So my wife has about 8000 AA miles. She does not maintain an active frequent flyer status and will lose the miles eventually. I tried helping her spend the points on gift cards thru Points.com but they require a minimum of 15,000 miles with AA to be able to do anything with them. At the same time I cannot have her trasnfer those miles to me because the transaction fees are ridiculous. Any thoughts on how she can "use" those miles?

You could rent a car for a day. Or you could purchase stuff at the AA mall to get a few more miles and then get a hotel room. 8000 is just a little short of the cheapest hotels AA offers, from what I've seen.

Since this in AA-specific question (how to use a small amount of AA miles), I'm not sure why you asked this in MilesBuzz! rather the AA forum. But anyway:

There may some options on aa.com to use 8000 miles or less if that's all you have (magazines, for example), but why not let the account build up to something useful with your help?

First step is to make sure her account never expires. One solution: Sign her up for AAdvantage Dining. (From of your other posts, I see you live in NYC. There's oodles of participating restaurants there.) If you think she'll end up "accidentally" (if not "willfully") dining in one of those restaurants, just sign up any card she might use. Otherwise, sign up a card you could use and at least once a year or so do a dine at a participating restaurant. That'll add a few miles to her account (and only a few miles if it's just one dine), but that's completely enough to extend expiration for 18 months.

(That's assuming you've already accepted that AA will in fact not fold. )

In case you don't realize, AAdvantage Dining only asks for a card number, not expiration date or name on card, and doesn't check the name on card. So there's no problem using your card to earn miles for someone else that way. I helped a friend whose miles were about to expire by entering a new card I had just received (and only wanted to use once for a small purchase to trigger a first-use bonus) and I used it for a cheap sandwich. I got the first use bonus, my friend got an 18-month extension of AA expiration. Win, win.

By the way, AA lets you redeem for one-way trips, so once you get to 12500 you can book a one-way domestic flight. (You could then book the other way with your own miles, if you have 12500 at that point yourself, and that way someone could travel both ways while cleaning out a 12500 account.)

But will she never fly again on paid AA? If there's a chance she will (you almost both took a paid flight to Puerto Rico, it sounds like from the other thread, had prices not been so high for the time you wanted to go), you can just use the above trick to defer expiration and then wait for her to fly on AA again to get her account to a better level.

So first you have to decide whether you really want to clean out her account now (no matter how poor the value), or whether it makes more sense to just keep the account alive and then increase it when it's "natural" to do so.

Sign up for AAdvantage dining and eat at one of the restaurants with a registered card linked to her account, that will also keep miles from expiring

-I should have read the long post above mine, but I'll leave this in case you are a lazy reader like me

Try to donate 500 to 1K miles to Red Cross

Do a survey: https://www.opinionplace.com/new_lan...sesid=7y90h102

Complete one and it restarts the expiration timer.

How about her signing up for some of the Citibank AA credit cards that are out there with the large mileage bonus.

I can't remember if there is one without an annual fee, but you could get it and make a purchase every couple months.

During last falls USAirways grand slam promotion, I used points.com to transfer 4 AA miles to 1 US mile. A horrible loss of value for any meaningful number of miles, but a cheap and easy way to reset the clock on both accounts.

There's no annual fee the first year on the typical Citi AA credit card offer, but making just "a purchase every couple months" won't get you any bonus, since the typical Citi AA credit card offer these days (that has any decent bonus) requires something like $2500 or $3000 of spend in the first 3, 4, or 6 months of the card to get the bonus.

And thus it's not a "brainless" decision to go for one (or especially two) of these cards these days. You have to be sure you can meet the spend threshold in time (and twice over if you're doing the trick of applying for two at once, in order to get two bonuses every 20 months instead of just one), or else it's not worth even bothering (because you'll lose your only chance in 20 months all for nothing).

Yes there is. Its called the bronze card and has no fee and gives 1 mile for $2 spent.