During January 2022, I did a ton of research on points and miles and I began to figure things out. First of all, I started to do all of this to save money on a trip to Europe. At the time, our plan was to fly into Munich and stay there for 10-14 days. I did a ton of research and decided that I would target United miles for the flight to Munich. They had direct flights from Chicago to Munich and while I understood that you could book flights on partner programs and get better value than by booking directly with United, I was a newby. I’m not trying to do calculus when I barely understand basic math. So we made the decision, everyone is getting United cards.
I signed up for the United Explorer Card. $95 annual fee, waived the first year. There was a 60,000 mile bonus when you spent $3,000 in the first 3 months. 2x on dining, hotels and United purchases, 1x on everything else. $100 credit for TSA precheck (this is a super common credit on credit cards that I will probably never use). They also give you 2 United Club passes annually. We recently got to use the United Club passes and now I don’t know how I’ll ever just sit in a terminal again. I’m honestly shocked by how much I care about those passes.
I also referred my wife to a United Explorer card, which meant not only did she have her own 60,000 point bonus that she was working on, but I also got a 20,000 point bonus for referring her. I know that doesn’t seem like it should work, but it does.
On to the point check!
I spent an additional $650 on my Citi Premier card to round out my required spend on that bonus. I earned the 80,000 point bonus and an additional 1100 points which put me around 87,000 points total on that card. At the time, Citi points were generally valued at 1.7 cents per point. That meant that those points were worth about $1,480, if you subtract the $95 annual fee and divide by $4,200 spent to get those points, that means I got a 33% return on my spend. That is bonkers!
I spent about $1,600 on my United Explorer card, and got a total of 1,800 miles from that spend, plus 20,000 points for referring my wife. Jenn spent $1,600 on her account and earned 1,700 points on her United account.
We finished the month with 87,000 Citi points and 23,500 United miles.
What we did right
We got into Chase credit cards. Also, we kept separate accounts, which allowed me to refer her for the referral points as well as set up multiple sign up bonuses. I also had a plan for what I was going to do with the points. I now knew that “saver” rates to Europe cost about 30,000 each way and I was going to need around 240,000 United miles to do a round-trip to Munich.
What we did wrong
We signed up for our credit cards pretty close to each other, which meant that we essentially had about 3 1/2 months to spend $6,000. We had a spring break trip in March which made the spending pretty easy to hit, though.
Newby to Expert Traveler 