I would consider myself a moderate player. It's hard to imagine leaving the game given the benefits we get from it as a family - but I would say we limit our involvement in the game to a few SUBs a year, various promotions we pick up from certain miles and points blogs and podcasts, and our core set of cards - Amex, Chase, BILT, and Capital One. So far, every year we've gotten multiple international trips at significantly reduced cost, with flights often covered entirely, hotels covered a lot of the time, and lots of perks and upgrades and spectacular experiences we would never have paid for in cash. And I don't even go to the lengths of maximizing gift card purchases and so on - too much of a hassle and I'm always concerned about some bank or other deciding that while they haven't cracked down on this until now, you never know when they might start. So I'm sticking with relatively straightforward SUBs and category spend, and still get phenomenal value from it all.

The coupon books are annoying, but - one of the positive things is most of them actually cover MORE than the annual fee right now without having to take advantage of every single one of them. Sometimes you need to use certain "tricks" to make them work (while I'm not big on MS I am willing to do these tricks, since I feel the worst case scenario is likely a clawback of points rather than an account shutdown). Thus far, I get enough value from the coupon books that the overall annual fee cost is low enough to be worth the many perks we get.

There's an intangible value for my family with Globalist status, suite upgrade awards, points stays in luxury hotels we would never pay for out of pocket. If anything, we've gotten a little bit tired of SO much travel, and are probably going to scale back a bit next year. But there's no doubt the value for us greatly exceeds the effort and cost.