Hi,

I'm trying change from earning cash back to earning miles. I'm planning on buying most of our domestic flights. Currently we travel a mix of Southwest, AA, Delta depending on the best fare/availability with 3 trips per year for work. I would like to use our points for aspirational international vacation travel which is maybe 2 times a year. After reading around the forums, other blogs and looking at the spending my wife and I do here is what I've come up with:

Spending Breakdown

My spend:

25% Restaurants
30% Groceries
30% Airlines
10% Hotel
5% Amazon
Total Spend ~ 30,000

Wife spend:

60% Merchandise
25% Restaurants
15% Gas, Travel, Grocery, Airline
Total Spend ~ 30,000

Current Cards

My Cards:
Chase Ink Cash
CapitalOne Quicksilver

Wife Cards:
Delta Gold Amex
Barclay Arrival+

Proposed Changes

My Changes:
Chase Ink Cash
Citi Premier (or Amex PRG once there is good bonus since I only get 1 shot)

Wife Changes:
Starwood Amex
Case Sapphire Preferred

Thought Process

In the wife's case the changes should get us Starwood points on the 60% of her spending that is non-categorizable, while the Sapphire would cover the dinning and allow me to combine my Ink Cash points.

I was thinking of using the Citi Premier to make Thankyou points that I could on Asian flights or in a pinch AA domestic flights while waiting on a good PRG bonus. The Premier has a category bonuses in most of my expenses Restaurants, Airline, Hotel while the PRG as Airline, Grocery, Gas with a spend bonus.

This would give us points with:

Citi ThankYou (or Amex Member Rewards)
Starwood
Chase Ultimate Rewards

The questions I have are:

Is this too much diversification for too little spend?

For my card setup should I skip the Citi card and just share the Starwood card until I can get a good bonus with PRG? Should I forget the PRG and just stick with the Citi or Starwood?

For my wife's card setup should she use the business or personal version of the Starwood?

Thanks for any advice!

Dude who cares what your spend ratio is. Just get the cards for the bonus. There are so many options that you won't run out in the first couple years as long as you can keep getting approved. Your spend is not going to generate you anything. I have my girlfriend the sapphire preferred because she always eats out. She didn't even spend enough money in a single year to cover 1 month of teens loads on a td go card. Your strategy is cool if you already have cards that you plan on keeping but you are better off shifting your spend to new cards to meet the minimum spend. Then you won't need to pay for domestic flights period.

Your post could be Exhibit A at the Trial Of Bloggers.

Sorry, you have been suckered.

You have obviously been following the popular blogs. You have been fooled into thinking that if you sign up for a couple of credits cards, and then spend your money carefully, you will soon be jetting off to the Maldives and Bora Bora in First Class every few months, your family drowning in champagne and caviar, living it up.

Well, there's bad news.

The fact is that the only people who are going to profit from your activities are the bloggers who suckered you into clicking their sign-up links. You do realize that they make several hundred bucks from your sign-ups, right? That's why they painted the picture for you of flying your family off to exotic places that you otherwise would never be able to afford.

Unfortunately, there is no way that you are going to meet your goals by simply spending your money, no matter how carefully you try to manage your various spend categories and how you pick your cards.

The cost (in points) of your "aspirational international vacation travel" (boy, you really have bought the bloggers' dream, hook, line and sinker - you're even parroting their signature catch phrase) is far, far beyond what you are ever going to be able to generate based on your description. You think you're going to be able to get enough points to take "aspirational international vacations" a couple times a year for you and your family, just with your regular spend and an occasional gift card thrown in? You might want to go back and run your numbers for that scenario.

ibleed0range is spot-on. You ain't going ANYWHERE just by managing your normal spending - unless you constantly spend an incredible amount of money, there's no way you're going to generate enough points for the kind of travel you are dreaming of. You are gonna need to constantly churn credit card accounts, and on top of that also move real money through whatever mechanisms are available to you. Meanwhile, as you slowly accumulate miles and points, the programs will devalue over and over again, as they tend to do more often nowadays. You're gonna be chasing your "aspirational international vacation travel" for a while.

Rather than obsessing over whether you should put dinner at the Olive Garden on your Capital One card or your Ink card, you might want to just try booking a sample "aspirational international vacation" and see how many points that's going to require (at today's rates - never mind that next year it will require lots more). Then take a look at how quickly you are accumulating those points. Run the numbers and see how your plan looks.

Switching which card you put various kinds of spend on is not going to make any appreciable difference.

Its never fun realizing I'm being an idiot, but I do owe you both for taking the time point out that what I was thinking is complete trash - so thanks. Really. This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted - an honest account of what will work and what is just internet trash.

So it sounds like I should be focusing on big signup bonuses from airline specific cards is that right? Then I'm supposed to keep the card until I dump the miles all once so that they don't expire and reapply?

Sorry, I'm a bit in the dark on what I should be doing since no one seems to want blog or post an easy guide about that.

It is far simpler to just put whatever spend you have toward meeting the signup bonus you or your wife have at the time.

First, you need to understand the motives of those whose advice you might be following. The bloggers make their living off of getting noobs to believe they are going to take fabulous vacations easily, as long as they keep signing up for their credit card links. The bloggers are liars. You need to educate yourself a bit about exactly what it's going to take to actually put yourself and your loved ones into the photos they post. Only when you realize how challenging it will be can you assess for yourself how realistic those dreams might be.

That said, there are grains of truth scattered around, yes, even on some of the blogs (but you should always question the bloggers' motives, which are generally not good). Yes, it is possible to take trips to exotic locations, by using miles and points. But there are dirty little secrets that the bloggers tend to ignore, blow past quickly, or just wave away as if they didn't matter to you. All of the following things will make it harder (sometimes much harder) to take the trip of your dreams:

• If you want to take someone with you (one seat on a plane is often not hard; two seats is harder; every additional seat makes it a much, much harder if not impossible). You got a spouse and a couple kids you want to take along? Good luck with that.
• Your options for when you take vacations are constrained. Do you have a job? You need to schedule your vacation in advance so you still have a job when you return? You have specific times when you want to go? You can't just drop your life and fly off to Fiji on Tuesday because a seat opens up? All these thinbgs make it more difficult.
• You have limited time off from work/school, so you want to maximize your number of days at your destination, rather than take crazy connectons that eat up a day or three each way? Again, that adds difficulty.

Now, all that said, it *is* possible to play this game and make it work for you. But it is not necessarily a quick, easy thing to accomplish. If you actually have a life, and can't (or don't want to) dedicate a non-trivial amount of your free time to making frequent trips to WalMart and other tasks needed to churn money, you should be realistic about your goals and what you're willing to do to reach them.

The first thing I would suggest is to take a realistic look at what your "aspirational goals" are, and how much effort it would take to reach them. Where do you want to go, when, and how many people do you want to take? Then using the tools available, see what it looks like to do a dummy booking. You will quickly discover the biggest dirty little secret that the bloggers tend to avoid addressing:

Getting the points is the easy part (well, relatively easy).

Actually using the points is the hard part.

Look at any of the dream trips you're thinking of. Look at different ways of getting there and staying there (assuming you're dreaming of both airline and hotel programs). Getting to Tahiti, when you want to (or when you can) go, bringing along your family, and staying in a fancy resort for your time there is NOT something you can get set for quickly or easily. But you should look at exactly how many points you would need to acquire - and how hard it might be to actually use them once you have 'em - before you start worrying about the smaller details such as which card to put what spending on.

All that said, you shouldn't be completely discouraged - people obviously do use points for trips, and it can be great. But you need to be realistic.

The bloggers don't have jobs. They aren't taking a family of 4 along on their trips. They don't have to fit trips in to school or work vacations. They have unrealistic flexibility that few people do. They can take advantage when a seat in first class to the Maldives suddenly opens up tomorrow and they can go. Of course, they stay only so long as needed to take pictures for their blog (note how they stay in those resorts of 1 or 2 days - would you like to move your family to a cheap motel after 2 days at the St Regis?). Your idea of a dream vacation probably isn't flying to the other side of the world and staying for 2 days.

So....first, be realistic. Look at what kind of trips you can take with how many points. Then, take a step back and come up with a plan.

For most folks, the plan involves getting a *lot* of credit cards. Because it's the sign-up bonuses that give you the big piles of points. BUt you have to be careful with this to be successful (and to not wreck your credit rating). It's gonna take some time., some patience and some effort. You can indeed be successful at this game, but it is not a game for those who are careless, impatient, and are not good at detailed record-keeping or lack of follow-up.

Take anything you see on a "professional travel blogger" website with a very large grain of salt. Don't ever use any credit card link from a blogger's website - you can always find links that are as good and often better here on FT, and by using the bloggers links you only encourage them to sucker more noobs.

Yes and no. That's an oversimplification. Yes, sign-up bonuses are the fastest way to gather a lot of points, but you have to be careful. When to keep/cancel a card and what to do about points expiring can not be answered in one sentence.

Anyone who suggests they have an easy guide for you to follow is a fraud. As a general rule, those who appear to make things look the easiest (say, those with circles and arrows...) are the most dishonest. Be prepared to invest some of your time in learning the game. There is no substitute for that. It's like anything else - learning a foreign language, how to play an instrument, or losing 40 pounds - you gotta do the work your self, nobody else can make it easy for you. But if you put in the effort, you will see results.

Stick around here. Read a lot. Read some more. Distrust what the bloggers are trying to sell you. Be patient. You'll do fine.

I have been a member for quite a while and am still a newbie in many respects but before I knew about churning cards I was able to focus on 1-2-3 cards for a planned vacation for us retirees.

In the past we both had Delta cards and were able to fly to Costa Rica and use points for hotels too, also for that trip I used my Marriott points and Taca airline points.
So between husband and I we had around 4 cards to get our "free" vacation.

In 2012 we concentrated on Chase United Explorer, Hilton, Chase Sapphire Preferred and SPG & Marriott again for our trip this past March to Hawaii . 7 days courtesy of sign up bonuses and first class airfare which also included car rental using UR points.

So it takes us awhile to get the points we need and use them to our advantage.
I have had up to 5 Chase and 5 Barclay cards at one point too and still have miles to use for next year's trip to Norway & Iceland counting on Citi AA & United for flights.

Used IHG points in Cozumel for 5 nights and used US miles this past May.

Hotel cards we use also are LaQuinta and Choice Privileges when we travel with our pets. Still have Jet blue, SW and AirTran miles (to become SW miles) yet to use for any unexpected occasion.

Have a goal and work towards it in as many ways as you can in acquiring points & miles
Good Luck and enjoy the ride!

I suggest deciding where you want to go and then deciding which hotels and which airlines. I'm chasing 1MM status with UA (which should happen by the end of the year), so I concentrate on hotels. I'm focused on Hilton, because citi is churnable (for the time being). I have gone to the Conrad Rangali Maldives for the last two years and will go again in Feb 2015. The basic room is $1000 a night, so I think the Hilton is worth it. I'm retired and travel a lot and skew my stays to Hilton, especially when there is a bonus. The Citi Hilton Reserve (and the Amex with the annual fee) both give gold status which I think is fantastic. Gold gives breakfast. When other hotels have great bonuses I've sprung for the card, using the points when it made sense. I spent almost all my SPG points on the Westin Excelsior Florence this month when the rooms were over 300 euro a night. (Now, I've got to figure out who to replenish my supply of SPG points). I've got points stashed away in AA, US and Delta, just in case. I used a bunch of Delta points to go to Fairbanks because I thought the fares were outrageous.

Figure out where you want to go. Take it slowly. It's better to dip you toes in slowly instead of jumping in over your head.

And the standard advice on FT holds--if you are not paying your balances in full at the end of the month, you shouldn't be churning.

With the Rangali stay (which is an outlier in terms of value per point), I save about $15k a year on travel through credit cards. That's really not an aspirational international vacation a year.

Read the hotel and airline threads to determine what programs make sense for you. Some people swear by SPG, but I still don't get it. I don't do business travel, so accumulating points by stays and spends doesn't go far with SPG compared with other programs.

Being a relative noob myself, these few posts have the most straightforward and concise information on how to play the game intelligently that I have read here in quite some time.

Thanks for sharing.

Well, if we take a few steps back from ever-so-fashionable blogger-bashing, there hasn't been a lot of help here so far. So I'll try my best to suggest the concrete steps you need to take to make your dream come true.

1. Ibleed0range's advice is right on. Forget the spend, well for now, and focus on new credit card sign up bonuses.

2. Your assumption that you need to pay cash for domestic airfares and save miles for international travel is incorrect. In fact, they are different kinds of miles, and you can collect both.

3. A million-dollar question is if your credit file supports multiple applications that we here call app-o-Ramas. If the answer is yes, decide what you and your wife are comfortable with. You don't have to go all or nothing.

4. Another million dollar question is if you can meet spending requirements (which can be from $1K to $5K in 3-6 months) without some tricks that you would need to learn first. This too should dictate how far and how fast you go.

Hope it helps.

nwflyboy has the best post here.

The blogger bashing is well justified. It's not just a fashionable thing to do.

AA may devalue before you have enough time to earn two tickets in international business class unless you churn credit card bonuses with Citi very quickly. It will take a ton of credit card bonuses to get two tickets via United Mileage Plus and Ultimate Rewards (you'll need to get cards for UA miles and UR for the bonuses). If you fly on separate flights and different airlines, then you might have more options. Don't forget both of you need very flexible employers and award space. If you need to fly when kids are not in school, just scrap the idea. You can't afford the anytime award rates to pull it off during the summer.

As suggested I've been doing more reading, and I tried experimenting with the redmeption side of things for trips I would like to take.

nwflyboy, rather than just an underline I think should have been bold, blinking and had sound effects.

I tried looking at trips to, vancouver, manilla, dominica, edinburgh, and salt lake city, anywhere from this month until july 2015 on AA, BA, Delta, United, Cathay, Aer Lingus, Singapore, and Korean - either I found no award flights, could not make the value break 2cpm, or it just needed an enormous amount of points (>100,000). This was just trying to book all points, roundtrip tickets. So then I started trying to do one way tickets and seeing if I could upgrade the long segments. It was still hard to find award tickets anywhere.

The best I was able to do was when I looked at CX from DFW to MNL and picked economy plus with an upgrade to business for 45k points each. I then added on economy positioning flights from where I live BHM to DFW each way. Is this kind of approach I should be using to find award flights or am I missing something big?

mnscout, what do you mean they are different types of miles? I was starting to get the impression that if the flight is less than $1200 there is no way to break 2cpm and thus more rewarding than a cash back card.

My credit file could probably support applying for a lot of credit cards, but I'm basically spend limited.
Cards that have transaction requirements or spending an amount in a couple months don't work out well for me. I will spend about 30k a year on a card, but some months I only have 8 transactions, and big purchases don't really cluster into 3 month intervals to time sign up bonus spending. For instance I only made the smaller spend requirement on the Ink Cash through gift cards. I think doing more than one card every few months would probably be difficult to impossible.

+1 Ibleed0range's post. Minimum spend for sign up bonuses outweigh any sort of smart category spending for the most part. I almost cringe when anything bigger than $100 is not going towards some sort of minimum spend, whether sign up bonus or large spend annual bonus. That being said, this all depends on your situation on upcoming loan applications or how big of a minimum spend load you can handle comfortably. Between 4 of us in the family, I always have some minimum spend going on throughout the year since we get 5-8 cards at a time each.

With that much flexibility on destination and time you found no availability? How many seats are you looking for? For oneworld searches, use qantas.com to search for availability. aa.com does not show awards for many airline partners, including CX.


This is not true. BA Avios are fantastic for flights within North America (or any short distance flight) and can beat 2cpm with ease under the right conditions.

Shoot I wasn't specific enough - I was looking for 2 tickets in business class that would span a duration of 5 - 14 days. The most common scenarios where that the "saver" awards where spread out over > 2week intervals, or there were regular business awards for 50k+ each way which dropped the value below 2cpm for a lot of North American continent awards. It was previously recommended to book as a single ticket, is per plane award space that limited? I don't think I'd be able to sell my wife on seperate flights.


Ok, I'll do that. I was a bit stumped why aa.com would show some flights if I booked as cash and then have nothing listed as open when I tried miles - even when their partner airlines like cathay pacific had open award space. I'd made sure I selected the one that includes oneworld partners as well when looking.