Welcome to FlyerTalk, devildc!

This may not apply if you intend to earn a lot of miles in your new FF program by actually flying, but if not, you might consider Starwood (hotels) rather than an airline. They're currently offering starpoints for refinancing and the Starwood Amex is often considered one of the best credit cards for earning miles/points. Best of all, while the starpoints you'll earn can be spent at relatively high valuations for hotel stays, you can also convert them into miles with a wide array of airlines. United doesn't offer such a great conversion rate, but with most other major carriers you get 1 mile per starpoint, and 25,000 miles if you convert 20,000 starpoints at a time.

So you could refinance and keep the points with Starwood until you want to take a trip, and then convert the points into the miles you need with whichever airline is still healthy at that point.