Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. Today, we're going to dip our toes over into the more seductive, more alluring, the sexier side of personal finance.

In that, we are going to speak today about credit card points and mileage games and hotel points, etc. I'm going to share with you why I think that for most people, this credit card points game is basically worthless, and in some cases, worse than worthless. I am, however, going to tell you the specific people for whom not only is this credit card points game not worthless, but in fact, it's extremely profitable and it is well worth considering.

Let's begin with a little bit of background. In order for you to understand the current iteration of the credit card points game, etc., you need to understand the history of the industry. I'm not going to lay out a hardcore history of the credit card industry, but rather just start by the integration of credit cards with airline mileage point programs, etc.

First, businesses have, for a very long time, understood the power of some kind of loyalty program. One of the four ways that a business can increase its revenue is to increase the number of purchases from a specific customer per year or per month or whatever. If you have a customer that ordinarily comes into your business once or twice a month, and you can instead get that customer to come in three or four times a month, that makes an enormous impact on your revenue over the course of the business.

Businesses have figured this out. We've all seen very simple loyalty programs where you get a little card from your favorite local submarine sandwich shop, and they say, "Buy 10 subs, get the 11th free," or your local car wash will give you a card and say, "Get 10 car washes, get the 11th free," things like that.

These are all basic forms of loyalty programs, and these made their way into the airline industry at the very end of the 1970s, beginning of the 1980s, when airlines figured out if we could somehow figure out how to incentivize people to fly with us on our airline, then we could get them to more frequently choose us instead of our competitors.

You have the concept of a mileage account, and with the early airline programs, it was relatively simple and straightforward. Let's say you flew 10 different 1,000-mile flights. That earned you 10,000 miles, and they would have a chart that says, "Once you've accumulated 10,000 miles on our airline, that qualifies you for a free ticket, and you can redeem your 10,000 miles balance with us for a free airplane flight or a couple of free airplane flights." I think these became very popular and were promoted significantly by the business community because they formed a really nice perk, a non-taxable job perk.

You might have a businessman who flies constantly for work. His employer is paying for all of those trips, but every mile he flies for work, he gets points in his mileage balance because those points are awarded to the actual flyer who's on the airplane, not to the payer, the business, who pays for the flight.

Due to a nice little loophole in the internal revenue code in the United States, these are just free non-taxable job perks. For a lot of guys, especially some guy who might be a road warrior in many cases, he could send his entire family on a luxury airplane flight vacation with luxury hotels based entirely upon the points that he earned from flying and staying in hotels on his business trips.

As airlines were looking for a pathway to increase their revenue, and the credit card business itself started to grow, then in about the mid to late '80s, you started to see an integration of part of airlines and hotels partnering together with credit cards. They would offer people the ability to purchase an airline-branded credit card or the ability to sign up for a credit card and get a certain bonus.

Today, these credit card programs have fundamentally transformed the entire airline industry in the United States, where not only does the company itself generate an enormous amount of revenue from these credit card programs, but also the entire airline has been restructured to cater to these programs. I follow a guy who has traveled enormously, is in the midst of starting an airline, etc., and he's a European guy.

One of the things that's interesting is every time he's in the United States, all he wants to do is complain about how the entire experience of first-class travel in the United States has been destroyed by the credit card system, because what has happened is instead of you gaining access to a first-class lounge or a business-class lounge because you paid for a proper first-class or business-class seat, now those lounges are jam-packed with aspirational travelers who are in there because of their American Express Platinum card or their status based upon a credit card purchase, and it's completely transformed the entire experience of travel, especially first-class and business-class travel.

I'm not here to partake in that whining and complaining. After all, with the number of airplane tickets that I buy, I wind up on more budget airlines than I would prefer sometimes, but the point is that these credit card programs have experienced an enormous – have had an enormous impact on the industry at large.

Now, when I first started to pay attention to this myself was at the early days of the credit card hacking industry, and the Internet enabled us to communicate about all kinds of esoteric topics, and because of my interest in personal finance, I was always attracted to this one, and I was an early subscriber to Chris Guillebeau's newsletters and – I mean, there are a lot of people before him, but that's just the name that I remember from back in that era, and basically, people would come together and they figured out how to game the system a little bit, and gaming the system, putting it very simply, involves signing up for lots and lots of credit cards in order to get substantial sign-up bonuses, spending lots of money on those credit cards in order to satisfy the minimum spending requirements of your initial sign-up bonus, as well as to accumulate points in an advantaged way, and then exploiting those points and redeeming them for first-class flights, really wonderful peak experiences, things like that.

And because of the ability of these communities to share information, the tactics and techniques advanced very quickly. Just by way of illustration, there was a time where there was a very short window when there were people that were buying coins directly from the U.S. Mint on their credit cards, and they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their credit cards in order to generate points, and then getting those coins and then, I guess, reselling them – I can't remember what they did with them – but putting them in the bank, et cetera.

And so there have always been ways to basically game the system, and those ways have been shared around these Internet communities very, very quickly. And today, the tactics and the techniques are quite advanced. There are many, many educators out there who have large, thriving brands of content and education devoted to teaching people how to maximize these programs, what cards to sign up for, how to make the whole system work, how to redeem them, et cetera.

There's many different angles to it. And this is something that has always been an interest of mine. After all, it's perfectly congruent with my brand. This is radical personal finance, how to get free stuff. And I have partaken of this off and on throughout the years to different levels, and it is this experience that has led to my forming the perspectives that I'm now going to share with you.

The problem is that I don't think that most people really are served by these programs. There are some obvious objections. For example, the most obvious objection is if you find yourself carrying credit card balances and paying significant amounts in interest, then these programs are never going to pay off for you.

And most of the educators in this space, people who have large brands, say that up front. If you're the kind of person who carries credit card balances, don't do this because it's going to wind up getting you into trouble. And I think that's good advice. So if you're the kind of person who carries credit card balances, you will not make up for the amount of money that you spend in interest with some free points and free hotel stays.

That's the first thing. There are other objections though that don't apply. So for example, some people think, "Oh, it's all a scam." It's not a scam. It is absolutely something that works. You can take free flights. I have booked various free flights. You can take free hotel stays. I've stayed in free hotel stays, et cetera.

Those things are there. The biggest problem that I have with it is that there is an enormous amount of learning that has to be done in order to exploit these programs at the highest possible level. And this learning is really significant. It's very, very time consuming. I'm not an ignorant person in the world of personal finance.

I grasp most things related to personal finance pretty quickly and I learn things fairly easily. Over the last couple of years, as I have dug back into this space and as I do with all of the stuff that I talk about, really worked hard to test everything for myself.

As I started hacking the credit card game and applying for new offers and accumulating points and et cetera, I was amazed at how complicated this space has become. Because there's this constant cat and mouse game between the credit card offers and the world of credit card hackers. And the offers are designed to appeal to as many people as possible, but then the hackers come along and abuse the offers until they have to make the offer a little bit less sweet.

And so the value of my observation is that the whole industry is not nearly as easy as it was 10 years ago. It's not to say it can't still be done, but it's not as easy as it was 10 years ago. The signup bonuses are, even if the nominal value point, the number of miles that you receive on a nominal basis may be large and higher, the actual value of those miles has changed dramatically.

And the airlines are always jiggering with their mileage award charts, and they're always jiggering with their alliances, and they're always jiggering with their dates and the tools et cetera to use it. And so it's extremely complicated. And what most people don't understand is that accumulating the miles is the easy part.

It's not difficult if today you wanted to go and join the airline miles game, it's not difficult for you to go and by three or four months from now have a few hundred thousand miles in your accounts as long as you have an adult sized financial life and you can meet the minimum spending requirements.

However, that's only half of it. The other half of it is the redemption. And this for me has been the biggest disappointment for my own situation. For example, when I fly, I don't, generally if I'm flying alone, I'm flying on business. And so ordinarily I wouldn't use award travel for that, rather I would just book flights and deduct them as business expenses properly.

So if I'm going to use award travel, I generally want to do award travel with my family. But due to the size of my family, it's often difficult to find the appropriate number of award tickets. Now I understand that I have an unusually large family in today's world when I'm buying seven airplane tickets, but even if you're buying four airplane tickets, you still have a similar problem.

And the biggest, like the most advantageous redemptions with using miles usually comes with purchasing business class or first class travel. That's where most of the best, that's where you get the most attraction. If you go on and you try to find somebody who's teaching you about the mileage and points game, what's going to attract you I think is the idea that look, you can get two business class seats to the Maldives and you can fly all the way there and back in business class with look at this great deal I got and look at this amazing over the water bungalow that I booked for X number of thousand points, and isn't this an incredible experience?

Well yes, it is, if you are one person or two people flying together, because you can frequently find one or two seats in business class as award travel. It's much more difficult if not impossible to book seven business class seats on one airplane ticket or one flight. I have not been able to successfully do that.

I have with some of the new tools that are now available, have been able to find seven seats and get seven seats on economy class, but not on business class. Speaking of tools, there was one tool that was an incredible value for me, and that tool it may be for you as well, because I accumulated massive numbers of points.

And then I could not figure out how to redeem them properly, and I signed up for various courses and various educators and whatnot. It wasn't until sometime back I discovered the tool of seats.aero, s-e-a-t-s.a-e-r-o, seats.aero, which is a little web tool that somebody has built that allows you to find award travel seats that are available from all the different airlines systems.

And that saved me, because now I was able to, using that tool, I was able to search for seven airline seats and only look at the airlines that had the appropriate amount of space. And that's what allowed me to start using points on airline travel. By the way, even this tool, if you go to seats.aero, you can use some of it for free.

I have a paid account, paid subscription to it, but you can use a lot of it for free. And one of the things that you'll quickly find out is you'll see the complexity of it. For example, in order to properly redeem your points, one of the tools and tactics that you need to learn is that you frequently need to redeem your points with a partner airline of the airline that you actually want to fly on, and it's not on the airline that you're redeeming them for.

So recently I was redeeming some points, let's see, what was it? I was booking for an Air France flight on Delta, which is a pretty simple example. I was booking on Delta for an Air France flight, and then I was booking on Air Canada for a Turkish Airways flight.

Things like that are very normal. And so you frequently have to book on an alliance partner in order to get things, and it takes quite a lot of time to figure this stuff out, figure out where would I like to stay, what would I like to do, et cetera.

The next thing that's a limitation for a lot of people is it's going to be very difficult for you to use these travel experiences for their maximum value if you have any kind of constraints on your schedule. So what really works the best is if I'm one or two people, and I'm open to any kind of peak experience, and I can just browse around using a tool like seats.arrow, and I can see, hey, where can I get great redemptions, and oh, that'd be fun.

Let me go and fly to that place, and let's go and fly business class there. And that's perfectly fine, by the way. That's what I teach. If you want to travel the world for cheap, then one of the basic secrets is figure out where it's cheap to go, and then figure out what's interesting to do there.

And the same principle applies to booking award travel, figuring out where you can get a great redemption for a great experience, and then figure out what you want to do there. What's much more difficult is to book a specific place on a specific schedule. So I want to be at this city on these dates, and I want this hotel to work out, and I want these airlines to work out.

Very rarely are you ever going to be able to accomplish the full booking process all based on your points. Very rarely are you going to be able to get the airline reward redemption on the date that you want, in the class of travel that you want, to the specific place that you want, and the hotel that you want as available, and have it all line up.

So frequently, you're going to be using your points to fill in one or two of those pieces, and then you're going to put one or two of those pieces just under normal, normal constraints. And okay, that's not such a terrible thing, but it's annoying and frustrating. And those are some of the biggest issues that I've had.

Similar thing, by the way, to booking airplane seats occurs with booking hotels. Let's say I want to book a hotel reservation. I find it incredibly easy to use up all my hotel points when I'm traveling by myself. That's no problem. Or if I'm just traveling with my wife or one or two people, no problem, because then everything works easy.

I want to book a reward. I need a standard room. If the standard room has a bed with, you know, it's a double room for two people, sometimes four people, et cetera, then that's no problem. I can book it with points frequently. Problem is that a lot of times, again, those are business trips, and those are trips that I would prefer just to pay for, and I'd like to save my points for my personal consumption.

But then when we go to personal consumption, then I need multiple rooms, and it can be difficult on various hotel platforms to book multiple rooms, or they're not available on the dates that I want, et cetera. And so it's just very difficult for my logistics to make that work.

And sorry, it sounds like I'm whining. I'm not whining. I'm just sharing with you what I've learned, because this does kick in at anywhere. If you have two children and you're a family of four, I think you'll experience these same things. I have not found – I'm sure they're probably out there, but I haven't looked for them either.

But very frequently, the most active teachers on this subject are usually a single guy or gal or a couple. And so all of their travel is done as two people, where the world is very – the world of mileage, redemption awards, et cetera, is very friendly to them. When I've had to figure out how to make some of this stuff work with many more people, I've found it much more difficult.

Doesn't mean that it's not possible. I've learned a lot. I mean, I've considered making my own course on the subject, and someday maybe I will. It's not the highest priority for me, but who knows. It can work out and it can provide some cool ways to get some peak experiences, but it's difficult.

Now, what's the biggest problem with it? My biggest problem with the whole system is the opportunity cost. And lest I sound like an endlessly scratched record, I am, because the biggest problem, the biggest cost for most of the things that we do is the opportunity cost, and I think that mileage hacking and mileage, et cetera, the whole deal, it's very much associated with this.

So recently, I booked a very complicated trip that I'm planning to take, and I'm going to not share any of the details for the moment, but a very complicated international trip. And I spent, in order to book that trip, I had all the miles, trying to use the miles, et cetera.

It took me something like 18 hours of work over the course of about two or three weeks to get this done, 18 hours just to book this trip. And I think I said it was a complicated trip. I booked it as a complicated trip, but it was complicated because it took so many iterations to figure out a version of the trip that I was happy with, of the destinations that I wanted to visit, all of the accommodations, et cetera.

And that was just 18 hours for one trip. Now what is the cost to me of that 18 hours of time versus the benefit? Well, the benefit is I was able to use my points. Great. But were the points free? No, they certainly weren't free. There's a cost to accumulating the points, et cetera.

And then using them, it was such a frustrating experience that it just made me wish I'm just going to pay for everything. And when I think about the amount of time that I've spent investing into the redeeming the stuff, figuring out the rules, figuring out the airlines, checking here, checking there, trying to get the best deal, the best value, et cetera, I just look at it and I'm pretty scandalized by it.

And I think, Joshua, just make more money. What an idiot you are for spending all this time trying to play this game. Just make more money. And make more money and afford to go and buy yourself seven business class seats because you can buy seven business class seats, you just can't redeem seven mileage award seats.

And that, I think, is the biggest thing that most people don't reflect on. The time commitment for this world of mileage hacking, et cetera, is enormous to learn it and to do it and to practice it on an ongoing basis. It has to be genuinely a hobby that you enjoy.

Going and searching for flights and checking this website, that website, this tool, that tool, et cetera, figuring out where could I go this month, where could I go next month, and just doing that, it has to be something that you enjoy, something that's relaxing to you, sitting on the couch watching TV and you're just goofing off on the laptop looking for valuable redemption awards.

The average person who doesn't have that kind of interest and isn't going to do it, I don't think is well served by this system because it's too time consuming for you to go and accumulate the knowledge necessary and then to know how to even go through and accomplish the redemptions.

The complexity of the whole system, the complexity of accumulating the points and doing this program and tracking my minimum spend, okay, where can I get another $3,000 of spending? And then I'm going to put this into this program, I'm going to have my American Express points, I'm going to have my ultimate rewards points, I'm going to have my Capital One points, I'm going to have, okay, this is going to go to this program, now there's a mileage bonus, let me go ahead and, the complexity of it eats up enormous amounts of time and it has to be a hobby.

And if you actually look at the actual value that you get from it, is that really a good value of the time? What if you had something better to do with the time? What if you had some way to invest that time to make more money, to do something more interesting with your time and with your ability?

In addition, there is, and I'm going to quickly come to who this is right for, but one more thing to point out. Frequently you're dealing with, because you're going after the luxury experiences in many cases, frequently you are dealing with not the best option. What I mean is, let's say you go to, I don't know, booking.com, you're going to travel to Paris, France, and you go to booking.com and you are going to choose a hotel.

Well, a site like booking.com will serve you thousands and thousands of different options, from the most luxurious to the least luxurious, et cetera. You can choose among those options. If you've got your credit card points, then you are restricted to the partner to which you can transfer those points.

Maybe it's Hyatt or Hilton or Marriott, those are the big ones, Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott and IHG are your big ones. Don't get me wrong, I really like these hotel chains. One of the things that in my own travel planning, whenever possible, I avoid flying on American flagged carriers. I avoid Delta and United and American Airlines whenever possible in favor of some foreign brand.

I'd rather fly on Korean Air or Singapore Air or Turkish Airways, et cetera, because I find that you get better service on non-American flagged airlines. However, I personally prefer to stay at American flagged hotels. If I have the choice, I'd rather stay at a Marriott or at an IHG or Hyatt or something like that, in many cases, rather than a small independent hotel, because you get a different level of service.

I don't know why there's that difference, but at least it's something I've noticed and I would bet other people have as well. That I would rather fly on a non-American flagged carrier in order to stay at an American flagged hotel chain versus the opposite. But still, you're just getting one certain thing.

Now with the portfolio of brands that each of these companies has, you can often find the kind of experience that you're looking for. But the point is that you're often locked in and the same thing happens with airlines. If you are flying for money, you have all the same searching ability that you can do and you can often find all kinds of inexpensive fares that are available for you, either due to better competition on that route and/or etc.

Just better competition on the route or more mistake fares or their sales. All the same things apply to finding great airfare deals. It's just a simpler, more straightforward system to spend less time finding a good deal on the kind of hotel that you want to stay at and the kind of airline that you want to fly on, rather than spending all the money and the time to deal with the points.

So who is a good fit for these mileage programs? Well, as far as I'm concerned, there are a few no-brainers. So the first one that's an absolute no-brainer is simply this. If you have some kind of significant ongoing expenses, usually expenses associated with your business, and you can pay for those expenses with a credit card, and there's no cheaper way for you to get those expenses covered with another form of payment, well, then you are a perfect fit for a mileage program.

So if you buy hundreds of thousands of dollars per year of Facebook ads and Twitter ads and things like that, or if you run a contracting business and you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year renting equipment, things like that, or if you purchase supplies for customer projects, you're renovating houses and you purchase tens of thousands of dollars of building supplies, which you then bill your client for, you are a perfect fit for a points credit card, because you'll have so much spending that just the natural value of the points, you'll accumulate enormous quantities of them.

And if you have enormous quantities of the points, and it's basically "free," then you don't have to spend all your time going through and trying to figure out how to maximize every single redemption. It's perfectly reasonable for you. If you earn hundreds of thousands of points per year just naturally, it's perfectly reasonable for you to pop open Delta Airlines and say, "I want to go here on those dates.

Oh, look, pay with points." And it's perfectly reasonable for you to pop open Marriott.com and, "Hey, look, I want this number of rooms," and boom, pay with points, done. It works fine. You're not in any way maximizing the system, but you are a good candidate for those kinds of programs, just because your built-in spending to the business allows you to accumulate points.

And those points are probably more valuable to you for those luxury experiences and those tax-free perks and things like that than would be something like a cashback option that just adds a little bit more profit that you probably don't need. The second person for whom this is really appropriate is somebody who's an aficionado.

So if you are a single person or a couple or maybe a family of three and you really enjoy this and it's something that you do as kind of a relaxing thing, then yeah, this is a good fit for you because you'll go through the learning process, you'll learn all the ways to exploit it, maximize it, you'll learn all the loopholes to redeeming them, and you'll be able to create some luxury experiences that you wouldn't otherwise have.

That really is true, and it is possible for people. But it needs to be your hobby, and this leads me to kind of the cross between the second and the third person. I think the third person for whom this is a good fit is somebody who just doesn't have other money-making opportunities.

Let's say, for example, that you and your wife are both college professors, and you just love it. You love teaching, you like your lifestyle, and this is what you're going to do, and you don't have any interest in trying to do a side business and becoming the next Andrew Huberman or something like that.

You're just focused on, "We like teaching our classes, and this is what we do." Well, in that situation, your income is not infinitely scalable. You're not going to go out and spend your time working on a side hustle to make more money. You're not an entrepreneur. You have a stable, fixed income and a good lifestyle associated with it.

Perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But the acknowledgement is, unlike me, who if I had invested those 18 hours into something else, I certainly could have made a lot more money than redeeming my points made for me. You have a different system. You have a different set of constraints.

If you have that, and you earn enough money to cover your expenses, and you're not going to go into debt, and you have a kind of a stable lifestyle, then this may be a way for you to just systematically acquire some points so that you can have some cool peak experiences.

It doesn't become that difficult if you have a little bit of basic knowledge. In essence, let's say quarterly, you're going to sit down and you're going to subscribe to a couple of newsletters or check out a couple of forums or subscribe to some various teacher's premium program. Every few months, you're going to make a credit card application, take out a new card, you're going to move your spending to that card for a few months, and you're going to accumulate quite a lot of points that way, and that can work well.

That's the crossover between kind of the person for whom it's a hobby. If this is really a hobbyist of yours, okay, you can do well at it. But I'm skeptical that most people are really getting all that much benefit from it compared to what is possible. Because for most of us, what we're giving up to engage in that world is many more lucrative opportunities.

It doesn't have to be a side hustle, it doesn't have to be entrepreneurship. But the problem with becoming an expert in the credit card points game is, unless you're going to build a business around being an advisor to people on credit card points, you're probably neglecting something else that would enhance your career more effectively, something that would allow you to improve your job skills.

With the amount of time that you spend playing with the credit card points game, you may be able to code, learn to code, and go into a completely different setup, or become the expert on artificial intelligence at your company, guiding your company to more profitability, or becoming world-class at some other thing.

And that's what we need to be really cautious of, is we need to be careful that we're not paying a higher cost with our opportunity cost than we are aware of it. If you enjoy the hunt for the deal, go for it. I think in many cases, you probably should focus out more on making more money instead.

Great. And if you have high consistent expenses that can go on credit cards, go for it. But remember that these things may be a distraction. And as I've said previously, as I reflect on 10 years of radical personal finance, one of the regrets that I have is that I spent a lot of time getting distracted with things that were…they seemed alluring, because they seemed like I was going to live the lifestyle of a millionaire without being a millionaire.

They seemed like things that I should go after, because look, I can exploit this, I can maximize this little loophole, I can save a little bit here, etc. And I've just come to see a lot of that as wasted time and effort. It's not a matter of…really great personal finance is not built upon a lifestyle of clipping a coupon here and saving a little bit there and finding some way to live like a millionaire without being one.

The most effective pathway is the direct one. It's the direct pathway to becoming a millionaire, to making a million dollars a year, to building a business that can comfortably buy you all of your first-class travel and put you up at the first-class hotels and things like that. I'm always conscious that that may not actually be open to everybody.

I'm not making fun of clipping coupons. They serve a value. But truly, we are more capable than we realize. And if I had stopped years ago chasing down little things to find a loophole and get something for nothing and go a little farther, etc., and just focused on the fundamentals, then it would not be necessary.

None of the little deals and things would have been necessary. And as I try to learn from the last 10 years and make a better plan for the next 10 years, this is at the core of where I'm at in my own business, my own personal finances, etc. And I don't think I have anything to apologize for in terms of the content that I've made or anything like that.

I don't think I've steered anybody wrong. I just didn't realize how time-consuming a lot of those things really were and how much better it would have been to focus on the fundamentals. And a more straightforward focus on the fundamentals would have, I think, more fully paid off. So now when I see people who are really interested in the credit card game, etc., I just ask myself, again, unless they're making money on it and they have a coaching business or whatever or programming some tool that works out and pays them money, I just ask myself, "Wouldn't you be better off doing something else?" And the answer almost every time has been yes.

I've never met a wealthy person who got rich because of their credit card points. There are a significant number of wealthy people who have gotten rich talking about credit cards, selling credit cards, etc., and no problem with that because there are a number of people who've been able to take a once-in-a-lifetime trip, a really peak experience because of it.

But on the whole, I've never met anybody who's become wealthy accumulating credit card points. And even if you go to those peak experiences, you know, I watch their YouTube videos and whatnot, you're sitting in business class or you're sitting at the fancy oceanfront resort, it's not a sustainable thing.

You're out of your league. You're out of your depth. And if you can use credit card points to put a little fire in the belly and say, "I want to fly like this every time," great. Go for it. But at the end of the day, I think credit card points and the whole game is much more of a distraction than many people realize.

They're not that hard to accumulate, although it does take a little bit of practice and a little bit of learning, but they are difficult to redeem. And the time-consuming nature of it is something that I think would send most of us in another direction.