While there’s a strong history of travel in my extended family, my own upbringing was in a situation where food on the table was a more pressing need than taking trips. I grew up living vicariously thru the adventures of extended family with hopes that someday I could follow in their footsteps.

After college I ended up in a field that was rewarding in every way except financially. A big trip for me was leaving the state via car. As time went on, I still lived off the stories of family (Cousins living in Brussels, Singapore, Paris, an Uncle traveling for Chevron, another for Honeywell, Grandparents vacationing all over the place, etc) and I slowly got myself involved in other pursuits that ate up what little spare cash I had.

Then I met the woman who was to become my wife. She’d traveled around the world and wanted to do more, as did I. We took our 1st trip together to Central America and before going, I suggested we sign up for FF accounts and the companion credit cards. At the time, I was overjoyed to see 30,000 miles – I thought this was the best thing ever! I started to scheme – how could we get enough points to take a trip to CA to visit family? Could we use it to go to her parents place in FL? (I was thinking small).

We planned our next trip, added a few more miles, and got engaged. As we started to plan the honeymoon, I spent some time looking for deals and whatnot. I came across the WSJ article on the coins, and then found the forums and the rest is history. I’m nowhere near the level of many of you but in the past year I’ve generated enough miles to cover our trip overseas next summer, so I‘m pretty happy with the results. Within a cpl months, I’ll have enough for our next trip after that. My wife is onboard with it now and we’re both on the lookout for the next great miles opportunity

At first she though it was a waste of time, or at best, a silly pastime of mine, but now she see it differently – we view it as my part time job – in the real world, we're both on salary, we can’t make overtime, and neither of us want to change employers or careers. Unless I take another job, this is what I make, period, and there’s no way in hell I’m working more hours than I do. So the various promos, scheme, etc are that part time job. And for the amount of actual time I spend on them vs. the returns (the value of the flights & rooms), I’m probably making more per hour on this then I do at my real job