So we did it! We took our first trip outside of the continent. For the kids, it was the first time they had left the country. As I expected, it was difficult at times, travelling is never easy and travelling to places where English isn’t the primary language is even more difficult. We turned out to be fairly well prepared, however, and were able to get around pretty easily. We had a great time in Europe and we were already talking about how we would return before we even pulled into our driveway. Luckily for us, we’ve figured out enough hacks to do it affordably.
Since both Jenn and I were signed up with the US Bank Business Leverage Card which both required a $7,500 spend in 4 months there haven’t been credit card signups ($15,000 is a lot of spending to meet for us). I did manage to hit my required spend on the Leverage Card and received my $750 cash back sign up bonus and I also had accumulated another $125 or so of cash back on the normal spending. So for what was probably close to $8,000 in spending on the card, getting around $875 in cash back is around an 11% cash back rate and I’m not mad about it. Jenn should hit her bonus in the next couple of months and that should be about the same. We immediately used the cash back from the Leverage Card along with the $425 left from my US Bank Altitude Card for spending money in Europe. That $1,275 did take a nice chunk out of our expenses while we were there and it was great to be able to use the cash back that way.
On to the Point Check!
I spent around $3,600 on my US Bank Leverage Card and earned $54 in cash back and also finished up the $750 sign up bonus. I spent around $200 on my United card and earned 300 United Miles. Jenn Spent $300 on her Chase Ink Unlimited and $600 on her Chase Ink Cash and earned a total of 3,300 Ultimate Reward points. Jenn also spent a little over $200 on her Wyndham Business Earner Card and earned almost 1,800 Wyndham points (I love that 8x on gas!). Jenn spent around $700 on her US Bank Leverage card and earned $11 in cash back. The only redemption was the $1,275 of cash back we used.
We finished the month with around 276,000 Chase Ultimate Reward Points, 83,000 Capital One Miles, 80,000 Delta Miles, 65,000 Marriott Bonvoy points, 26,000 Citi points, 24,000 United Miles, 5,000 American Airlines Miles and 2,000 Hyatt Points. We also were left with an underwhelming $66 in cash back. All of this left us with a total points value, according to The Points Guy of $10,100.
So it’s about that time. The flights, trains, buses, hotels and Airbnbs are all booked. Our passports are in our hands. In some respects, this is crazy. I’ve always wanted to go to Europe, it’s been something that I’ve dreamed about since I was a kid. It was just always unreachable or impractical. I’m sure we could’ve made it work at different times, but it probably would’ve been crippling to us financially. I could never justify it. Now that we’ve figured out how to make this work, it seems unreal that it’s actually happening. All we have to do now is wait and of course, pack.
A Change in Flight
We changed our flight from a two-leg flight from Chicago to Zurich with a 12 hour layover in Brussels to a direct flight from Chicago to Zurich. That cost us 28,000 United miles, of which 22,000 came from Jenn’s United accounts and 6,000 came from transferred Ultimate Reward points. There was a whole ordeal where Jenn had merged her business and personal United accounts and because of that the plane tickets she booked for Alex and I somehow became completely unreachable for customer service. It was some kind of insane glitch that ended up taking about 4 hours on United’s customer service to unravel when Jenn was trying to change our flights. Customer service felt so bad about the mix up that they upgraded us to economy plus, which at the time they were charging over $200 per ticket for an upgrade, so 4 hours on hold for $800 worth of upgrades, sure I’ll take it (especially when it wasn’t me on hold). Ironically, Jenn was considering upgrading her and Emma to business class which would have cost an additional 80,000 points, but because we had been moved to economy plus, the upgrade didn’t make as much sense to her. It’s one thing to spend 40,000 points per ticket to move from basic economy to business class, it’s another to spend 40,000 points per ticket to move from economy plus to business class.
The bad thing about this flight change is that we aren’t going to see Brussels, but the good news is that if we’re exhausted from the flight, we will now be able to take a nap once we’ve checked into the hotel. Also, this ends up giving us an extra day in Zurich, which I felt like we weren’t going to be in long enough. Also, since it’s now a direct flight, that means much less time spent in airports. This is going to make the trip simpler and I’m sure, better.
Jenn’s New Card is the Same as My New Card
Jenn applied for the US Bank Leverage Card and her application was accepted. This is the same card that I am still working on a sign up bonus for. The US Bank Business Leverage Card is a cash back card that gives 2x on your top 2 spending categories each month and 1x on everything else. It has a $750 bonus after $7,500 in spending in the first 4 months. It also has a $95 annual fee which is waived for the first year. It’s not a very exciting card, but with our points stacking up nicely, it seems more important right now to accumulate some cash for those expenses that points can’t cover. $750 is a pretty nice sign up bonus, even if there’s a fairly hefty spend requirement to get it. Essentially this works out to 11 to 12 percent cash back on everything we spend up to $7,500. I’ll take that.
On to the Point Check!
I spent over $3,200 on my US Bank Business Leverage and earned around $51 in cash back. Jenn spent over $200 on her Wyndham Business Earner card and earned 1900 points. She also spent over $300 on her Chase Ink Unlimited Card and earned 500 Ultimate Reward Points and $1000 on her Chase Ink Cash card and earned 2,900 Ultimate Reward Points.
With the redemptions and the earnings, we finished the month with 25,400 Citi points, 23,700 United miles, 80,200 Delta miles, 5,200 American Airlines miles, 58,300 Marriott Bonvoy points, 1,600 Hyatt points, 272,300 Chase Ultimate Reward points and $525 in cash back. Using the monthly valuations published at The Points Guy this brings our total to over $10,400 which is down a couple hundred dollars from last month because of the extra points and miles used to change our flight.
A Moment of Gratitude
We’re about to embark on a trip which Jenn and I have been planning for the better part of a year and a half. It’s not lost on me just how amazing it is to live in a time that I can just hop on a plane and overnight be transported to another continent. I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to be able to make this journey and be able to do it while my kids are at an age that they should be able to appreciate what they are experiencing. It also is not lost on me how much information we are able to digest in order to make this trip possible. I learned how to use points and miles by reading blog posts and listening to podcasts. I’m learning how to speak different languages by using an app on my phone. We have even gotten all kinds of travel and packing advice from watching YouTube videos. All of the information is readily at my fingertips which makes this trip possible and will hopefully enhance our experience. This is an incredible age that we live in and I’m very grateful to be able to take advantage of this opportunity.
This was the second straight month of a huge jump in value of points, miles and cash back. In all fairness, we had probably opened way too many accounts at once. It turned out to be a lot to keep track of and it left a lot of room to make mistakes. I think at one point we had 5 credit cards that we were trying to get sign up bonuses on. That’s probably not something we’re going to want to do too often, if ever again. But it did mean that we jumped from a value of points, miles and cash back of around $1,400 in December to $10,600 in May.
US Business Leverage Card
I applied for the US Bank Business Leverage Card and the application was accepted. The US Bank Business Leverage Card is a cash back card that gives 2x on your top 2 spending categories each month and 1x on everything else. It has a $750 bonus after $7,500 in spending in the first 4 months. It also has a $95 annual fee which is waived for the first year. It’s not an awesome card, but it helps us with two things, accumulating cash we can use on our trip to Europe, and with the $7,500 minimum spend it slows down this torrid pace of opening new cards we had earlier in the year.
A Minor Redemption and a Business Trip
I had one small redemption this month and that was to buy skip the line tickets for the Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel. For that I spent $100 of cash back.
I went on a business trip this month which boosted my mileage totals. I received 6,700 Bonvoy points by staying at the Springhill Suites Downtown/Riverwalk for 4 nights. I also earned 3,440 American Airlines miles by flying with American Airlines.
Anyway, on to the Points Check!
Jenn spent $400 on her Chase Ink Unlimited Card and earned 600 Ultimate Reward Points, she also spent $500 on her Ink Cash Card and earned 2,100 Ultimate Reward Points. Jenn also spent around $900 on her Wyndham Business Earner Card and earned around 2,500 Wyndham points and the 45,000 point sign up bonus. Jenn’s United Business Card renewed and she paid the $99 annual fee but she did get the 5000 point anniversary bonus for holding the business and personal card. Jenn also spent over $3,600 on her Delta Business Card and earned around 3,900 miles and the 75,000 mile sign up bonus.
I spent less than $300 on my Citi Premier Card and earned almost 500 Citi Thank You Points. I also spent $1,400 on my USBank Business Leverage card and earned around $23 in cash back. I spent less than $400 on my USBank Altitude Card and earned almost 600 points and the 50,000 point bonus. Since, I can’t figure any reasonable way to get more than 1 cent per point on those points, I’m treating it like cash back, so I’m counting that as earning $506.
At the end of the month, this left us with 25,000 Citi Thank You points, 45,700 United miles, 80,000 Delta miles, 5,300 American Airlines miles, 58,300 Marriott Bonvoy points, 1,600 Hyatt Points, 274,900 Ultimate Reward points, 49,500 Wyndham points, 83,300 Capital One Venture miles and $470 in Cash Back. By using the Points Guy valuations located at https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/ that comes to a total value of $10,650. Those points are in a number of programs and it might seem difficult to use those points easily, however, the transferable points make them more useable than it looks on the surface, as I describe in this post.
Planning for the Future
With our trip to Europe around the corner, we’re doing our best to accumulate cash to reduce the cost of the trip which will be used as soon as it’s earned. After that, we will probably be looking to pick up credit cards with sign up bonuses that can pair well with the transferable points we already have. One possibility would be any of the Chase Avios cards (Air Lingus, British Airways or Iberia) because they could be topped off with Chase Ultimate Reward points. A lot of it will probably be determined by where we might want to go for spring break next year. Whatever we decide, because of the points that we have available we should be able to have a variety of options and that’s going to make that decision a lot of fun.
After really pushing every angle we could for the last 17 months, we now have accumulated 25,000 Citi Thank You points, 45,700 United miles, 80,000 Delta miles, 5,300 American Airlines miles, 58,300 Marriott Bonvoy points, 1,600 Hyatt Points, 274,900 Ultimate Reward points, 49,500 Wyndham points, 83,300 Capital One Venture Miles and $470 in Cash Back. By using the Points Guy valuations located at https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/ that comes to a total value of $10,650. That sounds like a lot, but what exactly does that mean? It’s a bunch of points, but it’s spread over a ton of different programs. How useable are they, really? It turns out, that they are really useful because the real power are the transferable points that total up to around $7,500 worth of value between the Citi Thank You points, Capital One Venture miles, and the 274,900 Ultimate Reward points. Those points can either bulk up the points that you have in airline or hotel programs, or they can be transferred to a program you don’t even have points in, if there’s a great deal available. Let’s examine what these points could actually do.
United Airlines
Because Chase Ultimate Reward points are transferable to United Airlines (as long as you have a Chase Sapphire Preferred Card, Chase Sapphire Reserve Card, or a Chase Ink Business Preferred Card) the 274,900 points can be transferred to United. That means that while we have a total of 45,700 United miles, it actually means we have the potential to have 320,600 United miles. With United Airlines saver rates to Europe running at 40K right now, that means the possibility of 4 round trip tickets to Europe.
American Airlines & Delta Airlines
American Airlines doesn’t have typical transfer partners. There was a brief moment when Citi Thank You points were transferable in late 2021, but there aren’t any current transfer partners. So the 5,300 miles are basically useless unless I get an AA credit card with a sign up bonus. However, Marriott Bonvoy will transfer to AA at 3:1, so 57,000 Bonvoy points could turn into 19,000 AA miles for a total of 24,300 AA miles, with which you could probably pretty easily get a domestic round trip ticket. With Delta we have 80,000 points, so that’s a usable amount, but we don’t have any points with Delta’s only major transfer partner, American Express. There is a 3:1 transfer opportunity from Marriott, so we could transfer 57,000 Marriott Bonvoy points to Delta for 19,000 Delta miles to make 99,000 Delta miles when added to the 80,000 we already have. Neither one of the Marriott transfers would be an ideal use of Bonvoy points, but it is available. That could pretty easily get us a few domestic round-trip tickets as 16K round-trip in Basic Economy is not too hard to find.
Marriott Bonvoy Points
Transferring to Marriott can be done at a 1:1 rate from Chase Ultimate Rewards to Marriott Bonvoy. This means that there is a potential of more than 330,000 Bonvoy points by combining our Ultimate Reward Points and Bonvoy points. Since I’ve been eyeballing a trip to the Canary Islands, I found this listing which is a 3 bedroom villa with a heated pool in the Canary Islands for 43K points per night. That’s 7 nights in this villa.
Hyatt
Hyatt is known for having the most valuable hotel reward points. Because of that, Hyatt has been a favorite way for people to use Ultimate Reward points for years, since they transfer at 1:1 to Hyatt. While I only have 1,600 Hyatt points, we are able to leverage as much as 276,500 Hyatt points by transferring our Ultimate Reward Points. Hyatt points are extremely valuable. For example, if you just need a clean and comfortable room, Hyatt has some pretty nice category 1 Hyatt Places that you can routinely book for 5,000 per night. If you were to use those points that way it’s a total of 55 nights at 5,000 per night. If you want to book all-inclusive resorts, they are classed from A-F. The standard night bookings for A is 15k points per night, B is 20k, C is 25K, D is 30K, E is 40K, and F is 50K. So we would be able to book 18 nights at a class A, 13 nights at a class B, 11 nights at a class C, 9 nights at a class D, 6 nights at a class E or 5 nights at a super-swanky class F. We stayed at the Hyatt Ziva Los Cabos (which recently jumped from a class B to a class D) and we thought it was fantastic. If we were to go back we could stay for 9 nights, although my liver probably couldn’t handle it.
Wyndham Rewards
Both Capital One Venture miles and Citi Thank You points transfer to Wyndham at a 1:1 ratio, so if you total all of those points up, I have the possibility of 157,800 Wyndham points. The only interesting use of Wyndham points, for me, is to use them for Vacasa rentals. The generally accepted rule on Vacasa is that the you can basically book any available Vacasa for 15,000 points per bedroom per night as long as the normal price of the rental isn’t more than $500 per bedroom per night. In other words, these points would be worth 10 nights at a one-bedroom Vacasa rental worth up to $500 per night, or 5 days at a two-bedroom Vacasa worth up to $1,000 per night or even 3 nights at a Vacasa rental worth $1,500 per night. It’s such a good deal that we recently purchased points for a rental in Nashville and it saved us around $1000 over three nights.
Flying Blue
Ok, I have exactly 0 Flying Blue miles. Flying Blue is the rewards currency of Air France, KLM, and 4 smaller airlines. Just because I don’t have Flying Blue miles doesn’t mean that I can’t redeem them for flights, though. Flying Blue is great because they have great transfer partners and occasionally have ridiculous deals. They are 1:1 transfer partners with Chase, Capital One, American Express, Citi and Bilt. They are also 3:1 partners with Marriott Bonvoy. So if I do the math on the Capital One, Citi, Chase and Marriott Bonvoy Points, I have access to over 375,000 Flying Blue miles. On top of that, sometimes they have some awesome transatlantic flight rates. Here is an example I put together from Chicago to Paris. It’s round trip in Economy, 30K miles and less than $200 in taxes and fees. I could literally book this 12 times with the available points.
Virgin
Ok, this one, honestly, I don’t even believe this exists. Bear with me on this, again I have precisely 0 Virgin miles. Virgin has a ton of great transfer partners, similar to Flying Blue. They have Chase Ultimate Rewards, Citi Thank You points, Capital One and Amex all at 1:1 as well as Marriott Bonvoy at 3:1. In this case, it would be similar to Flying Blue with us able to covert our points to 375,000 Virgin miles, however, they also right now are offering a 30% transfer bonus from Chase, as described in this post from One Mile at a Time. With the transfer bonus, we would have access to 464,500 Virgin miles if we did complete transfers from Citi, Chase, Capital One and Marriott. Here is the deal from Virgin that would be the most intriguing to me – Virgin cruises occasionally runs sales on cruises where you can get a one week cruise for 2 people for 80,000 points. The latest special, as described by Upgraded Points, has 4 different 7 day itineraries for Mediterranean cruises to choose from. With the available points, we could cruise for 5 weeks and have points to spare. That’s just silly.
The importance of Flexibility
Obviously, a lot of these examples are ridiculous. We’re not going to stay 55 nights in a Hyatt Place, fly to Paris 12 times or cruise for 5 weeks, but they are meant to illustrate a point. If you stay on top of deals and know who you can transfer points to, you can really stretch out your points. If you can also be flexible with dates and locations, you can stretch it out even more. Keep in mind though, a typical, non-saver one way fare across the Atlantic Ocean is 70K United miles, not 40K, and business class typically runs 155K so these miles can disappear quickly if you’re not shopping around. If you try pricing out a Saturday to Saturday trip to Cancun during spring break on points to stay at an all-inclusive resort, that will probably be an ungodly amount of points, if you can even book on points at all. However, flying to Europe during spring break is off-peak and can be extremely cheap by comparison. Just like with cash, your points can go a lot farther if you are a diligent shopper.
Cash
I hope this never happens, but there is always the possibility that at some point I won’t want to travel, or can’t travel for some reason. In which case, these points are useless, correct? Well, not exactly. The credit card points do have a cash value, not the airline and hotel points, but the credit card points. The Chase Ultimate Reward points are worth 1 cent each, the Citi Thank You points are worth 1 cent each and the Capital One miles we have are worth half a cent each, when redeemed for cash. That would mean all of those transferable points have a current cash value of over $3,400. Which is nice, but probably not how I want to use the points.
What do we do now?
It’s almost strange to think about, but I just consider this to be a good base of points. We finally have enough points to utilize multiple programs (this post doesn’t even scratch the surface of great transfer partners, I didn’t even mention one of my favorites, Turkish Airlines). Our strategy moving forward will probably include a decent amount of cash back cards to fill in those gaps that points can’t, like Airbnb and taxes and fees on flights. It will also probably mean getting cards that are running elevated sign up bonuses. Either way, the next vacation we book should be easier for us to get a really good deal because of the flexibility we have built with this cache of points and miles.
We are the Cox’s. We are a quasi-normal, family of four. We love to travel, but we’ve always had to do it on a budget, and still do. Recently, we’ve learned some helpful things which allow us to have greater adventures and stay within our limited budget. This has opened up the world for us, literally. We’re still newbies but we now know the path to become expert travelers. Please follow along with us as we go from newbies to experts.
Motivation
We’ve always set aside money for travel. This was a non-negotiable part of our monthly budget. When the kids were younger, our trips were short and nearby. We live in Iowa, and a typical trip for us was Chicago, St. Louis, or Minneapolis. We looked for places that we could visit on a fairly short drive, stay in a cheap hotel, and we would visit zoos, children’s museums, and parks. We tried to pack in as much fun as we could as cheaply as possible.
As we got older and our budget grew a little bit more, we took longer trips. We visited further away places, like Florida, Virginia, and Washington DC. We bought a camper, and we use it a lot. We never flew, every place had to be within a couple days drive, because once we bought 4 plane tickets and rented a car, the budget was already almost blown. Flying internationally, let alone intercontinentally might as well have been flying to the moon.
One day, when our daughter Emma was a freshman in high school, she told us that she wanted to take the school trip to Greece. This was one of those trips contracted through a travel agency that they market to high schoolers as a “class trip” but only like 5% of the kids actually go, because it’s just too expensive for the average family. Thinking that it wouldn’t be that bad because it was a group trip marketed to kids, I asked “How much will that cost?” She said, “It’s only $4400!” Uh, okay, that’s not gonna happen. She might have well asked for a Porsche. And then I said something which probably changed our lives. “Emma, I promise you, when you graduate from High School, we will travel anywhere you want to go.” That was both a promise seemed completely unattainable, and a promise that I had no intention of breaking.
Revelation
In December of 2021, I started to realize that I had a future 8-to-10-thousand-dollar bill coming due in a year and a half and I was looking at having to completely drain our savings to pay for that. I would have, I just wouldn’t have been happy about it. How can we reduce the cost of this trip?
We were watching TV one night, and a commercial for a Capital One travel card came on. I thought, okay, well, I guess if I applied for a travel credit card, I might be able to pay for one of the flights, maybe? I googled travel cards like crazy, with no real direction, just trying to get the best possible credit card that could, maybe, pay for a flight. I settled on the Citi Premier card, it was offering an 80,000-point bonus and filled out an application. It was approved.
Now what? I had no idea what I was doing. I had this card, I needed to spend $4000 on it in 3 months to get the 80,000-point bonus. Not a problem for a middle-class family of 4, we almost spend that on groceries in 3 months, but what do I do with the points? How do I cash them in, what are they even worth? Then I hit YouTube – hard – and I kept seeing people talking about how they traveled all the time, for free. What? Now, spoiler alert, there is a lot of exaggeration on YouTube. However, points and miles are actually really valuable, and surprisingly easy to acquire. Fast forward one year and I had booked 2 round-trip flights to Cabo San Lucas, 2 nights in the All-Inclusive Hyatt Ziva Los Cabos, 4 nights in an AirBNB in Cabo San Lucas, 4 one-way airline tickets from Chicago to Zurich, 2 Nights in Zurich Marriott, 4 nights in an AirBNB in Munich, 3 nights in an AirBNB in Venice, 2 Nights in an AirBNB in Rome, 4 one-way tickets from Rome to Stockholm, 3 nights in a Marriott in Stockholm, and 4 one-way tickets from Stockholm to Chicago. All of that cost me a total of $3100 out of pocket. Of that, $2500 of that was AirBNBs which we prefer to use because having a kitchen saves us money on food. However, AirBNB doesn’t have a real points program. Also, that could have been much better, but I overspent on an AirBNB in Cabo ($1200), because it was our anniversary. The power of points is absolutely real. All of those points were acquired in one year of normal spending for us, just using the right cards.
We still have a lot to learn, and I invite you to learn with us. This blog will be about making the most of your money and your time. I’ll probably delve into some of our other vices/hobbies like running, camping, and beer. What I’ve learned in the last year is that there are a lot of things which are attainable if you stay focused on a goal.
Newby to Expert Traveler 