolidator fares through the airlines. Now, they don't have them for all routes and destinations, but they do for certain ones. And I've tended to see them more in like traditional vacation-y destinations where the airfare drops down. And that would Bahamas make sense. Hawaii is where you might see it.

Whereas if you're just looking for, oh, I'm going to fly from New York to Seattle or something, I bet you wouldn't see the prices be very good in that situation. So, yeah, so if you're flying, especially with like a family where, where discounted airfare, you know, the amount of discount you get is sort of multiplied by how many people are together in that package. You can do really well with travel packages in general. What often hurts you, though, is if you are going to book the hotel part and that's going to be like, Like, that's potentially adding cost over what you would have paid if you had just booked the hotel in, you know, separately. And that's where there's a whole dance.

And perhaps Marriott has the opportunity to cut on both ends, right? So if they're getting those consolidator fares on the airfare, maybe they can also give good deal on the hotels, since these are limited to Marriott hotels. I don't know that to be true. I haven't done any investigation in this. The one thing I did look into is I was curious, normally when you book a vacation package, You're eligible for like airline miles and stuff, but you're not usually eligible for hotel points. But Marriott's website says that you are eligible for points and elite nights when you book these. So that's that's pretty interesting for anyone who's interested in Marriott elite status.

Yeah, this isn't going to be a mattress run type of situation. You know, you're not going to get the 20,000 Marriott points aren't going to make up for the cost of your five-night vacation package, probably. And I say probably because I didn't look real hard. maybe there's like some hotel in Bali that's $30 a night and and a flight on like some discount carrier because that part of the world has a whole bunch of really cheap discount carrier maybe there's some package out there where you get close to it being a mattress from but unlikely unlikely yes so so it's not that it's just more so that I found it interesting that the prices were good yeah yeah yeah that's what I think too that I think it's more like hey it's worth and

investigating vacations by merit, even without this promotion. This promotion made us put eyes on it and see. And so if we see that it often has good deals, you know, that that's very interesting. Of course, getting 20,000 bonus points is a nice extra. All right. Next up in awards points and more, World of Hyatt is going to launch early access bookings for elites and cardholders on June 30th. So globalist explorers and World of Hyatt credit cardholders will be able to book awards up to 13 months in advance.

others will only be able to book awards up to 12 months in advance. But this isn't necessarily early access to booking. So I think you've kind of discovered here that this is really just more so a devaluation for people who don't have elite status or a credit card, right? It seems to be. What we've been told is that people can currently book 13 months in advance. And I think it depends on the property. I don't think all properties are available 13 months. advance, and I'm sure that'll still be true after June 30th.

But so what I think this is really doing is taking away one month of the booking window from people who don't have Explorer status or better or a Hyatt credit card. So is that good news or bad news? I mean, obviously it's bad news for people who don't have either of those things. I guess it's a tiny bit of good news for people who do because maybe you have slightly better access to award availability. Yeah, hopefully. We can hope for that.

Next up, and awards point some more. We have some new credit card referral offers out. Yeah. So, you know, it's always good when more opportunities are available for referring people and getting rewarded for referring people. And so we're seeing some new stuff.

So, for example, Bank of America hasn't traditionally offered the ability to refer friends and get points or rewards from doing that. But some people, not all and not me, have been targeted with the ability to refer friends to Bank of America credit cards. And they're getting, they're being offered $100 for each friend that they refer up to a limit of $500 total rewards each year in doing that. Apparently, these referral offers are only available through the Bank of America app. not the website, at least for now. So it feels to me a little bit like they're kind of like testing the rollout of this

and it's not fully rolled out. So it may be that, you know, maybe it'll roll out to everybody eventually. Yeah. And actually, I think that even what you said there is an indication of the rollout being kind of uneven because Stephen had found that he could only find a referral link, I think, via app. But my wife was able to generate a referral link via the desktop that showed up in her. desktop account. So, oh, nice. So yeah. So I think it's probably varying from person to person.

And I say my wife was able to from one card and I didn't have it on mine. And so it's obviously very variable as to what's going to be available. So but good news to see that. I mean, it's been a long time that hasn't been available. So if you do have it and you're able to refer player to or other friends or family, terrific. They're not the only ones. Windham is out. The Berkeley's Windham card is out with Tar. targeted referral offers via email, I guess, to earn 10,000 points per successful referral, up to 50,000 points. Yep, yep.

It's better than nothing. And Chase has increased the limit on their ink card referrals. So if you want to refer someone from a Chase Inc. or Sapphire business card to any of those, any Chase Inc. or Sapphire business card, you will earn 40,000 points for a successful referral up to a maximum of 200,000 points. So until recently, that limit was 100,000. So now you can refer more friends and get rewarded for it. Also, while this changed previously, it's just worth reiterating. It used to be a, you would earn 20,000 points. That's now 40,000 points. So overall, they've been upping the referrals for these ink cards, which is great. Yeah, yep, that is good news.

And on the note of the ink cards, that's actually a good transition to, I wrote a post this week about Instacart, learning to love my Instacart credits. And the reason I mentioned the ink cards is because those no fee Chase Inc. Business Cash and Chase Inc. Business Unlimited cards come with monthly Instacart Credit if you have Instacart Plus and some months of free Instacart Plus. And in fact, lots of Chase co-branded cards. Most or all of the co-branded cards, I think, have monthly Instacart credits. And so this is something that I had kind of ignored for a long time. I thought, you know, it's not really worth the time because I get these cards that have like a $10 monthly Instacart credit. The Inc cards, it's 20, but even still, I was like, ah, but I don't live somewhere where I can get

Instacart delivered. So I can't order for delivery anyway. It's probably not worth my time. But over the last several months, I finally opened my eyes to this. And I say that because, I mean, you wrote a terrific post about stacking Instacard a long time ago that I read. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's awesome. But again, thought, that doesn't really apply to me. It's not really worth it. And then I finally started using them. And I said, I'm saving a whole bunch of money here every month that I was leaving on the table. And yeah, there are some fees. And yeah, I got to place a bunch of separate orders. But it works out really well. We're saving like half on our, you know, on at least $130 worth of groceries every month. And that's not nothing. I mean, for people that will stay here

in debate over should I earn three points per dollar on this purchase or four points per dollar and should I pay a $95 annual fee or $3.20, but you know, we're going to argue about that kind of thing. I should probably be getting my $65 a month in savings, right? So just to remind people, we'll have links in the show notes. We'll have a link to Nick's post and I'm sure that post links to my post. But just at a high level, there's a lot of chase cards that give you either $10 a month or $20 a month in Instacart credits. And while it's not obvious how to sort of stack all that together, there are ways to to do that.

And so I think it's worth probably reading both posts to see different ways of doing it. And I was very interested in Nick's post because it sort of highlighted some things I hadn't thought about it. I'd been mostly limiting my uses to my $20 credits and not using my $10 credits. And Nick points out some ways that even the $10 credits can be worth using. So I need to think. Yeah, I think so. I think if you can do pick up.

And to me, like some people said, oh, but the savings aren't worth it. If, you know, some stores mark up the prices. There are some stores that don't. You get in-store pricing or whatever. And so obviously that's ideal. But then if you have a situation, even where the store marks up the price, if you do the math and you're doing multiple of these, and if you're doing one a month, it's probably not worth it.

But if you're doing multiple of these, it works out to be decent still, not terrible, but still a decent savings. And so we just place them all for pick up one time. And to me, there's the benefit, both A, that I'm saving a decent chunk on that grocery pickup. And B, I didn't have to go into the grocery store. I didn't have to walk around looking for stuff. I didn't have to pull stuff off the shelf that I didn't actually need, but just saw and made an impulse purchase on. Somebody else gets it and they carry it to my trunk and I'm saving money. Like that's ideal. Yeah.

That's ideal to me. So for me, for me, I've just been ordering for delivery cat food. There's a very specific type of cat food we get. Cats old and it's only eating one type of canned cat food. And luckily, both of the big box pet stores in our town are the ones that don't mark up prices. And they're actually cheaper through. they're cheaper than the normal stores I frequent where I'd probably, if I didn't have this Instacart thing, I would just be lazy and be like, well, I'm in the grocery store.

I'm just going to pick these up here. And I'd pay more, significantly more, if I did that. And because of all these credits, I get all this cat food basically for free. I haven't had any situations where they delivered the wrong kind of cat food or anything like that. So that's all worked out really well for me. Yeah, that's great. definitely take a look at that post. Take a look at Greg's post. Start using those. If you have those credits to use, get out there and use them. That's my moral of my story. All right. And we'll be right

back after this with our main event. Jamie writes in, love the show, but I have no idea what you're talking about. Please help. That's true. Well, this can be confusing. And luckily for you, Jamie, we have a beginner's guide that can help. You want to go to frequentmiler.com slash start here to check out our full beginner's guide. And we're back with today's main event, Life After City. So Greg published a post on the blog this week about how City shut down all of his cards and he lost access to some of his favorites. And so there's been a lot of comments on that discussion and there was a lot of interesting

information in there. So what we want to do is I want to talk to Greg and get some questions answered, talk a little bit about what happened, how you found out that your accounts were shut down and and then look a little bit at, okay, well, what did we lose and what are we going to do moving forward to kind of get past that now? And I say we as though it's we and it's not. I'm just trying to be in there with you, Greg, because how did you find out even that your city accounts were shut down? Did you get like a notification? You got a text message saying frequent miler, we're done with you. No more city cards. How did this all go down? Nothing like that. There was no message, no email,

no notification, nothing. So I was just, I was actually in town nearby. And at last minute, I remembered that, before coming home, I remembered that I was low on something that I should pick up from the local grocery store. So I just walked in and I bought like, it was something like two yogurts or something. It was really tiny little purchase that I didn't really have to make, but I'm so glad I did. I'll explain why in a minute, but I go to checkout, and as usual at grocery stores, I would use my custom cash card to pay.

So use my Apple pay. I have my custom cash card there. I try to check out, and the cashier goes, that was declined. I'm like, I went. Try it again, decline. So then I was like, okay, that's all right. I've got two custom cash cards. I'll use the other one.

Declined. Wait, wait, wait. Did your spidey sense? go up at all when the first one got declined the second time where you're like, when you pulled up the second custom cash, were you thinking it was going to go through or were you just trying to confirm? I wasn't yet.

Yeah. I just, I wasn't yet at the point of thinking that something was you know, wide or wrong. I just thought I, because I've had situations with Apple Pay where for whatever reason like it didn't go through properly and I've had to do it a few times. So I just thought something like that was happening.

And, um, but, with the second one, that's one. It's like, oh, oh, something's really wrong here. Especially when I picked a card from another bank to pay and it went through no problem. That's when I was like, this seems to be a city thing going on. So I opened the city app on my phone. And first thing that pops up is basically a promotion saying, you've been selected to increase your credit line on one of my cards. So I was like, well, that can't be good news, except that right underneath that pop-up, I could see account closed for, I think it was like my double cash or something.

And then I click through, you know, pass that pop-up, and I see every single one. I had, I was about to say have, I had a lot of city cards all closed. Oh, no. That's. That's got to be a terrible feeling when you see that. Wasn't good. Thanks for confirming that. Thanks for confirming that. So, all right. So, I mean, all of them were shut down.

I mean, but then what about, so I've heard in the past from people who had other folks listed as an authorized user, for instance. And their authorized users were shut down also. Did that happen to you? Was there anybody else affected by your shutdown? Yeah. I didn't even think to look at this at first. But Tim, I think, was the one in a Slack conversation with our team where I said, all my cards were shut down. I think someone asked, how about, you know, the rest of the people in your family.

And my son doesn't have any city cards, so there's nothing to look at there. But my wife had won. She had recently signed up for the Strat Elite card and gotten the welcome bonus and everything. and just, I think, just the week before this happened, she had moved 100,000, which is the max, of her city points to my account so that I could transfer those plus others of my city points to preferred hotels to the I prefer program while it was still available to transfer at that one to four ratio. So this was right before that ability to transfer one to four got cut off by City, got cut off by everybody. It got changed to one to two. And it was also before City stopped

allowing transfers of points from one person to another. So I did all that on time. But yeah, we logged into her account and her strata leak card was also closed. Oh, okay. So what happened? What caused this? I mean, you decided that they were shut down, but you don't seem outraged. It doesn't sound like, I mean, you didn't mention that you called city right away to find out what was going on. So that sort of hints to me that maybe this wasn't as much of a surprise what's going on here. What happened? I had learned in confidence about a technique for increasing card spend and the technique worked especially well with Citibank for a variety of reasons.

And it's not something that I really did much with, but it looked like the technique. was going to end, end of January. And so I started, I started greatly ramping it up, especially on a business card. So I had one city business, American Airlines card. Now, let me say, had I thought, had I stepped back and said, is it worth the risk of doing this? Had I even, had it even occurred to me to question that, and it should have occurred to me to question it, But had it, I would have said, no, it's not worth it. But sometimes, you know, I think everybody at some point in their life get into something that's kind of exciting for whatever reason. And you just kind of move forward without really evaluating it well.

I expect that gamblers know that feeling very well. Point is I went in hard, especially on that city business card that earns American Airlines points and status points. And I'd kind of done the math, say, like, how much would I have to do before this ends to get Platinum Pro elite status with American? And I figured that out and did it that hard. And at the end of January, it turned out that this technique wasn't fully dead. So I kept going with this on the city business card for another month and a half before I think the charges started getting declined. but I thought it had more to do with the technique than a problem with my card at the time. I don't know.

I didn't really think much about it. I just was like, okay, that game is over for me, whatever. I unfortunately, I know a lot of people, a lot of listeners want to know the full details about what this technique was, but it was told in confidence. And while it's mostly dead, it's not entirely dead now. There are still things people can do. I'm not going to break that confidence. that's been something I hold dear is that if someone tells me something and asks me not to talk about it,

I'm not going to. So I have to apologize for that. I know that can be frustrating as a listener here, but there's nothing I can do about that. Anyway, I was doing something that I knew Citibank. The point is, I was doing something that earned lots of points for very low cost. I knew City would not like it if they looked at my account. I cycled my limit a few times with that business account. And what that means is I ran out of credit limit.

And so I paid off the card mid cycle a couple times to give me more credit available so I could keep doing this within the month of January. And that probably got eyes on my account. And when they saw the charges, you know, I think that led to the shutdown. I was hoping that if eyes got on my account, It would be only for the city business card because that has its own login separate from all my consumer cards. But, you know, I lost that bet. So it's all on me. Very unlike I was shut down a few years ago by Capital One with their venture card where I had literally done nothing suspicious, but I got shut down.

This was very different where I knew what I was doing was risky. I should have not done it. And, you know, I paid the price and that's fair, in my opinion. I want to point out two things about what you just said. The first thing I want to point out is you mentioned that you knew you were doing something that the bank wouldn't like. And I think that that sentence gets misinterpreted because I think people assume that what the bank doesn't like is that you were spending a lot of money and that you were finding

a technique to earn a lot of points at low cost. and I don't know whether the bank likes that or not, but I don't think that that in itself is the problem. I think the problem is that it's very difficult for a bank to know the difference between when that's just an enthusiastic point collector and when that's somebody doing something nefarious, like money laundering or something that is a bust out type of behavior where they're going to like all of a sudden just run away from their cards.

So I think that the issue we often talk about is that some of those types of techniques, I mean, it sounds like you weren't doing anything illegal, anything nefarious, anything that was like against any kind of law or rule necessarily. But more so, it looks risky to the bank. And like that when he says the bank wouldn't like it, it's not that the bank necessarily be upset about how you were using your card per se. It's just more so they don't like the volume and the way you were cycling. it because that looks like the kind of thing that people who are doing illegal things do, right? Is that fair? Yeah, I think that's fair, but there's another aspect to it, which is when people, you know,

use things like bonus categories more than, you know, much more than expected. So the bank is paying out a lot more in rewards than they would expect a normal consumer to, do, they don't like that. And if they see a pattern of a lot of that, they have the right to shut down your accounts. And when I say the right, it's because the way the terms and conditions are of all these accounts is basically they can shut down your account for any reason at all. And so they would look at that and say, well, this is an unprofitable customer if they're going to be doing that kind of thing. I wish they would just say, hey, we don't like what you're doing, cut it out.

And then I would have, you know, stopped instantly. But that's not how they approach it. And that's their prerogative. So this is the way the game works. If you push too hard, you probably will get burned when you do that. And the hard thing for people, as you get more and more into the game, like you're going to meet people who are, you know, the whales. They call it the people who hit these things really hard. And there's a tendency for a lot of people to feel like they're missing out if they're not doing it too.

I generally avoid that for most things. I avoid that kind of reaction and that behavior. But this one just happened to be like super easy. And I failed at my own advice that I would give myself. You know, if I had given myself advice at the time, I would have done something different. And so I paid the price of losing my city cards. And again, I'm not mad at city about it. I'm more mad about Capital One shutting me down for no good reason.

Yeah, that makes sense. If you've read Greg's post about that and even the blurb that you included in the Citibank shutdown that kind of explained what happened with that, like I'd be more than a little annoyed. over what happened there. You're right to be annoyed with Capital One. But with City, it's fair. Your reaction here is, and I think your reaction is very telling. I think anybody who doesn't personally know you gets a little glimpse into Greg

the Frequent Miler, because if you read this story, it's not like some outrage story that Greg is upset and trying to call out Citibank. He takes responsibility for the mistakes he made and agrees with people who are like, oh, this probably wasn't worth worth it in there. And I wrote a post about chasing Caesar's Diamond recently, and somebody in the comments mentioned that I should. should have said something about problem gambling. And I went back and I added a section because I have

often hesitated to write about the casino aspects of the game. And I say that because people that are really into this hobby tend to be into math. And if you're into math, there tend to be some opportunities on the casino end of things, whether it's chasing status or learning how to play certain games to lower the house advantage, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. But the reason I've hesitated on that is because I've said before that I feel like the miles and points hobby really lends itself to creating this invincibility complex where we're like so used to the big wins that we think they're just going to keep coming forever and ever. And it's funny because you mentioned how you were, you know, you weren't worried about it. And like hindsight looking back, you're like, oh yeah, that was probably

not a good idea. But in the moment, you get very much into that, oh, no, this is easy. It's still going. It's going. It's going. And so I think that's very insightful, just looking at that, like from an outsider perspective and saying, oh, yeah, look how easy it is to kind of get caught up and in the wrong thing. So I think that's a really insightful piece of information there. But, but anyway, so what next? I mean, what did you do? You found out you were shut down. I presumably you had some points, right? So what did you do about that? That was, that was probably, that was the scariest part, is that I still had well over 300,000 points in my account. My wife only had 10,000 points. But I'd heard that when you get shut down by Citibank, that there's only a very brief window of time where you can transfer your points out.

And so I, you know, as quickly as I could, I logged into my city account and tried to jump over to my thank you rewards account so that I could transfer my points out. And it was challenging because when I tried to do. do that, I got redirected back to my city account each time. And so finally, luckily, I found a kind of backdoor into my thank you account, which was to click through from city to city travel, which took me successfully to the city travel portal, which is really part of in a way, the thank you portal. And then from the city travel portal, there was like an option, one of the menu items to go to thank you rewards. And so I did that and I clicked that and that got me in successfully and logged in.

I saw I still had the ability to transfer points. So now the question was, what do I transfer to? Yeah, that's a tough one to answer, right? Because city has a bunch of transfer partners. They've got some things that are pretty unique, like leading hotels of the world that nobody else really has or the, or preferred hotels, which isn't unique anymore. but, you know, it's an option anyway that is something you're not going to have a lot of access to otherwise, especially without Capital One cards in your own name. So, so, you know, there's a couple options there. You got stuff like Eva or EVA and partners that you use frequently, because I know

in the past anyway, you've used Virgin Atlantic quite a bit or you've used Air France, KLM flying blue quite a bit. So take me, walk me through how you decided what to do and what you ultimately did do. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah. So, So my first thought was about the things that are unique to city. And so like I didn't really want to transfer to Air France or to Virgin Atlantic because I have a lot of points in other transferable points programs. And so if I need points in those programs, fine. I have no problem getting those. So what I was looking at is what are, what's unique to city that, that I could, that I could take advantage of now. And so I was looking at EVA except EVA's, miles if I remember right, go away in three years if they're not used. So I definitely didn't want to do that without firm plans. And I've never used EVA miles yet. So that seemed like a really risky bet. Leading hotels of the world was a consideration. But I thought, well, the points are worth 1.6 cents each there. That's not terrible. But then I saw that there was currently at the time a

transfer bonus to leading hotels of the world. So it made the points worth around two cents each towards these these hotels. And so I was definitely leaning that way, even though I've used LHW points a few times, but it's not to me exciting. It's hard to explain why, but there's only so many properties that take points and two cents per point as value is the most you can get out of your city points in that in that situation and and so there's not that opportunity to get that like way way outside value i mean sell two cents per point is good but um so it wouldn't have been bad but i wasn't super excited about it but then american airlines is the is the one where they're the only program that transfers one to one to american i think the next best you can get i guess is

um does marriette still transfer three to one to america to uh american i can remember i can't I remember, yeah. So that's probably the next best you could do. So, you know, I thought about that, and then I realized, oh, wow, not only is it the only one that I could transfer to, but now that Barclays doesn't have American Airlines cards anymore, City is literally the only bank in America that you can go to to earn American Airlines miles from credit cards. It literally only one. And so my ability, you know, at least at that time, that's what I was thinking, my ability to get American Airlines miles in the future is like, nil. I mean, it's very, very, there's very few opportunities to get them in bulk anyway. So as soon as I realized that, I was just like, all right, I'm transferring them all to American.

That's all I'm going to do. So that's what I did all in mine to my American Airlines account. and then my wife transferred her 10,000 points to her American Airlines account. Now, together we have over a million American Airlines miles, which is very good. But as things stand, that's probably going to have to last us forever-ish. Ooh, yeah. Ouch. Ouch.

Well, and you say that because City is, I think, known to shut you down and then it's hard to get back in, right? I don't know what the clock is on that. Some other banks, you know, people have been able to get back in after a while, reapplying and stuff, but I haven't seen any positive data points with Citi where people have tried years later. Yeah. So that's a bad news, unfortunately. So, so, I mean, but that makes sense transferring to American Airlines.

I'm curious, actually, on the American Airlines front, do you have any plans to do like a Basque bank account in order to get American? Airlines miles on a regular basis. Obviously, you have the shopping portal still, but that could be something that you could at least have some coming in. I don't know. I don't know if that's important to you. That's a really good idea.

I hadn't thought about that. That's something I should definitely look into. So thank you for that. Yeah, I mean, you know, for right now. I see what you did there with the thank you, by the way. Not intended. But, you know, there's another small glimmer of hope, and I'd say it's very small, which is two days after the shutdown,

my Aviator Silver Card completed its transition to City American Airlines Globe Card. And by completed, I mean, I got an email saying it was done. I got logged into my city account, which I could still log into, still see all those closed accounts, but it showed the Globe Card. open. I didn't have the card in hand, though, to activate it and see if it was really working. I was worried that maybe when I activate the card, it would get shut down right away. But I was still hopeful, and it took a long time for that card to come in the mail. And I was away on vacation when it came. So it was only this past week, as we're recording this, that I finally got my hands

on the card, activated it. By then, I had received that email that I read at the beginning of the show where someone said that he had activated his card and immediately got shut down. So I'd already read that. So, you know, when I went to activate it, I thought, oh, it's going to get shut down right away, but it didn't. I took it out later that day or maybe the next day and used it at a couple local stores to see if it would work. And it worked fine. So now that it's about three or four days later, it's still open. But, you know, we've heard from other people that it took several days before their

Globe account got canceled. So I don't know. I don't know if I'm in sort of a lucky situation where, you know, it happened after the shutdown, but soon enough that I didn't get into the, you know, there might have been like a queue of past shutdowns that city had to go through to basically, to kill off these American Airlines cards that were transitioned in from Barclays.

Maybe there was a queue that was created right before I got shut down. You know, I mean, that's very optimistic thinking, But the point is, as things stand right now, I'm probably going to have my globe card shut down, but there's a small chance that I will have a card where I can earn American Airlines miles through spend. And I could do things with it, like earn through American Airlines hotels where it earns good multiple there. And that, and booking those hotels also earns extra points. So if I still have that avenue, then I would still have a good option. for earning American Airlines miles.

Yeah, you know, it's funny because when I did that trip to Reno or Lake Tahoe recently, I had booked a couple of hotels through American Airlines hotels in order to use our globe card, you know, our converted Barclays, aviator silver to AGOCard's, to AGOCard's to use the splurge credit on there. And I had completely forgotten that I had done that. And I just pulled up my American Airlines app the other day and I was like, well, I've got more status points. I don't remember making many purchases.

on the card. And when I looked at the activity, I was like, oh, that's right. I've totally forgot that those hotels that I booked earn status points. So, yeah, I mean, that is something that I think a lot of people that are big fans of the American Airlines program use AHA hotels quite a bit. So that could be another avenue for you to earn American Airlines miles moving forward. So at least there's some small glimmers as long as your American Airlines account remains in good standing, which am I right to assume that thus far, your American Airlines account has been on affected by any of this, right? Yeah, and I'm hopeful that that'll continue.

And the reason there's any doubt about that is because there was a time several years ago where people were applying over and over again for American Airlines credit cards for a particular offer that was not meant to be generally available, but could be used over and over. And a lot of those people had their not just those cards canceled, but their American Airlines account. canceled and someone just wrote in recently about having trying to create a new american airlines account and that it seemed to work but then that was shut down so i'm i'm hopeful that since you know that that ironically because they shut down all of my cards that this is more of a city thing than american airlines thing and and that american airlines is not aware even necessarily

about what's what's happened and so fingers crossed on that Fingers crossed, hopefully, especially because you do have a different number of American Airlines miles. That would be awful to lose us. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, speaking of what's lost, let's talk about it. I mean, you mentioned you had a bunch of city cards, but we haven't actually talked about which city cards you had and what you were using them for, if anything. So what did you lose in this shutdown? Yeah. Well, I'll quickly go through the list, at least from memory, as well as I could. But then I'll talk about which ones I really care most about. So I had a, a strata. I had a strata elite. I had the prestige card. I had the double cash. I had two custom cash cards. I had American Airlines Mile Up card. That's the fee-free one. And then I had the American Airlines business card that I talked about before. I think that's all of them. But which ones do I actually care about? The main one I care about, the prestige card. That's a

card that hasn't been available new for years. But if you had it when it became no longer available, you were able to keep it. And the thing that I value most about that card, valued past tense, is that it earned 5x on all dining purchases worldwide. And my wife and I, we eat out a lot. And we tend to, we like to go to, we're sort of foodies, we like to go to good restaurants. we spend a lot. So that 5x dining earned a ton of points.

And so that, that hurts. It also had a version of Priority Pass that includes restaurants. And so that was nice. But I'm saying it that way because I haven't been to many Priority Pass restaurants in a long time. Even when I've been at airports that have had them, I tend to just, you know, go into a lounge anyway and get food there. So it does, that's not a big deal, but 5x dining, losing that is a big deal. I lost the ability to earn 5X at grocery stores with my custom cash cards.

Not a big deal for me because I just don't spend a ton at grocery store. So it's not that big of a deal. I lost the ability to earn, as we just discussed, American Airlines, miles, and status through credit card spend. And I lost, you know, access to city's unique transfer partners. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, there's some significant bummers there. Even in the stuff that you seem not as concerned about, like the 5x grocery with the custom

cash cards, you had two of those, though. So if you're spending $1,000 a month, which, you know, it's a grocery store. There's a lot of things other than groceries you could be buying. And so if you're spending $1,000 a month there, that's the $60,000 miles a year or $60,000 points a year that could have transferred to different partners. So, I mean, it is unfortunately a loss not to rub salt in the wound here, just to more so say that, like, the city ecosystem was obviously valuable, even though I know grocery wasn't your primary expense by any stretch. So, yeah, that's a bummer. And the prestige card being gone, I mean, that really stinks. Most people listening to this probably don't have one or can't get one. So it's not necessarily as much of a concern for them, I guess. But if you still have it, I know, I personally, I regret having closed mine yours.

ago. So I wish I had kept that one around because certainly with the cost of everything going up, 5X dining would be more valuable now than it was to me then. We weren't probably eating out as much. And I wouldn't, we don't eat out nearly as often as you do. But with four people now, it's always not cheap. Even if we go to a cheap restaurant, it's not cheap. So, so I would like to have that and I don't. So I don't have that to deal with. But now you've got to deal with the aftermath of that. Like you got to say, okay, well, what am I going to do? Because you haven't had to question which card should I use at a grocery store or which card should I use when I go out to a nice restaurant. What are you going to do or you haven't had to deal with not having American Airlines miles

or access to those? So how are you dealing with each of these losses? Can you kind of walk me through your thought process? Sure, sure. Let's talk about City's unique transfer partners first. American Airlines is the biggest one, and we already talked about that, that, you know, we'll see what happens with the Globe Card if it does get shut down. I think Basque Bank is a really good idea. I should look into that. But other than that, you know, I'll look more seriously at when American Airlines has promotions. You know, they'll have promotions for booking travel packages, for example, and, you know, that might become more attractive to me than it would. have been in the past.

And I should mention that American Airlines, I'm sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, hopefully that those promotions won't be like you get twice as many points if you have a credit card. If you're a card holder. Ouch. Ouch. Hopefully not. No, I should mention that, you know, the loss of American Airlines, I think people that maybe

are deeply into the hobby might primarily see that as a loss of the ability to get great value on international partner awards because American has a pretty valuable international partner award chart still. And so that feels like a loss. But I feel that sting even more these days domestically, because domestically, partner awards are so much harder to come by these days that you almost need some American Airlines miles and some United Miles and some, you know, access to Delta or Southwest in order to book those. And so a lot of times I want a positioning flight or to book a backup flight. And I want American Airlines miles for that because domestically, that's what I need for that. And so I can totally see where you do need to find a way to deal with that and where something

like Bass Bank might come in handy in the sense that it would keep a stream of that coming in without any effort, although, you know, obviously if you keep the million you've got right now, you don't need to worry about that incoming stream for a hot minute here anyway. There are some other, or you got enough anyway and some other ones to earn them. So that's good. What about the other unique partners? Yeah. So, you know, EVA, they're the only program that transfers one to one to EVA, but Capital One transfers to EVA 4 to 3, so not nearly as good, but my wife has the Venture X card. She has a lot of points in her account.

So if we have the opportunity to book EVA with EVA miles, then we would transfer my wife's capital one miles to her EVA account, which is a reminder to me that I need to. to set one up in advance for her so that it's not like opening a brand new account at that time, which can lead to problems. And so I need to do that now. So it's good we had this discussion yet again because that's something I hadn't thought about earlier. So that's my plan for EVA. Leading hotels of the world, I don't have a backup plan.

I mean, it's not something we had access to before. I didn't miss it before City added LHW as an option. And go forward, I won't have access to it. It's not a big deal for me. I don't think I'm going to miss it. Preferred hotels is another one that it's not entirely unique, but both Capital One and just like EVA, both Capital One and and City, transfer one to two now to I prefer. If I need, I prefer points, again, I could use, you know, my wife could transfer to her. I prefer account and we can figure out how to use them there. In my I prefer account, I've got over

a million points now thanks to the last minute big transfers I did while it was still, while City still offered a one to four transfer ratio. So that's not a problem anytime soon in my mind. That makes sense. That makes sense. What about so I know obviously you mentioned in the post that you had done the cycling of your American Airlines business card in part to achieve high level status. You earned platinum pro status with American Airlines. So obviously having some sort of one world status was valuable to you. What are you going to do now? Yeah. I mean, I like the idea of, for example, being able to get into first class one world lounges when flying internationally. And that status would get me there. A really good alternative is getting Alaska Atmos status.

getting high-level status with them. And I do have the Atmos Summit card, and it, you know, between earning status points from spend on that card, plus the Atmos program gives you status points when you book awards. And so I'll be presumably booking more awards with Alaska Miles than American Miles

because American Miles now are more valuable to keep around for when they're especially needed. Anyway, so, you know, to me, it's not a big deal to say, well, I already thought Alaska was sort of a better bet by a slight margin anyway for earning status with them. And so pivoting that way is fine. I'm not worried about that. Well, okay, but I got to follow up on that because it does require quite a bit of spend if you're going to primarily use your Atmos Summit card. Now, you did mention that you earn status. You said when booking Alaska Awards, which you meant was after travel, right?

So it's not the booking, but the actually traveling on those awards that counts. I'm sure you know that, but just for listeners that may not be as familiar, you can't earn from traveling on those awards. But you're still talking about a lot of spend. Are you not concerned that, you know, are you going to use these same type of techniques and get your Bank of America accounts shut down? Yeah, that's a great question. I'm done with all those types of techniques.

I'm in the lucky position of having a successful business, which has very high taxes. And so as long as most issuers, unlike built, allow you to earn points on paying your taxes, doing very high spend on any given card is actually really easy for me. And I hope it doesn't sound like I'm bragging. I'm not intending to do that. But it's just a fact that, you know, when I look at how hard would it be to get high-level Alaska Atma status, it's going to be easy for me because of that. Yeah. And that makes sense.

I just figured that probably some listeners would have that question. No, that's, yeah, it was really good. Good point. All right. What about priority pass? Because you lost access to priority pass restaurants. What are you going to do about that? I mean, I know you said you haven't really been to one in a while.

Maybe you just don't care. just going to give that up entirely? Yeah, you know, I logged into my Party Pass account that came with a prestige card to see, could I use it? It logged in fine because I thought maybe they don't. Yeah. No, you know, maybe it would still work. But it logs in fine, but then when I went to show the barcode or the QR code,

it showed this account is no longer, you know, open or something. So they were right on top of that. No, I recently changed my U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve card to the no annual fee altitude Connect card. And the Connect card comes with four priority pass passes per year. And those can be used at restaurants. So given that I can't even remember the last time I went to Party Pass restaurant, having four a year should be fine. And if I need more, maybe I could re-upgrade to the altitude reserve, which gives you eight.

But the other thing I could do longer term, if it matters to me, is upgrade my Bank of America premium rewards card to the rewards elite card, which gives, which has a great version of priority pass, including restaurants. That's something I might do, maybe not upgrade, but maybe apply new. so I get the welcome bonus with it. But that's something I've long considered and just it hasn't been a priority. But maybe if priority becomes a priority for me, maybe I'll go ahead and do it. That makes sense.

Yeah. I still have the altitude reserve. So I've got the eight visits a year and I haven't used all eight of them the last couple of years as it is. And I'm likely going to have to downgrade that too. I've been holding out hoping that maybe U.S. Bank would shock the world and launch its transfer partners

on the altitude reserve, but I don't think it's going to happen. And the annual fee will come do, I don't know, sometime in the next month or month and a half here. So I will probably also be joining you in the downgrade to the altitude connect, I imagine. Let's talk next about grocery. So you were able to earn five points per dollar with a custom cash card that again, as we mentioned before, it gives you five points per dollar and up to $500 and spend in your chosen category each month. And grocery is one of the options. So that's a popular option for that. And I think one that you did use. Obviously, you went to pay for your yogurt with your custom cash card, and it didn't work. So what are you going to do the next time you need two yogurts? Yeah. Well, what I've started doing

is, you know, I looked at all the cards that I have available. And the one that I think is the best option for me with what I have right now is my built palladium card. You know, it earns 2x everywhere, except taxes. But it's really more like a 3X everywhere card-ish, depending on how you use your built cash to get accelerators or to use it to pay rent or mortgage. You can get even more than 3-X everywhere. I don't use it currently to pay any kind of rent or mortgage, so I'm mainly using the accelerator.

And so while I have the accelerator available, It's earning 3x everywhere. Once I run out of accelerators for the year, it'll drop down to 2X. But still, even 2x, built points, is worth a lot more to me than 2X any other points because built points that they have such good transfer partners and such good transfer bonuses. And so that combination makes them more valuable to me. than other types of points. So anyway, that's what I'm currently doing.

You know, I could earn 5x by using a card that earns 5X in certain stores and buying, for example, visa gift cards and using those at grocery stores. But, you know, I just don't spend that much at grocery stores. So that kind of effort just isn't attractive to me to turn a few more points. You know, we do spend a good amount at grocery stores. Obviously, the family of four, we eat more and we don't eat out as often as you do. So we spend a good bit on groceries, but my wife is still mostly using the built palladium these days. Because we get our groceries both at a regular grocery store, one that's just about a mile down the road that's overpriced.

And so we only go there sometimes. But if we're going to do an actual grocery chip, and I say we, my wife usually does this. So she'll often get different groceries in different places and a town about 30 miles away. So there'll be something she gets at a grocery store and something she gets at a warehouse club, and something she gets at Walmart. And remembering to use different cards in all three places and carrying the three cards. Right, right. I haven't got her used to switching the card and Google pay.

And so that's all kind of a pain. The easy solution is just toss the palladium card at it. So even though I care about that as a bonus category, I'm pretty happy with the three points per dollar on all that. stuff and getting it. What would what would you prefer her to use if yeah. Yeah. I mean, good question. We did just downgrade one of her cards to a custom cash, but I think I'm more likely to just knock that out with a gift card and make that easy each month rather than try to rotate that in or no when she's exceeded the 500 or no whether this place codes is grosser or not. Sure. Sure. So I not that. The MX gold card, but the problem.

and the AMX gold card for four points per dollar at U.S. supermarkets, and up to $25,000 spend per year than one X after that. That would be the answer. But I know from past experience that that gold card will end up getting used at Walmart at 1X. If that's the grocery card that's in there. And so that grates on me. And Walmart doesn't take Google pay or whatever. And we do end up getting stuff at Walmart.

So you've got to put something in. And so I'd rather make sure that the built card is the card that's in there and that gets used. And we earn at least two points per dollar or three when I've got the accelerators going. Like you said, it's a combination of the best transfer partners. And when we say that, they have very useful U.S. transfer partners, like in Alaska and United and some people probably get excited about Southwest at times. And so, you know, that's useful. And then they have very good international partners and they have Hyatt.

And so it's like, if I'm earning two points per dollar that can transfer to whichever of those meets my needs, great. And if we can use a transfer bonus, even better. So that's why I'm pretty happy with that. So I won't fault your grocery setup. And I don't know. I mean, yeah, sure, you could get an MX gold card. But if you're not spending that much at grocery stores anyway, I don't know if it's worth spending the money for a gold card. Do you?

Yeah. Yeah. That's a problem. The gold card seems like the obvious replacement for my previous situation. of where I was earning 5x at grocery and dining. And so gold card earns 4X for both of those things. But, well, we'll talk about more under restaurants. But as far as groceries, yeah, I just don't spend enough to say, yeah, the gold card is necessarily a solution.

But if I had it anyway, if I decided to have it anyway for dining, then, yeah, I might as well use it for groceries as well, right, to get the 4x. That said, I have a really healthy stash of American Express points already. And so the benefit of earning, there's diminishing benefit of earning a lot more. And so it's a tough balancing act. I would still probably use it over the Palladium card because it's earning more points. But it's not such a big win that I would care that much. And I think it depends on your use of the palladium card. Like if you're somebody who's going to easily max out the five per year accelerators

and you're going to easily spend the 25K, then you may want to limit that spend to things that you couldn't otherwise get a bonus category on. So in that case, maybe the groceries is wasteful because you're like, oh, I'm going to spend 25K on A, B, and C. you know, you've got somebody in college and you're paying tuition. You're able to get the, you know, your full accelerators there with five college tuition payments. Well, then, you know, you would want a different grocery card. So it depends on your situation there. But, okay, dining is a big part of that, though. I think big part of that equation. And obviously, this was probably the biggest loss for you in all

of this is the ability to earn five points per dollar on dining. Because as you said, you do spend a fair amount going out to eat. So what are you going to do now? Yeah. You know, so I looked at my current cards to see, you know, what earns the most for dining. I have a bunch of chase cards that earn 3x for dining. The Sapphire Reserve card is the one I would turn to and initially did. That was the first one like I put in my wallet when I took out the prestige card. Not because it was like better than the other chase cards, although it does have no foreign transaction fees. So it's better than like a freedom card for that reason. But because it has that $150, every six months for certain dining,

Sapphire Reserve open tables or something. I forget what that's called. And when I go to use that, when the Sapphire Reserve's not already in my wallet, I have to make a point of, I gotta make sure that's in my wallet before going to that restaurant. And so it seemed like a natural fit.

Just put it in there and just use for restaurants and then it's always with me. Another one I have that earns 3x at Wells Fargo Autograph card, Ernst 3X for dining. but I don't value those points as highly. The Atmos Summit card, though, that earns three points per dollar for dining. And a reader reminded me this morning as we're recording this that if you have a deposit

account with Bank of America, which I do, you have a 10% bonus on earnings with that card. So it's really earning 3.3 points per dollar. and it also earns 3.3, in my case, for all foreign transactions. And so this all happened a few weeks before I left on vacation for Europe. And so after having this have a reserve in my wallet for a week or so, I realized all this. And I actually changed my card to the summit for my dining purchases and then for all purchases. and then for all purchases when I was outside the country. And partly, it's not just because it's like that 0.3 extra.

It was more because I'm close to earning the card with $60,000 in membership year's spend, you get a 100,000 point companion award certificate that I'll take up to 100,000 points off of a second person's award cost. And so that's really valuable and I'm close to that. So I figure all my dining spends not just earning 3.3x, but it's also getting me closer to that 100,000 point certificate. That's a really good point because I think that that carrot and the Alaska status earnings are important components of the math here. I've mentioned, I think, at some point in the past, that the built palladium card, if you're using the accelerator, and again, if you're not even doing rent or mortgage or whatever, just the simple accelerator, then you're kind of looking at 3x everywhere. And I say kind of because it gets more complicated than that because you have to, you know, enable a new accelerator every 5,000 spend. And depending on where you are and your purchases, that can kind of be annoying. So it's not a perfect comparison here. But, but it has no foreign transaction fees. And so you can. could earn three acts essentially on all your foreign purchases with that and have the option to transfer to Alaska or to whichever other partner is good. So some people will look at that and say,

I'd rather be earning the built points. But I think if you're going, number one, if you have the deposit accounts, you're earning 3.3 earning a little bit more, that wouldn't be enough to get me to use the summit card. Maybe some people, but it wouldn't be enough for me to change my behavior there. The companion certificate, though, and the progress towards status, now that starts to tilt things. heavily in favor of the summit card. So I'd see we're going there. Yeah, I mean, don't give me right. It's a, it's a tough decision because the other thing, built palladium card, the spend on

that gets you closer to the next level of built elite status. And, you know, with each level you ascend with built elite status, that improves your transfer bonus percentage, like how much you'll get when there's a transfer bonus from built to a loyalty program. So, you know, it's very hard to do concrete math about, like, you know, to turn that into a X, like how much you're earning per dollar. It's very difficult because it's going to depend on how much you take advantage of those transfers. But anyway, so that's all to say that it's very complicated. And yes, the Palladium card is you could easily make an argument that that ought to be my restaurant card as well.

Now, what about... Okay, so anyway, those are the cards in my wallet now. We've discussed that I've chosen the Atmos Summit card. And that, you know, the Palladium card, though, even though it sort of base only earns 2X, is a really good alternative if I changed my mind there. What should I get, though? Should I just be satisfied with that,

or should I get something else? What do you think? Well, you know, I think the obvious solution, like you said, is the MX gold card because you'd be earning four points per dollar on dining. So you're only losing one essentially over what you were getting with your city prestige card. If you only look at the multiplier and don't consider the transfer partners at all, then you're only losing one point per dollar. Yeah. But I mentioned that because should you be considering the built obsidian card? The built obsidian card lets you choose between earning a bonus on either dining or grocery. So you could be earning 3x on either of those. Plus then if you used your accelerator, then you could actually be earning 4x on, you know, up to the $25,000 spend per year.

Again, you're going to have to continuously activate those accelerators. So 3x plus 4% built cash is what we can call that for the obsidian card. And that's an interesting, I don't know, an interesting thing to consider between those two. Because on the one hand, you've got MX points, which are tried and true. And you know what the good uses are for those. On the other hand, I think we've recently mentioned, MX has really been on kind of a downward slide in recent years. They've lost some good opportunities in the sense they've devalued transfers to a couple of programs,

changing the ratio. So not all of the airline programs are one to one anymore. We aren't seeing the frequency of transfer bonuses from them, even at their normal 25% transfer bonus or whatever it might be to the chosen airline. Whereas built, on the other hand, has continued to offer big transfer bonuses, not always programs that you want, but every now and then there's likely to come one that you are interested in. So I think that's kind of a tough call. You also have to look at the difference in cost. The MX Gold Card has a $325 annual fee. and some coupon book headaches.

The obsidian card has a $95 annual fee and no coupon book headaches. So I don't know. Which would you pick? I know I kind of sound like I'm leaning towards built obsidian, but I don't know if it's that clear cut. I mean, yeah, I'm very, very tempted by the obsidian card. If I was going to sign up for one new,

I'd rather have the built points. And so it can earn more at restaurants than the, built palladium card can it's earning an extra point per dollar um the downside here is that it gets complicated because built will only let me have currently will only let me have one of their cards i don't want to give out the palladium card that that's a great card in my opinion um the obsidian card would be nice to have now i could do a weird thing like i could have my wife sign up for the obsidian card and then we could use her card for all dining but then what's happening is all of the

if we do that then all of the new built points earned for dining you're going to her built account and built points are more valuable if you have high level elite status with built which because of my palladium card I'm the one that's going to have that and so she's earning built points then that aren't as valuable as when I'm earning built points right

So she could, there is a solution to that. She could add me as an authorized user to her obsidian card for $50 a year extra. And then she could choose to have me earn built rewards on the spend on my AU card if I understand how that works right. Yeah, it does add a little extra layer of complexity that I'm only recently starting to try to think through. And here's where I think it gets even a little more complicated, is that she can choose whether the points earned on your authorized user card go to her or to you. And the same on the built cash. She can choose whether it goes to her or to you. But I would assume that if the built cash goes to you, that means she's not earning the built cash to enable the accelerator in order to earn more points.

So the solution there is I guess she would earn the built cash in order to be able to continue. with the accelerators, then you don't necessarily have the built cash to buy up to the next level transfer bonus, although you probably still will earn it with your Palladium card. So it probably won't make a big difference in your case. But can she, can she have me earn the points, but she keeps the built cash? She can choose to do that. Yes, yes, it is an option. And I can confirm that because I just, we've gone through this because my wife added me as an authorized user on her palladium card. So that's probably the solution. And if she, if she uses her built cash, to do the accelerator thing,

will I still earn an extra point per dollar on my authorize user card? I don't know that yet. Because I hadn't tried. I mean, we hadn't tried to do this until just recently. So I don't know yet. I will let you know soon. So by the time this publishes,

hopefully I'll know the answer to that question and I'll publish an answer to it on the blog soon. So keep an eye on the blog. Another thing I want to know is the spend on my card that my AU card that's from her account, does that count at all towards elite status? So one way of getting built elite status is by having a certain amount of spend on your built card.

Does it count at all towards elite status? And if it does, does it count towards my elite status or her elite status? I don't know. That's another excellent question that I can't yet answer, but hopefully soon will, because we are trying that type of experiment out to find out how that all shakes out.

Okay. So let you know when I know. Yeah. Okay. So the short answer is I'm not immediately planning on signing up for anything new to handle really any of these situations. So what I'm doing is using what I think is the best card for each purchase that I already have. And we'll wait and see what next.

experiments show, whether my wife should apply for a built-up obsidian card. You know, we'll see whether anything changes with other cards available, whether something else might show up that, you know, would be a better pick than what I already have. Or someone listening might say, hey, Greg, Nick, you didn't think about, you know, the whatever card. Why aren't you doing that?

And then I'll be like, oh, yeah, I should do that. So let us know if you think of whatever that thing is. Well, and I do want to follow up with one other thing. You said if you were debating which to open new between the MX gold and the built obsidian, and you'd go built obsidian. And I don't know if you thought about that through the lens of a welcome bonus because the obsidian card doesn't really offer much of a welcome bonus. And the MX gold card typically does. Now, I know the reason you didn't mention that is probably because you likely aren't eligible for the welcome bonus on the MX gold card. and because you have a healthy stash of membership rewards points where that welcome bonus is not

necessarily a huge factor. But if you're starting at square zero out there, then that's another thing to consider. How much is that welcome? Because that welcome bonus might make it worth trying out the gold for a year at least. I mean, I haven't had the gold card before to my knowledge, to my memory, but my, you know, my wife hasn't. I used to use that. But if I remember right, I think there's that family rule where if you have the platinum card or have had the platinum card then you can't get a bonus on the gold card and so i did try i went through the application process yesterday um just to see i want to see what what it would offer me if anything and it said nothing for you and so it's probably because i have the platinum card um but uh you know every now and then uh offers become

available that don't have um the same restrictions on that them. And so it's possible that, yeah, that a gold card offer will come along where I could get a welcome bonus on it. And so I think that would be worth, you know, considering if and when that happens. But yeah, I'd still, yeah, anyway, so that's where things are at. All right. Well, we look forward to hearing from readers as to what your suggestions are for those next steps. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list.

Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Myler Insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for our giant mailbag, you can send that to mailbag. Send it to mailbag at Frequentmiler.com. Hi, I'm Mike Siegel comedian and since 2011 host of the Travel Tales podcast. When I'm not traveling the world telling jokes for money, I'm traveling for fun out of curiosity and love of new places.

And I love talking about travel with other people who share my passion. Whether they're travel experts, influencers, expats, or I'm just catching up with a fun friend. The subject is always my favorite one, travel. So if you love travel and want to listen to other people who love travel, and maybe even laugh or learn a thing or two, check out the Travel Tales podcast with me, your host, Mike Siegel, anywhere you get you. your podcasts. If you love travel, but don't always have time to plan, we've got a podcast for you. It's called Travel in 10, and in every episode, in about 10 minutes, we give you a smart, practical overview of destinations all around the world. We cover what to see, where to stay,

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