That’s a wrap for 2023 and it was a great year for us. We went on our first international trip as a family and primarily used points and miles that we earned in 2022 to book those trips. Jenn and I were able to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary in Cabo San Lucas, and the whole family took a pretty epic trip to Europe where we visited Zurich, Munich, Venice, Rome and Stockholm over two weeks. The cost savings from using those points and miles made those great trips possible for us.
We also booked a couple of trips for next year using points primarily earned in 2023. Jenn will be going on a girls trip to Playa Del Carmen with her mom and her sister. We have also booked a spring break trip with the kids to Costa Rica. I’m also looking into a couple of other trips for 2024, so I imagine we will be pretty busy.
Besides that, our points and miles balances grew dramatically in 2023, which should allow us a better flexibility when booking future trips.
Those AAdvantage Miles Were Gone Before We Knew it
We’ve obviously continued to earn miles on signup bonuses and December was no different. This month, Jenn earned a 75,000 point bonus on her AAdvantage Aviator Red card. This might be the easiest bonus in the points and miles world since she earned 60,000 AAdvantage miles simply by making one purchase and another 15,000 miles by naming our son as an authorized user and making a purchase on the authorized user card (I don’t get why Barclays does this, but it’s practically a free 75,000 AAdvantage mile bonus for next to no spend)
Those AAdvantage miles didn’t sit in her account very long though because we immediately used them to book those flights to Costa Rica. We were able to get 4 roundtrip tickets to Guanacaste from Moline on American Airlines for only 120,000 AAdvantage Miles and $336 which I thought was a pretty good deal. Both there and back we have an overnight layover, so we used 17,500 Marriott Bonvoy points for a hotel in Chicago on the way there and a Category 1-4 Hyatt certificate for a hotel stay at Dallas Fort Worth Airport on the way back.
Product Changing an Old Unused Citi Card
I product changed an old Citi Thank You Preferred card that I never used for a Citi Custom Cash. I couldn’t cancel the old card because it was my oldest credit card and canceling it would’ve negatively affected my credit score. The best bonus category was 2x on dining and I already have a Citi Premier that gets 3x on dining so it never got used. By switching to the Custom Cash card, I can earn 5x on by biggest spending category each month up to $500 in spending. I just need to remember to use it for just one category each month, and I failed on that for the first month. The product change process was extremely simple, I just called up Citibank and told them what I wanted. They switched it in just a matter of minutes and the cards arrived in about a week.
On to the Point check!
Our spending in December was pretty high, mainly because of Christmas, but there was also a tuition payment thrown in there. But the main amount of spending towards a bonus was on Jenn’s Citibusiness AAdvantage Platinum card, where she spent a little less than $3,500 and earned a little more than 3,600 AAdvantage miles.
| Card Used | Spend | Points Earned | Point Value | Points Per $ | Return on Spend |
| Citi AAdvantage | $1,156 | 1,325 | $19.88 | 1.1 | 1.7% |
| Chase Ink Cash | $518 | 2,570 | $52.69 | 5.0 | 10.2% |
| World of Hyatt | $352 | 1,759 | $29.90 | 5.0 | 8.5% |
| United Business | $351 | 351 | $5.09 | 1.0 | 1.45% |
| Citi Custom Cash | $305 | 869 | $15.64 | 2.8 | 5.3% |
| Citi Premier | $291 | 694 | $12.49 | 2.4 | 4.3% |
| Wyndham Business Earner | $113 | 903 | $1.61 | 1.0 | 1.5% |
| Total | $3,099 | 8,540 | $147.03 | 2.8 | 4.7% |
I’m still trying to dial in our non-bonus spending in the chart above, but made a couple of mistakes. First mistake was continuing to spend on my Citi AAdvantage Business Platinum Card after earning my bonus on it, since it’s a bad earning card. The second mistake was not just choosing a category for my Custom Cash card and sticking with it. The United Business card looks like a poor choice, but Jenn was getting cash back on groceries on that card, so it’s fine. Either way we finished with a return of about 4.7% on spending, and I would like that number to be consistently over 5%.
So with the Costa Rica redemption, the bonus and other earnings, we finished the month with 291,600 Chase Ultimate Reward Points, 88,400 Capital One miles, 35,900 AAdvantage miles, 31,600 Citi Thank You points, 30,900 Marriott Bonvoy points, 24,900 United miles, 15,100 Delta Skymiles, 5,500 Hyatt points, and $646 in cash back. Using the Points Guy valuations, we finished the month with $10,300 in points and miles, not too bad.
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