Originally Posted by MilesGator

I'm also curious about this (and I have investigated a little on Google ). Not counting the initial sign up offer, you get 100 AA miles per $1000 in their checking account.

That means to get 20k AA miles/month someone has to have $200,000 sitting in a checking account. Lets say those are worth 2 cpm, that's a value of $400/month. Now lets say they get redeemed for business class, that's probably closer to 4-5 cpm(? just a guess as I haven't had the luxury of redeeming for biz/1st) so they are getting a value of $800-1000/month. If you were to park 200k in some retirement/investment account that gets 5% return (doesn't seem unreasonable to me), your value would be $10,000/month.

Why is anyone parking 200k in a checking account? I love to travel, but it just doesn't seem like the smartest way to stash your money.