where to begin?
 

I feel I am ready for the adventure of points accumulation and successful free/cheap travel, but do not know where to start. Also I feel that our family is missing out on opportunities to double-triple dip in some situations, but I cannot figure out what to do. Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
Our situation:
Credit scores (both) - upper 700
CC: me – Costco Amex joined with hubby (opened 3-4 years ago)
Chase Freedom – joined with hubby (old card), as of now 2000UR
Chase Pref Sapphire - hubby (opened in Feb 2012), as of now 70,000UR
Amex Gold – closed 4 years ago
Spending: 3000 monthly (hubby) – job related expenses, 1000 monthly (50/50) – family expenses.
Club Carlson points: around 50K. Accumulated close to 200K last year (thanks to 2 big promos) and used them for 6 nights in Europe this summer. DH stays in hotels about 1-2 nights a month, not that much...
UA miles 16K (one account), US AIR – 12K (one account)

Due to the DH’s job we are able to use idine a lot. We have two idine accounts and we get around 500-600 dollars cash back every month. I was thinking about switching to miles instead of cash, but could not figure out if it makes sense. Now we are getting 15% cash back, airlines give you only 5 miles per dollar. 500 dollars a month or 15,000 miles a month, is it equal?
Our goal is accumulate as much as possible for travel to Europe, Asia, or within US for three of us. No dates or location are set, we also can travel only in peak seasons, since our daughter is in school. My DH hates to have a lot of cards in his wallet, but I think I will be able to keep everything under control and just give him one card in a time.
Where should we start?

I'm not familiar with idine. Any 15% cashback deal is exceptional.

In general here's what I would recommend:

There are 7 cards worth "churning" - that is, getting, meeting the minimum spend requirement for the signup bonus, then abandoning after the first-year fee waiver expires. These would be:

Amex Preferred Rewards Gold
Amex Gold Business
Chase Sapphire Preferred
Delta Skymiles (gold or platinum)
Citibank AAdvantage card (get two)
USAir Barclay's Mastercard
United Mileage Plus Explorer
(Some might also add Chase Ink Bold)

You should each get each of these cards, and read through the forums to make sure you get the best signup deals. Getting the best signup deals is an important part of the process. Also, look at the spending requirements and time/spread out your applications so that you can meet them. There are also threads about how to increase your spending (see Serve, Amazon Payments, and Getting Up Spending Without The Mint).

If you cycle through all these cards, you should be able to accumulate about a million points in a couple of years. That's the good news.

The bad news is that your points will be spread across the three main airline alliances, and you will have trouble accumulating enough points on any one of them for three tickets, especially if you want to travel business class. The other bad news is that even once you have the points, you will have to find availability. My experience is that you can find it, you just have to be somewhat flexible, but more importantly, you have to know the tricks of how to search. (Just as one example, the difference between flying from Raleigh (where I live) to Europe and back in business class can be 80,000 miles depending on whether you fly coach or first class on one leg of the trip between Atlanta and Raleigh - and the Delta website will not give you any hint at all that you can save 80,000 miles just by downgrading for one hour!)

But with some research on this site, and carefully managing your spending, yes you can accumulate a lot of points, and if you don't get enough, just reapply for the cards a couple of years after you cancelled them.

Learning how to answer that question will be critical to your success.

You have some general ideas of where you want to go. It seems like it would make sense to now explore the websites for the airlines who can get you there.

For most people based in the USA, it makes sense to earn miles in US-based programs. Generally, this means looking at American, United, and Delta. In each program, you can use your miles to fly on that airline and any other airline in their airline alliance.

So have a look at the AA, UA, and DL websites. They each have award charts that tell you how many miles to reach particular destinations.

Run some searches for dates that would be typical to get a sense for what the availability looks like.

Go to each airline's forum here on FT. Most have newbie and award booking "sticky" threads.

Once you figure out how many miles you need for your typical trips, you can compare to the cash price you'd pay to make the trip. For example, if it would take 60000 miles and you would pay $600 cash for it, then a mile from that airline would be worth 1 cent to you.

Would be great if you spent a few hours doing that research and reported back here with more questions. (And "show your work", as well, so folks can point out any missteps.)

Thank you for your information, it was very helpful. I am reading this forum up and down and it helps tremendously.

Yesterday I compared award charts miles vs. cash.
Since we always need three tickets, business class sounds out of our league.
I checked possible dates and destinations and found out the following:
We can find flights to Europe or Asia in the cheapest tier on our dates with no problem but the numbers do not add up anyway:
For example:
United
JFK-Lviv – 60K per pp. If I am getting 5miles per dollar, I need to spend $12K for just 1 ticket.
The cash ticket on the same date is $842. If I am getting 15% cash back, I need to spend only $5600.
About the same result is for Delta to European and Asian destinations.
So basically I need to earn at least 10 miles per dollar to justify switching cash back to miles.

I have this idea to triple dip our idine deal. Don’t mean to be greedy, but why not…
As of now we are earning 1UR points, or 2% Cash back on Costco Amex or sometime 5UR on Chase Freedom (if the restaurants are in the bonus categories), then we are getting 15% cash back total from all restaurant spending.
It comes in the mail – Amex reward gift card – no ATM withdrawals and I was unsuccessful with online purchases.
What would you do to triple dip and earn some miles/points again by using this reward card?

There is an arithmetic problem. You cannot earn 15% cash back on general spending, nor can you earn 5 miles or points per dollar on general spending. It's possible to earn large rewards on specific categories, but not across a wide range of spending.

However, your conclusion is probably correct, Miles and points seldom provide good value if redeemed for economy class airfare.

I am only talking about our idine spending - restaurants. Due to the nature of my DH's job we are able to utilize idine as much as possible. Our idine spending is about 3000-4000 a month that gives us 15% = $400-500 cash back. Or will give us around 15,000 miles, if we switch.
Besides “business” idine, we are not big spenders, so our personal spending a month is pretty small.

I am not sure how idine works, but you could try double dipping with a Chase Ink Plus card and the Amex prepaid card. If that is an option you will get cash back and the points. Check out the frequent miler blog here

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/frequentmiler/

Would you mind explaining how you can get 15% cash back using idine? Wow, that's awesome.

drminn's idea is a good one if you can register an Amex prepaid card with iDine. If not, why not consider the Chase Sapphire Preferred card which is always 2x on dining (uncapped, I believe, unlike the Freedom quarterly promo which is capped at $1,500)? At $4k per month restaurant spend, that would be almost 100k UR points per year (which you could combine with any Freedom-generated UR points on general spend or on restaurant spend during the quarterly promo for restaurants) without giving up the iDine cash back.

Or the Citi Forward card which is always 5x. If you also have the Premier ThankYou card, that turns into almost 7% back when used to purchase airfare. Not bad at all, especially for this particular person, who likes to buy cheaper tickets anyway.

This is due to the nature of my dh's job. Idine gives you 15 cash back if you use cc registered with them and dine in their restaurants. Since our dining expense around 4000 a month, every month we are getting idine cash card for the rewards in amount of 400-500.
I perfectly understand that most of the people do not have this kind of expense. It would be madness to waste these money in restaurants, instead of the plane tickets.:rolleyes:

Citi forward sounds good. But how do you get 7 percent with premier thank you?
Transfer points between accounts and purchase airfare at 33 percent discount?
Can you use points and cash at the same time, if you don't have enough point?

Could anybody share experience of redeeming points from Citi?
We do have both Chase cards : freedom and sapfire. I only redeemed points for statement credit there. Once tried to book a hotel, but the price was way higher that on any other site, even with 20 percent discount.

Yes and yes and: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/credi...133-point.html

Idine is the cashback program version of Rewards Network. Other Rewards network programs include Best Buy Reward Zone dining, Priority Club dining, Delta Skymiles dining, etc. When you eat at qualifying restaurants (search Idine to see), you get cashback/points from the program.

Idine happens to be tiered. After spending $750 a year, subsequent dining gets 15% cashback. I think you should stick with this program since the miles and points programs are significantly less generous.

For continuous spend, I do feel that Citi Forward is indeed the best card for eating out. However, at 75k TYP limit a year ($15k category spending), you will max that out in under 4 months. You may want a US Bank Cash+ card with one of the 5% categories set to dining. I do not think the Cash+ card caps their rewards.

redtop43 has a great list of cards with big signing bonuses. Study that list. Signing bonuses on those cards will help you earn a lot of miles fast. I will add to that list the ThankYou premier (if the 50k point bonus returns, since 50k points is worth $665 of airfare).