My wife and I have 9 kids (7 adopted), and are finally having some of them moving out of the house...to the west coast of course (washington and alaska). Being a one income family (spouse is a stay at home mom for obvious reasons...), and I don't have a job with business travel that generates free miles, I'm diverting some of my spare (ha!) time to figure out how to get some free flights.

In the past, we had credit cards that paid cashback rewards instead of miles, since (for us at that point) cash was of far more value than miles, even though I realize you could generally do "better" in an economic sense by getting miles instead of cents, especially if you took advantage of all the special deals, but since miles weren't of value to us in the past, well, we didn't go for them.

I recently signed up (in my name) for the 50K amex open small business card, and a 25K personal gold card, and the 50K united visa mileage card. In addition, I have the chase amazon card where I'm a month or two away from having 25K points which I could redeem for a free ticket.

My main question is whether this scenario will let both of us get a free ticket on the same flight at some point in the future? In other words, the united miles are obviously tied to my FF account, which I believe I could transfer miles at some hideously terrible rate to my wife's FF account, but I'm thinking that I can't use, say, the 50K miles there to get two tickets for the same flight, one in my name and one in my wife's?

And in terms of the amex MR points, I'm assuming (hoping) I can transfer them to FF accounts for both my name and my wife's, or else directly pay for two tickets via their travel services?

I really, really want to avoid the situation whereby we fly separately to visit one of our kids, since that would take a lot of the fun and romance out of the trip, so any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I am going to continue reading your site for some great ideas on how to take advantage of mileage offers...i do have a good credit score and no CC debt, so presumably I can keep doing these deals.

Now if only I can figure out how to use miles to get babysitters for the rest of the kids still at home I'd be set.

Thanks!