Welcome to the Travel Miles 101 Travel Rewards Course!

In this course we’re going to provide you everything you need to get started both earning and redeeming travel rewards points & miles and be able to confidently move forward and take action!

Our main goal is to provide you with the info you need to take at least one nearly free vacation each year using rewards points, and to bump your credit card rewards earnings from a measly 1% per year to upwards of 20%!

About Us:

Alexi Zemsky

I’m a cardiologist in Portland, Oregon and have been pursuing this strategy since 2011. Together with my wife and 3 children, I enjoy traveling to my wife’s native country of Japan to visit family, which is what initially inspired my love of earning and spending travel miles & points.

I’ve earned over 4 million miles with my credit card strategies and I love the intellectual pursuit of travel rewards in general.

Brad Barrett

I’m a CPA and the co-host of the ChooseFI podcast.  I live in Richmond, VA with my wife and 2 daughters.

I’ve been actively researching travel rewards since 2012 and have earned over 3 million miles by using this strategy. I like to focus on finding ‘sweet spot’ redemptions to get the most out of my travel miles.

Together, we are thrilled to have the opportunity to explain this travel rewards concept to you, as we feel this is a perfect way to enable you to save thousands on your future travels.

The Course:

Travel Miles 101 consists of the following:

• The Course: Travel rewards theory & actionable strategies to help you maximize your redemptions.
• The community: We want you to be part of our supportive community for years to come and joining our private Facebook group is the best way to stay involved. We have over 35,000 people in the Facebook group asking questions and sharing knowledge on a daily basis, and we hope you’ll join us there!

Each day of the course you’ll receive an email with a link to that day’s lesson (and all prior lessons). You’ll have access to this information forever, so feel free to reference it as often as needed.

What is this Travel Rewards strategy all about?

This strategy of maximizing travel rewards points is centered around opening specific credit cards that offer significant ‘signup bonuses’ of travel rewards points/miles and then turning those miles into nearly free travel.

In general terms, a signup bonus is approximately 50,000 points; each should be worth at minimum $500 – $1,000 (and if redeemed exceptionally well, we’ve seen over $2,000 of value from one card).

To earn that signup bonus, there are terms to meet, usually referred to as a ‘minimum spending requirement.’

An example of these terms would be, “Spend $3,000 in the first 3 months the account is open and earn a 50,000 mile bonus. Annual fee of $95 waived the first year.”

You have 3 months from the date you were approved to spend a total of $3,000 on that credit card account. You of course will pay the card on time and in full every month and when you have cumulatively spent more than $3,000, you will be awarded the bonus.

Sometimes, you aren’t instantly approved for a card. Sometimes it takes up to 10 days for the card to arrive. The time to complete the minimum spend is generally 3 months from approval date.

• Tip: Once you get approved, call the card issuer and try and get the card expedited. You may also be able to add a card to your digital wallet for use before the physical card arrives.
• Tip: The annual fee does NOT count toward your minimum spending requirement.

In this example, you would use this newly opened credit card for your normal spending until you spent $3,000 in total on that card (Important: spending must take place in the first 3 months from the date you were approved for the card. The clock doesn’t start the day you activate, but the day you were approved for the card).

Since you will be paying the card off on time and in full every month, it will cost you nothing!
In most cases the annual fee is waived the first year, so there really is a $0 out of pocket cost to earn a big bonus of around 50,000 miles/points.

Important Note: The timing of when the bonus points are added to your points/miles account depends on the issuing bank and/or travel partner. For many banks (Chase, Citi, Bank of America, etc.) the bonus points are credited to your account after the statement closes where you reach the minimum spending requirement. If this is in the 2nd month hypothetically, you would earn the bonus shortly after that statement close and you would not have to wait the full 3 months to earn the bonus.

Some issuing banks (American Express Membership Rewards cards, Capital One, Barclays) even award you the bonus immediately upon hitting the spending requirement, but in general terms it is after the statement close when you hit the cumulative figure.

In a future lesson we’ll talk about where these points reside for each of the major rewards credit card types, expiration policies and strategies, etc.

Tracking Your Rewards

It’s also important to mention in this introductory lesson that you must track your credit card and rewards account login information. This is fairly simple to track, but it is essential that you know the dates you opened the cards and the dates you earned the bonuses as it will be pertinent when you decide to reopen some of these card accounts a few years from now. Two ways to track:

1. Sign up for a free Award Wallet account by clicking this link. We were able to get our users a special deal, so use the promo code “travelmiles101″ to get 6 free months of “Award Wallet Plus”
2. The moderators of our Facebook group recommend using the free tracking tool called Travel Freely.

Is This Strategy Good for Everyone?

This is absolutely NOT for everyone, so please note: This strategy revolves around credit cards, so you must be careful or you could find yourself among the many millions saddled with credit card debt.

Only do this if you are responsible with your credit cards. We define responsible as:

• Paying on time and in full every single month
• Not spending more than normal on purchases just because you are using a credit card (instead of cash, debit, etc.)

What else leads to success with travel rewards?

• Having an excellent credit rating (at minimum 700, though 750+ is ideal.)
• Being flexible with your travel. We’ll discuss this at length later on in the course, but essentially it means flexibility with dates, times, destinations, etc.
• Being organized to track your spending toward the bonuses, account logins, and credit card data.
• Starting to plan your credit card strategy well in advance of your intended travel date. It’s more valuable to have the points when you need them rather than scrambling to earn them at the last minute.

What’s the potential value of this strategy?

Essentially all the value of this entire strategy comes from the signup bonuses. Because of this, you want to maximize signup bonuses where possible within your comfort level and overall strategy.

Example: Let’s say you earn a 50,000 point bonus for putting $3,000 of spending on the card. If you expect to get $1,000 of travel value out of that bonus, you’ve just earned a 33.3% rebate on that original $3k of spending, which is astounding!

Compare that with the 1%-2% you could get with cash back cards on the same spend, and you can see why you always want to be working on the next new signup bonus.

Would you rather have $1,000, $30 or $60? The answer is probably $1,000

If done properly, this amounts to a 20%+ rebate on every dollar you spend for life!

Card Opening Strategies:

Brad and his wife open one card at a time and concentrate all of their normal spending on that card. They are content with the lower stress approach of having one card at a time.

Brad will open an account in his name and they will spend on that account until the bonus requirement is met. Laura then opens an account in her name and they keep going back and forth like that.

It is important to note that each person can open every single card account in their name, even if they were added as an authorized user on someone else’s account. So spouses/significant others can double up on these bonuses.

Is this Strategy Finite?

People often ask if this strategy is finite or if you can continue with it indefinitely? Our thoughts are that based on the current facts, it is quite possibly something you could do for years.

There are 20+ distinct credit cards that we consider our top cards for this strategy and many beyond that list which offer some travel rewards benefits.

Having a spouse participate doubles the entire ‘universe’ of credit cards.

New cards are constantly being introduced and you can open every single one of those cards. In fact, most banks say that if a card is altered in any material way (even changing from a MasterCard to a Visa for instance) that it is considered a completely new card which you can open to earn the bonus.

Important Note: Each bank has their own rules regarding reopening cards in the future. It is unquestionably getting more difficult to reopen cards for these reasons:

1. American Express has a ‘one bonus per lifetime’ policy on their personal cards. However, people have been able to get the card again 5-7 years later. They will also have cards with No Lifetime Language (NLL) which makes you eligible to get the same card even if it hasn’t been 5+ years.
2. Chase bank has instituted what people are calling the “5/24 rule” which means if you’ve opened 5 or more credit cards from any bank in the past 24 months, you will likely not be approved for a new Chase credit card account. Important: being added as an authorized user (AU) on someone else’s account does count towards this limit, so try to minimize the number of AU accounts you add. This Chase 5/24 rule has had a huge impact on the strategy of opening cards and we strongly suggest you start with Chase credit cards for this reason.
   1. 1. In addition to the 5/24 rule, Chase also has restrictions on how often you can get a bonus. This can range from 24 months to 48 months.  For instance, with their popular Sapphire line of cards you can apply for one if you don’t currently have either Sapphire card (Preferred or Reserve) and haven’t received a new card member bonus for either Sapphire card in the past 48 months.
3. Citibank has instituted rules that you have to wait 24 months after opening or closing a card in order to get a bonus on any card within the same card brand.  Brand examples: ThankYou points and American Airlines miles.

Is this really “free” travel?

We often hear the phrase “free travel” thrown around in regard to travel rewards. We prefer to call it ‘nearly free’ travel, as there are some unavoidable taxes and fees that you have to pay on many of your award flights and hotels.

In most cases this amounts to about $11 on a round-trip flight in the United States and usually under $150 on a round-trip international flight.

Free? Not exactly.

Nearly free? Sure is!

And of course there’s the concept of “opportunity cost” that you would have earned about 1% cash back on your old credit card instead of using these travel rewards points for “free travel.”  So there is a cost there, but considering the bonuses offer significantly more value (likely 10x-20x the value), you’re almost always going to come out ahead using them for trips instead of the 1% cash back.

Action Steps:

1. Sign up for Award Wallet (promo code: travelmiles101) or Travel Freely and sign up for the main airline and hotel rewards accounts for every member of your family.
2. Enter your info into Award Wallet or Travel Freely for your personal information and any credit cards you previously signed up for.
3. We highly recommend you sign up for a FREE account at Personal Capital. We both use it to track our credit cards. More importantly, it is the best tool we have found to track our entire financial lives and net worth.