Silver to Gold
 

I will have 39,000 EQM at the end of the year. Should I use all of my accumulated 11,000 FEQM I have to reach gold or save to assure I will reach silver next year? I no longer have the Presidential plus so those 11,000 will be all I have. Not sure how much flying I will be doing with United next year...depends on how they use CLE. My airport is serviced by connection airlines of Delta/detroit, Continental/Cle, USair/Phi. Continental always worked well for me

Tough call -- the value of Gold is eroding next year versus this year; but Silver is eroding as well, and so much that it's almost worthless....

Tough to say if you don't know what your travel pattern will be next year. Gold obviously gets you companion upgrades, access to lounges on INTL reservations, higher priority for upgrades, but if you think you'll be hovering around 25k for the next year or two then the 11k may come in handy.

If the OP starts flying US more, PG will be much more useful then PS.

UACO has gutted silver. It's totally worthless. No E+ before OLCI. Only one bag. Gold gets you *G on *Alliance. I do mostly international now that I'm retired and being *Gold is important to me. I'm thinking of moving to either Asiana or Aegean to retain *G.

One other thing to consider is that FEQMs earned this year don't expire, while those earned going forward will expire. 11,000 FEQMs is quite a bit...for me the limit would probably be 2k-5k FEQMs to use.

Silver will get companion upgrades also, well at least theoretically.

Just to second this - flying CLE-CLT almost exclusively. It amazed me how little US cared about my Silver (early boarding? seat selection? ha!), but Gold they seem to really care about. That said I ended up going back to CO anyway because they "cared" about my Silver when that was all I had :)