every time you hear about another airline award chart disappearing or hotel program devaluation you might wonder is the points game even worth it anymore so today i'm going to break down exactly why i still believe we are living in the golden age of credit card points and miles i'm going to walk through the different types of points and how to calculate what they're really worth including the biggest mistakes that most people make when doing that math we'll look at where the value is what to avoid and whether you'd actually be better off earning cash back and for some of you i think you might be whether you're just getting started or deep in this game this is everything you need to know to fine-tune how you're playing the points game and whether it's actually going to be worth it for you i'm chris hutchins and if you enjoy this episode and want to keep upgrading your life money and travel click follow or subscribe so whenever i talk about points i hear some people ask is it even worth playing this game given all the times we keep hearing about devaluations and they're not wrong right i feel like most of the news we hear is oh this hotel chain moved their categories up this airline devalued their points it's not always the case sometimes you see jetblue just recently added condor as a way to redeem your points and they recently added japan airline so jetblue points might be more valuable and mesa which is a new homeowner's card added some transfer partners like sas which is a airline that we couldn't transfer to from any other currency so things do sometimes sound like they're getting better but most of the news is that points are getting devalued however i want to go back in time to explain why i still think that we're in the golden age of points and miles and i look back at this card that used to be kind of one of the greatest cards the starwood amex card it was the favorite of most management consultants and people who traveled and it was an amazing card at the time and it earned one starwood point i believe it had a 25 or 30 000 point welcome bonus when it happened and the really cool thing about this card was you could earn starwood points but starwood points could transfer to airline miles and you could transfer 20 000 points to 25 000 airline miles because they added a bonus every 20 000 points you transferred so if you did it at those intervals it was effectively a 1.25x on everything card it was amazing now we have 2x on everything cards so you can earn points way faster now i looked back at the original chase sapphire preferred launch it didn't even have 2x categories other than booking in the chase travel portal a couple years later in 2011 they added 2x on travel and then the next year they added 2x on dining it was revolutionary oh my gosh you could earn 2x on travel and dining it was amazing now we have cards that earn 5x on flights 4x on hotels 4x on dining things have just gotten so much better in the last 15 to 20 years when it comes to how much you can earn but also if you want to look back at what signup bonuses were i looked back and in the early 2000s people wrote articles about 10 20 30 40 000 point welcome bonuses that was news i've had multiple 200 000 point signup bonuses and some even greater than that it's not even crazy to pass up a hundred thousand point signup bonus right now because they seem to happen so frequently when 10 15 years ago they were unheard of so are miles and points worth less now than they were 10 years ago they absolutely are but can you earn them at a way faster rate also yes in fact i would wager to say that the average dollar value of a welcome bonus the effective value and the effective return on your spend in terms of what are you getting in terms of points back relative to their value i think both of those have gone up in the past 20 years and it's why i still think that this is the golden age of credit card points and miles and what you can earn and so i am really excited to be diving into the actual value of those points because i think that there's a lot of value to be had here but it's important to know that not all points are the same so as i run through this episode i'm going to highlight the four different types of points so we know what we're talking about the first two are probably the ones almost everyone's familiar with airline and hotel points now one thing to keep in mind airline and hotel points usually aren't very portable hotel points you can usually transfer to other people but airline points i don't think you can in any program some of them do have points pooling so you can kind of book together with a friend and combine those points but most of them do let you book flights for other people so yes you might not be able to transfer your united or delta points to your family members or friends but you could book travel for them so keep that in mind they're not as portable now the third type of point is transferable points and these are my favorite these are the points you get from city capital one amex chase built wells fargo mesa brax us bank supposedly later this year tbd how valuable that will be and the reason i love them is because you just get so many options you can transfer those points to airlines and hotel groups you can use them in their travel portal effectively more like cashback some of those programs let you just take it as a statement credit and so there's just so much more flexibility with transferable points that i value them much higher than airline and hotel points it's a little bit strange because at the end of the day i usually use them to transfer to airline and hotel groups so you would argue why would they be worth more if i valued a hyatt point at 1.7 cents and i use my chase points for hyatt points by transferring how could my chase points be worth more but you could also ask me would i pay more for a point that could be an airline point at 10 different airlines or five different hotel groups than i would for an individual airline or hotel group and the answer is yes because you don't know where that availability is going to be the trip you want to take to europe or the trip you want to take to asia might be on one carrier that if you only accumulated delta miles you might never be able to book so having transferable points i think is way more valuable but also they have transfer bonuses so i went back and i looked historically on average amex wins here with 17 transfer bonuses a year on average and i'm looking at kind of year to date 2025 and 2024 and what that means is 17 different times throughout the year amex would give you anywhere from probably 10 to 30 percent more points when you move them to another airline or hotel group sometimes for hotel groups actually that amount was as much as 50 or even 100 transfer bonuses but for the most part with the airline groups that bonus is right around 24 to 27 percent i actually ran all the numbers for all of them historically so on airlines 21 to 27 percent on hotels 29 to 65 percent with one exception and that's built now built has had less transfer bonuses over the last few years in total since the beginning of 2024 it's been 14 but if you have built status those transfer bonuses which always occur on the first of the month end up being as high as 100 or i think in some cases 175 percent on hotels that means that if you transfer a hundred thousand points to air canada aero plan there have been days where if you had the highest built status you would have 200 000 aero plan points so one of the reasons i think built points are worth more than all other points is that they've had these really lucrative transfer bonuses and even if you had the lowest tier of status within built it might only be 125 percent bonus or a 25 bonus where you'd get 125 of the points but that's still a meaningfully great bonus obviously if you can spend your way to platinum status and you get 100 transfer bonus that's even better so those transfer bonuses also give a little bit of a boost to the value of those transferable points so i love transferable points they're my favorite they're the things i'll talk about the most and then the last type of points is what i'll call fake points and they're with programs that might call what you earn points so in the case of bank of america you earn points but you can't really use those points for anything other than either booking travel or cashing out as a statement credit or just depositing into a bank account so if you can't transfer those points to airlines and if you can't use those points in an airline or hotel program i'm going to call them fake points i'm not even going to talk about them today i want to be clear that some programs call what you earn points even though you can't really do anything with them other than what you could do if they were also earned as cashback so that's the different types of points why is it important to know what they're worth why are we doing this episode today and i think there's really two reasons one is so you can compare points amongst themselves that might help you decide which card to open you might see a hundred thousand point sign up bonus for one card and a two hundred thousand point sign up bonus for another card but in the case of hotel points if those were hilton choice or ihg points you might not want two hundred thousand of them if you could otherwise have a hundred thousand transferable points and so it's helpful to compare the value of points to know which cards to open or which cards to use right some cards especially hotel cards might look like they earn a ton oh i can get 3x on everything with a hilton card but if those hilton points are only worth half a cent i'd much rather be earning 2x capital one points with a venture card because i think that's a better earning rate so that's something to keep in mind and then also i think the most important most important thing is to decide if this whole game makes sense if we compare earning points to earning cash back and by the way when i say points some programs call them miles we're going to bucket all of those in the same bucket if you compare them to earning cash back you can know if you're actually getting the value so if your points are worth two cents and you have a card that earns 2x points on everything then you're effectively earning four percent so if your best cash back alternative is a two percent card or even a three percent card you'd be way better off with points but if you go through the exercise we'll go through today and you decide that your points are really only worth one cent and you have a three percent cash back card well that 2x card is effectively earning you two percent and a three percent cash back card is earning you three percent you would be way better off earning cash back and paying to book all of your travel that said if you're comparing your points to your cash back and it's to tie or it's even close i'd always give the edge to cash back because you're not locked into anything right if you earn points and you decide later oh i'm not sure i do value them as much as i thought well you have them they're pretty hard to convert to cash in any way that's at least legal or by the terms and conditions of most of the programs but with cash back it's cash you can invest it you can earn a return on it you can do all kinds of things so if it's tie if it's close i would always err on the side of cash back this episode is brought to you by gelt when it comes to building wealth taxes are such a big part of the strategy and as tax time gets closer getting prepared now is so important and now that i'm working with gelt i finally feel like i have a partner i can trust to handle everything for my personal and business taxes think of gelt as the ultimate modern cpa of course they have an in-house team of expert cpas to work with who help you determine the most effective tax strategies to 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that's meatfabric.com all the hacks m-e-e-t fabric.com all the hacks policies issued by western southern life assurance company not available in certain states price is subject to underwriting and health questions okay so what are these points worth i'm going to throw a lot at you in this episode and i'm going to do my best to recap and summarize things as we go and end with really strong takeaways so that everything makes sense and so here's how we're going to walk through this episode i'll start with some reasonable floor value for points so you understand kind of what's the base then we'll look at what most of the experts in this field say how do they value points but then we're actually going to dig into the data itself to see how that might change things and it's actually really interesting now i think we have access to data that can give us a better understanding of the value of points and who might get more or less value than other people then i'm going to talk about how you kind of need to personalize all this to your particular situation i'll talk about how to do that and what kinds of things might change those values and then we'll look at why there might need to be a ceiling or a cap on the value we give points because you can buy these points and so if the alternative of accumulating them is accumulating cash back and then buying them really we could set a ceiling on their value as to what we could buy them for i'll share where i net out on points and what i think the values are and finally i'm going to walk through all of my learnings looking at the best cashback cards and the best points cards to see if there's actually an easier way to approach this question and i think there might be so like i said we'll start with what are the floor value of these points if they're transferable points one of the great reasons that i love transferable points especially for people who are new to this is that you can often use transferable points in the travel portal of the program so if you log into amx you can go book flights or hotels with amx travel now you might only get one cent per point and you might by the end of this episode think that's not a lot but when you compare cashback cards to points cards if you guarantee yourself at least getting one cent on the points card it's an amazing hedge for not being able to get all the value you think booking flights and booking travel some of these programs even let you take statement credits so if you're able to take a statement credit for one cent then the floor value of points really should be somewhere around one cent because if you could book flights any flight you want in the portal or hotels or you could take a statement credit that one cent value is kind of the floor now if you have airline and hotel points you usually don't have as many options of how you cash them out however most airlines and hotels have two tiers of pricing they have their what i'll call saver pricing or standard award pricing which is where you really get outsized value but a lot of programs now have moved to this dynamic version of pricing where take united american alaska delta southwest there is some value where you can book any flight and that value tends to be around at least one cent so if you just need to book a flight on united and there's no saver availability there's no special deals you can still book that flight with your united miles and you'll usually get at least a cent of value so for me i think the floor value for transferable points for airline miles is usually around one cent for hotels it's a little tricky for reasons i'll explain but their values kind of widely change depending on the program and some of them don't have the ability to use them as easily if there aren't those standard awards i've often looked at the hilton calendar and seen oh this night it's 120 000 points and this next night it's 975 000 points so it can be a little crazy looking at that so i don't have a perfect floor for hotel points but i'm not sure we need one i just thought that was a good place to start now the easiest place to say how much are my points worth is to just look at what most of the experts are saying and you can decide whether you want to trust their valuations so i'm pulling up this article from the points guy every month they update it we're looking at their august 2025 valuations and they say hey what are credit card points and miles worth amex membership rewards two cents capital one 1.85 cents then they go down and say what are airline points of miles worth and they go through every airline and they give a value like delta sky miles 1.2 cents they actually clarify that they recently increased this you go down in jet blue 1.45 cents and you can go down and see what they value these points are there are a few different people that do it a blog i really like one mile at a time does it as well i think they're a little bit more conservative with their point values and so here i'm seeing all the transferable points from them are 1.7 cents most of the airlines they value at 1.1 to it looks like about 1.5 cents and then on the hotels it's kind of across the board mostly because hyatt points and accord points are more valuable than all the others so if you look at all hotel points excluding those it's almost always in the 0.3 to 0.7 cents but hyatt points here are one and a half cents and accor points are actually at two cents but the devaluation of the us dollar has actually made them a little more valuable because accor points are fixed at two euro cents which is now worth about i think about 2.3 cents so you could look at the experts and just say what do they think now one of the things that's tricky about doing this is that most of these experts are basing it on the type of value that they think their readers and they themselves can get so if i look at the points guy valuation they're putting built points at 2.2 cents that is true if you take advantage of these transfer bonuses and you know what you're doing and you book flights in the way that a lot of these readers and a lot of the people writing these posts do frequent miler which is another blog that i love has a different approach they do what's called reasonable redemption values and they say they're looking at midpoint values that they think are reasonably easy to achieve so this is another approach and if you're not an expert in the industry and you don't know what you're doing yet this might be a better place to start they're going to value most transferable points at 1.3 to 1.55 cents lower than the other two by a pretty big margin but because they're saying this is what it's going to be worth if we make it easy if you want to get advanced obviously those can go up and so their reasonable redemption values i think are lower than the value i might get from points they bring an approach that i think is super helpful especially for people early in this but at the end of the day i prefer looking at the data and we have a few excellent sources for this so on the flight side there is a tool called points path and i don't have the data pulled up but just so people who aren't familiar if you're watching on video which by the way i think this episode and the previous episode will now be on video not just on youtube but on spotify i'm looking at google flights and what points path does when you search for google flights is they just go out and look at the points needed from that program and compare it so i'm looking here and it says oh from san francisco to jfk there's a jet blue flight it's 31 400 points plus 11 or 462 dollars now every time they do that math they save that data point and they have tons and tons of data now you can't access the data directly on your own but if you do go to the frequent miler website they've started using that data and they've reported on it and they've shared a bunch of it back so as an example if we look at some of this points path data i'm looking here for air canada they report a average value and a median value and so they're actually quite different and that's because a lot of the flights on the high end skew this data sometimes you'll find a last minute flight that might be a thousand dollars and it's a great deal with points but that doesn't mean that's the value you should expect and so there's medium values average values but the interesting thing is that they break out economy versus business and then they also break out domestic versus international now another source for this data which does a similar breakout is award wallet and award wallet is a tool that you can link a lot of your airline hotel and bank programs to they track the balances of all those programs i will say it's not quite as simple as it sounds the refreshing often needs you to have a browser extension installed or sync your email but for every one of their members that books a flight they see that in their email they go into a search using i think skyscanner and kiwi to find the cheapest tickets that meet a criteria that they've set which is same class of service same calendar day and no more than 20 percent longer in terms of travel time so they're going to go price these itineraries and then compare them to the number of points that the individual award wallet member used so if you look at the points path data it's based on all the flights out there whether someone actually ever booked it or not so it includes really bad redemptions that people might never do if you look at the award wallet data it's only the redemptions that people do and so you'll see that their average values are a lot higher so for example air canada aeroplan points the average value someone has gotten from award wallet is 1.85 cents whereas the medium combined value of aeroplan points from points path is 1.18 cents so that's a pretty wide difference but i think where it gets more interesting is if you start to look at the value for domestic versus international economy versus business class so if i look at this for air canada for a domestic u.s flight and keep in mind for people thinking well air canada is not in the u.s this is people using the air canada program to book domestic u.s flights most likely those flights are on united so the median value for an economy domestic ticket is 1.2 cents whereas the median value for a domestic business ticket is 2.1 cents similarly on international the median value for an economy ticket is 1.08 cents and the median value for business is 1.53 cents and the median value for first class is 2.26 cents those averages are even higher so the average value of an international first class ticket is 3.67 cents now this is the points path data this is just all the flights that are seen if you actually look at what people are booking at least people who use award wallet i'll take air canada again but then i'll talk a little bit about alaska because it's just clear to see why alaska points are so valuable the average point value for a regional economy flight is 1.21 cents and then for a regional first class it goes up to 2.56 cents and then if you look at long haul business or first class 2.63 cents so the big takeaway here is that if you're using your miles for short domestic economy flights you're going to get less value for per mile than you are using your miles for long haul first or business class tickets now if you're doing international or you're doing business class domestic those are still more elevated values than domestic economy but the biggest bang for your buck is on long haul business this is probably not a surprise to most people listening if you scroll through all of the award wallet long haul business class valuations for different programs it's like 4.17 cents 2.39 cents 3.19 3.92 3.28 almost all of them are one and a half to as high as 5.86 cents that's really high i'm not suggesting that everyone should value their points at 3 to 5 cents i'm just saying if you're using your points for international business class that's effectively what that value has been shown to be so if i'm looking at united i'm seeing united's points path data says that the medium value of economy is 1.09 cents but the median value of business class is 1.46 cents and these are tons of data points the total number of data points for united that this data is based off is 4.8 million flights so there's a lot of stuff going on here but there are two big takeaways for me so one is that huge difference you get between domestic and international economy versus business the other big takeaway is that some programs have a really wide band of potential point values and others don't at all and that's really notable when you're comparing the award wallet values to the points path values if you figure points path is everything award wallet is what the experts get and you compare those two you look at something like alaska where the experts are getting 2.12 cents and the kind of general data is getting 1.46 cents now these are just averages this is not looking at business or economy i took the average numbers but then you go down and you look at jet blue and you say wow all jet blue flights the average value is 1.21 cents the experts the people using award wallet the people like me the average value they're getting from jet blue is 1.24 cents and that's because there are a handful of airlines delta southwest jet blue where it's just really hard to get outsized value now in the case of jet blue and southwest they're mostly a fixed value point it does change dynamically a little bit but i haven't heard of a lot of situations where someone booking a flight on jet blue or on southwest or usually on delta has gotten two three four five cents with jet blue adding a few transfer partners internationally maybe that's possible every now and then you might be wildly lucky and get an international partner booking from delta in business class that's greater than that but looking at delta here the average value that a award wallet user is getting is 1.34 cents so yes that's more than the 1.14 cents that most people are getting on points path which is just all the flights but honestly that value might come from the fact that i would guess most award wallet members have a delta american express card which gets you a 15 discount on your delta bookings and that might make up for that delta so when you look at the flight data the big takeaway is business class and international flights are going to get you more value and certain programs like delta jet blue southwest are going to get you less value or at least less upside in value they might get you more consistent value but on the upside it's not going to be there and honestly if my choice was only earning points in those programs or cash back i'd probably go for cash back the reason i like points is because of the outsized value i can get from all those other programs on the hotel side award wallet does actually do the same thing for hotels so we can get the data that they show for hotels there isn't the same breakout of what do you get from international versus domestic suites versus not so they just have their average value this episode is brought to you by masterclass if i'm trying to rewrite something or do some research ai tools have been great but when i'm really trying to learn something meaningful in business or life and really build some mastery i love to turn to an expert or mentor and one of the first places i look is masterclass masterclass is the only streaming platform where you can get unlimited access to over 200 classes taught by the world's best business leaders writers chefs and more and if you're short on time you can get thousands of bite-sized lessons across 13 categories that can fit into even the busiest of schedules you can learn to win negotiations with fbi hostage negotiator chris voss unlock investing fundamentals from wall street pros master leadership with top ceos like bob eiger and howard schultz but it's not just business topics i'm loving their new science of parenting series right now and learning so much about being a dad to our two girls with masterclass plans start at just ten dollars a month billed annually and come with a 30-day money-back guarantee and right now our listeners get an additional 15 off any annual membership at all the hacks dot com slash masterclass that's 15 off at all the hacks dot com slash masterclass all the hacks dot com slash masterclass this episode is brought to you by built nobody wants to pay rent but if you have to why not get rewarded for it and built does exactly that they have totally changed the game by rewarding their members with valuable points and exclusive benefits around their neighborhood every single month by paying rent through built you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed towards hundreds of hotels and airlines a future rent payment your next lift ride and more but it doesn't stop there built is about making your entire neighborhood more rewarding you can dine out at your favorite local restaurants and earn additional points get vip treatments at certain fitness studios and enjoy exclusive experiences just for built members every month built is turning a monthly expense into an opportunity to earn rewards and discover the best that your neighborhood has to offer your rent is finally working for you earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by going to all the hacks dot com slash built that's all the hacks dot com slash built b-i-l-t make sure to use our url so they know we sent you the next tool i want to introduce is called gondola and they have amazing data for hotels and they do that because they have this website that allows you to search and compare cash and points booking rates for hotels the site's totally free to use they even track your points on hotel side but they also let you complete the points bookings on their site which is really cool so instead of using an award search tool finding a hotel booking and then going to the hotel website to book it you could do it all on their site so definitely check that out there is a referral link if you use someone's referral you get a free 50 after your first booking mine is at all the hacks dot com slash gondola so if you're going to sign up definitely use someone's referral code and every time they see a hotel they cache all of the data and they store it and then they let people like me analyze that data and share it with you guys and if i have one qualm with the site it's that sometimes on the search results page they will show cash data and then when you actually click into the hotel they live refresh it and that points booking might not still be available or the rate might have changed doesn't happen all the time but i understand why they do it because it's just too many things to refresh at once so it's a quicker site than some other ones because it's getting you all that data right out front but you need to click into the individual hotel to refresh the data to make sure that rates there but when it comes to looking at the redemption values they have a tool that they've given me to look at so i can see what is the distribution of redemption values for hyatt and so here i'm seeing on hyatt 730 000 different options across 1700 properties 23 brands and they show you the distribution the percentile distribution and they say median value of hyatt points is 1.65 cents per point now this is why i love hyatt points they're so much more valuable than all other hotel points and they transfer one-to-one from chase it's awesome they also say at the 75th percentile you get 2.15 cents per point and at the 90th percentile it's 2.81 cents per point they let you go further and say hey because most points bookings are refundable what if we only compare to refundable rates and then because one of the hyatt chains mr and mrs smith is just a fixed rate redemption there's not a lot of outsized value you can say hey show me only hyatt excluding mr and mrs smith now the medium value goes up to 1.89 cents per point when you're looking at refundable bookings that aren't mr and mrs smith the 75th percentile goes up to 2.46 cents per point and the 90th percentile goes up to 3.25 cents per point tldr hyatt points are worth a lot relative to airline points they're kind of comparable or even better the tricky thing with hotels is that hotel points are across the board if i look quickly at award wallet and the value that most of their members have gotten choice points hilton points at about 0.6 cents ihg 0.68 marriott 0.93 so they're kind of around all across the board if i look at the data from gondola i think the interesting thing is you can see a couple takeaways one if i look at hilton the median value is 0.39 cents however the 75th percentile goes up to 0.46 and the 90th percentile goes up to 0.57 so if you cherry pick the best redemptions you can get more value i think we all know that if you compare it to refundable rates the values go up a little bit but you know maybe 10 percent ish but if you look at particular properties and chains you see more value so with hilton at the 75th percentile points are worth 0.46 cents but if you look at the conrad it's 0.56 cents if you look at lxr it's 0.88 cents and if you look at the waldorf it's 0.65 cents so you don't need to remember all these numbers so i'm sorry for throwing them all at you but the takeaway is at certain chains within the hotel groups you can get more value this is similar to the airline example of getting more value from business class if you're booking luxury chains like conrad waldorf park hyatt st regis ritz carlton kimpton six senses in those respective chains you find that the value of those points are worth more so i think the big two takeaways here from looking at the data they apply to hotels and airlines the more premium booking you're doing whether it's premium properties premium cabins you get more value and if you compare what the experts are getting from their points to what the data shows the average price per point is it's just significantly higher i'll use hilton as a great example the median value for all bookings from the gondola data is 0.39 cents but if you look at what award wallet users are getting at hilton it's 0.59 cents now those point values may seem smaller but keep in mind that earning 0.59 cents instead of 0.39 cents is 50 percent more value so again the more you understand how to do this the more you're picking the best redemptions and not picking the worst ones the more value you're going to get now if you hear me talking about hotel points and you think wow if they're worth so much less than airline points or transferable points why would i want them keep in mind two things one oftentimes when you're using a credit card or staying at a hotel you're just earning way more points with top tier status at hilton and the top to your credit card i think you're earning 34 hilton points per dollar also keep in mind that if you're transferring those points from bank programs the transfer ratios are often not just one to one so if you go from amex to hilton you're going one amex point to two hilton points if you're going from city to choice privileges you're going one to two and so it's not always just a straight one to one transfer that said sometimes it is and that's why i never use those points as transfer partners from those programs so if you're transferring from chase to marriott you're getting one to one and those merit points are worth a lot less than airline points which is why i'm never doing those transfers so keep that in mind so now that we've looked at what experts say we've looked at what the data says i'm just going to do a quick kind of min max on the values here if i look at airlines and i look at the points path data i look at all the experts the minimum value that anyone assigns to airline points is 1.1 cents and the maximum is 1.55 now award wallet members might be earning a lot more than that but valuation wise that's kind of the range 1.1 to 1.55 cents if you're using premium cabins if you're doing what award wallet users say then i think it's a little bit different award wallet the minimum is 1.24 and the maximum is 3.65 cents so that's something to keep in mind as well on the hotel side generally all of those hotel points except for hyatt are in the 0.5 to 0.75 range and then hyatt is in the 1.5 to 1.7 range there are other hotel chains preferred leading hotels of the world a core at windham i did not include those in this analysis most of them are a bit more fixed rate values so it's not as interesting to think about their value and they have a limited number of places you can transfer to but just having valuations from data or experts is not really enough because if you're not staying in those luxury hotels or flying premium cabins then the values you get might be totally different so the real best answer here is to look at your own personal value and on a walk through how to calculate that unfortunately you probably don't have a history of every redemption you've done and what the going rates were at the time in the past so it's a little bit hard to go back in time but the next time you're planning a trip i'd encourage you to go through this process so you can get a sense and if you want right now you could even go and plan a hypothetical trip just to see what kind of values you're getting but as i did this i realized there's some things that i think most people out there are missing so let's start with just a simple example there's a 150 flight it costs 10 000 points and you might say great if i were to book that i would get 1.5 cents per point so my point should be worth 1.5 cents right it's not that easy so first off there are taxes and fees domestically those taxes and fees are usually five dollars and sixty cents so it's a little bit negligible so in that previous example i would just subtract 5.60 from the cost of the flight which would make the cents per point 1.44 cents per point however internationally especially on premium cabins those taxes and fees could be 50 and they could be a thousand dollars so i think of this just like an equation you've got the price of the flight equals the number of points plus the taxes and fees subtract the taxes and fees from both divide and you get the answer to what is the cents per point however you can't always compare the exact flight you're taking for a few reasons let's say you're flying from la to new york and the cheapest points ticket is on delta but when you look at the cash prices united's flight is half the price if you were booking with dollars you weren't going to book that delta flight for 2x the price so i think you need to use a reasonable alternative as to whatever you would book with cash and then maybe you need to adjust it for some premium cabin for example we might book a flight to europe using 50 000 air france points that otherwise was three thousand dollars in business class but would we really pay three thousand dollars to fly in business class if you wouldn't then i'm not sure that cent per point value makes sense because if you are using it to compare to earning cash back it'll put the favor in the points every time but if you wouldn't actually pay for that flight then it's not necessarily a fair comparison but also don't just use the economy flight prices because you're getting a way better experience so i'd say look at the price of flights and come up with a what is the amount of money i would have spent on this trip and compare the number of miles to that and if you are doing this looking at one-way flights keep in mind that in some geographies one-way flights are wildly inflated in price if you're booking them with cash so i've often looked to europe and found that a three thousand dollar round trip flight to europe might be twenty three hundred dollars each way but only three thousand booked as a round trip so when i'm really trying to be honest with myself and say what are my points worth on this trip i'll look at the round trip flight compared to the round trip points and i'll look at it on flights that i would have reasonably taken not just the flights that i booked with points often you can get really expensive flights with your points but there's another flight that wasn't as expensive that you would have been totally happy taking if you were paying for it yourself a couple other things to keep in mind if you need to buy positioning flights let's say you found a great award but it's from la to paris and you live in san francisco we need to factor in the fact that you might have to buy that other flight to get down to la but the biggest thing that i see no one doing on the internet when they compare what is the cents per point i'm getting on my trips is when you book a paid flight and this includes flights if you book them in a travel portal you earn points on those flights now depending on what status you have or what program it's in the number of points varies but for most of the u.s domestic airlines it's anywhere from 5 to 11 points per dollar and you earn credit card points when you book a cash booking whereas on an award booking you're only earning credit card points on those taxes and fees so if you stack those two things up that could be somewhere between five to fifteen percent you also don't always earn the elite qualifying points that you need on an airline to get status on your award flights and so that has to have some value too i went through the math i think that value is roughly around five percent if you really care about status on that airline if the only flight you're taking is delta and you never fly delta the fact that you're going to earn a marginal amount of elite qualifying miles or medallion qualifying dollars in delta's case is negligible so you shouldn't include it so depending on whether you care about earning status on the airline i think that the value of all of the points and status you're going to earn including your credit card on a paid flight is between 10 and 20 percent which is a meaningful change it definitely does make the math hard and so my quick rule of thumb is when i'm looking at a flight i'm booking with points i compare it to the most reasonable alternative that i would have booked as part of a round trip and i subtract the taxes and fees or any positioning flight and if i don't have status on that airline or care about status on that airline i knock off 10 percent and if i really value the status and i have a high level of status with that airline depending on that status level i'll knock off 15 to 20 percent so that means that 150 flight that was 10 000 miles could actually end up being closer to 1.2 cents per point instead of 1.5 cents per point most the time that bloggers share their cents per point including me i am guilty of this they don't factor in all this data and so i think the points path data above the valuation from experts above it's probably not using this data either so you could probably make a case that point values across the board are inflated by 10 to 20 percent that said there is one bonus for points bookings and that is they are often way more flexible back when we were looking at hotels when you found that you compared it to refundable rates you found that the hotel value per point went up well that's because most points bookings on the hotel side and on the flight side can be canceled for a full refund now that's not true across the board so definitely i'll link to an article in the show notes from frequent miler that is all about the award cancellation policies per airline because they're not all free but for american delta alaska and united and alaska by the way partner bookings do have a fee but that gets waived with their new summit card those cancellations are free and so there's some value there now if it's an airline you fly a ton and you cancel their flight you will get a credit on that airline and if you fly them a ton that might be really easy to use but if you're booking a flight to europe which we've done a few times and you have to cancel it and you had done that as a paid booking on let's call it luftanza well now you might be stuck with thousands of dollars in luftanza credit that i can guarantee you will be way way harder to use than if you just got your miles refunded so it's up to you to decide what value that refundability has in my mind anytime i was making a cash booking if they were to offer me a 10 premium to make that fare refundable i'd probably always take it so yes you could argue points prices are all maybe inflated 10 to 20 percent if you value flexibility maybe they're all deflated 10 so maybe it all breaks even there's a lot of ways to look at this if you just want to do it on easy mode i would say the easiest thing to do is subtract the taxes and fees of a comparable flight and discount 10 and know that going forward when i talk about cents per point on future trips i'm going to try to do a better job of calculating this that's a little bit more of a fair comparison so that it gives you a better idea of what points are actually worth but two big caveats here one just because you got a good redemption once doesn't mean you're going to get it every time just because you see a blogger promote hey this time i got 10 cents per point well that's because it's a great article title that's because people get excited to read it sometimes i use my delta miles and i might only get 1.3 cents per point that's not a fun thing to talk about so it might not make headlines but it is true so over time i think as you use your points and your miles and you start to look at the value you're getting you'll have a better barometer for what what your value is if you don't have that data yet maybe starting with something like the frequent miler reasonable redemption values is better because it's a little easier guide if you're a pro you probably already have a good sense of what the value is this episode is brought to you by delete me if you prefer not to have your identity stolen or your phone number or home address or even email showing up all over the internet then you really need to check out delete me unfortunately there are hundreds of data brokers online that are constantly sharing and selling your personal info and keeping track of them is like playing whack-a-mole but fortunately if you go to them one by one you can remove the data however that process can take hours and hours to do yourself i know because two years ago i tried and after 10 plus hours i didn't even get close to finishing i gave up and i started using delete me and since then i've now signed up my entire family because delete me will not just find and remove your personal information from hundreds of data broker websites but they'll continuously scan for new data that shows up which sadly happens all the time and they'll get that removed as well on average they find and remove over 2 000 pieces of personal info for a customer in their first two years and to date they've done over 100 million data removals for their customers so if you want to get your personal information removed from the web go to allthehacks.com delete me and get 20 off a plan for you or your entire family again that's allthehacks.com delete me thank you for being here today you can find all the links promo codes and discounts from all our partners at allthehacks.com deals they're all brands i love and use so please consider supporting those who support us number two while it's super helpful to know how much value you get from your points if you're using that value to compare whether points are better than cashback it's really important to recognize that sometimes you can buy those points with cashback you've earned so i want to walk through that and why that might put a ceiling on the value of points you have so first i'm going to use an example and in my last episode i talked about getting a 1500 room at the waldorf historian costa rica for 120 000 hilton points so if we take a hundred fifteen hundred dollars divided by 120 000 we get 1.25 cents per point now let's be aggressive with our cashback strategy let's say i have the robin hood gold card earning three percent back now to get enough cash back to pay for that fifteen hundred dollar room i need to spend fifty thousand dollars on that card now most hilton cards out there earn at least 3x on all your spend so if that fifty thousand dollars weren't in any category bonus i would earn 150 000 hilton points so that means that i'd have 30 000 hilton points left so clearly the hilton card would be a better deal right well maybe not first as i just talked about earlier that fifteen hundred dollars stay is likely to earn a lot of hilton points even with the basic card between that card and silver status you're actually going to earn 19 points per dollar so on that stay you would earn 28 500 points even more if you had diamond status so now it's almost break even right put fifty thousand dollars on a hilton card get 150 000 hilton points spend 120 000 on the room have 30 000 hilton points left or put fifty thousand dollars on a robin hood card get three percent back which is fifteen hundred dollars spend that fifteen hundred dollars on the room but also get 28 500 hilton points so we're within 1500 hilton points of these being almost identical but neither of those are the best case scenario because you could actually use that robin hood card earn your fifteen hundred dollars of cash back but then just buy those hilton points and hilton points go on sale all the time for as low as half a cent so let's say you took that fifteen hundred dollars you spent six hundred dollars to buy the points you need you would have nine hundred dollars left so comparing those three outcomes that's a way better outcome but if you want to do it apples to apples because it's hard to compare having cash back left over when the other two scenarios didn't have cash let's say you just spend the whole fifteen hundred dollars on hilton points you'd end up with three hundred thousand hilton points you'd book your hundred twenty thousand point room and instead of having thirty or twenty eight thousand hilton points in the other scenarios you'd now have a hundred and eighty thousand points left over so in that comparison you would have been much much better off with a cash back card using hilton points that you bought to book the room so the price at which you buy those hilton points for kind of creates an effective ceiling so as much as you could say that because you got a fifteen hundred dollar room for 120 000 you effectively made your hilton points worth 1.25 cents that is true you did get a ton of value from hilton points but if you're comparing that 1.25 cents to what you would earn on a cash back card i don't think it's a fair comparison because you could have bought those hilton points for half a cent so we need to look at the data on what buying points is worth to set a ceiling on what our points are worth and by the way in that previous example that doesn't mean i'm moving to team cash back it just means that if your only two options are the robin hood card and the hilton card you might not want to use the hilton card for your everyday spending so let's quickly run through what the data says about buying points so we can figure out what to do with that data so on the hotel side when hotel points are not on sale excluding hyatt they typically cost one to 1.25 cents which is about one and a half to 2x the valuation that most people give them it's pretty awful i would not buy hotel points if they're not on sale that said hilton ihg and choice points are always on sale so you're okay they go on sale seven to ten times a year so i think it's easy to put a ceiling on hilton and ihg points at a half a cent and on choice at about 0.62 cents marriott and hyatt are on sale a little bit less but when they do go on sale their sales last as long as two months but their sales prices aren't quite as close to the value most people get them for so if you're going to use them marriott points are often on sale for 0.89 cents and hyatt points are often on sale for 2.8 cents so you could use those ceilings if you want i don't think it'll be that valuable but i feel like it's important to talk about airline point values are a little bit easier because they're all a little bit more clumped together to recap on the public valuation side they range from 1.1 to 1.55 cents but the amount to buy them is all over the board when they're not on sale the cheapest airline point you can buy is at 2.3 cents all the way up to 3.8 cents again like hotels if points aren't on sale don't buy them when they are on sale they're anywhere from 1.25 to 1.88 cents except delta which looks like never go on sale so i'm never buying points whether it's airline or hotel points if i don't have a redemption in mind and i know how i'm going to use them but the challenge here and why i don't know if it's fair to use the exact sale prices as ceilings for airline miles is that they're not on sale nearly as often as hotel points the only exception here is avianca life miles they went on sale 17 times last year i thought about throwing the dates into chat chapt and if i did i probably would have gotten an answer that they were on sale like 340 of 365 days so i would put a ceiling on avianca points at 1.3 cents because they're almost always on sale but their program has a lot of quirks and i don't think it's a program that someone new to this game should be using and honestly i still have a bunch of points there that i haven't used because of all the nuances of the program that said on any given day at least five or six airlines probably have their points on sale somewhere in that 1.2 to 1.88 cents value that i mentioned so i think it would probably be fair to put a cap on the value you give your points and miles at two cents per point so i guess the takeaway here is that if you're looking at your data and you're ending up with point values that are higher than some of these sale values then i would encourage you to bring that number down because it's not necessarily a fair comparison it's absolutely fair to say you got that much value from those points but if you're trying to compare whether you should be earning cash back or not i would cap your airline points at two cents and i would cap your hotel points at 0.5 to 0.62 for most programs 0.9 ish for marriott and probably around 2.08 for hyatt so my summary is that i'm not buying points unless i need them and i know the program really well and i know how i'm going to use them but i would apply these caps if i'm doing any calculations as it applies to comparing airline and hotel credit cards to cash back cards right obviously it's totally true that you could get two cents of value from your hilton points but if you want to compare your hilton card to an equivalent cash back card i would cap the value of those hilton points at half a cent same for ihg choice again 0.62 marriott 0.89 hyatt 2.08 on the airline side if it's avianca cap it at 1.3 cents for all other airlines i would probably cap it at 2 cents just because there are a lot of options but they're not consistent so you probably couldn't come down much lower than that now you'll notice all those values we talked about were for airline and hotel programs yet i'm constantly talking about how much i love earning transferable points and most of the cards i'm spending most of my dollars on are for transferable points because you don't need to commit to one program so like i said before if you find a flight on lufthansa you could just transfer points to a star alliance airline and assuming that availability is there you could book it whereas if you're accruing delta or american miles you'd be out of luck so how do we think about valuing those transferable points i think at a minimum they have to be worth the average of all the programs you could transfer them to but i'm not transferring them to places with terrible value so you could probably make the case that they should be valued at the maximum value of all the airlines and hotels you could transfer them to that wouldn't necessarily account for the fact that there are transfer bonuses and you get value from flexibility so this is a tough one the points guy errs on the higher side valuing chase amex built at two cents per point or more one mile at a time just gives them all 1.7 cents per point and frequent miler has them all around 1.5 cents per point keep in mind they're doing these reasonable redemption values so they're not trying to target the max value you can get for me i'm almost always getting at least one and a half cent per point often it's two cents per point or more i recognize i could buy those points so i can't go above that level so i probably lean towards something around the one mile at a time perspective of saying i'm going to value all my transferable points at 1.7 cents per point now again if you're new to this game if you're flying mostly economy if you're flying mostly domestically maybe you're not getting 1.7 cents per point and that's totally fine right the game is not to try to get the most value because if you have to take trips you don't otherwise want to take to get the most value that doesn't make sense the point of all this is to make sure you're maximizing what you earn when you're spending money on a regular basis but one other important consideration here is really about your own psychology you might realize that points allow you to take a trip that you wouldn't have otherwise taken in the same way that paying down the principle of your mortgage forces you to save earning points instead of cash back might force you to travel if you had that cash back you might not have made the decision to spend your money on travel but with points you really have to travel to get your value out of them which might be a good thing on the flip side the overhead of booking a trip with points can be a lot especially if you're new to this it might limit where you can go or the dates you travel and the best deals might put you in a situation where they're driving the trip instead of where you want to go now i think as you learn this game more you can get past that but it's definitely a consideration and i would bump up or down my point value depending on how strongly i felt about either of these for me i love the former i love that it forces us to take trips i do hate that the process is harder right if i were just sitting here with no points at all and we wanted to take a trip i would just find the best deal but i would probably game that out as well trying to figure out well what if i fly here and then change planes and go here or book two separate flights so that overhead would probably exist for my personality anywhere but it's just something to consider and i think for a lot of people might give a slight edge to points so with all that taken into account i think the real benefit of having a good framework for valuing points is not just to know how much value we're getting it's to give us a good comparison of whether earning points make sense over earning cash back unfortunately i will save you a lot of work here because i took a lot of time digging through my credit card optimizer tool which i built to really help you compare what value you get out of all of the different cards you could spend on but one of the inputs for that tool is what is the value of your points so hopefully this episode will help you drive that number if you want to play with that tool go to all the hacks.com card tool and you can buy it there or it's free for all the hacks members which you can learn more about at all the hacks.com join so my goal was actually to run through all the different spending categories and all the different credit cards out there to compare the best cashback rates to the best points earning rates because at the end of the day if the place you spend the most money on gives you an option of a forex points card or a two percent cash back card well then as long as your points are worth half a cent or more then it's a clear decision to go for points and so for this episode i ran through all the cards i had but i did not include the earnings on cards where they were capped at less than ten thousand dollars of spend a year so there are lots of cards that might give you five or six percent on the first hundred or five hundred dollars a month or a quarter i excluded all of those cards because i just don't think it's a fair comparison and it just makes the math really messy so as i ran through this data i looked at kind of two versions one is assume you have all the best cards in all the categories so on the cashback side that means you have the verizon card the gemini card the altitude connect on points it means you have cards like the amex business gold card or the chase inc cash card that's version one version two was i assumed you had a more limited set of cards and it might be one or two cash back cards for catch-alls it might be on points common cards like amex gold chase reserve city premier autograph journey and when i ran through it the results were surprisingly the same for both of those sets for many categories gas grocery flights hotels dining entertainment the points card matched or beat the cash back rate meaning that if you would get three percent cash back you would also get three or more x points on those purchases and so for most of these categories it makes more sense to go for points if you want to get the maximum value now obviously if you're working on a welcome bonus whether it's a cash back or point welcome bonus then none of this matters because the earnings of most welcome bonuses take for example a hundred thousand points for six thousand dollars of spend you're going to get a better return on that welcome bonus spending than you will with any cash back or any points card in almost any category so if you're working on welcome bonuses keep going but let's ignore that for a moment and look at the four categories where things were a little interesting so the first one is non-flight and hotel travel now the big change here is that the chase sapphire reserve used to give 3x travel now it gives 4x on flights and hotels but 1x on all other travel there is actually no points card that earns more than 3x points on travel but the altitude connect card from us bank actually does earn four percent on all travel and if you have a bank of america premium rewards or premium rewards elite card and you have a hundred thousand dollars in a bank of america or merrill lynch account you actually earn 3.5 on all travel as well so if the best you can do on non-hotel and flight travel is 3x points and the best you could do on cashback is four percent then you really need those points to be worth more than about 1.33 cents for that trade-off to make sense and on that point side to get that 3x points the only cards still doing that are the autograph card from wells fargo and the amex green card which i know are not the most popular cards so i would say if you spend a lot of money on non-flight non-hotel travel it might be worth digging into this a little bit more and you might find that a cashback card like the altitude connect is the better card for you next category is amazon this one's really easy there's nothing in the points world that i think comes close to earning five percent back on the prime visa if you spend a lot on amazon you probably want that card i do not earn points on amazon purchases next category is a small one for i think most of us which is streaming but that altitude connect card i mentioned before you get four percent back on streaming the best points cards that i found earn 3x points so i don't think most people are spending enough on streaming for this to matter but if for some reason you're spending a ridiculous amount of money on streaming you know depending on how you value your points it might not make sense to be earning points on streaming but the big one here is the everything else category it includes all the spending at places that you aren't getting bonuses on dining on gas on groceries on travel and this one is really dependent on which cashback card you have on the point side there's a bunch of options to get 2x points venture venture x from capital one if you have the city strata premier or elite you can get the city double cash there are a bunch of options for getting 2x points on everything and on the cashback side there are a lot of options for getting 2 cash back and if that's your only option on cash back then again it's a relative do you value points more than one cent if so points wins if not then it doesn't make sense however there are cashback cards that earn more than two percent cash back and that's where this gets interesting so the first one which was a lot more compelling earlier this year was the us bank smartly card now if you have the us bank smartly card after it got nerfed this year and you factor in all these new limits what you need the fact that in order to get beyond two percent you have to hold cash in an account that earns almost nothing i don't think you can make a strong case for this card being any more than a two and a half percent cashback card and even that feels like a little bit of a stretch because you still have to keep ten thousand dollars in an account earning nothing but let's say that's your primary checking account and you already leave that there we'll call this a two and a half percent cash back card well to use a 2x points card like the venture venture x cards over a two and a half percent cash back card you really need to make sure your point value is above 1.25 cents that's above the floor value so that means you need to be comfortable transferring to airlines and hotel groups and booking flights and so at that point i could say it really depends on you but it's starting to make a case for cash back if you're not that experienced or you're not interested in some of the premium travel options that get higher value from your points next up is the bank of america setup where you can put a hundred thousand dollars in bank of america or merrill lynch and when you do it at merrill lynch it can be stocks so it doesn't need to be something that's making you lose interest putting it in an account that earns nothing with that card you'd be getting 2.625 on everything you spend on and so comparing that to a 2x points card means you need your points to be worth 1.33 cents or more so as that number creeps up you have to ask yourself am i really getting enough value for my points to justify getting 2x points versus 2.625 cash back if you're not in a situation that you could put a hundred thousand dollars of cash or stocks at a merrill or bank of america account then it's not an option then finally if you have the robin hood card you could be getting three percent cash back on everything so in that case you'd need your points to be worth more than one and a half cents and i would argue that if you're not experienced in this game or using premium travel now that you factor in some of the things i've realized like earning points on cash bookings i think it's a hard case to make that you're going to consistently earn more than one and a half cents on your points obviously if you're working on a welcome bonus it's a no-brainer to spend the money on a points card but if you have no welcome bonus and you're debating between a three percent cash back card and a 2x points card i don't know it's a tricky comparison especially factoring in that that cash back can go straight into a bank account that you can hopefully earn four percent back right now in today's environment versus those points are going to sit maybe in a transferable points balance but they're not growing over time i thought long and hard about this one for myself because i actually think that i could make the case to switch to a card earning three percent cash cash back however the robin hood card doesn't consider taxes or business type transactions eligible for cash back and if you look at all the spending that we do that is not in all the categories that bonus like dining and groceries and travel and then you remove taxes and business transactions there's not a lot left so yes i could open that card and i could be getting slightly more value for all those everything else purchases however we don't have a lot of purchases in that category so if you're doing a ton of spend in the everything else category maybe you're spending a lot on home renovations buying furniture in that case i'd actually consider you to go look at the mesa rewards card because that card gets 3x on home improvement stores and furniture and home decoration so that one actually in that example i'm wrong go look at allthehacks.com/mesa in the other categories i'm not sure what it might be maybe you're buying a lot of stationery maybe you're spending a lot on ebay just things that don't bonus that maybe aren't considered business type transactions it might make sense to look at a cashback card if you value your points anywhere close to or below one and a half cents a point so to recap for almost all purchases with most cards if you value your points over one cent then cashback won't be worth it however if you spend a lot on amazon i'd get the prime visa if you spend a lot on non-flight hotel and travel or streaming and you value your points right around 1.2 1.3 cents i would take a look at that altitude connect card and then for all the other spending that's not bonused on any cards it really comes down to which cashback card you have and whether you value your points at more than the cashback rate of that card divided by two since there are a lot of 2x points cards so if it's two and a half percent cash back then you need to be valuing your points at more than 1.25 cents now for me i said i value my points at 1.7 cents at least the transferable ones so the only place the math gets close is on that everything else category and if there was a card that was an uncapped three percent on all my spending i would consider switching my cash back to those purchases if a card comes back that's four percent on everything with no caps and no restrictions i would move all my everything else spending there unfortunately almost all my everything else spending is in categories that that robin hood card excludes and there's not really another option that's uncapped right now but i'll keep my eyes out it feels unlikely anyone that does it ends up changing it the coinbase card came out and it seemed like it was going to be uncapped four percent now it's capped so i am pessimistic that one of these cards will come out but if they do i will gladly switch my everything spending to team cashback and of course if you're working on in welcome bonus that's always going to be the better return on your spend so to do the final recap transferable points probably have a floor value that's at least one cent and airline points might be similar hotel points all have different values but for the most part excluding hyatt i'd say they at least have a floor of half a cent when you look at the data you'll see that if you're booking more premium flights or hotels your points are going to have more value but you need to adjust all that data for your own trips that you actually take to look at what kind of value you're able to get and unfortunately there's no one right answer it's all very personal but you also need to factor in some of the things that i think this industry as a whole leaves out which is that booking flights and hotels with cash often earns a lot more points and status and points on the credit card spend to book them then i think is getting factored in here at a range of about 10 to 20 percent so make sure you include that if that's important to you and if you value the fact that points force you to travel give the value of your points a bump if you value that points bookings are easily refundable then give that value a bump if you hate the overhead of booking travel with points and you are very unflexible and you just want to be able to book whatever flight you want maybe bring the value of points down a bit but not lower than that one cent value because you could still go book that flight in a travel portal on whatever flight you want with almost every transferable currency after looking at all the cards you could likely use for spending i think it's really easy to make a case for points for everything as long as you value your points at more than one cent and if you've made it this far you probably do with the exception of the categories i mentioned which is amazon non-flight and hotel travel streaming and that everything else category which really just needs to be compared to whatever the best cashback card you have would be earning finally i'm going to push you all to test your convictions in whatever value you think you've come to for your points using something i learned from greg at the frequent miler he encourages you to think about what you would really pay for these points so if you came to the end of this episode and said i think my points are worth one and a half cents and someone actually offered to sell you points in whatever transferable currency or airline you want would you really pay one and a half cents for them would you really buy another hundred thousand million chase points alaska points for one and a half cents if that's the value prescribed and if not if you really wouldn't buy them at that price i'd encourage you to think about maybe lowering that valuation okay i know we packed a lot into this episode so if you have any thoughts questions reactions that came from it please send them to podcast at all the hacks dot com or go to all the hacks dot com slash ama and submit them as a question i can tackle in an upcoming ask me anything episode thank you so much for listening i will see you next week