It's not so easy to spend "vacation" points as fast as you accrue them...

Wow. 2x per month for a year. ^ Thanks for sharing.

wow. now I want to cash out my Arrival points. is the best way to just buy an airline giftcard?

It was $15.5k until January when I requested a CLI. Continued doing 2x after the CLI.

Exactly. I had so many points back in February we had a $500 dinner for 2 at the Michelin starred restaurant of a resort we were staying at just to burn some off. Was planning to use nearly 100k points next month in Iceland for car rental, Blue Lagoon visit, etc. Luckily my SO has an Arrival+ in her own name with 150k points she earned from legit EDS.

That's one good way. There are others. Be creative.

Why not just playing the book-&-cancel game to cash out all the points

I was hoping we'd keep this a little more obscure, but yes. Do this.

Seems to me that would be more likely to result in a shutdown by barclay...

Looks to me like the 2x CL was the issue here.

That's quite a lag time then. Like I said, I've been doing this for over a year. I think it had more to do with ramping up spend on the US/AA card right as the cards were being transitioned to AA. I did basically no spend on my US/AA card until the 1.5x miles promotion came around in February. Hit the 20k mile limit for the promotion and decided to keep going to top off the miles I needed for an an upcoming trip (as opposed to transferring SPG points to AA like I normally would). So around 3 months after I started doing some heavy spend on US/AA I'm dead. Seems more likely than the 2x CL I had been doing since pretty much day one on the A+ over a year ago. Barclays had to prepay money to buy a block of AA miles. A lot different than how they have to account for A+ miles.

So what card *is* good to MS with? Seems everything is getting shut down. Don't want to use Amex because FR. Don't want to use chase cause too valuable. Don't want to use barclays cause they're closin em now. Damn near every diners is gone too - keep mine under 5k a month and have skated by. So what is everybody's big spender? What is even left? I think that's everything I got! I'm afraid to do 10k/month on anything now...

Unless you're churning for cash (and even if you are, this may apply if you have several competing companies' offers/cards on the table with similar benefits) then the best advice I can think of is to distribute your activity across several cards. For example, if you're doing 10k/month and have four cards you can work with, do 2.5k/card each month. On the one hand you won't end up with a ticket to Fiji on any given airline each month; on the other hand, you'll still get there eventually and your rewards should be distributed enough to avoid a meltdown on one card causing across-the-board problems.

This was my attitude with the OM offer: I split my buys over three cards so as not to slam any one of them with an excessively unusual outpouring of activity. I still had to knock down fraud alerts on all three cards (since in all cases there were instances of 2-3 same-sized purchases), but I also wasn't twigging ten $58*.** purchases in a row on any card.

I'm doing around 15k per month on my BA+ with a 10k monthly limit. Am I pushing my luck?

In my opinion any time you cycle your CL in a month you are taking on additional risk. This is compounded with cards like BA+ if you are holding a balance that could be lost if the issuer cancels the card. Not saying don't do it just be cognizant that you are adding some level of additional risk.

I did the same thing - OD on several cards. I do the same with AGC, Simon when it was available here, walmart, etc. But I was hoping I could focus on one card so I could build up some points to get round trip flights, several days in the same hotel, etc...instead of having to move hotels, get only one airline ticket, etc.

2.5k a month makes it hard to get one, much less two tickets (rooms, etc) per year. For example, a round trip to europe on AA is 120k for a couple. At 10k, you can get it in a year. At 2.5k, it will probably cost 160k in the 4 years it would take to earn! A ticket to Fiji? Forgettaboutit! Will never happen.

Seems like there are no cards left for MS.

(I was using 10k, btw, cause that's all free with redbird debit with 2 cards right now. These people talking about 20k, 30k a month...I can't even imagine what they're using.)