Frequent Miler on the Air - Points for the next generation | Frequent miler on the Air Ep306 | 5-16-25

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

In today's episode we'll talk about how you can still book Emirate first class awards, we'll discuss Spirit Airlines is going premium, and we'll look at how you can prepare your kids for points and miles.(01:29) - Does anyone else feel like American Express' customer service is above and beyond the rest?(09:33) - Chase Instacart benefits on many cards(17:07) - Buy Marriott Points for as low as 0.89 cents each (or maybe lower)Read more about buying Marriott points here.(23:33) - Emirates restricting first class availability to elite members from 5/12/25(24:14) - Read about booking Emirates first class with Qantas or Air Canada miles here.(27:43) - Too good to last: Rakuten stops offering rewards for Chase cards(30:08) - Japan Airlines added as a new Bilt transfer partner(32:23) - Combined Alaska/Hawaiian loyalty program now expected in August(38:31) - Spirit updatesMain Event: Points for the next generation(47:57) - Sign up for airline accounts to earn miles now(57:39) - How do you track all these accounts?(1:04:29) - Help them build credit history(1:10:13) - Help them build college savingsRead more about earning miles for college savings here.Or find the best options for buying Gift of College gift cards here.(01:18:52) - See our Plastiq guide here.(1:22:15) - Help them build rewards balances & let them help you build yours(1:23:06) - Help them build their credit card collection(01:34:37) - Learn more about Travel Freely here: https://frequentmiler.com/take-the-stress-out-of-credit-card-bonus-hunting-travel-freely/(1:39:08) - Why isn't anyone talking about the Accor Signature Annual Membership given their airline transfer partners (many with a 1:1 ratio)?Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder

This is a Voy Escape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's show, we've got good news. You can still book Emirates First Class using your points. We have surprising news. Is Spirit Airlines going premium? And we've got everything you need to know about how to prepare your kids for points. Frequent Mylar on the air starts now. Today's main event points for the next generation. People often ask us about their kids, how they can, you know, get their kids

ready for earning lots of points, how they can get them ready for playing the points miles game. Um, we get questions, everything from, you know, should I be doing something for my toddlers, to, you know, older kids to my kids just about to turn 18? What credit card should they get when when they're ready? So in today's main event, we're going to be addressing all those questions. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it both so I can share some of the things I've done and I can learn what it is that Greg has done since he's a few stages past me and preparing his own son for miles and points here.

So let's talk about all that. But if you want to jump ahead and you want to get right into a particular topic, don't forget you can expand the show description and look in the notes for timestamps. We always have timestamps to all the various things we're going to discuss as well as links to more information where applicable wherever you're watching or listening. Don't forget to give us a thumbs up, like it, leave us a review. We appreciate your comments and your feedback and all of the stars you've given us. So thank you very much for that. It is time to drag

out this week's giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Ben. Ben says, thanks for all you do with the podcast. I have a point that I don't think I've heard addressed before. Of course, when we're deciding which card to use, we factor in the earn rate. But I often find myself using my Amex cards all the time for two reasons. First is that their customer service is above and beyond any other company. Anytime I have to deal with Chase, it's a living nightmare. I don't think in the dozens of times

I've had to call Chase, I've actually been able to accomplish what I needed to. City has also been a nightmare with being misled about what cards can do what, being transferred over and over again with no solution in sight, etc. With Amexx however, I can always get through to someone who will help me, and I'm rarely led through the phone maze or on hold for more than a few minutes. Also, the chargeback policy on Amex is top notch. Anytime I make a purchase of something that even has the chance of malfunctioning or needing a return or repair, I always put it on my Amex. The piece of mine is worth more than any points earned could be. The only things I put on my chase cards are things that I know I'll, I'll never have an issue with taxes, car registration,

etc. I wonder how many other people out there feel the same way I do signed Amex's CEO. No, yeah, this is a really interesting one. I saw this email come in. and I'm curious about your thoughts on this Greg. So what do you think about all that? Yeah, I mean, I think it makes a ton of sense. It's not something that I think about often. So for me, the one time it comes into play, well, I should back up and say, I agree with his statements

sort of at a high level that Amex, I feel like is more likely to have good customer service to resolve things than most other banks are. But I haven't had as extreme of experiences, like I haven't had bad experiences, calling chase, for example, to get things done. Citi, they're pretty weird. That doesn't surprise me at all. But, you know, I know things like dealing with, like, warranty issues, I would expect Amex to be much better at. And so when I have a very large purchase of something where I really want to count on the purchase protections that come with it, I do tend to look for, you know, what's the best Amex card to use for that purchase. But it's so rare that I have that

happen, you know. So the last time I did that, we had to buy a new refrigerator. And I thought, wow, the advantage of earning more points with a different card over, and I'd rather turn down the manufacturer's extended warranty and just go with what Amex has. And so that's what I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I totally agree that Amex customer service tends to be above and beyond other issuers. Certainly, Siti, like you said, is gonna be really weird.

So definitely that. That may come into play. And I have sometimes used an Amex card, particularly a platinum card, for purchase protection on a big purchase that I thought might malfunction or on something that I wanted return protection on a big purchase that I thought might malfunction or on something that I wanted to return protection on.

And even once I bought a new phone on an Amex card and I dropped it like a week later and purchase protection paid me back for it. So there are times when I've done that, but the number of times I have chosen which card to pay based on the customer service in the event that I have an issue, I could probably count on two hands at most, maybe even on one hand. Because I probably could count on one hand the number of times I've had to use any of that stuff. So luckily, knock on wood, I rarely ever

have to make a return that I didn't expect, or I don't know if I've ever filed a warranty claim on something, you know, so those are things that are so rare to me that they wouldn't drive my purchase decision for the most part. And when it comes to customer service, I can't think of the last time I called Chase for something other than like moving credit line

from one card to another. And same goes for basically every issuer. It's very rare that I end up having to call customer service for anything. Now, let me say, sometimes a purchase doesn't code correctly on one card or another, and that can happen over all sorts of issuers where like I expected something to code as a restaurant and it didn't,

or something like that. And I generally don't sweat those things. Like if we're talking about an extra point or two per dollar and I spent a couple of hundred dollars Like I'm not gonna worry about that couple hundred of points So I'm not gonna frustrate myself and call and deal with getting transferred person to person I'll avoid that conversation and trust that majority of the time things are gonna work the way I expect So so I don't make a lot I think the reason when you know when you say you haven't heard people talk about this a lot

It's because it's not something that comes into my mind very often because I haven't run into a lot. I think the reason when you say you haven't heard people talk about this a lot, it's because it's not something that comes into my mind very often because I haven't run into a lot of issues. Now, if you have, of course, I would expect that it would affect your behavior. And like I said, I recognize that the times I've had to reach out to Amex have been superior in terms of customer service for the most part. They tend to know their product and also you can handle a lot of things via chat, which is nice. Whereas other other folks, you get a call or send a secure message. And that's a little slower. I like that the chat reps are empowered to do things and fix things and stuff like that. But

again, I guess I've been lucky, and I just haven't run into so many issues that that is a major, a major thing that comes into play for me. Yeah, yeah. And for me, it's a related thing that comes into play for me. I like, yeah, yeah. And for me, it's a related thing I do. It's, it's not about which bank, but it's about, I like having a small set of cards that are my go-to for certain types of purchases and that way, if something comes up, I know which card I use to buy that thing and I can go find

the transaction and then call the bank and say, you know, if I have to card I use to buy that thing. And I can go find the transaction and then call the bank and say, you know, if I have to, it's rare. Like you said, I mean, very rare that I have to call the bank about anything. But that way, you know, I just know where it is and I can deal with it. So that's sort of related in that sometimes I'll make suboptimal decisions, but you know what, like if you're earning two points versus three points for a handful of purchases here and there, it's not going to add up to that much.

Right, right, right. And I, and compared to the number of points Aaron, from welcome bonuses and different promotions, referral bonuses, or spending bonus categories and whatnot. It's such a small number that it's not going to affect the bottom line in terms of the number of points. That's usually the way that I look at it. I mean, the other thing that comes into play here is that I expect poor customer service across the board these days, which stinks. It's probably bad that I expect that.

But I do. I don't have high customer service expectations in general. So I rarely expect that if I call for something that somebody's going to be super helpful. And that doesn't just apply to banks, banks, airlines, hotels. If I call a company I ordered a shirt from, it doesn't matter. Anywhere, generally speaking, customer service tends to be relatively poor. So I don't really make a lot of decisions based on customer service. Don't get me wrong, when I find good customer service I love it and I I appreciate it and I will try to you know, give that company repeat business

But but I don't generally have high expectations, especially if something's complicated then even with MX I don't expect that somebody is gonna Understand the nuance of the program the way that folks like us do right, right? Okay, but interesting. I mean and and we're not and I like Greg said program the way that folks like us do. Right, right. Okay. But interesting. I mean, and we're not, and I, like Greg said, I think it makes sense if you've had really good experiences with MX, stick with your MX cards.

There's plenty of MX cards that aren't a good return on most spends. So it wouldn't be hard to put most purchases on MX cards. So I don't think you're probably sacrificing many points in most cases. So, all right, Great there, Ben. Thank you for that. Let's talk about card news. So in card news this week, we got Chase up.

So Chase is out with some new Instacart benefits on a whole bunch of different cards. What's that all about? Yeah. So when when they refreshed their United cards and and couponize them like crazy, if I'm remembering right, one of the many coupons was these Instacart credits. And basically, with all of their cards that have annual fees, anyway, the United cards, you get three months of Instacart plus, and then $20 of monthly Instacart credit. So you make an Instacart purchase, you get $20 off as long as that card is selected. And I don't think either of us really thought much

about that because it was like, you only get three months and then you got to pay for Instacart. I mean, I think maybe you got a discount, but still if you weren't interested in paying for Instacart, you'd have to have Instacart plus in order to get that credit I believe so it just didn't seem all that exciting but now a couple things

Now they've expanded the this kind of credit To a huge slew of chase cards So what you have now for the $20 monthly credit, you have also the Inc. Business Cash Card and the Inc. Business Unlimited. And those both also come with three months of Instacart Plus. But then also almost every co-branded card,

so the Marriott cards, the IHG, Southwest, Aeroplan. Hyatt rather, yeah. Southwest, Aeroplanet. Hyatt, rather, yeah. Yeah, you name it. All those co-branded cards have the same deal except $10 monthly credit instead of 20. Weirdly, there's nothing yet for the Chase Freedom or Sapphire cards. I don't really get what's going on there,

but maybe that'll come out soon or maybe there's a good reason for it. But for what's going on there, but maybe that'll come out soon or maybe there's a good reason for it. But for whatever's going on there, the reason I think this is worth talking about is that if you have a bunch of these cards, you can register each one and the three months of free Instacart Plus is stackable. So whatever your current, if you've already, even if you've already paid for Instacart, um, whatever your current end date is for what has been like paid for already, uh, when you register one of your qualifying cards, you get three more months, uh, towards the end. So I registered a whole bunch of my cards and now my, you know, my

Instacart goes well into 2027. So, um, you can do it that way. Now you can't do two of the exact same card. Like you can't on one account put two ink business cash cards, for example, it just tells you that you already have that. But if you have, you know, a couple of people in your household that both have Instacart, you could do it on each. And so anyways, so suddenly it becomes kind of interesting to me because especially these $20 credits, that you'd be able to get a decent discount once a month for each card.

You just have to change which card you're paying with. Yeah, so you can't stack multiple credits together. You can have like 10 chase cards that each have a $10 credit and get a single hundred dollar credit. You have to make 10 separate purchases and get $10 each time or $20 each time with your business cards. That's right. That's right. So I don't think of it as a way to get things free because usually to avoid fees, you need like $35 minimum or something like that, depending on where you're buying from. And so, you know, I'd think of it more as like a way to get a substantial discount off your Instacart order,

which would be great. And you can though stack with Instacart gift card credit. So like if you get a deal on buying Instacart gift cards, you can load those to your account and then use those. So you know, imagine getting like 15% off when you're buying your Instacart gift card as deals like that, you know, I feel like fairly frequently come up and then you can stack with these deals too. Yeah, yeah, you know, I had no interest at all in this personally because I don't, the closest stores on Instacart to me are like more than 30 miles away so it's not a not something that's really useful where I live but now that it's $ household. So I'm going to look to set this up and or keep it in mind for the next time that I'm at a hotel somewhere and we need

something that we forgot to bring with us and I can order it and use the credit and get something for at least close to free if not free. You know, and so I think I'm going to find it useful for that and or when we're traveling and just need stuff. I guess the same thing. So you know that I think that's pretty useful especially on I'm excited about it on the ink cards because both

a it's a more useful amount at $20 and B those are cards with no annual fee like right get anything out of the Instacart benefit on those it'll be a win. So I think that's pretty nice and the $10 credits are good too obviously if you live in a place where Instacart is pretty prevalent I think the nice. And the $10 credits are good too. Obviously, if you live in a place where Instacart is pretty prevalent, I think the nice thing about the $10 credit is that might, depending on how much you're ordering,

go a decent way towards mitigating the fees, like whatever. I don't know what the delivery fees are and how much the upcharge is to order through Instacart, but that's gotta take care of a piece of it on some size order. And so that's kind of nice. And then you get the convenience of the stuff getting delivered.

Like that would make me more likely to use Instacart if it came closer to equalizing the in-store price because there's some amount I'd be willing to pay for the convenience of stuff getting delivered over having to go get it myself. Oh, for sure. Also, Instacart will let you with some stores select for pickup and then you don't have any delivery fees,

but there is still a fee if it's at least the store that I looked at, if the order's less than $35, there's a fee for using it. They also embed fees, meaning the prices are like 10, 12% higher than if you went to the store and bought them. So that's that. The other thing is I noticed at least for me, and I'm saying it that way

because I don't know if this is everywhere, but when I open Instacart in Ann Arbor, restaurants are an option. And it's using Uber Eats as the mechanism, but I believe you can use your credits to pay for your Uber Eats orders by going through the Instacart app. And if our editor, Carrie, doesn't mind

pausing the recording for a few seconds, I'm gonna try it out and I'll report back in just a minute. Sorry. Okay, well, that didn't work out. I tried it out and when I went to check out with my Uber Eats order, even though it was inside the Instacart app, it had me use my Instacart, I mean my Uber Eats credits and payments that didn't have anything about my Instacart credits or these credit card credits. So I guess that wouldn't work.

But anyway, the rest of the stuff we talked about within the card should work. It's a fun thought. It's fun to think outside the box and look for those types of opportunities now and then. So it was worth a try. Yeah, very good. All right.

That's Card News. Mattress running the numbers this week. You can buy Marriott points for as low as 0.89 cents per point or maybe lower even depending on what you've been targeted for, I believe, right? Yeah. So in reality, what's happening is people are signing in to see what their bonus is and people are getting targeted for either a 30%, 40%, or 50% bonus.

A 50% bonus is where it would be a lower price. It would only cost 0.83 cents per point to buy Marriott points with a 40% bonus that costs 0.89 cents per point. 30% bonus, if I did my math right, it's 0.96. So it's very close to one cent per point. So I wouldn't really be interested in that. So let's talk about the 40% or 50% bonuses where you could buy Marriott points

for less than 0.9 cents per point. Is that worth doing? Should you be in the market for buying Marriott points for a trip? Well, so my first instinct would be no, because our reasonable redemption value for Marriott points is 0.76 cents per point. And that means that I can reasonably expect to get 0.76 cents per point or better. So paying 0.89 or 0.83 means that I might not be able to get as much as I paid for them out of the points.

And so I'd rather just be paying for the stays in that case, right? Right, I mean, if you're doing it completely prospectively, like you don't have a stay in mind, you just think you're going to use the points, should you buy them? Probably the answer should be no, unless you are confident you have a history of getting better value for your points, because you

can. I mean, it's not unusual to see opportunities to get, you know, more than one cent per point value with your Marriott points. When we looked at the properties in the U.S. that we looked at the properties in the US that we looked at in order to come up with our reasonable redemption value, the 80th percentile was getting 0.92 cents per point value and our 90th percentile was getting just over one cent per point value. So even at the 80th percentile, you'd be getting more value than you paid, just by a little bit though, you know, so I'm not sure I would, I still wouldn't do this if I was confident

of getting 80th percentile value, but at the 90th percentile getting one cent per point, if you're very confident that you will, I could see doing it. Yeah, you know, I was being a little facetious, I was leading you into that I think, but I think there are times when it might. for instance, the Westin Bora Bora is a property that comes to mind because it was recently renovated. I've looked at it a number of times and the times I've looked rooms have been 70,000 points per night.

And so if you were to buy 70,000 points at point eight three cents per point, that'd be $581 worth of points. And cash rates at that place are like probably 12 or $1,500 a night. So if you wanted to stay at a place like that, you'd get a huge discount by buying points potentially and obviously fifth night free, right? Staying, you know, five, pay for four, whatever they wanna call it.

Could make it even better. So there are situations like that. Where this could certainly make sense. If you're looking to book a hotel and you see that the cost to buy the points required is significantly less than the cash price for the hotel, why not do it? And that'll especially be frequently the case if you have like a five-night stay because Marriott has the sort of fifth night free. I'm saying sort of because what they do is they take whatever was the lowest point night

and take that off the price. But still, that can help a lot in the overall price. So yeah, even at the 30% bonus, it could be a great deal for a specific purpose. But if you're just thinking about like, I'd like to increase my Marriott points, I would actually so personally Like I would consider doing it at the 50% bonus. I'm not interested at that 40% bonus or less So six hundredths of a cent is what makes the difference for you. Yeah I'm not the center point part partly because yeah It's a good point

that it's so little the difference, but I'm much more confident at that 50% bonus level that I would get good value for my points. That is, I mean, that's the definition of penny pinching right there, where you're pinching 600th of a penny. Well, what about you? Where would you? Well, so I said, maybe know, maybe not in the beginning, but actually truth be told, it's

hard to earn hotel points at a reasonable clip these days because very few cards offer a good return on any sort of spend in the form of hotel points. There are some examples, some situations, but not overall. So Marriott points in particular are kind of hard to justify earning on any of their cards, really. situations but not overall so marriott points in particular are kind of hard to justify earning on any of their cards really so um so this could be a reasonable way to stock up on marriott points if like greg said you're somebody who is always using your points uh to to cherry pick those top end properties where you're getting hugely out sized value then i could see this i mean because

i would rather buy these points than earn them by spending on an inferior card. If you're earning 2% cash back everywhere, then essentially you use those two cents to buy what, two and a half Marriott points basically. It's kind of like earning two and a half Marriott points. I mean, that's not great, but it's not terrible either. Maybe. I'm going to give it a solid maybe. It depends on your redemption patterns,

how many points you use every year, how many points you've got. It's not a slam dunk. Don't go out there and buy just because they're on sale. They go on sale from time to time. They go on sale a lot. I'd say that 50% bonus is less common. You don't usually see them as cheap as.83.

We have seen that before, but it's just not very common. And I checked all of the accounts we have and all the Marriott accounts we have in our household, and no one got targeted for that 50%. So I think that's rare as well. There you go. All right, there you have our definitive opinion on that. Let's talk about being bond void. Emir Emirates bonvoid us this week.

Yeah. So Emirates, if you want to use Emirates own miles to book first class awards, you can't. They decided that, well, you can't unless you have elite status. Right. Well, you can't unless you have elite status. Right. So that's just the way things are. So they decided that, no, only their elites get to book their blingy first-class product. But if you have your heart set on booking it,

you should check out, we created a how-to video and you can check that out, but let's mention a couple ways that you can still fly Emirates First Class with points. One way is to get Elite status and you could do that really easily by signing up for the Emirates, there's a $99 card available which will give you silver status for one year and then you could keep silver status after that with $20,000 spend per year on the card. It's not a particularly interesting card otherwise. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but if your heart's really set on using Emirates points to book Emirates first class, that's a way you can do that. Probably a better way for most people is to book Emirates First Class with Qantas points.

And you might say, well, that sounds good, but I don't have any Qantas points, but you probably do have the ability to get them easily because you can transfer from MX membership rewards, Citi thank you points or Capital One to Qantas. And then you could do things like book Emirates First Class from Newark to Athens for 129,000 points and about $100 in taxes or between

JFK and Milan for just under a hundred and eight thousand points one way and a little over a hundred dollars in taxes. So those aren't bad options. If you want to fly all the way to Dubai, which is most of their flights from North America, you're going to be paying more. So the cheapest I found was around 150,000 points and over $800 in taxes and fees for one way. So pretty pricey, but at the same time, this is a very expensive product if you're

going to pay with cash for it. Very blingy, great experience. So I could definitely imagine splurging for that. There you have it. There you have it. So hope is not lost. If you want to book Emirates first class, there is, again, easy elite status via credit card

or for the time being anyway, you can book via Qantas. For those curious, yes, you can also book via Air Canada Aero plan for like a bajillion more points. It's not probably worth it as compared to transferring to Qantas if this is what you want to ultimately do. Right. In fact, I stumbled upon a situation where I found out that Air Canada sometimes gives lower award prices to elite members. And I have elite status because of my Marriott titanium status. Then they have the part, this partnership.

So, um, so I found that a particular flight JFK to Dubai with Eric Kennett aero plan would cost me a bajillion points, but someone without status, it was two bajillion points. Oh, and so bajillion point savings there. That's incredible. Yeah. So off the top of my head, it was, it was something like 390,000 points for me.

600 and something thousand for someone without status. Yeah. Wow. Well, congratulations. Well done. Hit the jackpot. I saved hundreds of thousands of points and I saved hundreds of thousands of points more by booking with, well, I didn't actually book, but if I were to book with Qantas points instead.

Yeah, there you have it. There you have it. All right. Let's talk about awards, points, and more. First up in awards, points, and more. Sometimes we say if it's too good, if it sounds too good to be true, you probably need to jump on it right away. And I know some people were out there saying, no, it probably, it is probably still going to work. It's just you got to jump while you can. You got to strike while the iron is hot. And so those who did strike while the iron is hot, when we said, Hey, Rakuten is offering a bunch of points, you can get membership rewards points, Amex membership rewards points applying for chase cards. And we told you, you should do it and earn a lot of points doing it. And sure enough, if you struck while the iron is hot, you got those, those points ready or, you know, pending or whatever coming at you.

But if you didn't, it's gone, right? Yeah, I logged into Rakuten this morning as we're recording this and they still show the three chase credit cards that were available before but they all result in zero points or zero percent cash back. So that deal at least at the moment is dead. I will say, in case you missed it, on our blog we post right away about it but we also know that lots of people are more podcast listeners than blog readers. So we did a special early, earlier than usual coffee break, as soon as this like came out to let people know about it. So I think a lot of our listeners got in on the deal while it was really good for

a while, it was 30,000 points for signing up for the Sapphire preferred 100 K offer. So you got the chase a hundred thousand points and the Amex 30,000 points. I will, you know, I want to toot our own horn a little bit because a lot of sites did not even mention this. Um, a lot of podcasts didn't even mention it because it means losing out on affiliate commission. Like, you know, we all earn a commission if you click through our links and sign up for cards, but we're really committed to trying to find the best opportunities for our listeners, our readers. And so even though pointing you to Racket

in meant we weren't getting commissioned from those signups, it was the right thing to do and hopefully it'll keep you coming back. Hopefully. Hopefully. Alright. Very good on that. Well, bad news that Rakuten is not offering the rewards anymore, but it's good that we were able to get that out there anyway while it lasted. Alright, next up, Japan Airlines is added as a new built transfer partner. So this is an interesting one because Japan Airlines is popular or offers popular products to fly. But my goodness, the points have been almost impossible to earn for a long time unless you've just

happened to fly a lot of Japan Airlines, I guess. They're the only one to one transfer partner built is now the only one to one transfer partner to Japan Airlines. I believe you can transfer from Marriott. Is that right? So probably three to one from Marriott. And that's the only other option I think for they have a credit card, but I think the welcome bonus on the credit card is like 10,000 miles and it offers like one mile per every $20. It's not a good card. It's not a good card. Otherwise, unless you, unless you're seeking lifetime one world status, because there's a way to spend a gajillion dollars and earn that. But yeah, so now we can earn built

points, transfer to Japan Airlines. Japan Airlines is known for having some really amazing, very good award prices. Unfortunately, on June 10th, some of those are going to increase. They already announced a devaluation of their award charts a bit. Especially booking Japan Airlines' own first class is going to go up a lot. The others are pretty modest changes, I think. And so there are still going to be some really good deals available with using Japan Airlines miles and taking advantage of multiple stopovers. There's a lot of things you can do with those miles. We're not going to get into that right now. Maybe we'll

we'll do a full show on that at some point. But a downside is that their miles expire in three years, no way to keep them alive. So, you know, only do this if you are 100% sure you're going to use the miles and hopefully not cancel the flight and get the miles back because they will expire. And you should also know that Japan Airlines has restrictions about how long your account has to have been open before you can book awards. BILT has managed to get a special deal where that's reduced that amount of time for BILT members.

But you know what, even if you're not a BILT member or if you are, but have no intention of transferring to Japan Airlines, whatever, it's a good idea just go ahead and open a Japan Airlines account now. Get it open so that if it ever comes up that you decide, oh, it's a good idea to book an award, you might as well have your account already ready to go. Don't have to wait at all once you transfer the points and can book it right away. That's a great piece of advice that will come back in a little while in terms of opening up frequent flyer accounts, even when you don't think you're going to need them right

away. But we'll come back to that in a bit. So definitely take care of that. Interesting. I mean, I don't have any intention to book any awards with Japan Airlines mileage bank anytime soon, but if you do then definitely This is an awesome development because there are some good sweet spots there Speaking of good sweet spots. We expect the combined Alaska and Hawaiian mileage program the loyalty program to arrive in August and of course, I mentioned sweet spots because Alaska is known for lots of good sweet spots. My goodness, like I was looking

at awards again this morning to Europe and I like there's so many available with multiple seats from the East Coast for like 45,000 miles a person to 55,000 miles a person class in business class is incredible. The availability is wild on on their partners right now. So anyway, so I'm excited about that. But of course, if those if and when the two programs combine, we expect you probably will no longer be able to transfer Amix membership rewards points to Hawaiian, which of

course is a big deal because your Hawaiian miles can then transfer to Alaska or will become Alaska miles if you don't do anything with them yourself. So this is sort of like, I would say probably a last call for transferring to Alaska or transferring to Hawaii in any way from MX membership rewards. I would take that as the writing on the wall that certainly by August, I expect this will be gone

if not sooner. And there's a very good chance it'll end sooner than that. We, but we don't know. So if you're planning to move points to Alaska via Hawaiian from American Express Membership Awards, do it now. I just did more for my son this time. I wanted my son to have a big bunch of Alaska miles to play with. He has a lot of, or had a lot of American Express membership rewards points. He's been signing up for like business cards

over and over basically. And so I figured it would be good for him to take a bunch of those, not all of them, but a bunch of them and turn them into Alaska miles before it's too late. And so that's what we did. Yeah. You know, I've been hesitant because I have this big family trip coming up. And so I've been hesitant. I always want to have enough points in my pocket to be able to like salvage things if something goes wrong. So like we miss a flight or something or if like it's canceled, I want to have enough transferable points on hand to be able to make a quick

move and book something. And for four passengers, that's not as big of a deal as it is for eight. So I've been hesitant to transfer and like, and reduce my pile of transferable points just in case something goes wrong with this upcoming trip. But I'm getting really nervous that I'm gonna wait too long and then be crying myself to sleep over

not having transferred the MX points. So I think I'm just gonna go ahead and do it and clear out one of our membership rewards points accounts, which will put a significant hit in our total transferable points balance. But then I look at it and say, well, but Alaska has a lot of availability on their partners right now between Europe and the US. So if something goes wrong, there's a decent chance that Alaska is going to save the day for me.

So I might as well go ahead and make that move now But yep, so consider that again writing on the wall It's time if you're looking at the Hawaiian Airlines credit cards or a Hawaiian Airlines credit card We don't know if and when those are gonna end but I wouldn't be shocked if those end and then last piece of advice So I want to mention because it'll come up a few times Some people have asked what if I don't transfer my Hawaiian miles to Alaska? And so the answer to that is I expect they will automatically go over to the Alaska side or I say Alaska side. It'll just be one loyalty program. Whatever it is. That's what will happen. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, but while you say I have no doubt, yes, that's absolutely what will happen, but I would recommend moving them to Alaska sooner rather than later. And the reason why is because Alaska is kind of running the combined program. And so whenever this happens, I would assume the whole system for moving points between Hawaiian and Alaska is probably going to go down for a few days because it's a big IT undertaking to be able to do that. And they're going to have to match up, you know, like Greg Davis Keene with Greg Davis Keene. And if you haven't done that for them, and especially if one of them was Greg Keene with Greg Davis Keene. And if you haven't done that for them, and especially if one

of them was Greg Keene and one of them was Greg Davis Keene, then that process, like there's so much potential for problems. That's a really good point. Also, I think it's worth mentioning another thing to do before it's too late, which is if you or anyone in your family has a Wine Airlines credit card, that means you can move points from one to another for free. And if you like to consolidate all your miles with one person's account, this is the time to do it. Because once the Hawaiian Airlines cards are gone, we don't know that you'll have that ability anymore.

So, you can move all your points from your kids, your spouse, whatever, to your account or to whoever's account, and it makes sense to have all the miles in. Move them first to Hawaiian, even if they're in Alaska right now. Move them to Hawaiian, then move them all to the same place, then move those to Alaska for the person that that should have them. Yeah, yeah. Yep. That's that is absolutely what I would recommend doing now rather than waiting because you may be waiting in purgatory longer than you'd like. So I would get that done. All right. Let's talk finally about Spirit Airlines, which I know excites

Greg when we talk about Spirit. So everyone's favorite airline Let's talk about spirit. So spirit made a bunch of announcements this week. And so some of them were pretty simple or Not wildly shocking or exciting. They're adding extra legroom seating, but they're taking away the blocked middle seat for the go comfy product so they're gonna add legroom, but they're gonna take the blocked middle seat for the GoComfy product. So they're going to add legroom, but they're going to take away seats. And I asked them specifically, is that going to reduce the standard seating? And it's not. And the reasons, because the math works out here, they were blocking the middle seats. So there were six middle seats that were blocked for the GoComfy

section. So essentially six seats they couldn't sell. So instead, they're just pulling a row of standard seats out of the plane in order to expand legroom. So instead they're just pulling a row of standard seats out of the plane in order to expand leg room. And so they're gonna have 42 extra leg room seats now because they're able to add a few inches to each seat. So that's good for people who are long, but not wide, I guess. Correct, correct.

Yes, because yeah, it's gonna be three people in those rows now, but they found that people, they said that people preferred the extra leg room by a little bit. Interestingly, as I talked to somebody about it, they said their data showed that people over 35 preferred extra leg room and people under 35 preferred the blocked middle seat by small margins anyway. For me, it depends on who I'm flying with. If I'm flying with the three people in my family, then I'd rather have the extra leg room and all sit together. If I'm flying with like the three people in my family, then I'd rather have the extra leg room and I'll sit together

If I'm flying with just my wife, I'd rather have the extra room on the side and but of course I have short legs So yeah, yeah, don't don't don't count me. Don't count in that account here Our opinions don't count here But the nice thing is that you'll be able to you already now can redeem your spirit points for any of the seating products So if you want to sit in the big front seat, which arguably is as good as anybody's domestic first class, in my opinion, I think they're really nice seats, you can do that now. So you can do the go big, but you can only do it on the fair bundles. You can't do it separately on the seat for go big or go comfy, which is kind of disappointing in my opinion. But at the same time, probably if you're getting the big seat, you would have paid for the carry on presumably anyway. So unless you had elite status, I guess,

then you didn't need to. All right. So that's that card. Or the Well, the Yes, yes, because now the credit card comes with two free check bags, but it doesn't come with a carry on it comes to free check back. So slight difference there, depending on your travel preferences. So yes, credit card now comes with two free check bags, debit card is coming in the fall and debit card might initially sound not interesting, but I think there's some interesting use cases.

So first of all, it's not gonna be free. It's gonna cost $6.99 a month. So seven bucks a month. So essentially you can look at it as like an $84 annual fee, which sounds like a credit card. It does come with many of the credit card perks. It does not come with free checked bags, but for instance, it comes with the ability to pull points.

And that's a feature that I really like of the Spirit program, because as a leisure traveler, I've flown Spirit just a couple of times in the last couple of years with my family of four, and combined total, we have almost 21,000 Spirit points right now, but they're split over four different accounts.

And so right now they're not terribly useful. I might be willing to pay seven bucks for a few months of the debit card in order to be able to pool them because as one combined total of 20,500 points they could be much more useful to use for a redemption and I kind of like that it's a monthly fee instead of an annual thing because maybe you could just get it for a couple of months for a particular redemption. So I think that's potentially interesting. Spend on the debit card's only gonna earn one mile for every $2 spent on most stuff, one mile per dollar spent on Spirit, of course.

And that's designed for a totally different customer base probably than most listeners to this show. At the same time, if you have bills that can be paid via debit card, or that you want to pay via debit card, I should say, then it might be of some intrigue because it's gonna also earn status qualifying points at the same rate as the credit card. So so depending on your volume of debit card use, that could potentially be interesting if you want status because status is now going to give you the chance for free upgrades at

the gate. They're going to do like basically the same kind of thing everybody else does with an upgrade list at the gate. So their gold members will have first priority, then silver members, then credit card holders. So if you are an elite or a credit card holder, you will have the chance to get upgraded to either the go comfy, the extra legroom seats or the big front seat, depending on what's left

at the time of of boarding. So that's kind of a nice benefit. It's going to extend initially right now. It's only for the member, but starting in June, so starting within just a couple of weeks of when we publish this, it'll be for you and one additional person on your reservation. So, you know, it might be nice to get an upgrade. So I didn't realize that. So even card holders without elite status are

eligible for upgrades. It's just there be there. We're behind the elite and it's the the so the the card is also the tiebreaker. So like if you have two gold members, if one of them has the card, that's going to be a tiebreaker for getting an upgrade. And then, you know, if, if it goes down to just card holders, it'll be rolling status qualifying points for the year that'll determine the upgrade priority, I asked those types of questions because I was curious. So, um, so that's that, um, speaking of asking those types of questions,

that was because I, I was, I attended a launch event, they had an event at their headquarters in Fort Lauderdale. So I had the chance to actually talk to people from spirit and ask them some questions and get some more information. That's why we have kind of a bit more information on those things than we otherwise would. And I think that there's a couple of other things coming that haven't been announced yet.

I picked up on a couple of tidbits while I was there. Like the fact that I think there's probably gonna be a premium credit card coming sometime soon and Also, maybe the chance to transfer points from partners of some sort. I don't know what that's gonna look like I don't know who's gonna have points that you can transfer to spirit, but I'm kind of excited about that That could be pretty cool Now Greg is not excited about that because and he's right about this spirit points aren't terribly valuable They're usually worth somewhere between one and one point two cents per point we really need to

develop a reasonable redemption value for spirit we will soon because i'm curious whether or not it'll be worth transferring to spirit but you know if you want to be able to to redeem points to fly in like a domestic first type of a product at times when spirit is far cheaper than everybody else it might be appealing if you're able to transfer and get the 1.2 cents per point because you might be able to get like a nice seat for like, you know, 12 or 13 or 14,000 points. So we will see and we'll cover more of that as time goes on. Yeah, yeah, I'm still stuck on imagining what a premium credit card from spirit is going to look like because like, that's so against their their image

But I guess they're I guess they're trying to change that image Well, you know I get the sense that they're trying to to appeal to the broad range of preferences that customers have and so, you know They recognize that some customers are the type that don't want a credit card at all So the debit card offering I think makes a lot of sense I mean, there's a lot of people that are focused on not using credit cards at all I'm not or don't have a credit rating right would support and getting exactly exactly don't have access to I think makes a lot of sense. I mean, there's a lot of people that are focused on not using credit cards at all. I mean, obviously- Or don't have a credit rating that would support getting a credit card.

Exactly, don't have access to it, exactly. So plenty of reasons why a product like that makes sense. But then obviously they've found it important to offer some sort of like a premium economy type competitor. I think they felt like there weren't enough GoCumfee seats. There was more demand than they had seats. And that's what precipitated the decision to expand the GoKomfi section.

So I think they're realizing that there would be demand for those things if they had enough of them. And so I think it makes sense that they've expanded GoKomfi. They've now offered some upgrades for elites, like a legacy carrier would. So I think it's kind of a logical next step that for people who are interested in those things, offer them something that's going to appeal to them that

would maybe draw them away from flying Delta or United or American. So yeah, yeah. I, you know, I have my doubts about how successful they'll be, but yeah, I'm rooting for them. They have a great route network out of Detroit, which is my home airport. And so I do care about those things. And so, you know, if they get good at delivering a premium or even a more standard type of experience, you know, less nickel and diming and, and, and, and so if it feels like flying, you know, United or Delta, then I would be,

I'd be excited because it'd give me a lot more nonstop flights and real competition with Delta. So like Delta hasn't really competed much on the routes where they fly the same route, because it's not the same customers that are buying those. But if Spirit ups their image, I think Delta is going to have to try to match prices on those routes. Yeah. Well, again,

that's part of the reason I find this interesting. It's obviously it could put pressure on others and we say could because like Greg said, I share the skepticism as to whether it'll all get executed the way that people wanna see it. But Spare seems very interested in looking at the data that they have. So I think that they're pretty attuned to whatever they think they're gathering

rather than deciding things and trying to make the data fit what they want, I think. I get the sense that they're actually trying to respond to what they see as being reliable data. So anyway, we'll see. If they do, it'll be good. And I think that because right now, anyway, the price difference is often pretty significant.

The few number of points that you'd need and the ability to get access to things like points pooling and then maybe the two free checked bags with the credit card might make the program make some sense to some larger segment of people anyway than before. So we'll see. We'll continue to follow it. Let's get into this week's main event. Main event time, points for the next generation. If you're raising kids, it's your responsibility not just to feed them and get them educated, but also to get them ready for lots of points and miles and,

but also to get them ready for lots of points and miles and, and the ability to redeem them. So we're going to go through what you need to do as a parent or guardian and, uh, to, to, you know, get your kids in the right position to, uh, really take advantage of the points and miles game if you're interested in doing that. Um, but since you're listening to this, I'm assuming you were. You must be, You must be. You must be.

So we got to talk about what we need to do to help them, right? Because you got to help the kids get set up and ready for things. So first of all, let's help them build loyalty accounts, loyalty accounts, I should say. Let's help them build loyalty accounts because you can get them signed up for accounts now to start earning miles now. So many airlines offer the ability to set up your kids with frequent flyer programs, frequent flyer accounts, I should say rather. So you can get them in Alaska mileage plan account, a Southwest airlines, rapid rewards

account, et cetera. And that can be useful, of course, for paid flights, because why wouldn't your kids want to earn points now also, it's particularly useful if for instance, you're earning spirit points, you're going to pull them later or a number of other airlines offer opportunities where you might be able to pull them later. So that's I think a good reason to get them set up and earning some miles. Last year, my kids earned miles flying Hawaiian Airlines, which I booked a paid flight through the Amex travel portal using one of the benefits, the business platinum benefits to pay with points rebate. And so my kids each earned like 13,000 Hawaiian miles and now I was able to pull those into my Hawaiian

account and then transfer them over to Alaska. So it's useful just to get them set up with that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah and let me mention a few other opportunities. So JetBlue has points pooling as well, United too. And maybe Alaska will retain some sort of ability to do that after the merger. If that happens, keep in mind that there's a lot of airline partnerships out there. So for example, if your kids are flying, you hopefully are flying with them, but are flying on American Airlines, you might want to have them credit that flight, put in their Alaska mileage plan number to earn Alaska miles instead of American Airlines miles, especially if Alaska does end up having pooling. Same thing like United, let's say you're flying one of the partners like Air Canada,

you might want to, well, Air Canada actually is pooling as well, I think. But just an example, if you wanted United Miles, you might want to put their United Miles account on there instead of Air Canada. Yeah, and you know, I've done the same thing in the past. We flew British Airways on a similar quote unquote paid fare that we used, business platinum points, repaid with points rebate to take care of so that we'd earn a bunch of miles on the flight. And I got one son signed up for Alaska mileage plan and got his Alaska number put on that cause he was going to earn a boatload of Alaska miles.

And then I went, I forgot until like the last minute to try to sign up my second son for an Alaska account. And when I went to do it, unfortunately, one downside that I was going to talk about in a minute, but I'll throw it in here is that the signup process isn't always as straightforward and simple for a kid. When they're under 13, some airlines will require that you need to call and speak with someone to set up an account.

So there might be an extra step or two in order to get your kid signed up for an account. And I waited until the last minute and I didn't have the ability to call and get that set up. So my second son I put his American Airlines number on the same flight and you earned far fewer American Airlines miles, but he earned some miles nonetheless. And so having them signed up for those things and taking care of it in advance really is a good idea. There's a lot of other opportunities too. Like for instance, you can take advantage of shopping portal promotions.

If there's a shopping portal promotion where you earn an extra thousand or two miles for spending like five hundred dollars across all partners, well I will oftentimes take advantage of that and sometimes multiple times throughout the family. Maybe we need to buy you know a whole bunch of mulch at Lowe's and I can buy some through one person's account one through another and one through another and go pick up three different orders for mulch at Lowe's because it helps me meet the spending requirements so that we'll all earn the bonus for that. So I take advantage that the kids have shopping portal accounts with American Airlines, eShopping and Capital One shopping accounts because

there's great referral promotions for that and whatever else. So many of those things you can you can do and take advantage of those. It's important to get them signed up for those accounts sooner rather than later, so that you have a seasoned account, so to speak. And this goes back to what we talked about earlier in this particular episode, we were talking about Japan Airlines

has a minimum time requirement after you create a Japan Airlines account before you can start redeeming miles out of it. And some other airlines have similar things when it comes to transferring. So for instance, to transfer points from AMEX membership rewards to Iberia, I think you need to have an Iberia account for a minimum of like 45 days or 90 days or something before you can start transferring in points.

And so other airlines have similar things where I've been told that it's very common for airlines to have a minimum seven day period after you've signed up for the program before you can start redeeming miles. And that's not something that they state outright anywhere. It's just a behind the scenes kind of a thing. And I've run into that where my wife created a brand new frequent flyer account, transferred miles in, and then wasn't able to redeem them and super frustrating.

So create accounts for the kids now. Yeah. And for yourself, too, for those reasons, if you haven't already. Another thing that sometimes happens, it's not published that this is the reason, but it seems to be like with Air France, for example, if you created an account and immediately transferred in a bunch of points and booked something,

there's a chance that they will do something negative to you. It may be something like at the airport actually, ask for proof to see the credit card that you use to pay the fees with it, just to prove that you are who you say you are, that kind of thing. But it could be worse than that of them canceling your account or your ticket or whatever.

So, and the reason they do it is because it looks like mileage broker activity where someone sold miles to someone else to book a flight and they don't like that. So, if you've had your account for a long time, it'll look less like something like that's happening. Yeah, so you wanna kind of create those accounts now. So I make sure that everybody has frequent flyer accounts with any airline that's likely to be useful. I don't worry about it for every airline under the sun but any

airline that I feel like might be one that either A will want to redeem miles for, B has some sort of like shopping portal promotions or a good way to earn them on paid flights or see an airline that I think they might wanna transfer to someday when they're 18 and have a credit card, might as well get them signed up and started now. So give us a list of just five so that people aren't overwhelmed. Well, I would definitely do Air France, KLM Flying Blue

because they have been known in the past to lock up accounts when they're brand new and you're transferring right away. So open an Air France, Flying Blue account now. Stop the podcast and open it for you and everybody in your family. No sense not doing that. Same thing with Iberia. I would do just because again, they're known to be tough, although Iberia might be a less useful program. So I would probably open accounts for Alaska, American Airlines, and then I don't know Air Canada

Aeroplane because of the pooling probably because it's super easy pooling. Now United also offers pooling, but it's a little bit more complicated. Air Canada Aeroplane is way more straightforward. So that'd be a useful program to have for any Star Alliance paid flights to credit to Air Canada Aeroplane, I think, so you can pull the miles.

By the way, you mentioned maybe Alaska will retain some sort of points pooling in the future and I wanted to jump in there and say I did have a chance to speak with some executives from mileage plan last year and they indicated that they do intend to preserve some type of ability to pool but not quite as broad as what Hawaiian has now. So my take reading between the lines on what was said, which of course I could be wrong, but my reading between the lines was that I think we'll see family pulling with Alaska,

but not the ability to send miles to just anybody like you can with Hawaiian right now. That's my guess. Good. So mileage brokers really make things hard on a lot of people. I mean, yes, they provide good deals for some people, but they lock up award availability like a year in advance and hold on to it till they have a buyer and things like that. And so anything that a airline can do to make that harder, but still preserve our ability to like pull points within our family is great. You know, I don't like it when programs go too far

and become like punitive against everybody, but to stop brokers from doing their thing. Great. I'm all for that. There you go. When it comes to hotels, I honestly don't know if you can do this for hotels. I wouldn't expect so, because you usually need to be 18 to check into a hotel.

I have not tried to create loyalty accounts for my kids for hotels. I find that less important, probably, because they're not going to earn any sort of hotel points, because I can't book a hotel in their name, even if I wanted to. But so I focus on airlines for this for now. Yep. All right so the problem here becomes and a reader that asked

us about this recently was like like how do I do this without having to track 47 different loyalty accounts and you know if I open up and you told me just five and so if I have a family of four and I open accounts in those five programs for four people Then we're talking what like 20 accounts that that's gonna be base bare minimum. How do you track all that? Yeah, so I Totally would use a word wallet. I do at home You can put in everybody you can have one award wallet account and put in everybody's, you know, all of their different frequent flyer programs in there. It doesn't

do, there's a few airlines that it doesn't natively support. And unfortunately, those are popular ones like American Airlines, and Delta, I can't remember off the top of my head what they all are, but for all the others, you can use it. In fact, even for those, I do use it. I just, it just doesn't sync those accounts. But for all the others, it's great because it automatically checks the balances.

It'll tell me if points are close to expiry. So I need to either transfer in, you know, a thousand more points to extend it, or somehow use a couple points. Like, I've bought magazine subscriptions for a few hundred points that I didn't even want, just to keep points alive in the past, things like that. And that way you don't have to keep track of all the logins and everything because Word Wallet will do that for you. I don't, and I know Nick doesn't either, I don't put in bank account information, like logins into Word Wallet, but for all the frequent

flyer programs, I feel totally confident letting them manage those passwords and everything. We should also say that in order to, if you're signing up for stuff for your kids, you're going to have to enter email addresses for each person. And so what I like to do is I create a new Google account for each person and I name it like in a way that I can easily remember what they are, like the first name of the person dot Greg, for example, so that I know that it's like their account, but I'm managing it at Gmail.

And then I don't check each of those emails. What I do is I have them all auto-forwarded to one of my primary email accounts through Gmail. And that's how I do that. And then that way, you know, you can, you have all those emails and you're in control of them. When they're old enough to take things over, you could either just give them full control

of those emails and stop the forwarding or go into individual programs and see if you can change the email address that's tied to them. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I've done the same thing. So my kids have email addresses like that. There's a pattern I follow and keep that pattern for all the addresses that I manage. I do not do the auto forwarding though. That's brilliant. That's a great idea. I've got a bunch of the accounts on my phone or others that are logged in on my computer, but the auto forwarding, that's the way to do it. Well done. Yeah, it'll be confusing at first though,

because you'll get emails that you think are to you, but you can easily see who the two is and realize what's going on. And or just set up one account that's specifically for all of that forwarded stuff. And so then all the forwarded. There you go. Then you just have one place.

Just one place, yeah. Yeah, so anyway, yeah, the solutions there. So good solution and one that I meant to mention when we talked about signing up for loyalty accounts. But yeah, that's a good tip and use Award Wallet just like Greg does. So very useful. Also, you can track shopping portals

through Award Wallet too. So there's other stuff you can track there So it's a good useful tool for managing all that stuff kind of keeping an eye on all of it now every now and then somebody Asked us what about security are you concerned about your accounts getting hacked if somebody hacks a word wallet Are you concerned about them cleaning out all your mileage accounts and the answer is yeah, sure I mean, I'm a little worried about that. I'm worried or more worried about that. I'm worried-er, more worried about letting miles expire,

forgetting that we've got miles, forgetting to use a free night certificate. So it helps me enough that I'm willing to accept whatever small risk there might be, you know, in terms of some sort of a negative thing like that happening. I've never heard of any sort of a hack with a word wallet. I think that they're pretty attuned to the fact

that that's really important for them. Yeah, and through personal conversations with the creator of AwardWallet, I remember years ago him telling me about how they hired, what are they called, black hat, no white hat hackers? I forget what that is, but the hackers who basically paid to hack your site and try to get at the passwords and other stuff. I think the way it works is they get paid each time they find a vulnerability and report

it and then it gets fixed. So I thought that was very positive that they were taking proactive steps to try to make sure that they couldn't be hacked. And so, yeah, I mean, I've used them for many years now and never had any kind of issue like that. You know, these days it gets a little annoying because a lot of times certain programs require two factor authentication.

And so you find that award wallet isn't able to refresh the data by itself. So you have to go in every now and then and kind of manually refresh all the programs that have like red flags next to them, letting you know that they couldn't refresh. And, but it's still, compared to having to log in all those sites by yourself and keep track

of things, it's still way easier. Another thing we didn't mention that I find really important about it is it lets me know when I have free night certificates that are going to expire. I mean, it's so hard to keep track of them if you have a bunch of credit cards that have free hotel nights. And so I really value that as well as the expiring points alerts. Yep, absolutely. Absolutely.

All right, so we help them build loyalty accounts through creating accounts for them and using award wallet to track it all so we don't lose track of any of that. Next, we're going to help them build some credit history. And so by that, I mean kind of help them build up, well, a credit history with the bureaus. And one of the easy ways to do that

is to add your kids as an authorized user on some of your existing cards. You don't actually have to give your four or five-year-old an authorized user card, but you can add them to your account as an authorized user. Now, I say your four or five-year-old. Some issuers have rules in terms of how old you have to be in order to be added as an authorized user. Now I say you're four or five year old. Some issuers have rules in terms of how old you have to be in order to be added as an authorized user.

Amex and discover, I believe both require authorized users to be at least 13 years old, so some issuers have a rule like that. If your kid's 13 or older though, you could add them as an authorized user, help them build up some credit history as those accounts likely will get reported to the bureaus for them. Other issuers do not list any sort of an age requirement. For instance, both of my kids became authorized users on chase cards within like, I think my first son,

I added him within a month or two, and my second son within like a day or two, added as an authorized user on one of my chase cards after they were born, I'm saying. So they've had chase cards right from the very beginning. So I don't know for sure whether that's going to help them in the long run. Algorithms could change on how credit scoring is done

and everything else and whether or not that history will come into play 20 years from now when they're applying for cards. I don't know, but it's not going to hurt them probably to have been authorized users on cards that are really old. So I think it's a good start. Yeah, right. It definitely won't hurt them, and it'll probably help. I know that you're right.

Things can change any time. For my son, when he turned 18, he already had a very good credit score, and it was way, way above any of his friends. And so he was able to get approved for credit cards right away. Meanwhile, my niece, when she applied for her first card, I hadn't thought to do the authorized user thing for her.

She applied for a Discover It student card. My son did too, that was his first card. He got approved. She didn't get approved, but the nice thing about the Discover It student card is they then offered her a secured card option, which is where you just like, you know, put a few hundred dollars into a Discover Bank account,

and then you have a few hundred dollars of credit available to you because of that. a Discover bank account and then you have a few hundred dollars of credit available to you because of that. And then eventually that helped her improve her credit and turned it into a regular Discover rate card after a little while. There you go. So doing this in advance can help make that process simpler and remove that stuff. Right, right.

Because she wouldn't have had to do that, presumably, if I had thought to add her as an authorized user, she probably would have had good enough credit from the get-go. Yeah, yeah. And we sometimes see authorized user bonuses for adding an authorized user after they do a certain amount of spend. We've very frequently seen those from Amex in recent years. And again, you could add a kid who's 13 years old or older and potentially get an authorized user bonus by using that card

for purchases. So you could certainly add an authorized user to help you grow some points while they grow some credit history. So it can certainly be a good way to add to the family bottom line. Back when I added my kids, I think our first son, when I added him, I added him to a Marriott card because they had a bonus of like 20,000 points for adding an authorized user and then also had a big spending bonus at a particular category and so we knocked out spend there and earned a whole bunch of bonus points just by adding him as an authorized user. So you could look for those opportunities and look to maximize those with your kids.

Now again, they've got the minimum age requirements with some issuers, but not with everybody. Right, and try to do more than one bank as well. If I remember right, and don't hold me to this because I might be remembering a little bit wrong, but one issuer, I'm pretty sure it was Amex, all of the authorized user cards that were in my son's name,

didn't show, like showed up as the starting date of when he turned 18. Like it showed that as the open date. So it didn't really help his credit history until he got older than 18, right? But other cards from other banks showed up with whenever I opened them. So, so that's why I would suggest first, don't trust Greg's memory because it's terrible. So I wouldn't bet on it definitely being Amex that was the issue. So instead, it didn't hurt to have them on the

Amex card. So I would just do a number of banks. Yeah, yeah. If you can. That's a good piece of advice. Yeah, years ago, it was possible with Amex to get backdated. And so you would get an account opening date of the date that somebody had opened their card. It used to used to be possible. You could add like I could add Greg as an authorized user on my Amex card, and then get my member since date backdated to his member since date and then it would show that my cards were open maybe even before I was born or something you know Greg's not that old it wouldn't be that long but uh but but there used to be a hack there but that's uh long gone so that doesn't work that way anymore but probably adding them as an authorized user like Greg said on more than one bank is a good

move so that you can hopefully build up some credit history there. So that's a good start for that. And I do the same thing. I created created bank accounts for the kids again, in part just to build some history, build some relationship. I think those kid bank accounts were at a bank that allowed that to have an account with a kid's name and then a grownup on it as well. So that's all good stuff.

Then you can help them build college savings. And you've written the definitive, I think, guide to earning miles for college savings. Yeah. So thanks to a gift card called Gift of College, it's possible to earn rewards while saving for college. So there are these savings accounts called 529 accounts, where you can contribute to a child's future education

spend requirements and the money grows tax-free in those accounts. And then when you go to withdraw it, as long as you're withdrawing for a legitimate education expense that's allowed under the plan's terms, then there's no penalty. If you take it out for other reasons, there's a 10% penalty on the earnings that you made. Anyway, the point is, you could use these Gift of College gift cards to fund a 529 account, and you can sometimes buy those Gift of College gift cards at stores where you can use a credit card, earn rewards buying those cards, then you load the funds onto a 529 account. The unfortunately for most of us, the places where you could do this are very geographically

limited. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, Nick? Yeah, so you can buy gift to college gift cards online, but typically online, they only come in lower denominations and with an activation fee that makes them not attractive because the activation fee on the cards makes up too much over percentage of the value of them, which you really ideally wanna find is a place where you can buy cards in person

because then those cards usually can be loaded with up to $500 at a time for a $6 fee. So the fee is like essentially 1% fee to load the cards up, more or less. So the trick there would be finding a place where it costs you, let's say a 1% fee to load a $500 card, but you can earn a category bonus that's worth more than that. So there are certain chains that offer these. A couple of examples are Cumberland Farms, which is a gas station that mostly exists in like the northeast of the United States, upstate New York, Massachusetts, and in Florida. I was just in Fort Lauderdale the other day,

and there were a bunch of Cumberland Farms in that area. So that's pretty geographically limited. Then HEB, which is a grocery chain in Texas also offers them And I think that there's some pharmacy chain in the southeast I can't remember which one but we've got an entire guide So if you just look for if you Google frequent Mylar best options for buying gift of college gift cards We have the best options listed on that page so you can see where you can go get them But the trick is you know if you're earning let's say three acts because you're buying them at a gas station and you have a card that are offers three points per dollar at gas stations, and they're costing you a 1% fee, or so more or less, you're looking at like essentially a 2% win on putting money away for college savings and potentially more depending on how you use your points, of course. So that's a pretty good deal in terms of just college savings

because you can come out ahead of the fee with the right credit card and category bonus, even without a category bonus with a 2% back card. If you're able to buy these with a $6 fee, a $500 card with a $6 fee, you're gonna earn $20 cash back. You're gonna come out 14 bucks ahead of the fee for every $500 that you spend

or that you put away for college savings. So that's pretty nice on its own, a pretty good deal, but you've maximized this even further. And I was talking about this just the other day because I ran into somebody who was talking about how they were paying for their kids' college tuition on a credit card in order to earn elite status. And so they were doing that and I said,

oh, well, if you're paying the college directly with your credit card, you should actually be double dipping. How does that work? Right, right. So the double dip works like this. The first dip is you put enough money for the tuition

into the 529 account by buying these gift of college gift cards. So that's one. But two, if you can pay with a credit card, and I'll go into more detail about that in a second, if you can pay with a credit card for their tuition, then you simply withdraw, instead of telling the, instead of like hooking up the college admission fees

to your 529 account to pay directly, you instead, you withdraw the exact amount you're about to pay from the 529 account and just put it in your bank account and you mark it as an eligible withdrawal, and it is, and then you pay the tuition with your credit card, with whichever one gets the best rewards or ideally one where you're working on a new welcome bonus so you'd get huge rewards from it.

And so you can get points. So let's say, you know, overall, tuition costs $100,000 for four years, which is very, very low for most, for many colleges now, but just to make the math easy. And let's say you got three points per dollar doing the Cumberland's Farms thing and buying those gift to college gift cards there. So that's 300,000 points. And now let's say you use a credit card that earns two points per dollar to actually pay the tuition. That's another 200,000 points.

So you're talking about 500,000 points and paying that 100,000 tuition. Of course, it could be much, much higher than if you had welcome bonuses, right? Because each one, every semester, you could be earning one or more welcome bonuses. And so then you could be talking about millions of points over the course of four years, for sure.

And buying the gift cards too, because you could be buying the gift cards and earning welcome bonuses while you're doing that too. So I mean, you could be buying the gift cards and earning welcome bonuses while you're doing that too. Totally. You could really maximize this intuition, do really well. Right, right. Now, it's actually possible to triple dip, which is you can also, you can also use gift to college gift cards to pay student loans. So if you got a student loan, now I didn't do this with my son, but if you got a student

loan but still paid for everything the way I said before and then paid the student loan with gift to college gift cards with more gift to college gift cards, then you could triple dip this whole thing as well. I do want to mention that even though not all colleges accept credit cards or might charge a fee, another option is there's a service called Plastic, P-L-A-S-T-I-Q, which you can use to pay college tuition with a credit card. They charge approximately a 3% fee for doing that. I wouldn't normally wanna pay a 3% fee

in order to earn credit card rewards, but if you're working on welcome bonuses where you're getting way more than 3% value from your spend, then I think it makes a lot of sense. I did that quite a bit when my son was in college. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, if you're something that comes to mind is, let's say your tuition is $20,000, the Amix Business Platinum card has frequently offered a welcome offer of like 150,000 points

after $20,000 and spend. And so you could potentially knock that out in one shot, paying the tuition using a service like plastic, because they do allow MX cards to be used for tuition. And so for 3% on that 20,000, which is $600, if I did the math right, you can earn 150,000 points plus the points for the 20th split. So you'd earn a total of 170,000 points for a $600 fee. I mean, that might be worth it to you.

And certainly you can get a lot more value than $600 out of 170,000 points. So, and if you're able to repeat that, all the better. Right, right. And Nick mentioned, well, they allow AmEx cards to be used for this. Plastic does have some strict rules about which cards can be used for what.

So check out our Plastic guide to see whether the card you wanna use for tuition is eligible. I can't remember off the top of my hand or my head. Either way. Yeah. Whether there are any that don't allow paying tuition. Yeah. And research your 529 plans.

Every state has a 529 plan. You don't have to invest in the 529 plan from your state, so you can seek out which state has the plan that fits what you want the most. For instance, I wanted Vanguard funds. I wanted low cost funds in the 529 plan. And New York State happens to have those. So I did do the New York State 529 because I live in New York State and also New York State offers a tax benefit for contributing to a New York State 529 because I live in New York State and also New York State offers a tax benefit for contributing to a New York State 529.

If I had picked the Washington 529 plan, New York would not have given me a tax credit for investing in that particular savings program, but maybe the Washington one has something that you might want. Or I make that up, I have no idea what the Washington 529 is, but you should research it because they do vary in terms Of how you can invest the money what types of investments are available and that might make a difference in which one you pick You don't need to again use the one in your state and your kid doesn't need to go to college in that state to use It you can use the New York 529 to pay for college anywhere

And in fact, I think if I'm right and don't quote me on this because this is not my area of expertise But I think even if you're paying high school tuition I think as long as it's educational then I think you can use the five to nine or you have to be college I know I think it has to be college. They might be that again. I'm not an expert on that, but Look that anyway, I did want to mention something go back to something earlier Nick implied that if you found a gift of college gift card in a store, then it would be loadable to $500. Not all the ones you find in stores are loadable to $500, especially, I don't know if they're still doing it, but like Target and some other like national brands

had started selling these gift cards, but with like $100 or $200 maximum, but with still like $6 fees and it just became Unreasonable the fee on top of that low limit and so I don't recommend doing that Very good. Very good. And also, you know You you should know that you're not necessarily gonna be able to walk into a store and walk out with $20,000 and give college gift cards. You're probably gonna have to spread those purchases out I know for instance Cumberland farms the register seems to break if you try to spend

$2,000 or more on one shot. So I wouldn't buy three or four, I think, of those to get to the $2,000-ish, but I couldn't buy a fifth one, I think. I can't remember the exact details, but so I bought them a couple thousand dollars at a time and loaded each 529 with $10,000 in the first year by buying those cards. So it's also also don't be surprised if you were if you go in a store that has them available, loadable up to 500 but won't let you use a credit card to pay for them. That happens as well. Unfortunately, my only advice there is either if you if you don't think it's a hard coded thing

in the register, you can go back when someone else is working. Otherwise, you'll have to find it in another store and try there. But keep an eye out. I mean, if you're traveling, you're on vacation, you happen to be in Texas and you pass by an HEB, then you might want to pop in if you're contributing to a 529 anyway. So that's something to keep in mind. All right. So we talked about helping them, again, build loyalty accounts,

helping them build credit history, helping them build their college savings. So next step we got to talk about helping them build rewards balances and let them build for you. Now I talked before about shopping portal accounts, sign up everybody for a shopping portal account, take advantage of those shopping portal bonuses, earn the referral bonuses for portals. So I mentioned that my kids have accounts with a number of portals and in many cases I referred them so that I'd earn a referral bonus and they'd earn a referral bonus when the minimum

purchases were made. So that's certainly something worth using. And over time, considering as they get older and they are buying some of their own stuff that you can pick and choose whose account it makes sense to buy things through in terms of where you want the miles or bonuses to go. So it does require some organization and thought but you could certainly do that And earn those temporary spending bonuses So again, I manage those shopping portal accounts for everybody in the household, but I think we kind of covered that already

So then last but not least help them build their credit card collection. Now, my kids are very young They're seven and four they have their airline accounts. They're authorized users, they're doing all the shopping portal shenanigans, but I have not yet helped them really build their credit card collection. So I don't have direct experience with this, but you do, Greg. So what do you do when your kid turns 18? Well, that's the key, right? You the reason Nick hasn't done that yet for his kids is they're not old enough, they're not going to be able to sign up for any new cards. But once your kid turns 18, hopefully if you've opened, if you've done the other things right for them, they should start with a decent credit history right off the bat and be eligible for a credit card. But even then, your best bet is to start

with an easy to get card that's intended for someone who's just starting out. And so a number of banks have student cards, cards that are intended for like college student type types. And what my son did, and my niece, I mentioned this earlier, they both had them sign up for Discover at Miles cards. And a nice thing there is that, and I'll just say again what I said before, that if you're not approved, there's an option to get a secured card, which is actually a pretty good version of,

secured cards have very negative things associated with them, but this one has no fees. It's just, you just put some money in the bank and then they have a credit line that's that big and then eventually they're able to convert it to a real Discover It card. And so it was a really nice path to getting a credit history by doing that. And so it was just like, it was all streamlined, you know, she applied for the Discover It student card and in the process was told, well, you don't qualify for that, but would you like this secured card? Boom, she got that. The other thing to be aware of when they applied, there was no

such thing as this, but now there's a card called the Chase Freedom Rise, which is again intended for people who are just starting out and want to build credit history. The landing page for this card says if you open up a bank account with, I think it said $250, that your chance of approval is much higher. So I actually, I like this option a lot because it actually has a path and you can read it. Go go to the Chase Freedom Rise webpage and you'll see you'll see this in there, but it explicitly has a path to turning the Chase Freedom rise into a regular Chase Freedom card. And so, you know, you're getting this like deliberately, probably with a very low, you know, credit line card, but it'll move into one that's, that's, you know, more widely

usable with a bigger credit associated with it and everything. And most of all, with points that can be very valuable because these are Chase Ultimate Awards points that your students will be earning from the get-go. So that's really nice, whereas Discover It, it's just really cash back for the most part, which is fine. But if you want to be able to do things like move, if your child signs up for the card using your home address so that your home is still their home for the purpose of managing their credit, then you'd be able to move their points to your

account to do things like if you have the Sapphire Preferred card, you can then transfer the points to Hyatt, for example, to Book a Stay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, we mentioned kids having to be 13 or older to be authorized user on some cards and kids being 18, of course, obviously, to open their own credit cards. But there's no such requirement for redeeming rewards, by the way. So for instance, my son, I mentioned, had earned a boatload of Alaska miles on an itinerary that he had credited to Alaska. And he was able to redeem those for seats for the family to fly on, on a flight within Europe, on thin air. So he, it was easily possible for him to redeem those and pay the taxes

with one of his parents' credit cards so that we could all fly. So I'll be sure to thank him when we take that flight. But certainly, you can do that. You can redeem from their account, too, for the family. So that's worth mentioning. But OK, so they start with probably a Discover It student or a Chase Freedom Rise. I like those as good starting points.

Then how long until the next step and what is the next step? Yeah, well, so, you know, basically, you need to make sure that they are using the card regularly and paying it off in full each month. You just want to establish those good practices right from the get go. And then, you know, once they seem ready, you can, I mean, they can check their their credit scores and see if it looks pretty high. I don't know exactly how long you need to do this. And in my son's case, I think I'd let him just sort of go on his own with his discovery card for, may have been as much as two years.

I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think that the very next card I had him sign up for was a Chase Inc. business card, a free free Chase Inc. business card with a big welcome bonus. He, his business was like, I don't even remember what it was. It was like more of a plan to have a business

than a business that was earning any money. And that was fine. We just put in that he did, you know, I can't remember computer consulting or something. And he got approved. And since then he's signed up for lots of different Chase Inc. cards.

He signed up for probably a dozen Amex business cards and some Amex personal cards as well, and some other personal cards from other issuers as well since then. So yeah, and he just recently got in on, there was like a big offer for the venture card and he got in on that and got approved. So yeah, you're kind of off to the races once, once you've built that first, you know, credit history.

So about how long was it? I mean, obviously, but like you said, I think that was an important point you made that you want to wait until you're sure that they're responsible with the credit that they're They're gonna be using it responsibly and paying it back before you encourage Continuing to expand to other stuff But let's say you've got a kid that's been growing up in this environment that you know Understands what's going on with all of this and is excited to get going and earning their own points and you know They're responsible and only using it the way it's intended and paying it off every month as they should. How long do you have to wait after they get the student cards before you start considering

other cards? I have no idea. Nobody knows. Nobody knows for sure. I would wait at least six months, but that's just sort of like my guess. And you might wonder, well, how could he have afforded to pay, to meet the minimum spend on all those cards he was signing up for? Well, for most of them, he wasn't, I was managing the card spend for him.

So there are a bunch of cards where he would sign up and I would just take over everything for that card. Like I would make sure he gets, he, uh, met this minimum spend and paid and paid the credit card bill. He would never actually have it for day to day spend in his wallet. Yep. Yeah. So there you go. That's strategy and yeah, six months, I think is a good actually piece of advice

there though, because I know that, uh, that showing six months of positive credit history will make a difference with some issuers. I think that's a number, like sort of an even number that gives you some opportunity. Now are you going to be able to get an ink business card after six months? I don't know. Who knows? Like Greg said, nobody knows for sure, but it's probably about the right time that you could start trying some other things.

Certainly within a year of positive history with their own cards, you should probably be able to start getting approved for other stuff. But I think that also an important point there that Greg makes is that as a parent, if you're going to encourage your kid to get into that and start opening more cards and earning more points, it makes sense probably to keep a watchful eye on that and make sure that everything is getting taken care of. Yeah, it's gonna just vary from kid to kid, right? You'll know if your kid's responsible enough.

I know, like, my son's responsible, but forgetful. And so I think he would agree with me. He wouldn't trust himself to do it either. You know? So I had to make sure, at least in the beginning. And, you know, it was fine. Wise. Wise to do that.

Don't forget about referral bonuses, of course. So, you know, I imagine that probably you referred your son for some of those cards. Oh, yeah, yeah. We did some great things like when they're big Chase Inc. bonuses, for a while they had 40,000 points per. So when you referred someone else, you would earn 40,000 points

and they would earn whatever the welcome bonus was, like let's call it 90,000 points. So we would do a chain and my family of my wife, uh, son and I, where I would refer like my son, he would refer my wife and she would refer me. And so we would get a total of 130,000 times three. Um, so 390,000 points, um, on top of whatever you earned from the spend itself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great deal. So don't forget that.

That could be a really powerful tool when you're playing in family mode, is referring each other for new cards. And sometimes if the referral bonus is good enough, you might even consider referring somebody for a card that they don't particularly care about. But if you're able to get 30 or 40,000 points for the referral, that might be worth it in itself

and in the right situation, particularly with business cards that are not going to affect their ability to get approved for other consumer cards. Right, right. Or, so, you know, another thing is the other way around, like maybe, so I believe I referred my son way back when for the Amex Blueex blue business plus card, which has no annual fee. And I picked that because yeah, I wanted him to have cards that had no annual fee. Um,

and so it didn't have a big bonus, but I got a referral bonus. He got one, um, and he got the welcome bonus, but he also gets to refer other people from that card. And so, you know, you can make a whole chain of that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, so if you're opening cards on your own, like let's say you've got a player one and a player two, two parents in the household that are earning points and doing all that fun stuff,

and now you're managing for a kid, two kids, three kids, whatever you got in your household, that sounds like a lot. How do you keep track of which cards you've opened, who's eligible for what, when your spending requirement needs to be met, how much it was. Have you ever had that situation where you're spending in a card for a while and then you're like, wait, what was the spending requirement? I don't even remember. That's happened to me before. What do you do? Yeah. Well, with the spending requirement, I actually keep my own spreadsheet with just that and make sure I track that very carefully. But for every card, well, I use travel freely to simplify most of this. So what travel freely does

is it lets you, it just asks you which card did you sign up for when, and if it's a new sign up, it'll suggest whatever the current welcome bonus is. Is this what you signed up for, the 60,000 point bonus for this card? You can change that if you want to, but all it needs to know is the date you signed up, what the bonus is, and then it will send you email reminders like,

hey, you've got one month left to meet the, let's say $5,000 spend requirement on this card you signed up for. So that's useful. At the end of the year, it'll send you a reminder saying, annual fees coming up, you might wanna cancel the card

or downgrade it, whatever. So I find that really, really helpful. So what I did is I created for both my wife and son, their own Travel Freely accounts, and both of them are tied to those email addresses that we talked about before that are like.greg because they really come to me and so all those reminders from Travel Freely actually go to me and you know so just so it's just very very simple you know you applied for a card you just have to

remember that one thing go into Travel Freely tell it what you just signed up for it. You don't have to tell it, and you can't tell it your credit card number. There's no security concern about that. It's just having a system that can keep track of all of your cards, when the card bonus is, when the annual fee is. And then the long-term payoff for doing that is not just the short-term ease of keeping track of things, but it'll also keep track of things like, are you eligible for a new card? So, for example, like Marriott cards have very confusing rules about whether you're eligible for a welcome bonus on a new Marriott card, if you've had some other Marriott card

in the past, blah, blah, blah. It figures all that out for you and will tell you whether or not you're eligible it keeps track of your chase 524 status meaning you know if you've signed up for five or more cards in the past 24 months chase might not approve you for new ones it just has this super easy thing telling you what the current status is and when it will drop down. So like you can, and you can see which card will drop off, which specific cards that you had signed up for will drop off, meaning will become more than 24 months old.

Um, and so all of those things are just, you know, perfectly designed for that. And I don't know, I would tear my hair out trying to manage welcome bonuses and cards for my family if I didn't have that. I honestly think I would not have them signing up for many cards because I wouldn't wanna deal with all that. But we earn hundreds of thousands, probably millions, probably over a million points every year

because all three of us sign up for Cards Right early. Right, right, yeah, yeah, absolutely. In my household as well, so a tool like that can be super useful for tracking all that stuff. And so that's something that we recommend because it's so useful. That's something Greg uses all the time himself. So when he says, you know, you should consider using this

That's because he uses the same thing. You know, we mentioned a word while earlier It's something that we use very frequently ourselves So so yeah trouble freely great thing to sign up for and we'll have a link for more information about that and a lot of The other stuff we've talked about in the show notes today because we do have a lot of resources written about this stuff So hopefully you can earn a bunch of points and get your kids set up to earn their own points so you know when you're an empty nester you have one fewer seat you need to worry about because hopefully your kids will be taking care of their own travels so that is a potential good side benefit and perk there. Alright I think that

brings us to this week's question of the week and this week's question of the week is kind of long but I think it's interesting and this week's question of the week. And this week's question of the week is kind of long, but I think it's interesting. And I'm gonna bet that what this question is about is something that's probably unfamiliar to like, I'm gonna guess 90% of people listening, maybe Greg included, and maybe only useful for a small percentage of that,

but I think it's interesting. So the question's a little long, but here we go. Benjamin writes in, says, "'I was listening to your latest podcast "'and also booked a trip to Bora Bora for next year I booked Air France returning from Papayate from Tahiti to Los Angeles Now I included that part of this because that's gonna come back into play in a minute So they booked Air France from Tahiti to Los Angeles. Yeah One program that I've not heard anyone talk about perhaps perhaps you have in the past, is the Accor Signature Annual Membership,

which is a program based in Brazil. I know some of you are saying it's based in Brazil. It has nothing to do with me. Hold on, hang with me here. So the premium annual membership is 6,720 Brazilian Rials, or 1,189 US dollars. So it's 1,189 US dollars per year, and in exchange for that $1,200, let's call it gives you 75,000 a core points. So of course, the hotel chain, of course, the core live limitless is their loyalty program. You got 5,000 points each month and an additional 5,000 points every four months. So it works out to 75,000 points a year, you can use those state those to book a course days at an estimated

two cents per point. That's about it's a little bit more than two cents per point because it's really two euro cents per point. So you pay $1,200 and essentially get $1,500 worth of core points. So he says, but actually a bit more. Yeah, but actually a bit more exactly. And potentially a bit more than that. Here's where I thought it actually got a little more interesting yet. So that could be a very good value for the course days However, I learned there are several airlines that are core points transfer to at a one-to-one ratio and even more to two-to-one ratio That's not necessarily recommended but Air France, Iberia, Qantas and Virgin Australia all transfer to one-to-one ratio I was able to transfer my core points to Air France to book that business class award ticket from Tahiti to Los Angeles

One caveat is that it takes longer than average to transfer transfer my core points to Air France to book that business class award ticket from Tahiti to Los Angeles. One caveat is that it takes longer than average to transfer. I initially transferred 2000 points and it took 48 hours. Second time it was 24 hours, but with Air France you could hold a reservation for 72 hours, which gave me enough time to transfer the points. That was, that alone was a great return, but you could also receive 1000 status points per month, which is enough for gold status and just a couple thousand points shy of platinum status. So he's got a three night a couple thousand points shy of platinum status.

So he's got a three night stay booked in order to earn platinum status with Accor. Although Accor is not as popular in the US, they have a number of great luxury and lifestyle brands, Fairmont, Raffles, Sofitel, et cetera. Platinum status would be a significant value staying in any of the luxury properties. Wanted to share this experience and tip,

feel free to reach out if you have any questions. So, not with us, it was Ben speaking there. So, what do you think about this? You pay about $1,200 for what is essentially $1,500 or $1,700-ish worth of Accor points. Would you do that? You're subscribing. So, would you do that for the Accor points to start and or would you do that for miles in some of those programs? Yeah. So what would that come to the cost per mile if you did a one-to-one transfer from Accor? That's a great question.

So it was $11.89 was the cost of it and it'd be 75,000 miles over the course of years. So it'd be 1.58 cents per mile, about 1.6 cents per mile. Yeah, I'm definitely not a buyer at that level. It would be a very unusual situation. Because I have so many transferable points, it wouldn't make sense to buy them. The only time I could see doing that is if you didn't have another way of getting those

miles and you had a award that you wanted to book that was where you were getting significantly more than one point six cents per point value from that award, which is not unusual. But the point is, it's much easier and cheaper to get points through welcome bonuses and things. But the hotel thing is pretty interesting. First of all, because if you're someone who would often pay for a core Hotel stays, you're sort of buying those stays at a discount. Right. And I like the elite aspect to it, because if you're actually gonna be using them

to stay in Accor Hotels, then you're gonna be earning extra elite credits, and you're actually going to be using them to stay in a core hotels, then you're going to be earning extra elite credits. And you're going to get to platinum status where you get things like to suite upgrade nights. And I believe it's really nights not stays. So, so it'd be good for a weekend to upgrade it to a suite. But still, that's not nothing. So if you're in a core fan, I think that makes a lot of sense. That's a pretty big Investment for me too. I wouldn't do it just in case like like I haven't seen a core hotel in a long time and So it's it's it's a it sounds like a good deal to me but not good enough to say hey I'm gonna jump on this just in case I'm gonna have an opportunity to use it. No

Yeah, yeah, so I mentioned that this is a program that exists in Brazil. So somebody brought this up years ago now, I think, to us in an email, and I looked at it. And initially, when I first looked at it, I said, Oh, you have to live in Brazil, though. I thought you had to live in Brazil in order to buy this. And then as time went on, I heard more and more people talking about it. And I realized you don't have to live in Brazil in order to buy this. And then as time went on, I heard more and more people talking about it and I realized you don't have to live in Brazil in order to be able to buy this.

So you can buy it. But my thought has been very similar to Greg's in that it's potentially a win, but not big enough to get me to shell out about $1,200 upfront. Now I just looked up the exchange rate. So euros to dollars is around 2.2. So you're getting like about 2.2. So so the you're

getting like about 2.2 US cents per point. So the 75,000 points you buy over the course of the year is basically 1650 at today's exchange rate. So you're paying 1189 for $1,650 worth of a course days. That's a good discount. That's decent. If you're going to spend $1,600 at a core anyway. That's a good discount. That's decent if you're gonna spend $1,600 at a core anyway, why wouldn't you get the discount might as well? So, you know if you are staying at a core properties, then I think this might make sense now I say it might make sense. It takes a while because you're getting the points every month It's like a subscription sort of a thing. So it's not like you have 75 K all at once

So you can't get that discount right away. It's like a future discount So a little bit more complicated. When I heard the example of the business class flight between Tahiti and Los Angeles, I said, well, that's certainly worth more than $1,200, right? So based on the cash rate. So the cost of that, if you look at it, it's effectively buying the miles

for a business class redemption like that, business class ticket to Europe, something else that you might do with those 75,000 miles. There are plenty of situations where you might get more valuable stuff out of those if you transfer to airline miles. But Greg brings up a great point. It's an expensive price to pay and those programs that transfers one to one are programs that you can get by opening a new Amex card or referring somebody to an Amex card or opening

a new city card or Capital One or whatever else, depending on which cards you want to open. It's not necessarily difficult to earn those points in the US, though I say not necessarily and not everybody has an unlimited capacity for spending and earning welcome bonuses. So I think it could be attractive 1.6 cents per point could be attractive in some scenarios. But like Greg said, it's not something I do speculatively. It's not a slam dunk.

And generally speaking, if you told me that here's the manufacturer spending opportunity where you can earn points and it's going to cost you 1.6 cents per point, I probably wouldn't be interested. And that's even if they were transferable points that transferred to a lot of different airlines, that's more than I'm usually willing to spend. For points. But right. isn't for everyone necessarily. In fact, programs like Air Canada Aeroplan that have really valuable points, every now and then have sales where you can buy the points for less than 1.4 cents each.

I mean, so, you know, I would do that. So yeah, anyway, it's a super interesting opportunity. And again, the core thing for hotel stays, I think it's really attractive because one interesting thing about a core, I haven't done this personally, but my understanding is that you can either use the points upfront to book your stay, or you can use them at checkout to pay for your stay.

And so, you know, yeah, you, you won't, you don't get all the 75,000 points upfront, but if you're booking a hotel stay, that's a year away, you can then use all those points at checkout. And, and the other nice thing is like, usually when you're using hotel points, you can't stack other types of discounts like AAA discounts or portal rewards, but because the court has separated the paying for the hotel from, you can do all that. You can get your discount, you can

get portal rewards if a court is on there, I don't know if it is on a portal and and then still pay with points when you're checking out and You know book whatever room type it is you want if you need a suite you need something with more space You're gonna get that consistent value for any room type So that's pretty nice and I assume that if you charge other stuff to your room like a massage or a meal or whatever else That you could redeem your points to check at checkout same I would think so. So I mean, yeah, let's let's be clear. We're not discounting it as potentially a good deal and a core as potentially a good

deal in the right situation. It certainly might be. It's not a slam dunk for us. I don't think I'll subscribe, but I find it interesting. And I knew that there'd be some segment of readers or listeners rather to the podcast that would find that interesting and is worth knowing about. So there you go. There's your little tidbit for the week. All right. If you enjoyed that tidbit and you'd like to get more of that type of stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you

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