Welcome!

What is "minimal?"

There can be great advantages to having some available miles on an airline other than your most frequently used airline.

For example, if you could get up to 25K miles in your US air account through various means...then some day you might need a last minute air ticket. NW might not have availability, and then you would have those US miles to fall back upon. You could even use those miles to help out a relative who needed such a last minute ticket.

(Notice also that the 25,000 mile awards on NW require a Saturday night stay...otherwise it takes 50,000 miles, so another good reason to have some miles in another plan!)

I can't really speak to the transfers...but everything I have read indicates you lose big time in the transfer.

Even if you have minimal miles there are creative ways to use them. For example, I was able to use 5000 AA miles to book a roundtrip ticket on Hawaiian Air.

Keep hanging out here, and you won't be a rookie for long!!