If I understand this right, I can book a North America flight, even if it's a short distance, like San Francisco to LA, which sometimes is only 7,500 miles. And then at a date after that, I can book a one-way ticket, even if it connects within one region. So like you said, Cape Town to Kenya or to the Seychelles, places where flights are really expensive.

And then a date after that, just book another flight within North America, LA back to San Francisco. Don't even have to take it. Could conceivably get both your North America flights and the international flight for potentially 15,000 or less miles. Yep. That's amazing. Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel.

I'm Chris Hutchins, and I am excited you're joining me today for a conversation all about points and miles with none other than Julia Menez. She's the host of the Point Strategy Podcast, GeoBreeze Travel, where she interviews travelers from all walks of life about their points and miles tactics. I know I've learned some great points hacks from her, so it's awesome she's here today.

We're going to talk about using buyers groups to earn points without increasing your budget, stacking deals to get more points, her best cards, Chase's 5/24 rules, some sweet spots to maximize your points, when it makes sense to buy points or put your taxes on a credit card, and a lot more.

So let's jump in. Julia, thank you for being here. Hey, I'm so excited to be here and to chat about points and miles with you. One of my favorite topics. Julia and I, we actually met, for those listening, at a conference called FinCon, where we were both up for the best new personal finance podcast.

Yours for GeoBreeze Travel and all the hacks for me. Both of us lost, but we both won this friendship. And I'm excited that we got that chance to meet because I've actually... Some of the things I want to talk about today are points and miles tactics that I had not learned about until following you.

So I am really excited for this conversation. I just want to jump in and start talking about earning points. So I think one of the topics that I want to start us with is one I get a lot of emails about. And after I published a post about my trip to Bora Bora, the first question from a dozen people was, "Well, that's cool.

But 500,000 points to go on a trip is a lot. How do you get them?" And I have my tactics, but I want to hear from you. How do you help people think about starting to earn points on a smaller budget? Yeah. So the signup bonuses are going to be how most people are going to earn most of their points.

So obviously a lot of people are familiar with the signup bonuses. You spent maybe $3,000. In the first three months of opening your car, you're going to get 50 or 60,000 points. That's where a lot of your points are going to come from. But a lot of people will react to this and be like, "Okay, but I don't have like $3,000 of stuff that I need to buy.

We are on a pretty tight budget. What do I do? Do I just not get the signup bonus?" But there's lots of ways around that. If you have a smaller budget, it's going to be really important to find some kind of source of reimbursable spend. And this can be as simple as you pay for dinner for a whole bunch of people and everybody Venmo's you back.

That way you get the points for putting the spend on your credit card, but it doesn't really affect your bank account because other people are paying you back. You can plan parties. I know that we just talked on my podcast about you planned a whole bunch of bachelor parties for people in Mexico and got reimbursable spend that way.

So you can earn a ton of points by doing that. You can put work travel on your card if your job allows it or any work-related expenses, and then just fill out an expense report. If you're a teacher, we have an episode, I think it's episode 56, featuring Zach from Travel Freely.

And he was a teacher and had a very small budget, but wanted to earn more points. But he was also the tennis coach at that school. So all of their team trips, he would just put it on his card and then fill out an expense report and get reimbursed for it.

So finding some kind of reimbursable spend is really cool. One of the more advanced ways that people do this is through something called buying groups, which basically there are people who like to resale at scale. Think like PlayStations, Apple products, cell phones, things like that. Most of the time, if there's a really good sale on an iPhone or an iPad, you're going to be limited for how many you can buy.

You can't just run into Best Buy and be like, give me all your iPads. I'm going to resell them right before Christmas, or give me all your PlayStation fives. I'm going to price gouge everybody on eBay who wants this for Christmas for their kid. And so since you're limited for how many you can buy, some people outsource the buying to other people where they'll say, hey, I am wanting to resell iPads.

I'm offering this much. Get me an iPad, ship it to my place, and I will reimburse you. And so then you go out and source all of these different electronics, ship it to their address, and they pay you back. So this is a way that some people in the points world get a lot of spend.

There's lots of different channels that do this for buying groups. Some of them are like PFS, NYS Buyers Club, Buy For Me Retail. We have a whole master class about the pros and cons of each one and where you can source all of these different products that you then ship to these different places.

But the general mechanics are they put out basically an ad that says, we're buying this. Here's how much we'll reimburse you for. And then you try to source that item at a lower cost so that you're not losing money and then ship it directly to them, and they'll pay you back.

Do they usually pay more than it would cost? So there's different ways that can be done. Some of them actually pay a pretty hefty commission. So PFS mostly sources like collectible gold coins from the U.S. Mint. If a coin is going to come out, they're not going to be able to get more than one.

So they say, okay, everybody buy one of this coin and we'll pay you the cost of the coin if it's like $3,000 for a collectible or something plus $200 commission. These deals are super rare, but that's the one that will actually pay a lot more. Some other ones, they pay a little bit less than you might just be able to get with a store price.

But if you're using that expense to meet a minimum spend on your credit card where you're going to be getting $800 of travel vouchers or something, 60,000 points, it could be worth it if they say, well, I could buy these for like $3,000. They're only reimbursing me like $2,900 or something, but I'm going to get 50,000 points out of it.

It could be worth it. There's also other tricks to help make it a little bit better of a return on investment for you called stacking, where if you are clicking through Rakuten and earning some more shopping portal points for buying this PlayStation or this electronic, then that helps to bring your cost down as well.

So that can help make up for the gap. You're also putting it ideally on a credit card that earns points. And I want to come back to point stacking, but buyers groups, it sounds like there needs to be some trust here. I see an ad on the internet that says, "Send all the iPads you want to this random address in this warehouse and we'll for sure send you back money." Are they reliable?

Do you trust them? How do you know that you're not buying a device that you are going to mail off somewhere and never get paid back? So they have tracking IDs where they say, "When you order your Amazon thing, put the tracking ID here. Make sure you add this code into the description on the Amazon so we know how to pay you back." They have internal tracking and some of them will pay out faster than others so that you can pay off your credit card before the 30 days.

And it'll vary on which ones are better than others, which ones are more trustworthy. The ones that aren't as trustworthy will lose their credibility super fast because every points person who's in the buyer groups is going to start complaining about them. So that's one way is to just be in the points community and talk to other people about which buyers clubs they're using and which ones have the best payouts, which ones pay out the fastest, which ones have the best offers, and then go from there.

And when you say be in the community, where are you learning about all these different buyers clubs? So I have a Patreon where we have a lot of people who will ask questions on this. There's also other Patreons who will talk about buying groups. One is called the Points Analyst on Instagram.

He has a Patreon. There's Pack Your Bag with Points. He has a Patreon or a Discord. And he talks about a lot of these tactics as well. And then there's just a lot of people on Instagram who advertise that, "Hey, you should use this credit card if you can't meet the minimum spend.

I like to use buying clubs. Here's the ones that I use." So there's a lot of us on Instagram who talk about buying groups. Okay. I'm going to ask for a handful of links, including to your content, your masterclass, and I'll put it all in the show notes. But this sounds like something you could do to earn a meaningful number of points each year.

Is that fair? Oh, of course. Yes. Some people are putting thousands upon thousands of dollars in this to earn lots of signup bonuses, just maxing out their 5x categories on Chase Freedom Flex if that comes up. Because one of the main places that people will source from is Amazon.

If you are getting 5 points per dollar at Amazon, then you're going to meet that 1500 cap really fast on a Chase Freedom or a Chase Freedom Flex by doing buy your clubs. For those of you not familiar, the Freedom Flex and the Freedom card may look like cashback cards.

When you look at them online, they say, "We get 5% cashback on these categories each quarter." But if you also have a Sapphire Preferred or a Sapphire Reserve, you can actually use the points or the cashback you earn on these cards as points and transfer them places. So the same goes with the Freedom Unlimited, which I've talked about a lot as a good companion card.

So I'm slowly learning that in almost all of the programs, whether it's Citi or Capital One or Chase, but not Amex, that if you have cashback cards, you can usually combine the cashback perks with your rewards card and be able to transfer those points as well. There's one other app that's really good for meeting minimum spend and getting reimbursable spend.

It's called Grabber. So if you travel to Latin America a lot, it's spelled G-R-A-B-R, then in Latin America, a lot of the things that we have in the U.S., like iPhones, will actually cost more there because of the taxes and everything. So there will be people who are going to say, "Hey, are there any Americans traveling to this city in Brazil?

I'd like to buy an iPhone. I'm willing to pay this much." So let's say the price in the U.S. is $1,000. In Brazil, it's going to cost them $1,500. They might say, "I'm willing to pay $1,250 for an iPhone." Then you put in your bid and then deliver it to them, meet in a hotel lobby or something in the daytime so that you don't meet in an alleyway, obviously, as you're turning over the phone.

But they prepay for this. So as soon as you do the exchange, you'll get paid that reimbursable spend as well. So not only do you get reimbursed, but you also get paid a commission for delivering this, and the commission should be enough to cover any kinds of custom taxes that you might have to go through or just the time and effort for hauling stuff in a bag.

Don't bring 25 iPhones into Brazil. That looks sus. But you can bring a couple iPhones, a couple of other things that people are requesting. Medical devices sometimes get requested if they just don't have access to them in those hospitals. So you can bring some medical devices for people in Brazil and they'll pay a commission for it.

So that's another way to get reimbursable spend as well. And really just pay for a trip to Brazil or Argentina or a lot of other South American countries if you were planning to travel there anyway. You talked a little bit about stacking. And I think it would be good to walk through an extreme example of how valuable this can be.

So maybe one of your own that you've had recently where you're able to stack as many points as you could on a purchase. Because I think sometimes we think about the most obvious way to earn points is sign up bonuses. You get these huge bonuses for spend and then your regular day-to-day spend.

If you spend a lot on travel, you spend a lot on groceries, there are cards to maximize that. But every now and then, you're making a purchase that's large enough that you're like, "Is there another way to maximize?" And there are. Talk about all the ways that you know that you could stack points together on an expense.

What I like to do for excursions a lot is I'll go to Groupon and then find an excursion that I want to do. It'll normally be kind of discounted. Well, then I'm going to go figure out what's the exact amount that I'm going to spend on Groupon. And I'll buy a Groupon gift card through this app called Flues because they're probably going to give me an extra 5% or 6% back just for buying their gift card and that I'm going to go use on Groupon.com.

But I don't go directly to Groupon.com. I instead go through Rakuten.com because Rakuten will also give me an extra 5% to 6% usually for clicking through. I've gotten as high as 18%, I think, if it's like beauty salons and spas and stuff. So I'm earning credit card points. I'm earning points through Flues.

I'm earning points through Rakuten. And I get a Groupon discount. So that's one example of how you can stack things. I try not to go super crazy with stacking like 17 steps because that's 17 steps you have to track in each one. Like what if one thing goes wrong?

But there's a lot of different ways to automate the stacking. It's really easy to do this with restaurants. So you can sign up for airline dining portals, lots of different dining portals. So you just have to link any credit card that you want. And then when you dine at a partnered restaurant with that credit card, then you're going to get extra points through this dining portal.

So in New York, we have a lot of restaurants that are in this dining portal. We also have this app called Seated where you make reservations through this app. You take a picture of your receipt afterwards to make sure that your reservation is completed. And they will give you 23% back a lot of the time, sometimes up to 60% back for dining.

And if you can do this on a group dinner, oh, I think I made like $60 in one weekend because everybody else was from out of town. And so there was the group bill. I took a picture of the full group receipt before we split it up and earned $60 from some group dinners.

So you can stack Seated, you can do the dining portal. Can you stack different dining portals? How does that work? I know. And for anyone not listening, a listener, Harish, who's starting a podcast after all the... He heard all the hacks. He was like, "I want to do this.

It'll be called Hacking the American Dream." And he was like, "Do you talk about dining portals? They're crazy." And so he sent me some screenshots from the Southwest Rapid Rewards Dining Portal. And he's like, "There's a bunch of restaurants. You might not find all the restaurants you want to go to and certainly don't only eat at restaurants for points.

My advice is eat for food and go where good food is. If those intersect, that's great. But do you have to pick one? Or can you say, "I'm going to do the American Dining Portal and the Rapid Rewards Dining Portal and, and, and?" Normally, you can only choose one per card.

So if I'm using my Amex Gold to get 4x points on dining, I can only link that to one program because most of them are going to go through the same central place and the same restaurants are on most of the networks. So you can really just choose one, unfortunately.

But you can link it with another app that's kind of like a dining portal called DOSH, where it's the same idea. You just have to link up your credit card and then go to a partnered restaurant or shop with a partnered store, pay with that linked credit card, and then you're going to get some points with DOSH as well.

And for super, super stacks, Episode 7 of the Geo Breeze Travel Podcast features this girl named Angel Trinh. You can find her on Instagram @pennywisetraveler. And she stacked like 15 things one time in a group outing. She did like an Uber Eats credit, DOSH, Seated, Dining Portals. I think there was like a Rakuten thing because she purchased a gift card to use at the restaurant there as well.

So she was stacking so many different tactics for one dinner. So again, that's Episode 7 of the Geo Breeze Travel Podcast. And that goes into a much more extreme example of how to stack things. Awesome. Yeah, I have slowly inched my way into stacking. And the way I often do it is I use Cashback Monitor.

So anytime Julia mentioned Rakuten, a lot of people know that formerly known as Ebates is a portal you can earn cashback when you're shopping online. Anytime I'm going to make a purchase online that costs maybe over $100, I'll go look and say, "Is there cashback or points?" And the thing Cashback Monitor does that's really cool is they'll show you what are the best places for cashback, transferable points, airline points.

So if you're watching on video, you'll see 2 chairs behind me. But in the near future, you will see a sofa behind me because this recording studio/office will soon become a guest room as well. And so we needed a sofa bed. And I was like, "Okay, we found the one we liked at Crate & Barrel." And I was like, "Where can I get points?" And it turns out that, yeah, I could get half an Emirates point per dollar or a few other places, but I get 3 JetBlue points per dollar.

It was the best deal. So before I bought the couch, I went to JetBlue. I logged in. And I ended up transferring... Or not transferring, clicking through their link to purchase the Crate & Barrel couch on crateandbarrel.com, but earning 3 JetBlue points per dollar. This is a money hack, but you might like it.

One thing that I found is there are a lot of ways online you can earn coupons for major retailers. And so one that a lot of people know about is anytime you change your address, the USPS sends you a bunch of coupons to your new address. There are websites that sell those coupons to save you the hassle of finding them.

And so right before we purchased the couch on Crate & Barrel, stacking the JetBlue points, I went to this website, and it's called saveindeals.com. Like 7deals.com, but S-A instead of S-E. And I tell you, this site looks like it's illegitimate. It does not look like a professional website. But what they do sell are Lowe's, Home Depot, and Crate & Barrel coupons.

So I went in and I found a 15% off Crate & Barrel coupon. And for the low price of $3.99, I PayPaled a random address. And seconds later, I had an email with a 15% off Crate & Barrel coupon. Sometimes you used to be able to find these on eBay.

It's become harder to find them. A lot of people list them on Craigslist, which is how I found them. I use SearchTempest and search for coupons and it searches like all the Craigslist around the country. So you can also stack with coupon codes. I think most people listening have probably heard of Honey or RetailMeNot and websites you can get promo codes for.

But when you want actual coupon codes with unique barcodes, yes, you can do the change your address, but you can also buy them online on sketchy websites. One other place where you can stack so many things is in Las Vegas. There's so many different ways to get deals in Las Vegas.

So one of my favorite apps is called the My Vegas app. And then you just play these free slot machine games. They give you free tokens every day in hopes that you get addicted to gambling and then put money in their app, which I've never actually done. But they give you all of these free tokens and you play little slot games and you can redeem the points that you get for free Las Vegas hotel rooms or food or show tickets, tons of different things.

And it's for the MGM network in Las Vegas. And MGM has a partnership with Hyatt. So here's what you do. Play the My Vegas app, get a whole bunch of points that you can redeem for a free room or two, and then go online status match. If you have Hyatt Explorer list, you have Hyatt Explorer list or globalist status, then you're going to have MGM gold status, which means you don't have to pay any resort fees at all.

So you have a free hotel room where you normally have to pay taxes and fees, but you don't have to do that anymore because it's waived with status. And then when you check in, you give them your Hyatt elite ID number, your world of Hyatt ID number so that you're going to earn Hyatt elite nights for staying at this free MGM hotel.

And that brings you closer towards status so you don't have to stay at nearly as many different Hyatt hotels just to get like the free breakfast or the free upgrades or any of those other statuses for people who really want globalist status but can't afford to stay at that many Hyatts, don't want to put a whole bunch of spend on a world of Hyatt card through buying groups or anything like that.

This is a really cheap way to just get elite status with Hyatt. How many nights could you conceivably do this for in a year? Like how hard is it to actually earn these MyVegas points that get you free nights? Super easy to earn the points, but they limit you to one premium redemption each month.

So you can do two nights per month because some of them are for one night free, some of them are for two nights free. So you can conceivably get 24 elite nights this way, which is almost halfway to the 60 that you need. Also, you can just pay for the cheap Vegas hotel stays.

You can, but don't have to stay there. If you wanted to just book the Excalibur for four nights on like week nights, it's like $20 or $30. And then the rest of the steps are the same. Your resort fees are waived. Make sure you give them your Hyatt ID upon check-in.

Then you just get four Hyatt elite nights for $20 to $30 each. So you can get status really quickly that way. Before we jump forward, I want to just highlight some of the crazy amounts of points stacking deals. I'm looking at Cashback Monitor right now, and I'm looking at the Apple Store, for example.

You buy an Apple product, and you click through the Chase portal. If you have a Chase Freedom card, you're going to get two points per dollar on Apple. Nike, three points per dollar. Also, through Top Cashback, 10% cashback. So this comes to a place where you're like, "Well, what do I really want?

Do I want to maximize my points or do I want to maximize cashback?" But some of the deals I've seen have gotten really, really lucrative. And I just want to make sure people know that this isn't a place where you could earn a couple points here and there. You can earn thousands of points on a purchase you're already going to make.

Also, sometimes Rakuten will increase the amount of points that they're giving for a Marriott or an IHG or something. If you already have a trip booked and the price hasn't changed too much for your dates, cancel that trip and rebook it clicking through Rakuten, because then you can get 10% back on IHG or something for a trip you are going to take already and you haven't already paid for.

So that's another thing that we do with just getting more points if you're on a small budget without having to spend more than you wanted to spend. Yeah, keep an eye on these portals if you have big purchases. I know our couch, it's not in stock because of all of the supply chain issues.

But they told us in our email confirmation, "If we have to cancel it, you're okay until it's been confirmed that it's going to ship." So you better believe that I was checking. If for some reason there was a 10% cashback, which is not unheard of on some stores. In fact, I think when we bought our first couch from Macy's, Macy's is notorious for having some of the highest cashback rates.

And I believe we used like a 10% cashback link to buy the first couch. And so I would certainly cancel and repurchase the couch if it ended up being 10% or 20% off because of it. Every now and then I find out there are deals to be had that I missed out on.

So the charity donation thing in December where people were donating money and earning crazy amounts of miles, I kick myself regularly for the fact that I missed out on the opportunity. Where are you staying on top of things that are very timely? I know there are certain sources that write really good content.

But what are the places you go for the deals that are timely and you need to act on them quickly? Are there specific places? Yeah, so if you follow a lot of us on Instagram who post about these, I post about these and you turn on post notifications, then you'll get alerted.

But you can do that with any blogs that you follow too. So a few of my favorites, I really like Frequent Miler and Doctor of Credit to stay on top of these different deals. Those are two of the ones that I follow very closely. I check it every day.

I aggregate all of these into an app called Feedly. So I don't have to go to each individual blog website that I read. But you can put on notifications on your email when you're subscribed to their list as well if you really want to jump on things as soon as they hit.

That brings us to another point. So you use the Feedly app. But what other tools do you use to organize all of this? I know there are points all over programs. And one of the things that I've accumulated over the years is small balances in lots of places, keeping track of it all.

I know, I think you have a binder with lots of credit cards. How do you organize all this information? Are there tools that you use to stay organized with your points or you use to book things that you prefer? Yeah. So I have different tools for different purposes for figuring out how many points I have with each program.

I like to use Award Wallet. So it's just one dashboard that aggregates everything into one place for you. So I don't have to go check my Chase account, then my Amex account, then my Marriott account, then my Hyatt account. It's all just in one dashboard. And it's free. There's a paid version where they'll actually send you alerts if you have points that are expiring.

I like to use this tool called Travel Freely to check how many cars have I opened in like the last 24 months so that I know my 5/24 status. I like it because it sends me email reminders when I have an annual fee that's going to come due. So then I can decide, OK, should I hang on to this card?

Am I getting enough value out of it? Or should I just downgrade it because I'm not getting enough out of the annual fee? So I like Travel Freely because it sends me that reminder to stay organized for which card to use for any given purchase. I like to use an app called Card Pointers.

You just tell it what cards you have and what you're trying to buy, whether it's groceries or gas, online shopping, public transportation. And then it'll tell you, oh, based off of the cards you have, here's the one that's going to earn the most points/most value. So you should use this card for your dining purchase.

And it just takes out so much decision making and brain usage if all of this is already calculated for me. They also track, in the pro version, all of those Amex credits, like, oh, did I use my dining credit this month? Do I have shopping credits that are left somewhere else?

You can track those on Card Pointers. So those are three apps that I really like to use to stay organized. I want to come back to something you said, which in the miles and points world is really well known, but I think for a lot of people listening might not be, which is the 5/24 rule.

So can you talk a little bit about the 5/24 rule and why it's important for people? Sure. So 5/24 rule is a rule specifically set by Chase that says if you applied for five or more personal cards across any bank, Capital One, Amex, Chase, Citi, then you will be rejected on your application for your Chase card if you've already done five or more applications in the last 24 months.

And because of that, that's why a lot of points blogs will really prioritize recommending Chase cards to beginners because you can grab five Chase cards and then move on to other banks, but you can't grab like five Capital One, Amex, and Citi cards and then move on to Chase because they'll reject you.

So that's kind of the order of operations of cards is because of this rule. This rule drives so many decisions that people make with points and miles. And sometimes a good offer comes up and you're already at 4/24 and like it could be worth it to just get the Capital One Venture X or something else.

But that's what the 5/24 rule is. If you're listening and you're thinking about a Chase card, it's always and you think there's any chance you might have opened five cards up in the last 24 months, at least is it just opened or is it applied? Okay, so I would recommend anyone who thinks they could be in that camp to check this out before because you're going to get immediately denied from Chase if you have.

Is there an easy way to find out if you forget how long you've had certain cards for? I like to use Credit Karma because they're going to have my entire credit history of like when certain accounts were opened so I can use that. But then going forward, once you know how many you've opened, use something like Travel Freely because it's a lot more user-friendly rather than going through the credit history on Credit Karma.

Yeah, we're still in early days with all of these points and miles products. And I've talked to the founder of Card Pointers and I just wish that they all started talking to other services more regularly. I don't want to track whether I've used my dining credit or Uber credit.

I want you to talk to Uber, find out if I have and remind me if I haven't. So I'm hopeful that in the years to come, a lot of these products start to connect to some of the platforms they track. Like Award Wallet connects to some of the points sites so that we can get kind of like really real-time notifications of things.

But we've talked about the Card Pointers app before and I'm a big fan but I just feel like there's so much more opportunity as a lot of these programs open up and make it easier to share information between each other. It is worth noting on the 5/24 rule that business cards for Chase are subject to but do not count towards 5/24, which is the most confusing thing.

So if you are looking at any Chase business cards, if you're over 5/24, you can't get them. It doesn't matter if you have like a separate EIN, you can't get them until you're back under 5/24. But if you're at 4/24 and then you get a business card from Chase or Amex or anyone with some caveats, then you're still at 4/24 afterwards because the business cards don't count towards the 5/24 score.

There are some exceptions, TD Ameritrade, Capital One, Discover, I think, but nobody's really using those too often. So most of the time, like with Chase and Amex, you're going to be good. We didn't ask this, but I probably should. And I didn't even have it on my list. What are your go-to cards?

Whatever signup bonus I'm working on is going to be Plan A. And then Plan B is whatever Card Pointers tells me to do. For dining, that tends to be my Amex Gold. For rent, obviously, it's going to be Bilt because that's the only one that's going to let me earn points on rent.

Otherwise, most of the time, I'm working towards a minimum spend unless there's like a lot of hotel promos going on, then I'll just use the Hotel Carl Barron card. And when you're... Do you have a threshold for when a signup bonus is worth applying for? I think there's always a signup bonus you can find to earn 50,000 points.

And there's rarely a signup bonus that'll earn over 100,000. Is there a point at which you see something and you're like, "Let's jump on it"? I try not to get shiny card syndrome for seeing different promos. So what I would do instead, especially for beginners, is pick a trip that you want to take and work backwards from there, figure out the different routes that fly into that destination, how many points those routes cost, what kind of points you need, and let that determine what kind of credit cards you're going to open.

Don't open cards just because you saw a whole bunch of points influencers post about it, and because there's a great signup bonus, but you have no idea how you're going to use those points. Because let's say there's a really good Southwest promo, but you're going to be living abroad most of next year, do not get that Southwest promo because it's going to be completely useless to you.

So I would say work backwards rather than chasing good signup bonuses. How would you recommend doing that? Let's take an example. If someone says, "Gosh, I'm trying to think of what I just got in my email." Someone said, "I want to go to Italy." So they're planning a trip to Italy.

Let's work backwards on that process of how do you arrive at which card might make sense? So there's a new tool that came out. It's called Point Me, point.me. And this would be the first and easiest step is if you already live near a major airport, you just plug in your airport, you plug in wherever you're trying to fly.

It will tell you what is the best route for points and how many points you're going to need, what kind of points transfer, what cards will transfer. So that's like plan A where everything works on the happy path. Sometimes it's going to give you ridiculous results like, "Oh, I want to fly direct from Kansas City to the Philippines on business class." That's just not going to happen.

So then you're going to need to probably do a positioning flight to a larger airport and look from there. Always be open to looking at surrounding airports or maybe if you live like, I don't know, North Carolina, South Carolina, you can position yourself to New York and then fly to Italy from there.

Do it in two legs and do two different searches rather than just looking straight from North Carolina into Italy and be like, "Ah, there's nothing. There's nothing." Or if you wanted to go to a specific island in Thailand, do not look for flights directly into that island. Look for flights that go into Bangkok and then take a cheap Thai Airways flight once you're there.

So the positioning flights are going to help a lot. Another trick that's really good for figuring out who flies to certain airports is look at that airport's Wikipedia page because it will list all of the airlines that are serviced by that airport. And from there, you can kind of figure out, "Okay, are they mostly Star Alliance flights?

Are they mostly One World Alliance flights?" And you kind of learn over time who transfers to who. But you can figure that out from just looking at their Wikipedia page. I like that. I want to talk about sweet spots for redemptions, especially maybe if you don't have a huge balance.

I know you've dug into a lot of this, taken many of them yourself. What are some really amazing international redemptions? So for international or domestic redemptions, you can get anywhere in the US, including Alaska or Hawaii on Turkish Miles and Smiles for 7500 points in economy or 12,500 in business class if you can find the award availability.

To transfer to Turkish Miles and Smiles, you're going to need either city points, built points, or Capital One points. The booking process is a little annoying because you have to call somebody once you find the availability to actually get these seats. But if you can get them, such good outsized redemption.

You can fly from New York to Hawaii in business class, 12,500 points one way. So that's one for domestic. There's the ANA around the world redemption, which is one of the most popular sweet spots that anybody ever talks about. And basically if you have Amex points, you can transfer them to ANA Airways, which is a Japanese airline, and they will let you book up to eight legs in business class around the world.

And it depends on like the physical number of miles you're flying, but it's going to be like around 125,000 points total for eight business class flights. So there are some rules around it. You have to be traveling continuously east or continuously west. You have to have at least one stop in North America, South America, one stop in Europe or Africa, and at least one stop in Asia or Australia.

And you cannot cross back and forth between different continents. So like once you go from North America to Europe, you can't suddenly go back to North America, but you can travel around within Europe. You can crisscross back and forth within Europe before moving on to Asia. So this is one of the most outsized redemptions ever is the ANA around the world.

You make me feel bad not talking about it before. You're like, "This is one of the best things." I'm like, "Oh man, this is why we have Julia on the show." Because I remember learning about it a while ago and haven't thought to bring it up. But 120,000 miles for business class around the world with eight legs is unheard of.

So sorry, but keep going. So to book this thing, what you do is you search on ANA's website to figure out what the eight legs you want are. And you don't have to have eight. You have to have a minimum of three, maximum of eight. So you find the flights that you want, write down the flight numbers and the flight times and the city, kind of make your itinerary.

Then you have to call ANA in order to actually book this because their website cannot handle an eight-legged multi-leg trip. Also, you need to transfer in your Amex points. However, it takes three days. So in those three days, you have to pray that your availability does not disappear. So you should do this like 10 months in advance so that in case one of the legs is gone in those three days, you have like backup routes that you can do.

Also, if you call ahead of time, like at the beginning of those three days, if you get a nice ANA agent, they might hold the space for you while waiting for your points to transfer over. I've never heard that hack of asking someone to hold, but be kind and maybe you'll be lucky.

I think with ANA, they also have an incredible round trip to Japan. I don't know if it's still only 80,000 miles, but one of the better deals. And what I say is, look, it can be daunting. If you're transferring all the miles and points you have to ANA and relying on them for one specific trip that could be gone by the time three days pass, I don't know if that's the best use case.

But if you have enough points that you could transfer 80,000 and you know you want to go to Asia, but you're totally flexible when, you can probably make it all work. But I didn't know that you could call and ask them to hold it. And if you can get someone to do that and take away all the risk, that's the move.

You can also, if you didn't want to fly all the way around the world, but you just want to experience the actual ANA plane, which is fantastic. It's supposed to be one of the nicest first-class products in the sky. You can travel from the US to Japan in first class.

I want to say it's like 120,000 points round trip, which is crazy good because these flights are $20,000. And sometimes you can transfer Virgin, you can transfer Amex points or any kind of points that transfer into Virgin Atlantic and then book ANA with Virgin Atlantic. And sometimes there will be Amex transfer bonus promos.

So you transfer 60,000 points or whatever, you get maybe like a 20% bonus. So you can do that. You cannot transfer Virgin points to do ANA all around the world, but you can just do it if you want it to fly to Japan and back on ANA's actual plane.

Any other amazing redemptions? Maybe if someone's trying to go to Europe, where's the sweet spot to book that? So I want to talk about a sweet spot across Europe. You can actually do this for like 10,000 United points in business class from like France to Greece, which is crazy.

So this is called the United excursionist perk. We're going to start with a small example and then go into the super hack example. So what this is meant for is if you're doing like a triangle itinerary, like you're flying from New York to London to Paris, back to New York, if you do it all on United points, that middle leg is free as long as the middle leg is in the same region.

So there are certain rules. We're going to assume everybody who's listening to this is based in North America because you can do this for other regions, but for North America, your first flight on the itinerary has to start in North America and your last leg has to end in North America and your free segment, both ends of it have to be not in North America within like another region.

So Europe is one region. So that's why that itinerary works of New York starts in the North America region, fly over to London, London to Paris is both self-contained in a separate region, and then it ends back in New York. So you can do that. How you can super hack this, it does not need to be a continuous itinerary.

So let's say you went onto Scott's cheap flights or something, found a really good deal flying into Paris and you found another really good cash deal from Greece back home, but you have no way to connect these two deals. You can actually fly across Europe for free, basically free.

So here's what you do. So you're in, let's say you're in Los Angeles. You can book a United flight from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for like 5,000 points. Then the next thing you search for in your itinerary is from Paris to Athens. And then the last leg is going to be from, I don't know, another random flight from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for 5,000 points.

That middle leg is still free because your first flight starts in North America from that random Los Angeles to Las Vegas flight. Your middle leg is completely contained in not North America, Europe to Europe, and your last leg, which is another Los Angeles to Las Vegas flight, still ends in North America.

So then you just have to fill in the gaps of like, find a cheap cash flight, find another way to get from the US to France, find another way to get from Greece back home. But that middle leg is going to be free. Also, that's just an economy thing.

If you wanted to book Los Angeles to Las Vegas in business class United, you can get that middle leg for free in business class because it'll match whatever is like the first leg. You have to take the first flight or it negates the rest of the itinerary, but the last flight is optional for you.

So for people who want to just like do like a quick route, or if you already have to take a short domestic flight anyway, and you can plan ahead and structure these itineraries, you can fly Cape Town to the Seychelles, which I don't even know how expensive that would be, but you could do that for free if you can structure a United excursionist itinerary correctly.

If I understand this right, I can book a North America flight, let's say even if it's a short distance like San Francisco to LA, which sometimes is only 7500 miles. And then at a date after that, I can book a one way ticket, even if it connects within one region.

So like you said, Cape Town to Kenya or to the Seychelles, places where flights are really expensive. And then a date after that, just book another flight within within North America, LA back to San Francisco, don't even have to take it could conceivably get both your North America flights and the international flight for potentially 15,000 or less miles.

Yep, that's amazing. That's a great hack. I'm going to brainstorm ways to use it. If anyone listening has creative ideas on how they could use something like that, definitely reach out. Would love to see all the creative ways they wrote about it. A few other quick things before we go.

I've gotten a few questions from listeners that I feel like would be a great conversation. And I want to get your take on some and one is from Eric from Cincinnati, who, you know, I won't say the city's from everyone, but Eric's name in his signature or in his email from was Eric from Cincy.

So I, you know, it seems fun. Asked if buying points ever makes sense. And I'll give you my perspective. And I want to hear yours. And we can go back on a few of these questions. But in general, there are always all these promotions that I've seen from airlines from hotel groups to buy points.

And they're like, "Oh, it's 2x points. Everything's 50% off." My advice has always been, if you have a redemption in mind, it can be a really great deal. Or if the whole world is blowing up about how it's the best thing ever, and like, you have to do it, great, which is rare.

But otherwise, I see almost weekly some promotion for buying points at a huge discount. And I pretty much disregard all of them unless I'm about to do something. What do you think? Very similar thoughts. So do not speculatively buy points, only buy them if you already know how you're going to use them.

And you've done the math to make sure that whatever redemption value you're going to get from using those points is better than the purchase price of those points. Don't buy points for 2 cents for $1. Sorry, don't buy points for like 2 cents per point, and then use them on a redemption where you get one and a half cents per point.

So just make sure that you know what you're going to use them for and that you've done the math on it, and then you're good to go. The two exceptions I have are, it might not be a great deal to buy points. But if you are trying to book a flight or book a hotel, and you have almost enough, you want to book an award that's 80,000 points and you have 78,000, and you don't have any way to transfer it in, it could make sense to pay an astronomical like 5 cents per point or whatever the fee is to get those last 2000 points to get you this amazing reward.

That's generally, I think, one of the few use cases, but it falls into exactly what you said. Make sure you have a way you want to use it in mind before you do it. Because just like Mary, it's recently done some devaluation. The last thing you want to do is buy something that sounds like a good deal today, but the program changes and maybe it's not a good deal tomorrow.

Absolutely. What about paying taxes on a credit card? I think I had always thought my whole life, it would never make sense to pay fees on a credit card purchase. So whenever someone says, "Oh, we'll charge you 3%," before the built card, it was like, "Oh, you can pay your rent, but you have to pay fees with plastic or other services." I was always like, "It never makes sense to pay fees to earn points." And then I just started digging into paying taxes on a credit card this year, and I'm not sure I agree anymore.

It can be a really good way to meet minimum spend if you don't have another way to easily meet your minimum spend. So for example, the Amex Business Platinum has $15,000 minimum spend, which is a lot. And so if you don't want to do buying groups or any of the other reimbursable spend things that we talked about earlier on in the episode, it can make sense to just pay an extra 3% to get that 120,000 point bonus on the Amex Business Platinum.

So if you're going for something like that, or you have Hilton Surpass where you get a free night if you're putting $15,000 on the card each year, if you're going to get whatever 15,000 times 3% is at least that much value out of your free hotel night at some Waldorf Astoria, it could be worth it to do it for something like that, or just to cap it if, "Oh, I'm 10,000 of the way there.

I have no other way of getting that 5,000." Then it might be worth it if you want to put your taxes on a credit card and pay that extra fee. So I started looking into this and I realized most of the places you pay for things online on a credit card, the fees are pretty high, 2.5%, 3%.

I've seen 4%. What I realized was that the fees to pay your taxes on a credit card are actually lower than I expected. So there are 3 sites the IRS shows. The lowest one is pay1040.com and the fee is 1.87% this year. So I was thinking, "Gosh, I have a Venturex card." And at the worst case, you can redeem your points, which you earn 2 of at 1 penny, booking travel.

So 2 cents per dollar spent, so 2% cash back. Also could do it with a Citi Double Cash or any card that pays 2% cash back, you would actually net a profit paying your taxes on your credit card. Now, I quickly thought, "Ooh, who doesn't want a free profit?" So I was like, "Hmm, what if I put $10,000?" I'm not saying I owe 10,000 or you would, but just to illustrate the example.

And I realized if I'm going to put $10,000 on a credit card, and I'm going to pay a fee of $187, but I'm going to earn 2%, which is $200. I'm literally going to make $13. And that's for a $10,000 tax bill. So I thought, "Okay, this is not a way to make money.

This is not a way to rack up points at the IRS's expense. But what it is, is a great way to meet minimum spend." So if anyone's listening, and they had a business and they signed up with Capital One's Spark Cash Plus card, it had the most egregious minimum spend, which was $50,000 in 6 months.

And now all of a sudden, I'm thinking, "Maybe I should lower my deductions from work for my withholdings from work on my taxes so that I owe the IRS money so that I can put some spend on this card." But at 1.87%, I think it could work really well for meeting minimum spend and not losing money.

But it's probably not a way to generate a return. If you overpay your taxes, the IRS will issue you a check back. It's very slow. They're very slow to do this. But if you wanted to pay them $50,000, they will probably send you a check back 6 months later for $40,000 in this example, and then you earned your bonus.

So that is a strategy some people do. I don't want to be that leveraged for $50,000 for 6 months. But some people do things like that. Yeah, I definitely do not want to owe... Especially on a card that's a charge card. Maybe if it was a 0% APR card, you could carry it.

But I did realize that if you're trying to meet a minimum spend in 2022 at 1.87% on the right card, it has to be a card that's earning you 2% back or more. Otherwise, you'd be losing money. But I've turned my position on this a little bit, and I think it could make sense.

Last few things. I got an email from a woman named Brandy, who pointed out something that I didn't realize. I'm not in the military, nor is my spouse. But I recently learned and wanted to share that if you have a Chase, an Amex, or a CityCard, and you are in the military or your spouse is in the military, they will waive your annual fees on all the cards.

I looked at the list. It's Chase Reserve. It's Amex Platinum. Real cards with high annual fees. I know you've done an episode on a lot of these things. I wanted to hear your take on this and other perks that might apply to people in that situation. They'll waive it on all personal cards.

Unfortunately, they won't waive it on business cards if you're trying to get the Chase Inc. Business Cash or the Amex Business Gold. But for all of the personal ones, yes, you don't have to pay the $700 on the Amex Platinum, which is amazing. We actually have an episode that covers a lot of different military benefits.

It's episode 67, featuring Mark White. He's in the military. He talks about the waive fees. You can get into different lounges for free with military ID if you're traveling. You can get free status with Caesars. I don't know if they still do this because they recently changed their program.

But it used to be that you would get automatic platinum status for both the military member and their spouse. And each of those would get you three free nights at the Atlantis in the Bahamas. So six free nights for an Atlantis Bahamas vacation for a couple. So lots of different tricks like that.

More of them in episode 67 to talk about lots of different military benefits and places that you can get discounts or just extra perks for military. And one thing you told me, there's a site called ID.me, where it's not just military. There are other branches of healthcare and I think education, maybe, where you can go link up your email to prove that you're in that group or even verify it in other ways and get access to a lot of perks.

Yep, absolutely. Travel perks, different discounts with different stores, restaurant things. So if you're a student, a teacher, government worker, healthcare worker, military, you can go to ID.me and check for all of these different discounts. Awesome. Last thing I want to share is I've talked numerous times on the podcast and gotten so much great feedback from listeners getting upgraded around the world by sending a note into the hotel after booking directly with them.

And people have asked me, "What is the message you send?" And I've always given really generic advice that was, "Oh, just say, 'Hey, I'm coming. These are my dates. This is what I'm doing.' And I want to share your link, which Julia has set up. Let us know where to go for your guide to exactly what template you should send to a hotel to maximize your chance for an upgrade.

So I made you guys a special link. It's at GeoBreezeTravel.com/allthehacks. It'll take you directly to the template that I've used to get some amazing upgrades. I look forward to more conversations like this down the road. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Thank you.