I don't consider myself a hoarder but do have about 650,000 between US and DL. Since maintaining status is important and seemingly always on the edge, I will buy my ticket and use miles for the family when traveling personally. I even let the wife have my F seat on occasion! I also keep some for that last minute and extremely expensive "funeral" fare.

One business-class round trip between the U.S. and Europe, for two people, is 200,000 miles in a typical U.S. program - and that's if minimum-mileage awards are available. Other parts of the world take more. To me, balances such as those in the quoted posts are way too low to be a burden. It's easy to go through them in a short time, and dangerous to assume that one's current rate of mileage accrual (whether from business travel, bonuses, or anything else) will continue indefinitely.

I agree with Effrem that holding 200,000 -300,000 miles is not too much for comfort, particularly when one saves miles for larger trips.
I have about 500k Membership Rewards points and 50k-250k in each of several airline programs. For leisure family trips, I always buy the tickets, but my wife and I take a big trip without the kids every 2-3 years, and it's very helpful to have larger balances to draw from, especially when you need to be flexible in airlines or alliances. We recently went to SE Asia, and the flight over (SQ EWR-SIN direct) was 229k MR points (converted to SQ miles), and the flight back (CX HKG-JFK in F) was 135k AA miles - it was great to plan the routes we wanted and not have our milage balance dictate our itinerary...

You are willing to pay additional 90K+ miles for one person while you can easily fly from JFK / YYZ / YVR/ SFO / LAX to HKG and then onward to SIN on CX F? Granted if you want to try SQ F, and are willing to pay for the high redemption level of SQ... that is your choice... The difference is 180K miles for 2 persons, and that is enough for an F AA OneWorld to cover 25K miles distance traveled...

But I wonder if you could do better by using Alliance partner program(s) to redeem that SQ flight? how about AC?

Since he is your ex.... (and I assume not a Flyertalker)
 

Perhaps you should nominate your ex for an episode of this show:

Hoarders

http://www.aetv.com/hoarders/index.jsp

"Each 60-minute episode of Hoarders is a fascinating look inside the lives of two different people whose inability to part with their belongings is so out of control that they are on the verge of a personal crisis."

The show focuses on physical hoarding (I think, I have not seen it yet), but perhaps they could do an episode on hoarding things like FF Miles, creidt card points, Hotel progam points, etc.

PS How are miles handled in a divorce?

EQM for me, RDM for you
 

That is my simple rule of thumb: I earn status / EQM for me (eg, I pay for the flight) and the RDM's I earn are mostly for others.

In 2010 and 2011:
- Summer 2010 flew my family across the country on miles for vacation (burned some of my Marriott points and free National car rental days on that trip too.)
- flew my brother across the country multiple times - and he lives in a sparse hub with only expensive flights...
- Kids tickets SFO - SYD next December in Y - saver awards. If I can accumulate enough to get a C round trip on the same flight for my wife and I, then I'll use miles for our ticktes too. Otherwise I will buy Z (cheapest C) tickets for my wife and I.
- Summer 2011 travel across country for the family

The one time I used RDM's exclusively on myself was to upgrade a SFO/JFK UA PS flight to C. R/T this was 30K miles, which I found to be a great use of my miles! (I did not have CR-1's at that point.)

I do not look that hard at the cents per mile of my redemptions. Miles are there to be used, and having them sitting in my account and accumulating is not my preferred strategy. To each their own however.

[QUOTE=Happy;15724340]You are willing to pay additional 90K+ miles for one person while you can easily fly from JFK / YYZ / YVR/ SFO / LAX to HKG and then onward to SIN on CX F? Granted if you want to try SQ F, and are willing to pay for the high redemption level of SQ... that is your choice... The difference is 180K miles for 2 persons, and that is enough for an F AA OneWorld to cover 25K miles distance traveled...
QUOTE]

The numbers I gave were for both of us, not per person - and, yes I was willing to "pay" the addtional 90k miles for the two of us for the flight for several reasons - being able to have uninterrupted sleep for as long as we wanted on our flight out, great connection timing to Bali, and experiencing both SQ premium long-haul and the world's longest commercial flight. CX F on our return was a better "deal" but we were very happy with all the above about the SQ outbound flight, which is my point that sometimes it's good to have a few hundred thousand miles on hand to get the routes or flights that you want.

Flights to some small towns are sometimes too expensive (equal to transatlantic trips in some cases). In these situations I prefer to use miles

Me too. Have 5 QF J tickets on hold for the same flight, which will never happen again. This opportunity is exactly why I kept growing my stash of AA miles. A million miles in the bank seems like a lot, but it disappears pretty quick at 125k/ticket.

The opportunity to get a few DFW-SYD J awards that you mention is exactly the type of "emergency" that requires a serious mileage stash.

we have about 1.3 miles in our accounts. We would love to spend them, however when you get a miserable 12 days of vacation a year it is hard to go anywhere. The points we have with each carrier are earmarked for specific trips, we just want to get the time to go.

Unfortunately having points does not mean you can redeem them when you need them. My mother died earlier this month and we had to fly to Oz at the last moment, however all the points were not of any use as no carrier had points availablity so we had to dip into our pockets and earn more points.

So he can look at his account when he logs on to AA.com and stare at it (the high number) along with status : Executive Platinum. :rolleyes:

The old AA.com listed your mileage balance on the front page.

It's about keeping score. "How many miles do you have buddy?. Guess what, I have 1.3 millon!!!"

Some people do this with bank accounts. I probably should :)

I'm generally a burn-as-you-earn type (as noted above, potential devaluations play into my thinking).

However, I do keep enough airline miles in reserve, should the need for an emergency (domestic US) trip arise (such as a family member's illness).

Usual uses:

Lounge memberships
Occasional upgrades (I have strict standards on this)
Flying people out to see me who wouldn't come anyway
Last minute trips where the fare is too high (I went to the World Series last year, well worth the Y redemption).

AS on CX
 

R/T to Asia in CX F for 140K miles per ticket.... Very attractive option for all those AS miles...