If you're looking to rack up way more points and miles, but without spending more money or opening up another credit card, you are in luck because today, I'm gonna share over 50 of my favorite tactics that you can use to earn more points, travel more for free, but without increasing your spending.

Some of these little known tricks are so great and easy for anyone to use to earn more points on everything from buying gas and coffee while you're traveling, or even from your utilities or banks. I'm Chris Hutchins. I love helping others find deals and earn more points. And if you enjoy this video, give us a thumbs up, or if you have a question, leave it in the comments.

And if you wanna keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, consider subscribing. Let's jump in first and start talking about shopping portals because I think this is one of the biggest ways that you can earn extra points without spending money beyond what you're already spending. So I personally love Cashback Monitor.

And the reason I love it is because you can go into any retailer. So I'm looking right now and say, oh, I wanna buy something at Nike. And it'll actually show you where you can earn the most points per dollar or cashback across all the different programs. They have credit card point programs.

They have travel points and miles programs, meaning airlines and hotel groups. But then they also have other programs like Rakuten, which I will get to. So there are a bunch of different ways that anytime you're looking at any retailer online, I think you should probably go in and look at whether there is cashback.

There are browser extensions for certain ones, but I like Cashback Monitor 'cause you can actually pick the best place. Now, almost every airline offers some sort of shopping portal. United, Delta, American, Southwest, Alaska, JetBlue, some of the international ones as well. And then Wyndham is probably one of the only hotel programs that does.

And then Rakuten is also a really great option because you can link your Rakuten account to your Amex account and earn Amex points. So instead of just earning United points or Southwest points, you can actually earn Amex points, which as you all know, are a transferable point that makes it really, really easy to transfer to lots of different airlines and hotels.

Rakuten also usually has a referral promo that you can check out on the deals page on our website. I'm actually just looking at the Rakuten site right now. And there's a ton of stuff here that I think are pretty obvious things people might use. Choice Hotels, Sixt, Viator, Old Navy, Zappos.

I didn't even think about that. We just ordered from Zappos. I'm gonna ask Amy whether she thought to use Rakuten. Knowing her, she probably did. She's more on top of the cash back than I am usually, but lots of great options. Some of these like Rakuten, United, Alaska, and JetBlue also have card-linked features so that you can link your card and earn when you're shopping in-store.

Also keep your eye out for Shopping Portal bonuses because sometimes they have bonuses and elevated rates. There are some weeks where Rakuten is 10X on everything. It's changing all the time. One really cool thing that you can get on Cashback Monitor is you can actually see the history of the earnings.

So you can look at what's the best cash back rates. You can look at what are the best point rate histories, credit card points. And so you can get a sense of, wow, is this often a category where I could earn 10% back on Rakuten, which is effectively 10 Amex points per dollar?

And right now it might be two, but it looks like it goes to 10 every couple of weeks. Maybe if I'm making a really big purchase, I should hold out. So Shopping Portals is a massive place that I earn a bunch of points. Now I'll keep in mind, if going to Cashback Monitor is too much work that you don't do anything, you're probably better off just picking one.

Maybe it's Rakuten where you can get transferable points, installing their browser extension, and not really worrying about it. The only other thing I'll make sure that is worth calling out that applies to a lot of the things we're talking about today is that this episode is all about earning more points.

So I'm not gonna talk about ways that you can earn more money, but there are times where you might say, well, the United Portal will give me one point per dollar, but some cashback portal might give me 20% cashback. Well, in that case, you're probably gonna wanna optimize for the cashback and not optimize for the points.

So I'm gonna focus only on ways to earn points today, but you always wanna make sure that you're not giving up something worth more than those points to get them. Okay, so shopping portals, great option. Unfortunately, you won't find Amazon on a lot of those shopping portals. However, I did find a little trick reading an article on Frequent Miler that you can get 3x JetBlue points on Amazon if you're making purchases while you're on their Wi-Fi on flight.

I haven't confirmed that this is always working, but at least according to the internet, it is. So if you do have a JetBlue flight coming up, might be a great time to do some of your Amazon shopping and get 3x points on that flight. Another option for earning extra points when you're shopping online, if you have an Amex card, is to go look at all of the card-linked offers they have.

Right now, I'm looking, there's 267. Most of them are gonna be cashback offers, but there are 19 right now that are points-related offers. So if you're trying to get more points, for example, here, it says spend $25 or more at Pete's Coffee and get 1,000 membership rewards points up to three times.

That's actually a pretty good offer from an ROI standpoint. I'm surprised I didn't see that and talk about it sooner, but it expires in four days, which means by the time you hear this, it will be expired. But there are often things in here where you can earn extra points in addition to cashback offers that are there much more frequently.

If you wanna make sure that all of these offers are just auto-added to your cards, definitely check out Card Pointers and specifically Card Pointers Pro. If you're watching the video, you would have seen that as soon as I went to this site just now, Card Pointers auto-loaded every offer on every card, so it's always there.

And then it actually makes it easy in the Card Pointers app to search, "Hey, do I have any offers for Macy's?" And it'll tell you where you have those offers and which cards, so you know which card to use. A few others worth calling out, United has this app called United Mileage Plus X, and it's kind of like a shopping portal app bundled around one particular program, which is United.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work on the web, but fortunately, one of the things that's unique about it is that it lets you buy gift cards and earn United Miles doing that. So if you wanted a lot of United Miles and you knew you were about to make a purchase at Airbnb for a trip, you could go buy an Airbnb gift card in the Mileage Plus X app.

And I have heard that they pass along the merchant code of the gift card, so if you're buying a travel gift card, you can still get the points as if you spent on travel. And then sometimes they even give bonuses if you use a United card to do that.

That said, there are a lot of places online where you can get cash back for gift cards or you can buy gift cards at a discount. So always make sure you're not buying a full price gift card to get three points per dollar when you could have bought that gift card for 15% off.

So keep that in mind. And then the other site worth bringing up here is Simply Miles, which is a similar platform that American has where you can find a lot of offers to earn bonus miles and loyalty points on American. When I logged in, there were 72 offers that I could link to my card, but you do need a master card.

It's similar to the offers you get when you log in and link your Citi, Bank of America, or Amex offers to your cards, but it doesn't require you to have those and they're slightly different offers. So Simply Miles is an interesting one that'll actually come up again at the very end of this because there is one of the best opportunities for miles ever through Simply Miles.

On shopping, there's also a site called MyPoints. And right now, if you just sign up for MyPoints, which is a little bit of a shopping portal, but it also does a few other things. Right now, when you shop and spend $50 in your first 30 days, you get 1500 bonus miles on United plus 250 when you sign up.

So you can get almost 2000 miles just for a pretty small amount of work. And then you also earn points when you're shopping, when you're filling out surveys. And then you can also scan your grocery receipts to get more points. It's a little unclear how you redeem those points.

It seems to imply that you can redeem them for United, but I haven't actually created the account. So I don't know the answer to that question, but you could definitely earn almost 2000 miles just by signing up. So worth being in here. And speaking of surveys, there are a handful of survey programs.

So on almost every website for an airline, you can find a list of all of the programs they have that are partners. And that's actually an important thing because I'm not gonna mention every single partnership. So when I look at United's website right now, I'm gonna mention the highlights.

They have a shopping portal, but there's some small things in here like Therabody. You can earn six miles per dollar spent on Therabody products. I didn't go through and include every single merchant and every single deal because that would just be a lot. I tried to include the bigger ones that were broadly applicable.

But one category, for example, flowers. Pretty much every single airline, if you go to their website, or if you look at the cashback portals, there are massive returns on flowers. There must be really, really high margins in flowers. So I would say if you go to any of the airline, go to like earn miles, name of airline, name of hotel group, and almost every single one of them has a place on the website where you can find all the different ways that you can earn points outside of just flying.

When it comes to surveys, there is a site called eRewards. And on eRewards, you take surveys, you earn points, and then you can redeem those points. And they have a bunch of partners where you can redeem them for American, Hilton, Alaska, United, JetBlue. So pretty wide ability to use your points.

Downside is it didn't seem like the best use of time. So there were a couple of surveys that I had the option to take. There was an eight-minute survey that offered one point and a 37-minute survey that offered eight points. So I guess from points per minute, it's like that last one was about a little more than four.

So let's round up to be generous and say five minutes per point. And it took 25 points to get 500 miles from an airline. So if you're spending five minutes per point, that means that you're gonna spend 125 minutes to get 500 miles. 125 minutes for 500 miles is, I don't know if that's the best use of time.

Spend two hours of your time to earn 500 miles, which typically let's say are worth 2 cents, $10. Probably not a good use of time. If you happen to have a job where you're required to sit in front of a computer and you can't do anything else, but you don't have to work, maybe it's worth filling out surveys.

If you wanna encourage your kids to fill out surveys for you, maybe that works, but I doubt they'll meet the panel requirements. But it is an option to earn points. And most of the airlines, as well as Hilton, have their own white label survey for points programs. I have noticed that depending on your role and function in your career, there might be better opportunities.

So if you're a senior executive, maybe there are some of these panels that you could be on that will pay a lot more. When I went in as someone who was self-employed, the best I got was 37-minute survey for eight points. Now, I didn't take the survey. Maybe I could have taken it a little faster, but it seemed like not a good use of time.

Let's think about a little bit more ways that you spend money locally that you might be able to earn a lot more points. So a big one is dining. And most airline and hotel loyalty programs also have a dining program. They're almost all run by the same underlying company.

And so if you link your credit card, which is how it works, you link any card. So let's say you go to your Delta dining program, you could link your Amex card. And then when you go to a restaurant, you earn Delta points. Now, if you go and link that card to another dining program, you get removed from the other one.

So you can only have your cards linked to one dining program at a time, but you usually earn points for dining. And sometimes if you opt into their emails, you get a higher earn rate. And sometimes if you review a restaurant, you get extra points. And so I currently have all of my cards linked to Built's dining program, because I find their points the hardest for me to earn and the most valuable.

So for me, I'm like, let's earn as many built points as I can. So that's a great way to earn points on dining. There's often restaurants that you're already going to that you can earn points on. So great option there. And to be clear, you don't need a Built card to use the Built Rewards dining program.

And that's actually true of a lot of the Built Rewards program. You don't need their credit card to get a lot of their benefits. So you can sign up for Built Rewards. You can play some of their games every month and earn points. And there are actually a lot of ways to earn points through Built without having their credit card.

On the dining front, there's also a website that IHG has, where if you book an open table reservation through the IHG site, you earn 150 IHG points per reservation. So easy to bookmark that. Anytime you're making a restaurant reservation, if it's on open table, you can earn some IHG points.

When it comes to drugstores, as of recording this, Built just announced a partnership with Walgreens, where again, a Built Rewards member, not necessary to have the card, you can link any of your existing credit cards to their program. And they'll do a few things. One, anytime you shop at Walgreens, you'll earn 1X Built points on everything.

You'll earn 2X points on Walgreen branded purchases, and then another 100 points for every prescription refill. And so that's on top of whatever your linked card is getting. So if you link a card that earns three points per dollar at drugstores, you could get another one point on everything, two on Walgreens, and then prescription points on top of that.

On top of that, Walgreens is passing along data about what products that you're purchasing are FSA eligible. And Built's gonna notify you, "Hey, here's a product you could reimburse with your FSA if you have one at work." So it has a little side benefit as well. I've already gone in and linked my drugstore card in that program.

And it'll be a great way to earn a few extra points a year. If you're a Starbucks fan, they have a partnership with Delta, where you get double stars on your Delta travel days, as well as anytime you reload your Starbucks account with $25 or more, you get bonus miles for Delta.

And it's a sliding scale. If you load $25, you get 25 miles, but if you load $100, you get 200 miles. So this is on top of whatever you're earning, of course, for your credit card and whatever Starbucks rewards you're getting. So this is one where, if you're a Starbucks fan, you should just be earning free Delta miles, and you should just reload your balance instead of spend your credit card, and you'll get extra points on Delta, which who doesn't want some free miles?

When it comes to groceries, this isn't that straightforward, but there is a way to get points on groceries. And if you live near and shop at a Safeway, Cars, or Albertson's Grocery Store, they have a Just For You program. It's part of their rewards, where as you spend money, you earn reward points.

Sometimes you can use those for discounts on fuel, but it turns out that they have a promotion with Alaska Airlines, where you can redeem those Just For You points for Alaska miles. And it turns out the program is actually pretty good. Like the value of the redeeming towards your groceries is not as good as the value of getting Alaska miles.

However, you do need to go in and put in a zip code for your local store address in Alaska for it to work, and you end up being able to get a reward is worth anywhere from one reward is 100 miles, all the way up to seven rewards is 1300 miles, but it's a pretty decent redemption.

I'll link to a article in the show notes that Frequent Miler wrote about how to do this and how to set it up. But if you shop at any of those grocery stores, definitely a way to earn some extra points. Speaking of local, if you happen to live in Washington State or the address on your Delta account is in Washington State, there is a site that went live this week at 12status.com where you earn one mile on Delta for every Seattle Seahawks passing yard the entire season.

Last season, it would have been 4,167 miles, at least according to ChatGPT. And so if you live in Washington State or at least the address of your Delta account is in Washington State, definitely register at 12status.com to get some free miles this football season. As far as going to live events, there are two ways to do that.

Ticketmaster does have a program with Delta also where you get one mile per dollar on eligible Ticketmaster purchases in the US. I will say that oftentimes Ticketmaster shows up on a lot of shopping portals. So you definitely wanna make sure if you're buying something on Ticketmaster, yes, you could get one Delta mile, but if you could get 10% cash back, maybe that'd be a lot better.

There's also a site called Audience Rewards, which is where you can go and to book Broadway and off-Broadway shows. And they have a partnership with United that you can find on their website where when you book shows, you can earn miles. And so sometimes it's 100 miles a ticket, sometimes it's 700 miles a ticket, but if you're already gonna go buy tickets, might be worth just getting a few extra miles anytime you're doing that.

There are sometimes some bonus offers up to about 2,000 miles on certain shows. Last, I mentioned fuel briefly. If you buy fuel at a Shell station and you wanna earn some American Airlines points, you can link your Shell rewards to your AA account and end up getting more points that way.

So you get 250 points when you enroll and then you get another three miles on AA for every gallon of fuel you buy. Obviously, I wouldn't go spend more money to buy gas at Shell just to earn points if it's an extra 30, 40 cents a gallon. But if you regularly shop at Shell, great option.

We actually have electric cars, so the only thing I'd be filling up is a Vespa where we fill up like a gallon of gas every two to three months. So not one that I'm taking advantage of, but if you fill up at Shell a lot for gas, great way to earn some American miles, which by the way are pretty difficult to earn because they're not a transfer partner of any program.

Now let's talk about travel. Now, the obvious way to earn points and miles when traveling is on your airline flights, you put in your mileage number for your airline program and you earn miles. Some programs even let you earn miles when you're booking flights with miles. Used to be that flights with miles are nothing.

Now that's not the case on certain airlines. So I figured that's a bit obvious. The two edge cases that are maybe not obvious are one, when you're flying on airlines that you aren't familiar with overseas, you might not realize that they sometimes are partners of airlines that are worth collecting miles in.

So in the case of our trip to Europe, we flew on Transavia, which if they had a loyalty program, I probably wouldn't enroll in it, but they were partnered with Flying Blue so I could earn some Air France points. And then we flew on Condor Airlines, which surprisingly is partnered with Alaska.

So I earned a bunch of Alaska miles flying on Condor, which is great as well. So anytime you're flying on an international airline, take a look and see if they're partnered with any airlines that you try to collect points and miles with because you might be able to earn your points there.

The last one is if you have children, you should definitely be opening up accounts in their name for their mileage programs. So they start earning miles as soon as you're buying paid seats for them. So about two years old, if you're doing the lap infant thing before that, which is what we did.

Both of our daughters have mileage accounts on every airline that they've flown on. And so they've built up a little bit of a balance. It's not too big, but I'm hoping that by the time they're ready to start booking their own travel, maybe they've racked up enough points to give them a little bit of a headstart on something.

So that's how to earn airline miles. On flights, let's talk about hotels and home rentals 'cause there are a lot of interesting partnerships here. Obviously you can earn hotel points when you're staying in hotel rooms. The only hack here would be if you wanna really try to aggregate points in one place.

So for example, when my wife and I are traveling, I earn all the Marriott and Hyatt points, she earns all the Hilton points. Something that works pretty well is you could book a room in whoever's name earns the points, put in the notes, the other person is checking in.

And usually it's no problem for the other person to check in and keep the other person on the reservation. So if I were gonna stay at a Hilton without my wife, I would probably still book it in her name and have a note that says, "My husband will be checking in before me." So that we could just continue to both use her status and earn points there.

But you can actually also earn airline points sometimes booking hotels. And you could do it in about three different ways. So one way that I'm not a big fan of is some hotel programs will let you actually opt out of earning points in the hotel program and earn airline points.

So you can go into Marriott and say, "I don't wanna earn Marriott points." And pick an airline and earn those points. It's not really a great deal. So I pretty much never do that. And by pretty much I don't. Though, if you were a diehard loyalist to one hotel chain, and you happen to have a stay at one hotel chain where you don't even care about earning points, maybe it would be worth doing.

But the programs I really like are ones that stack on top of that. And so United and Marriott have a partnership that stacks. Hyatt and American have a partnership that stacks. And Emirates and Marriott have a partnership that stacks. So if you're staying at a Hyatt, you can earn some extra AA miles.

If you're staying at a Marriott, you can earn United or Emirates points. So those are good options. On top of that, there are hotel booking platforms that almost every airline has. So JetBlue has a program called Paisley, and you can go to the Paisley website, which I think is just paisley.com, and you can go book hotels.

And what effectively is happening is they're taking the hotel commissions they earn from that platform and giving you JetBlue points in return. So they're not allowed to give you their commission, but they can give you some points. And Paisley is cool because it also includes the inventory from VRBO.

So if you're booking a vacation rental on VRBO, or I guess I'm supposed to say VRBO, you can book it through JetBlue Paisley's site, and then you can actually earn JetBlue points on top of booking that vacation rental. Delta has a site called Delta Stays, and Alaska has a site called Alaska Vacations.

They're both powered by Expedia. So when you book hotels there, you earn points in their mileage programs. American and Southwest have hotel programs. Then also there's a site called Rocket Miles. And separate from all the airline programs, it's independent site, but you can earn points in 40 different airline partners.

So Rocket Miles, for example, has some pretty decent ways to earn points. I just did a really quick search right here. I'm looking in New York City for a couple nights, and I chose that I wanna earn United Miles. You can obviously choose Aeroplane, Delta, Southwest. And it says, okay, I'm gonna book this hotel stay for two nights, it's $1,400, and I'm gonna earn 15,000 miles for this day.

So not a bad redemption. If you value United points at, you know, let's call it two cents, that's a $300 back. $300 out of $1,400 is like a 20% return. Now you value it one cent per mile, it's a 10% return, but definitely a decent option. So if you're booking a hotel and you wanna earn some extra points, those are great options.

However, I will say, just like I've said many times in the past, when you book through any of these third-party travel portals, you're often having to deal with the travel portal if anything goes wrong. And in many cases for the hotel chain, you're not gonna be able to earn points on their chain, and you're probably not gonna get your elite benefits in many cases as well.

So I'll flag that if you're staying at a boutique hotel where there's no loyalty program, there's no elite status, it might not matter as much, but if you have a lot of status and you wanna earn points at Marriott, you might not wanna book a Marriott stay through any of these programs.

Also with hotels, if you are booking a event or a meeting, you can often get really, really great earnings. So something on the order of, let's call it one to three X points per dollar, if you book a meeting or a wedding or an event at a hotel. So definitely make sure you go through whatever meeting program they have to earn that.

And in some cases on Hyatt and Marriott, and I think Accor, you can actually earn elite status through booking events. So I think Marriott gives you one elite night credit for every 20 room nights booked, and I think Hyatt gives you two elite night credits for every $5,000 spent.

Unfortunately, I'm not planning any events, otherwise it would be a great way to really rack up some status and points. On the home rental front, Delta, British Airways, and Qantas have a partnership with Airbnb, so you can earn points on Airbnb bookings through those partnerships. I think British Airways also works on Airbnb experiences.

I mentioned that you can search Vrbo through the JetBlue site. They also have a partnership with United that lets you earn points from there. United also has a partnership with Villas of Distinction, which is like a really high-end luxury villa site, but you can earn extra points booking through that.

I think you get three miles per dollar spent on luxury villas, which is not a bad return, right? That's somewhere between, depending on how you value it, 3% to 6% off. So if you're already booking a luxury villa and you can book it on that site, why not get some extra points in addition to whatever points you get from your credit card?

So that's hotels. When it comes to car rentals, similar to hotels, the car rental company often says, "Hey, do you wanna earn miles, "or do you wanna earn whatever rewards we have "in our car rental program?" I used to opt for the car rental program rewards because I thought they were a better deal, which I think they are.

If you rent frequently enough, then you're gonna be able to use them. Hertz's new rules about expiring your points are such that I've actually earned Hertz points every Hertz rental I've had, and never been able to use them 'cause they've either expired or been hard to use. And so I probably would have been better off earning miles the whole time.

You know, for example, on United, if you do that with Avis or Budget, you get 500 to 1,200 miles per rental, depending on your United status. If you're renting from Turo, which is a site kind of like Vrbo and Airbnb, but for car rentals, they do have a partnership with Delta where you're able to earn 2,000 miles on your first trip, and then another 500 miles for every trip after that.

So if you're trying to earn some Delta points, or if you're trying to rent on Turo, great option. I feel bad because our au pair just rented on Turo, and I forgot to tell her, and this could have been an extra 2,000 miles. So shame on me. If you're taking a cruise, I can't promise it's the best deal.

So shop around, but almost every single airline has a cruise portal where if you book a cruise through their portal, you earn a bunch of points. Similar to hotels, there's kind of a standard industry commission in the cruise world where you can earn, you know, somewhere on the order of 10% as a travel agent.

So effectively here, the airline's program is acting as the travel agent and giving you some of their commission in the form of points. If you take Lyfts and Ubers, on Uber, they have a partnership with Marriott Bonvoy. It's not that great. It really only works on premium rides. So it doesn't work on UberX.

And it does work on Uber Eats orders if they're over $40. And it can get as lucrative as 6X points if you're ordering on Uber Eats while staying at a Marriott. So that's one option. On Lyft, you actually have to pick, do you wanna partner with Alaska, Delta, Hilton, or Bilt?

And then you earn bonus points in those rewards programs anytime you are riding with Lyft. Right now, if you link your Hilton account to Lyft, you're gonna get 1,500 bonus points when you take five rides. Now, that's in the next six days. So by the time this comes out, hopefully there's another promotion, but always good to just check, you know, maybe you've been earning, you know, Bilt points for Lyft the entire time, but now there's this great promotion with Hilton, swap it over, earn some Hilton points.

You can always swap it back. Also when traveling, there's a site that I'd never actually been familiar with until I started doing this research called Thanks Again. And it's a site where you can basically earn points on a lot of the stuff you do at the airport. So parking, shopping, dining at the airport.

Looks like they have a lot of chains in here. Sbarro, Dunkin' Donuts, the CNBC store, Chipotle, Auntie Annie's pretzels. And so you sign up there and you're able to earn points anytime you're spending money at the airport, and you can redeem those points for Alaska miles. So another option there.

Last one on travel is all the activities you're gonna do in a place. And so I mentioned you might be able to earn some points on Airbnb experiences. If you're trying to book something through Viator, you could actually do that through a Wyndham site or an IHG site. And so I'm looking right now at Hawaii on the Wyndham site.

And I assume Hawaii will show up because there are lots of activities to book. You end up seeing all the same activities 'cause it's powered by Viator, but you earn Wyndham points when you book it. You could do the same with IHG. There's another site called Get Your Guide, and they have a partnership with Alaska.

So if you wanna book any of those experiences, you can do that and earn Alaska points when you do it. And so great option to earn some extra points when you are booking things. It's not actually clear how many points you're going to earn. I'm looking at this site right now, and it says you earn four miles per dollar spent.

You get them within two weeks. So if you figure four miles on Alaska could be worth, let's call it 2 cents, 8% back, not bad, though obviously compare that to what you could get on a cashback portal. And I'm gonna take this example because I've said that reminder three or four times, and I'll just go in here and search for Get Your Guide on Cashback Monitor.

And we'll see, I can get 7% back on RetailMeNot. I can get one mile per dollar on United, and I can get two Rakuten points per dollar. So in this particular case, I'd say getting four Alaska miles is probably the best, at least in my opinion. Just for fun, I'll go back and look at Ticketmaster.

Ranges from like half a percent to 5%, but up to 3% on Rakuten. So it looks like you can go on Rakuten and get 1% on ticket purchases, 3% on resales. So would you rather have one Delta mile or one Amex point? I'd probably go on Amex point. So yes, Delta has that Ticketmaster partnership, but I probably wouldn't do that.

The last platform here is Hyatt. They have this Find Experiences program, and it's kind of unique. I haven't really seen anything like it before where the hotel chain, kind of like how Airbnb has experiences, has a whole experience program that's not necessarily linked to having to stay at the hotel.

So I did a search. There's more than 500 experiences around the country. You get 10 points per dollar spent, plus additional if you have a credit card from Hyatt. Really interesting program. In San Francisco, there was a really cool Japanese whiskey tasting. There was an Alcatraz tour and a few other things.

Definitely worth looking around to see if there are any activities here that are good. I would say getting 10 Hyatt points per dollar on an experience, I probably value Hyatt points at like 1.5 or more cents. That's like 15% cash back. So next time I'm looking to book an experience, I'm definitely gonna take a look here.

Also, it feels a bit more curated. When you go to Viator, you go to Get Your Guide, you go to Airbnb Experiences, it can be a little bit overwhelming. I can't speak to the quality, but I don't know, it feels a little more curated, which I like. And then last one, I forgot to say, when you're traveling, if you have a pet and you need to find someone to watch that pet and you happen to wanna use Rover, Alaska and American each have a partnership with Rover to get one point per dollar or one mile per dollar when using Rover.

So that's an option. Another big category here is kind of on the banking, money, personal finance side. First, let's talk about rent. If you pay rent, you really should be checking out Built Rewards. You can earn points through the rewards program, through their card up to 100,000 points a year.

Highly recommend, built points are fantastic. Definitely worth checking out if you are a renter. Another option on the finance side is a little bit interesting, but I've been digging in a bit, which is around debit card spend. So I said this whole episode is about earning points without spending more money.

Let me explain. So Amex actually has a rewards checking account. They say it earns a high interest of 1%, not exciting to me. But what is interesting is you earn rewards on debit card purchases. And you get one Amex point for every $2 of debit card purchases. So not a crazy earning rate, but there are a lot of cases where there are things that you can spend money on with a debit card that you just can't use a credit card for without paying a fee.

And so if you live somewhere where your property tax can be paid with a debit card for free, or maybe it can be paid for a small fee, sometimes if you look at different places to pay your taxes online, which we'll get to, there's just a small fixed fee to use a debit card where there's a percentage fee to use a credit card.

Some bills can be paid with a debit card for free, but not with a credit card. PayPal BillPay lets you use your debit card to pay a lot of bills in places that otherwise maybe don't take debit cards. And then I've heard that there are a lot of credit unions that will let you make auto loan payments and home equity loan payments and even mortgage payments with a debit card.

So if I had a credit union loan, I would ask this question, which I actually did for our car loan. And they said, yes, of course you can use a debit card. Turns out it had almost a 3% fee, so it wasn't worth it. But if there are a lot of things that you spend money on already, where you're paying through a bank transfer or using a debit card that doesn't earn anything, I think it could be worth checking out this Amex checking account where you can earn Amex points with your debit card.

Also, there are some bank accounts where when you open up a bank account, they'll let you fund that account with a credit card. So if you're opening up an account at a bank or a credit union, you could earn some extra points doing that. I did say at the beginning of this episode, I was talking about ways to earn points without spending money.

And so I guess if you load your bank account with your credit card, you get that money right away so you don't have to actually spend it. So that I'll say counts. You'll notice I'm not talking about welcome bonuses, category bonuses, 'cause that's spending money. And we've talked about that in the past, we'll talk about it in the future.

It's just not this episode. I did mention taxes, and I went a lot deeper on that in episode 164. But if you're already paying taxes, which most of us are, there is an opportunity to earn points when paying your taxes. Now, that usually comes with a fee when you're using a credit card, though this debit card option is interesting.

I haven't actually experimented with it. But in some cases, you'll earn more rewards than the fee costs. And especially if it's a business that you're paying taxes for, the cost of that fee might be a business expense, making it even better deal. So if you have a card that earns two points on everything, and you're paying a 1.83% fee, which is kind of, I think the lowest it goes, or maybe it's 1.82, it could make sense.

I'd say that's a little bit more in the buying points for Cheap Camp than earning points for free. So let's brush that off. The next one is one that I've used a lot in the past, which is there's a bank called Basque Bank, which has a partnership with American Airlines that lets you earn American miles instead of earning interest on your account.

Now, funny enough, Basque Bank also has savings accounts that earn interest and checkings accounts that do the same, but the mileage account is a mileage savings account that earns two and a half American miles for every $1 you've saved. And you also get a bonus of 20,000 miles if you deposit $50,000 and keep it there for six months.

Now, if you do the math in today's interest rate environment, where we're earning 5% on savings or more, I'm not sure how much sense it makes. So I ran the quick numbers. So if you put your $50,000 in and you leave it there for six months, you'd earn your 20,000 point bonus.

You'd also earn half of the 125,000 points you'd earn if you put it in there for a year. So that's 62,500 points for a total of 82,500 points. Now, obviously it depends on how you value American Airlines points or miles to decide whether this is worth it. But I'll say that if you're earning 5% interest on that same amount, it'd be about $1,250.

So if you value American points at one and a half cents, it's not quite as good a deal. If you value them at two cents, it's a better deal. The only thing that I didn't factor in here, which I think is relevant, is that you do pay taxes on the interest you earn in your account, and you do pay taxes on the miles you earn.

However, last I remember, and I could be off on this number, the value of each mile they give you for tax purposes when they send you a 1099, is something like 0.4 cents per mile. So if you wanted to look at this math and adjust for the fact that for every penny of interest you earn, you're gonna pay taxes as if it was a penny, but for every mile you earn, you're gonna pay taxes on it as if it's 0.42 cents, then you might come out a little bit ahead depending on your tax rate, depending on how you value these points, but it's an interesting option.

However, when interest rates change, assuming they do, this can get a lot more lucrative. And so back when interest rates were almost zero, I was using the BASC account to earn one mile per dollar, which I valued way more than the interest I was getting anywhere else. And so if interest rates drop again, this is a place where I'm gonna be looking, especially because American miles are so hard to get.

American does partner a lot with Citi for a lot of their cards. And from time to time, there are Citi bonuses that give you extra American Airlines miles for opening a Citi account. There aren't any of those right now, but that's an option. And then the last one on this finances side is, if you're shopping for mortgages, there are a couple of partnerships between airlines and mortgage companies.

So Rocket Mortgage, I think, and Guaranteed Rate have partnerships with United, where if you get a mortgage through them, you actually get 25,000 mileage plus miles if you close that mortgage or refinance. I have looked in the past. If the best rate you're getting is at Rocket Mortgage, awesome, go for it, get your 25,000 points, but don't go get a bad mortgage rate to get some extra points.

So keep that in mind when you're looking at this. Better Mortgage has done some of these promotions in the past as well, but I couldn't find one right now. Then there was this other bucket of five or six things that I didn't even know where to put them that I'm gonna wrap us up on.

One is, if you switch energy providers, most airlines have a partnership with two or three energy companies. It seemed like all of the energy companies that you could earn miles from switching to are NRG, Reliant, Zoom Energy, and Energy Plus. So I'm not too familiar with what it looks like to pick your energy company, because in the Bay Area, it seems like everyone just has PG&E.

But if you live somewhere where one of these might be a better deal, you can absolutely earn airline miles switching to them. For example, if you switch to Reliant, you can earn up to 27,000 miles. You get 15,000 when you sign up. You get 500 each month for 24 months.

So definitely worth looking into if you are in the area of any of these energy companies, and obviously you're not gonna have to pay more for your energy to switch. Another one that I haven't mentioned here, but I've talked about a lot on the show, is transfer bonuses. And I guess the reason I'm saying that is if you have a bunch of points at a credit card company, and they're offering you 15, 20, 100% transfer bonus, Bilt just recently did for Virgin on September 1st, you could get 20 to 100% transfer bonus.

One way to get extra points without having to spend money is to transfer your points during a transfer bonus. Now, I don't like the idea of locking your points into one airline when they otherwise could have been flexible because airlines are devaluing their miles all the time. However, in some cases, I find that it's worth it.

When Bilt had a 100% transfer bonus to Aeroplan, I transferred a ton of my Bilt points over to Aeroplan because I could turn 100,000 Bilt points into 200,000 Aeroplan. And so that to me was absolutely worth it. I felt reasonably confident given that Aeroplan I think has more airline partners than any airline in the world, that I would be able to get good value.

And even if those awards went up 50% in cost, I'd still come out ahead. So one way to get more miles and points is to take advantage of transfer bonuses, but I'd just be really careful to make sure you're transferring to a program you understand, you're getting a bonus that is worth the fact that you're giving up some of that flexibility of being able to transfer anywhere.

So if you had 5 million Amex points, would it make sense to transfer two or 300,000 over during a great bonus? Yes. If you only had 100,000 Amex points, I probably wouldn't risk it because I would wanna make sure you had the most flexibility. However, another way to earn extra Amex points or other credit card points is looking at card referrals.

So not every card can earn points on referral. Not every referral offer is as good as public offers, but from time to time, there are referral offers where if you were to refer someone from one of your cards from Amex or another popular bank, you'd be able to earn extra points if someone signs up for that card.

I know a lot of people do this between their partners to earn some extra points. And two last ones. And the first one I thought was obvious, but I met a few people who didn't think about it this way. And that is that if you work for a company and you have business expenses, you might not be required to use a company credit card if they issue you one.

So at Google, I remember they issued a G-card to everyone. And frankly, they made expensing things a lot easier if you were using your corporate card, but you were also allowed to use your personal card. And so if I was gonna go buy a flight to Europe, I'd definitely rather put it on my Amex Platinum and earn five points per dollar than putting it on the G-card and earning nothing.

So definitely if you work at a company and you have lots of business expenses and you haven't considered finding out whether you can use your personal card, it might be a way to earn a lot of points. And I know early on in my career, that's how I was earning a ton of points, especially if I had to stay at a hotel and I could use that hotel's credit card.

You know, you could be earning, depending on the chain, upwards of 10, 15, 20 points per dollar spent on a hotel. And so I would absolutely love to use my card earning those points than the company I work for. Obviously this does mean that you are personally loaning your employer money.

And so I would do this only in the case where you are extremely confident your employer is stable enough to pay you back. If you work for a company that doesn't meet that criteria, I would definitely not be willing to risk losing the money to earn the points. And then last, I'll talk about donations.

And so there are a couple options for earning points when donating money. Now, this isn't a way right now where you can actually earn enough points that it's worth donating if you didn't want to already. But if you wanna donate money to the National Cancer Research Foundation and you do it through the United Portal, you get 10 miles per dollar donated.

And then right now there's a program for donating to Stand Up to Cancer through American that depending on a few circumstances can be 25 or 50 miles per dollar, which is a great amount of miles to get back for a donation you wanna make. And obviously I'm all for being charitable, but these two examples are not examples of ones where it's worth it to donate money you don't want to donate just to get the miles.

However, in 2021, there was a absolutely crazy deal where if you donated money through Simply Miles to Conservation International, you got a whopping 240 American miles per dollar, which effectively brought the price of American miles down to 0.42 cents, which I think mainly by coincidence is the exact same price that they are valued for when you look at Basque Bank earning, but I think that's purely coincidence.

Now, this was an incredible opportunity. I think it's very easy to make American miles worth at least one cent, if not two cents or more. And so I personally know a handful of people who bought millions and millions of miles. I think if you spent, let's call it $20,000, getting 240 American Airlines points per dollar, you would have ended up with 4.8 million American miles.

Honestly, I wish I could go back in time and take advantage of this. I don't know how I missed it. I was in the space, this podcast existed, but it happened during the holidays. I keep waiting for something crazy like this to happen again, but it hasn't. I am ready for the next time it does.

And I will absolutely let you guys know. However, some of these things are really timely. So this is a great example of something where it might not come out on the podcast fast enough, and it's why you'd wanna be subscribed to the newsletter, because we send the newsletter every week.

So you can subscribe at allthehacks.com/email. Every Saturday, I send an email with all the great deals, some of the news and interesting things that are happening, some of my top recommendations from the last week. Sometimes they're actually deals that are even more timely. They're only live for an hour, a day, a couple days.

When that happens, I send them to the All The Hacks members in our member site. That's something that I just can't do to the public because I'm not gonna spam tens of thousands of people every time there's a deal. But if you're interested in getting those deal alerts anytime they happen, it's usually maybe once every month or two, but sometimes they're really great.

We'd love to have you in the All The Hacks membership. In addition to that, there's a lot of other stuff we're doing in there. We have a bunch of member-only discounts. You get free access to a lot of the products and tools I've built, like my credit card optimizer, and priority access to any events we're doing.

But the big change that's happened recently that has either already happened and you've seen it in the podcast feed or is about to happen, is that we're gonna start creating member-only content. And we're doing that for a couple of reasons. One, there's some content that we just can't talk about to the entire audience of the podcast.

And so we're gonna have to do that in a smaller group. And so that's part of it. There's also some AMA content where I do episodes with members where you can ask questions and we do some of those live. So that's the All The Hacks membership. It's now going to come with this extra podcast feed that'll probably have an episode once a month.

And we'll try to put a preview of those episodes out to the main feed so you can get a sense of what's going on to the extent we can. So that's all thehacks.com/join if you're interested. I think that's it for this week. I just want to point out that these deals that we ran through to earn extra points and miles, they're changing all the time.

So if there's an airline you're looking to earn in, definitely go to their partnerships page. Definitely subscribe to the newsletter where I'll send out updates as things change as well. Hopefully by the end of all this process, you're just racking up tons and tons of points, taking awesome vacations.

If I missed anything, send me an email. I'll make sure we update the post for this episode with a list of everything in there. So the show notes will have links to everything we talked about, and you can get all those at allthehacks.com, which if you notice has also been chrishutchens.com for some compliance reasons, but all the links I've ever shared, allthehacks.com/anything will still work and will forever work.

So go check that out. Look at the show notes, grab those links,