Frequent Miler on the Air - Where’s the best place to live for miles and points? | Coffee Break Ep03 | 3-5-24

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

We love talking about points and miles all day, every day. That's why we've decided - in addition to our full-length Frequent Miler on the Air podcast episodes, we're going to share a little something to enjoy during your Tuesday coffee break too. Not a full hour of discussion and analysis like you'll find on the full episodes, but a mini version with a single topic of focus. While Greg and Nick are traveling, Frequent Miler teammates Stephen and Carrie covered this Coffee Break episode for a topic particularly suited for Stephen. (01:28) - This Coffee Break topic came from our last Ask Us Anything, Live when one of our listeners asked, "If you could live anywhere in the U.S. based solely on points and miles opportunities, where would you live?" (01:58) - Stephen and his wife have been on a 7 year road trip to explore every state in the US. (03:22) - Which places stand out as particularly good for points and miles enthusiasts and why? (03:56) - Earning opportunities are a significant factor in how Stephen evaluates each destination. (04:52) - Texas is particularly good for Stephen's points-earning strategies. (05:54) - Ohio (and particularly Cincinnati) is also good for Stephen's points-earning strategies. (06:40) - How do those destinations work for award booking? (Or does that matter?) (08:01) - How much do points and miles factors actually impact Stephen's decision about where to live? (12:50) - Is any destination better than no destination (as in continuing to be nomadic?) (14:01) -  What is Buc-ees? 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. You'll find all other Frequent Miler on the Air episodes here.  Music Credit - Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Here we go. This is not your usual Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Hey, how's it going, Stephen? I'm good. How are you? Good. Listeners at home probably noticed that this is not Greg and Nick. This is Stephen and Carrie. Stephen, can you explain what you do for Frequent Miler? I'm a part-time

rider on Frequent Miler. So like I tend to post about quick deals and take care of last chance deals and occasionally do some of the longer posts as well. Awesome. I'm sure readers of the blog recognize your name. And I'm Carrie. I'm the creative director, so I do a whole smattering of various things. Greg and Nick are both traveling, so it's up to Stephen and I to give you your coffee break today. So I wanted to introduce the coffee break topic by first explaining that we also have a segment that you may have seen before called Ask Us Anything Live. If you're not familiar, that also shows up in our podcast. And once a month month we invite people to join us on YouTube live and ask us questions this coffee break episode comes from a creative

question we got from someone that's particularly well suited for Steven they asked if you could live anywhere in the US or the world for that matter based solely on points and miles opportunities, where would you live? So you already know Stephen writes for Frequent Miler. What you don't know yet is that he has been on a long 50 state road trip. So yeah, we set off on the 50 state road trip on January 1st, 2018, and it was meant to be a five year road trip. But then COVID and other international travel and stuff like that has meant that we've extended it to seven years. That means that we're due to be finishing the road trip at the end of this year, and we're going to finish it off in Hawaii. And then after that, we're just looking for

somewhere to settle down for like one to three years, maybe a little bit longer. We'll kind of see how that goes, just because we're kind of tired of moving every single week sure after seven years it gets old after a while so yeah um so after seven years being a nomad you are looking for a place to live um this person wonders where you might live based on points and miles uh and we found out we discovered in that episode of Ask Us Anything that you actually have a spreadsheet. Yeah. So can you tell me?

It's not a very developed spreadsheet. So basically I set up a spreadsheet with all the possible cities that we were thinking of. And I started filling it out for one or two cities in terms of the pros and cons of each destination. But then my wife and I just kind of like sat down and kind of like really hashed out what are the main places that we're thinking of looking at.

And so we kind of discounted about two thirds of them. And so we've been left with five, either cities or general locations that we're mainly looking at now. Perfect. So of those, we would like to know, so where comes to the top of the list based on points and miles, efforts, endeavors? So it kind of depends on what aspect of it you're looking at. So there's kind of two sides to this. There's one side of it where where's the best place to live if you're looking to earn a whole bunch of points and miles? The other is, where's the best place to live when you want to actually redeem them?

So if you're like me and you're into gift card reselling, then there's kind of like two or three places that I found in the country that seem to be kind of like ideally optimized for that kind of benefit. And if you're not familiar with what gift card reselling is, there's a few different ways to go about it. But as an example, let's say your local grocery store is selling a $100 Lowe's gift card and they've got a coupon for 20 bucks off and so you can buy it for $80. You might be able to resell that for say $85.

So you make $5 profit plus you pay for that gift card with a card that owns more grocery stores so you earn the bonus points for that so five bucks isn't a huge amount and so people might think like what's the point of doing that but if you can scale it and then buy many many hundreds or thousands of dollars worth um of gift cards then you can make some potentially decent money and a whole lot of um points and miles out of it as well so that's why it's so appealing to quite a few of us um in terms of the best place to actually go about doing that it feels like texas um has um it's kind of like has the sweet spot of a lot of different things so quite a few cities they have clogger stores or stores that are owned by clogger um there's quite a few cities that have Kroger stores or stores that are owned by Kroger.

There's quite a few like Albertson and Safeway type stores and they have gift card deals. There's HEB, which is a huge grocery store chain there. And they have some absolutely amazing deals there, particularly around Thanksgiving kind of time. But throughout the year, they have some really good ones. Brookshire Brothers, I think, is there or Brookshireire i don't know how they pronounce it um down there and you mean great deals for gift cards for this kind of thing not just you know your groceries your thanksgiving groceries yes yeah yeah um and so those are just some like fantastic things and so and they all those stores seem to be spread all over the state so in theory that would be be a good place to be located if you're wanting to get into the gift card reselling world, because you can make some decent money down there.

Another good place is Cincinnati, and it might be the kind of wider Ohio area. But Cincinnati in particular, because it's home to Kroger and that's where the headquarters is. They have so many Kroger stores there. You also have quite a few Mayo grocery stores, which they're based up in Michigan mainly, but they've expanded outside of Michigan. And so Cincinnati has a few stores there and they have some really good gift card deals throughout the year too. So those are kind of like two of the sweet spots that I found while we've been traveling around nice i happen to have lived in ohio and texas before but i never to my recollection took advantage of any of these not shame on you not at least purposely i know i shouldn't admit that on on this show um so that

gives us a lot of detail about the earning side buying gift cards at these different uh grocery stores um but what about when it comes time to book your ticket um are ohio are cincinnati and texas also good destinations for award booking or not so much for your kind of sweet spot on the redemption side would probably be on the east coast particularly the northeast where you've got um newark in new jersey you've got jfk and radio in new york you've got boston and then heading further south as well then you've got washington dc you've got philly you've got miami and so you'll find um quite a few um different airlines flying out of those and that will help you um optimize your opportunities to be able to um book award flight those don't necessarily tie up with um the best places to earn miles but

right the other thing to consider is that it's generally not too hot to find flights that go to new york and things like that which is why we'll often talk about finding positioning flights and things like that just because we're certainly not going to be basing our location based solely on okay where would good award availability overseas be Just because we can be fairly flexible and fly to wherever, just because we could fly to Chicago or Detroit or something like that too, if we needed to. Yeah. So New York stands out for the airport, but you can get to New York if you've got a decent airport wherever you're at.

So then last question here. I'm curious, how much is all of this actually contributing to your real decision like are you actually going to end up in cincinnati or at the end of the day are you looking at you know i don't know other real life factors instead so cincinnati's certainly up there we um just spent a couple of days there and we have good friends there and so um we love an excuse to go see them there and eat some skyline chili um but also we ended up spending an afternoon just driving around all the different neighborhoods based on a bunch of properties that i'd found on zillow just to kind of get a feel for um where we um where we would like to live and it seems like north side

in cincinnati seems to be kind of a place that's a bit more of our vibe and things like that um and so that's kind of what we'd be looking for more just for the general quality of life because it has kind of a walkable downtown area with bars and stores and restaurants and things like that that we would like um so yeah if we could find somewhere that would be walkable that would be excellent um another place that i'm interested in is st louis um i really liked it there when we visited last year um they have some um cool looking locked apartments downtown that are really close to the arch um nice and they they have um like again a whole bunch of kind of like nightlife and things like that when it's not like we're big party animals but um coming up in the uk I'm just kind of used to being within walking distance of things I'd want to do where we live.

And we lived there for five years after we got married. My wife's American and she kind of really appreciated that, too. So if we could find somewhere like that where we can just wander down the road to our local or something like that, it would be nice. But does that tick the uh grocery store requirements um well cincinnati meets um grocery store requirements um st louis does to an extent too because they've they're starting to get um some maya stores there they have family fair and schnucks and things like that um another place we've been looking at is the Finger Lakes region. We just absolutely loved it there when we visited last summer. So beautiful, excellent hiking, wineries, so many waterfalls and things like that.

So the quality of life up there would be good. And it's pretty low cost to live in too. Downside with that is there aren't really any kind of stores where there would be gift card deals. So I'd be for going from that. But would I care if i'm like out seeing like waterfalls every day would you care so that would be another thing to consider and then another one that's i guess kind of like near and dear to carrie is west virginia so there's a possibility that 40 of the frequent miler team might end up in West Virginia. Yes, this is what I'm rooting for.

So in case you weren't aware, Carrie and her husband, they moved to West Virginia as part of the Ascend program. And that's where they pay digital nomads to move there. So that way you're not taking any jobs away from people living in West Virginia, but you're contributing to the local economy, contributing to the community, paying tax there and things like that. So it's kind of a win-win for everyone. So that's something that my wife and I are looking into because we both work online and so we'd have

that kind of flexibility to do that. I'm really rooting for it. I'm trying to get you guys here. So we actually visited Cary and Drew overnight. We stayed down there just for a quick overnight stay just to check it out and see if it was somewhere we liked. And we did really enjoy it there. The other location in West Virginia we're interested in is Morgantown. That's a college town. It's kind of a bit more vibrant than Lewisburg and certainly more busy. Bigger city for sure. But Lewisburg was a really nice, enjoyable place just to hang out. Again, that's somewhere that's kind of like walkable and things like that.

So that was nice. We do have a Kroger also. Yes, they have a Kroger. They have a Walmart, which could be useful too. Whereas Morgantown, they have a few Kroger stores. They've got a Giant Eagle that sometimes has good gift card deals too so i would on the gift card side of things morgantown is beneficial yeah um property wise there's a lot more available in morgantown just because it's um a much larger city and things like that better airport positioning too and good

airport positioning or relative to louisbourg anyway yeah sure um so morgantown is about an hour and a half's drive away from pittsburgh which isn't necessarily ideal in terms of having a longish drive like that but it's certainly a shorter drive than we'd have if we were living in louisbourg i think to get to a major airport so yeah we've kind of like morgantgan towns um like high on our potential list of places to live too so then last uh point uh all of these options even if you end up in lewisburg as my neighbor uh still easier than trying to do the gift card purchasing and reselling from nomad life right it's got to be easier than that yeah so i i guess it depends on

how motivated you are to do it and so like in theory it could have been good for me on the road trip just because we've been moving around so i could have been like going to all these different grocery stores have all these different opportunities and things like that however because we're moving all the time and because i'm like researching where we're going to be staying next or what to do there, then we're kind of wanting to just be where we are in the kind of experience. And so don't end up having a whole bunch of time to be driving around all the local grocery stores just to take advantage of all these deals. So it'll be nice being settled somewhere because then I'll have more time on my hands to be able to do that kind of activity, which will be useful. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Well, I'm rooting for you to end up here in West Virginia. But, you know, maybe we need a few more. Maybe we need a schnook and an H-E-B.

And a Buc-ee's. They don't have gift card deals, but Buc-ee's. I see more and more Buc-ee bucky's around yeah do you know where the furthest bucky's is from texas um they have one i think i don't know how far west but certainly eastwise then um there's one in saint augustine florida um oh wow yeah yeah we stopped there recently there's one in florence um south car. They have like at least one or two in Alabama. I didn't know that. So yeah, they're spreading out a little bit more now. Wow, that's crazy.

I just think of it as a Texas thing. Well, it's too good to- Yeah, and in case anyone isn't familiar with Buc-ee's, it's going to sound weird. It's a guest station, but it's an experience to behold it's um they they have world famous clean bathrooms and i can attest no joke like famous because we found out about them when we were in australia so there was someone on our like tour who was from texas and she said when you go to texas on the road trip you need to check out bucky's and she explained why but um they like the gas station area is absolutely enormous they have great beaver nuggets which is like caramel um

i don't know it's like caramel it's not caramel it's like a nut cluster thing right yeah um they have um surprisingly good food for being a gas station, but it's not a gas station, really. It's like Walmart meets Target meets a gas station. I don't even know. But you have to go to a Buc-ee's if you ever find yourself near one. Totally. Yeah. Yep.

But now we've got Buc-ee's more places. Did not know that. Worthwhile coffee break, if only to learn that um well thank you steven i think we're getting close to our time limit so i'm gonna let you go and don't forget to uh visit frequentmiler.com forward slash subscribe if you want to uh follow the rest of our content get notifications about new posts um you can also like this video on youtube and subscribe to our youtube if you haven't already that will give you notices of our Ask Us Anything Live, for instance. Am I forgetting anything?

I don't think so. I don't think so. Click the timestamps in the description if you want to get to a specific part of this episode. And thanks for joining us. Thank you. See you later.