When we got started in points and miles, I really wanted to find real world examples of people who were doing this and had done it for a while. Mostly I found a bunch of people who wanted to brag about flying first class to the Maldives. That’s cool and all, but I have a family of 4, and frankly I don’t mind flying coach. Sure, I’m 6’2″ and getting crammed into a seat with no legroom sucks, but I’m more interested in maximizing the number of vacations and the amount of time we can spend on vacation. I wanted to see how regular people were doing it, so hopefully I can provide you with that information. I’m writing this in January 2023, so we need to do a bit of a trip down memory lane, to my first points credit card statement.
In late December 2021, I applied for the Citi Premier Card which was offering an elevated 80,000 point bonus after spending $4,000 within 3 months. It comes with a $95 annual fee (I cringed at first about annual fees, but I’ve learned to accept it as a necessary entry fee into benefits that outweigh the fees). One other caveat here, I have no idea what my interest rates are on my credit cards, and don’t care, because I don’t pay interest, ever. If you are holding balances on credit cards, points and miles credit cards will kill your finances. They all have insane interest rates, and any benefits you get from the points is quickly destroyed by the interest charges. If you want to do the points and miles thing, set your autopay to full statement balance and mind your budget.
Anyway – on to the point check!
The Citi Premier card has 3x points on Restaurants, Gas Stations, Travel and Supermarkets and 1x on everything else. We used this card almost exclusively that month and spent around $3,600 and earned around 5900 points. No bonuses earned in January.
What We Did Right
Citi points are transferrable to a lot of programs and these points allowed me to makes some pretty good bookings later on.
What We Did Wrong
One thing that I was completely unaware of was the Chase 5/24 rule. I don’t want to go into it too much, but Its really important to people who are trying to maximize points and miles. It basically means that Chase will not approve you for a new credit card if you have been approved for 5 credit cards (of any kind) in the last 24 months. Chase has a huge variety of credit cards that have really nice bonuses to a variety of points and miles programs. I applied for a Citi card and that put me at 1/24, I could have gotten 5 Chase cards and applied for the Citi card afterward, not a huge deal, but also not ideal.
The real bonehead move here, though, was making my wife an authorized user. I know you’re probably thinking that I don’t trust my wife, no, that’s not it. By making her an authorized user, it also put her at 1/24. One thing that I will hit on in other posts is why you and your spouse need to have separate credit cards. The main reason though is twice the credit cards, twice the bonuses.
Newby to Expert Traveler 