Thanks for the responses everybody!
Originally Posted by
sbm12
Welcome to FlyerTalk!!
I'm going to disagree with the others who have already posted. The 11K you have from CO is close enough to zero that I wouldn't really take it into account when planning.
Assuming you have a decent credit score (which can be hard in college but some folks do it) I would start churning the heck out of the AA/Citi credit cards. Leverage the Mint dollar coin program to make your minimums to get the bonuses if you don't otherwise have the necessary spend. Because of the pace at which one can churn those cards you should be able to generate enough points for a trip to Oz using AA/QF, potentially even in the pointy end of the plane.
Plus, doing it with CC churn doesn't require actually spending too much money out of your own pocket. Even if you spent $2-3K/month out of your pocket and could charge ALL of it that would only be 36-54K miles in the 18 months that you have. That won't get you very far. In other words you aren't really going to make it just by earning points on CC spend; you need something else as a "kicker" to make the numbers accrue more quickly.
Wow, I completely agree with everything you said.
I just spent the past hour reading up on the AA program and here is what I gathered:
- According to the AA reward chart I would need 70,000 miles for a round trip ticket (125,000 for a business ticket
).
- The Citi card offers a bonus of 30,000 miles which can be renewed every 60 days
- At this rate it seems like I should be able to have enough for a business ticket in under a year.
I feel like I'm missing something because it seems pretty simple but I'm not really sure what.