Originally Posted by
ginmqi
Heh, well... awesome for you I guess.
I haven't touched MS really but am a very amused/curious observer/lurker.
I'm always amazed at people who are MSing 5-figures a month...some people probably can MS the equivalent of the avg US house-hold income...per month! Astonishing. (Maybe this isn't even that impressive given what are probably not even publically posted....)
I can definitely understand that if you know how to play the game and have your own ways that you DEFINITELY want to keep the pie as close to yourself as possible, since wide spread knowledge can get something shutdown very quickly.
The wide range of human ingenuity is definitely impressive.
And my wife thought I was being "clever" with my credit card bonus/churning strategy. I can even imagine how MSing can actually become so valuable as to be almost like a 2nd "income-source" if you can minimize fees and maximize rewards.
5-10 years ago I was working, with a girlfriend-later-wife in Canada, and I MSed mostly for flights for her to see me, and her to go home to see her family in Europe every summer. We got divorced, I retired about 5 years ago, I MSed the SunTrust Delta card for a while, then for CB on a moderate scale, now I do monthly what an average household makes, if dad is nurse and mom is a software engineer. Yes, it is a kind of income and I'm sure I make more after the taxes I'm not required to pay than the CSR's at Wally. I've had two bank and 3 CC shutdowns and so what? If someone told me "If you only do $x a month you won't get shut down" I'd do $x but nobody is telling me that. I'm very happy about the new limits at SM, I don't know why they decided to do something so MS-friendly (their term for us is "gamers") but bless their hearts. If I have to give this up I'll miss the money but also having something productive to do every day of the year.