What if the way you've been thinking about points and miles is the very thing holding you back? Today I'm talking to Devin Gimbel who has a perspective that as soon as I heard it I knew I needed to have her on the show. So we're going to break down her four-step framework for points and miles.

We'll explore some tactical ways to overcome analysis paralysis and why using points for maximum personal value beats trying to optimize the wrong things. We'll also cover a few new tactics for accumulating points, scaling point strategies for families, and a lot more. The best part about this conversation is that I think it will be just as valuable to someone early in their points journey or a little bit further along feeling stuck as it is to someone who's as far down the rabbit hole as I am.

Speaking of me I'm Chris Hutchins and if you enjoy this episode please share it with a friend or leave a comment or review and if you want to keep upgrading your life money and travel click follow or subscribe. Devin how do you think you think about points and miles differently than others in the space?

I think that there is an absolute use for looking at points and miles as how do we use these to essentially get free or as close to free travel as possible. I think that's an amazing use of points and miles. So I'm not necessarily looking at how can points and miles keep my travel costs as low as possible.

What I'm looking at is how can I take this travel budget that I've allocated? How can I expand it at exponentially using points? And when that's the actual question then I think that automatically informs kind of everything that comes downstream of it. So some of the I think mainstream advice about how to earn points while I think that it's useful and valid depending on what your background is it's not applicable necessarily anymore for me.

So I'll just give you one example. When I was learning about points and miles I felt like a lot of the information out there was essentially always be working on a new welcome bonus offer. Allocate all of your expenses to a brand new credit card and then just rinse and repeat.

And again I think that there are scenarios where that makes amazing sense. And there are scenarios where it doesn't, you know, fast forward a couple years. My husband is self-employed. I am now self-employed. We have businesses that have expenses. Our expenses are now at the level where it is not practical for us to have an approach where all of our expenses should automatically go on a brand new card in order to earn a sub.

The number of cards that we would have to be applying for on any given day makes me even as a points enthusiast start to sweat. It is just not possible. And so I think there are areas where a lot of traditional points and miles advice and education are phenomenal.

And then depending on what your background is, your context is that may not hold true anymore. I will gladly and enthusiastically pay a processing fee in order to pay certain expenses with a rewards credit card to earn points, even if I'm not earning a welcome bonus on that specific expense.

And it's only because I have run the math and it makes sense given my kind of specific scenario is that there's no one right way to do points or miles. There's no one right way to earn them or to use them. And once you have kind of a foundational amount of knowledge and experience, then you can start getting really critical and curious about, okay, but what about me, right?

What about the way I want to earn points and use points or what about my specific situation might actually call for a deviation from what is actually really conventional and sometimes amazing education and advice out there? This reminds me of an email I got and I shared it with you where someone said, Chris, you give so much information, but it's really hard, at least on the point side for me to put it to use.

I feel like I've unlocked this magic. But now when I think about trying to maximize it, you've taught me the scope of everything that can be done. And now I'm convinced I'm just going to screw it up and I'm almost paralyzed. And I feel like the reason that I first thought I had to invite you on You've got a way of thinking about this that I think would be really helpful to people, not just at that stage, but throughout the journey that would make it a little easier to think about how to get out of some of that paralysis, how to feel better about learning a lot.

I know as a podcast host, I like dumping lots of information. I don't want that to be too overwhelming. So I thought we could walk through that framework you have and then talk about a bunch of tactics that people can fit into it at different stages. Let me talk about what is this framework?

Some people may be familiar with it, people might want to Google it. So there's this one very specific graphic. It's a curve. It's called the Dunning-Kruger curve. So we can link to that in the episode show notes. You can, like I said, pull this up on Google. And kind of where this comes from is that they wanted to see was, okay, how do people experience kind of themselves based on how much knowledge or skill they have in a specific area.

So they ran these participants through, you know, the study, all of these tests to assess competency in certain areas. And then they also surveyed the participants and actually asked them, okay, how well do you think you did? And a lot of us, when we know nothing about something, we're like, yeah, I don't feel very good about that.

And once we know a lot about it, we feel very confident. But what was really interesting that Dunning and Kruger found is that this very kind of first stage of learning their first stage of competence in something, where you're actually very bad at something, or your level of knowledge in it is very, very small, a lot of us tend to have a lot of confidence at this time.

Now they have a term for this kind of phase of learning or this phase of competence. And I don't know exactly what they say. But I call this sort of the peak of Mount ignorance. Because when you look at this curve, if you want to pull it up online, you'll see that with just a tiny, tiny little bit of movement in terms of your knowledge or skill, your confidence skyrockets.

So it goes way, way up. And I think when this relates to award travel or credit cards, I think we've probably all gone through this experience at some point. You know, we laugh now when I talk to friends who know about points and miles, someone will text me and be like, Oh, you're not going to believe this.

You know, I was out at dinner. I was treating, you know, my family to this dinner, the guy next to me made a big show about pulling out his Amex personal platinum card to pay for dinner. Basically, wow, there's so many other credit cards out there, you know, that are so much more valuable in terms of earning points for dining than this one specific one.

But that guy in that moment is like, I have this amazing credit card, you know, I'm earning all these points is probably only because he doesn't actually know what he doesn't know yet, right? Maybe he doesn't know that there are other amazing rewards credit cards that are going to get him so much more points for dining than an Amex personal platinum card is.

But when you don't know what you don't know that really, really fascinating thing about this is that you don't feel bad about it, right? You the amount of knowledge and skill that you possess, you're feeling pretty, pretty good about it. And that is the fascinating thing about this first phase, there's a different way to do this.

And that's where actually I encounter so many people in this hobby, which is they're no longer at that first stage of learning where their confidence is really high, even though their competence does not match it yet. Instead, they've already moved on to the next phase of what happens when we tend to learn, which is that as high as you get with your confidence initially, when you don't have a tremendous amount of knowledge or skill in this area, you get just a little bit more knowledge, you gain a little bit more skill.

And what Dunning and Kruger found happened confidence in the second phase is that it plummets, like it goes very sharply downward, very, very fast. So many of us, I think, go very quickly from Oh, my gosh, this sounds so amazing. Or I want to dive in, I want to learn about this, to I am doing it all wrong, right?

They realize, wow, I've missed so many opportunities. I signed up for a credit card and didn't even earn the welcome bonus, because I didn't realize that was a thing, right? People tell me, you know, I used all my points, and I redeemed them for what I now realize was incredibly, incredibly low value.

Like, the refrain of this phase of learning is basically, I did it all wrong. And this is why I think when you understand the way that we learn, and you realize, Oh, no, this is just a phase. My hope is that people will realize like, No, no, this is not the end.

This is not where you say, Oh, yeah, it's too hard. And they give up. When you understand this is how we learn. This is how we experience building skill. Then you can understand, Oh, wait a minute. Now there's more that comes next and not give up. You've also talked about this as like unconscious incompetence.

And now you've moved to conscious incompetence. It's like now you know what you don't know. And I feel like I've been there. The email I got was about someone who was there. And honestly, I feel I'm sorry to everyone who I have, you know, introduced from their unconscious incompetence to their conscious incompetence.

But I will say that for every email I've gotten every story I've heard of someone who feels overwhelmed. There's five more emails of people who made it through this this kind of valley of despair, and have started to master these things have started to apply them and gotten one win.

And the knowledge of I now can do this better. The knowledge of that one win is it brings you up this this journey to amazing things. And I know it can feel tough. I know it can feel hard at the beginning because we've all been there. But but but how do you get out of this valley of despair?

And what does that look like? Yeah, this is I think the question that everybody wants answered. Okay, what now is like, you could give up? Hopefully you don't. And Chris and I are here to tell you, you know, so many people have learned how to do this, you absolutely can learn how to do this.

But what do you do when especially you notice that you're in this phase of feeling like there's too much to learn, or you don't have enough time? One is when you actually do just allow yourself that moment to recognize, wait a minute, what's actually going on, is that I have learned more than I knew before.

It's just that my confidence has gone down actually no more than I did a month ago, a year ago, 10 years ago. It helps to reframe and remind you, wait a minute, no, I am actually getting better at this in terms of my knowledge base. And what follows knowledge is skill.

So as long as you keep learning, you keep practicing, you keep trying, your skill is going to catch up with that knowledge. And so in the beginning, it really is just reminding yourself, no, no, no, no, no, it doesn't feel easy right now. But there is value in continuing to work on this.

Because what happens next is that as you continue to gain knowledge or skill or competence, you know, in this specific area, your confidence actually does start going back up. So it doesn't shoot straight up the way that we initially see kind of at the beginning zone of learning. But now it starts a really strong and steady climb upwards.

And this correlates with a transition between becoming what's called consciously incompetent. So you stink at this, but you realize how bad you are at it, to actually transitioning into conscious competence, meaning that now you're actually getting better at this thing, even if it takes concentration and hard work. And what this means is that, you know, I think you if you're in the world of points and miles, if you listen to Chris talk about all of the amazing things that he does with points and miles, he doesn't probably seem like he has to work very hard for it, right?

He could probably walk around with 10 credit cards in his wallet, and know off the top of his head for any given expense, what's the best card that he wants to use for that expense. I bet if you asked him, hey, I want to take a trip, I have a family of three, and I want to travel from the East Coast of the United States.

And I want to visit any major city in Europe, what should I do? I bet that off the top of his head, he could probably rattle, oh, here are a couple airlines you might want to check or here's the first step, right? The only reason he can do that is because he continued to learn and practice and he moved out of conscious incompetence into conscious competence.

And so all you really have to do, and I'm not trying to minimize this at all, I'm really trying to break it down and make it simple is that you just learn one thing at a time, you just try one thing at a time. I think one of the biggest mistakes we can make in this hobby is thinking, I need to try to learn it all immediately, or I need to try to implement 20 things at once.

You don't start with where you are for some of you that's going to be saying, look at the credit cards that are already in your wallet, how confident are you that you're using them very well to their highest advantage right now? Maybe you're walking around with points earning credit cards that you didn't even know are earning points.

And so where you want to start is familiarize yourself with the cards that you have, how can you use those cards a little bit better. And I think when you look at it that way of what is just the one next skill or one next aspect of earning points or redeeming points, that is going to be the highest value for me.

Once you start there, then you've removed that expectation that you're going to try to learn or execute or be expert at 100 things all at once. And then every time you take a step forward, I think it's so important to really, really acknowledge for yourself. Wow, I just learned one thing.

I think we have this tendency to downplay it, right? Like, oh, well, I learned how to use an Amex personal gold card to get more points on my grocery spend than what I was getting before. And we say, but that's not that big a deal. Because look at all these other things I don't know yet.

And I think that that's a really big mistake. And I think what we need to do is not compare where are we standing today with what is that ideal goal? What if I was like Chris, you know, with my points and miles? Instead, you have to compare yourself to where you are coming from.

And I think that is one of the ways that you can really, really actionably begin to move from that valley of despair from feeling terrible, or overwhelmed about points and miles to really truly beginning to build up your skill. And as a byproduct of that your confidence and how you feel about it is naturally going to increase.

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That's upwork.com to post your job for free and connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. It's funny because completely aside from points and miles, a couple weeks ago, we went to Colorado and I have snowboarded since early elementary school and I went to school in Colorado and I would say I have not found a run on a mountain where I didn't feel very competent in my and confident in my skills.

Now, we were taking my two daughters who are under five and I thought two things. One, teaching kids how to ski is much easier on skis. And let's put aside the fact that I probably could have taught them how to snowboard, but let's just shelve that. And we were using these harnesses and it's just so hard to do on a snowboard.

And I thought, well, why don't I just ski? Like, we're not going down these difficult runs. We're going down the easiest runs on the mountain. What if I rent some skis and we go and experience this? And thankfully, we were in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. And there is a massive, beautiful, huge resort.

And then there's a local resort downtown that on all but Sundays is only $50 for adults and it was free for the kids. And then on Sundays was free for everyone. So I rented some skis. Now, I wouldn't advise anyone learning to ski for the first time to try and also take their toddler on the chairlift.

But first time off the chairlift, both of us fell, slid down. And I was like, I went into this thinking, how hard could this be? Well, first of all, I never even thought about skiing. It didn't even cross my mind. I was totally fine that I didn't know how to ski.

And we went for two or three days and it was just brutal the first day. And at one point I was like, maybe now I'm good enough to help my daughter. And all of a sudden, she's going down and I can't control her and I'm falling over. And it's like, I went from a very competent snowboarder to an absolute clown.

I wanted to video some of the kids, but I was like, I have to focus so hard on skiing that I can't even make a video. Whereas on a snowboard, it would be just be completely unconscious. It was just so easy to do. And so I just stuck at it.

And to make everything worse, my kids are progressing incredibly fast. My nephews are like pros jumping off the sides of the mountain. And over two days though, I could feel the confidence. And I think unfortunately, something like skiing, it's very easy after 10 runs to be like, wow, I came down this mountain better than I did before.

And there was no part of me that thought, but why can't I go down that mogul run over there? No part of me was looking at that run thinking, I wish that I could do that at this stage. But in the points of miles world, it's so easy to see someone redeeming around the world ticket in business class for four people, which is the equivalent of that double black run with moguls and think, I want to do that right now.

And I don't know why, but it just made me think, why is it so much harder for someone learning a skill that's online, that is less physical to be comfortable not trying the really hard thing out the gates. Whereas for me, know, it was so easy. In fact, by the last run, my nephew was like, let's just try this easy black run on on day two of skiing of my, you know, my life.

And I regret doing that. But but I had no injuries. So I guess it was okay. Yeah, I think too. It's so fascinating your experience with the skiing where you're like, it didn't even occur to me to say, Oh, my gosh, after, you know, five minutes, yeah, let me go jump on this incredibly grueling, potentially physically dangerous course based on your current level of skill set.

But when we're learning something like points and miles, you know, I think a little bit of it is just that bias of what we're all just exposed to, on the internet, you know, on podcasts, maybe from our friends, if they're really active in points and miles. And I think that a lot of times, like, what is fancy, what's exciting, right?

It is those stories. It's those stories that are at the far end of the spectrum in terms of somebody's ability or interest or expertise or skill level, where we say as someone, you know, who's learning a new thing, well, I want that, right. But I love your analogy so much.

And I actually think how much better would a lot of our learning experiences be if we held that example in our mind, you know, to go from very beginner to very, very expert overnight, maybe I can just release that expectation of myself. Now we're climbing this this slope of enlightenment as it as it's called.

And what is the process of going up that slope kind of stage three to getting to the final stage? Yeah, so I think the best feeling transition when you're learning a skill is when you move from that second stage, the valley of despair, where you are consciously incompetent, to then that slope of enlightenment, where your confidence goes up, your competence goes up, you're consciously competent.

That is that transition where you start to see, oh, wait a minute, I am actually doing better, and I feel better. But that's not the actual endpoint of learning or skill or confidence. That third phase, when you're consciously competent, you are better at this skill, but it still requires a lot of energy and focus and attention.

Maybe you're getting a little bit more skilled at using more than one rewards credit card and really deliberately and strategically picking, which is the one I'm going to use for any given expense, because I know it's going to give me the highest bonus points earning for this activity, or maybe you're starting to learn how to do stacking, right?

So you already feel really confident with which credit cards you're using. But now you also want to say, how can I optimize and maximize my points are even earning even more, maybe I'm also going to utilize an online shopping portal. But the whole point is that when you're in that third phase of learning, it still requires a lot of deliberate focus and attention.

So nothing is really automatic yet. But you can see that when you are paying a lot of attention, when you are trying to, you know, remind yourself, what am I not supposed to forget, you know, at this stage, wow, you're getting a lot better at it. And then what happens as you continue to just learn more, and practice more things you do over and over again become routine things that you once had to pay a lot of attention and focus and energy to in order to do it well, they become unconscious for you.

And I think this is the step that so many of us aspire to get to, we want to get to the place where points and miles feels easy, right where we can walk around with 10 cards in our wallet, and we know exactly which one is going to be best for any specific expense, where it is easy to sit down in front of your computer and say, I want to take you know, my family of three from point A to point B, I actually know exactly where to look to find the best deal, I know automatically whether or not a given points rate for an award flight is a good deal or a bad deal.

All of these things become easy and very routine over time, only as a reflection of the amount of times that you've practiced it. And so, so many of us that want to get to that stage of unconsciously competent, what I want you to hear and understand is, we are all on our way there, we don't get there at our as our second step, unfortunately, but if you continue to learn, if you continue to practice, then a lot of these things that require a lot of energy or a lot of attention to do the first time or the second time, they become incredibly, incredibly easy over time.

I'll just tell everyone, it never stops, right? I think about this for myself, and we're trying to book for four people now instead of two. And, you know, we're starting to plan farther and farther in advance. And, you know, we're planning a trip to Asia next year. And I'm like, I have to relearn this whole process because we were always just booking last minute.

Now we're starting to learn about when do schedules open, what airlines release, how many seats at the certain days, these are all new things to me. And then the other thing I just want to remind everyone listening is that sometimes I'll do an episode and I'll talk about how I did a thing.

And I've probably spent 30 or 40 hours going deep on that thing before I talk about it. And so hopefully two things are true. One, you know that, but two, hopefully some of my synthesis saves you the time of needing to go through some of that work. But it doesn't mean that it's always going to make sense.

You might need to practice it, you might need to approach it practically, you might need to, you know, do some reps. But one thing I think would be really fun to do is there are a handful of areas that I know you've dealt with that as we think about that, that slope in stage three, getting to stage four, maybe we could spend the second half of this kind of running through a few areas and hearing some of your learnings.

I can jump in if I have any, uh, in various areas that will help people kind of build a little bit of knowledge from the experience you've had. Yeah, I think that's great. And I think the other thing that is always fun to do is I think there can be this misunderstanding that if someone does seem like they're good at something that they made no mistakes along the way.

And I think that that is entirely untrue. Like you said, you may have spent 30, 40 hours researching something before you actually present it to your audience. I know the reason that I can relate to people who sometimes find points and miles hard, especially in the beginning is because I've made so many mistakes in this hobby.

I continue to make mistakes in this hobby. And I think that that really helps to remind folks that, oh, wait a minute, this is not, uh, you know, like you start on one day, you learn a couple of facts, and then you do everything right from there on out.

So absolutely. Let's kind of walk through what you think is going to be the most high yield for everybody. I'll give you the one example from just two days ago where I had that exact thing. I was looking for a flight. I was trying to book something from the US to Europe.

And I was like, well, it's this many points on British Airways. And then I saw it pop up on Alaska. And I was like, oh my gosh, it's even cheaper. And I booked it. And I was like, wait, I didn't, I didn't check American. And then I looked and American had, I was already in the checkout flow.

I'd already booked it. The price on American was like 20% less. I had miles there, but there was only one seat and it was too late. I couldn't book it using the cheaper option because I'd already used the seat. And I was like, I could cancel it and hope it goes back, but will it?

And so I'm messing up all the time still. Like I, you know, sometimes that's, I got excited. I didn't think to look somewhere else. But one thing that helped me was I looked at it and said, well, this is still a way better deal than I would have gotten otherwise.

Could it have been 20% better? Absolutely. Did I even look if there was some shopping portal that I could have added? A lot of times, no. I had a conversation with my wife the other day. I was looking at expenses. I was like, you know, I looked at this purchase and I was like, was that you?

And she's like, yeah. I was like, do you look at buying any gift cards for that? Because they would have been like 15% off. And she's like, no, I forgot. And we forget all the time. So I might share the stories that are most relevant to people to save and maximize.

But I probably could also share some of the stories where, you know, we didn't take the advice that we talked about, you know, in the episode of the week, we just forgot, we missed, we were moving too fast. And, and I think that happens to all of us. So you just mentioned high yield, like, what are some of these high yield opportunities that you often talk about when it comes to maximizing?

And, you know, how do you find them? So, you know, in terms of high yield things, I think, again, my approach to earning points might not look like everybody's, I think there are people for whom always trying to have a brand new card open, so they can put all their expenses on that card.

So they can always be working towards a welcome bonus. I think if that is the scenario, that's most high yield for you, I think that makes so much sense. I very rarely open new cards now. And part of it is, I've been doing this for a long time. So I have all of the cards I consider to be actually, actual foundational points earning cards that I want to use on a regular basis, but also because it no longer makes sense for me to constantly be trying to open cards.

And so I think the first step is really looking at, again, what, where am I going to get kind of, no pun intended, the biggest bang for my buck. And so for me right now, it's things like having credit cards that give me really, really great bonus points earning for my everyday suspense spend when I'm not actually working on a welcome bonus.

And so I have personal cards, I have business cards. And part of that too, is also looking at what are the points currencies when you are ready to kind of expand beyond one type of points currency. If you feel like you're in the phase where you're ready to get into a second or a third points currency, at any given time, what is the highest yield points currency that I'm trying to earn?

Because I think people can get very, very kind of confused or in the weeds when they do start to have more credit cards and saying, wow, I've got five different options of cards that I could use for this one particular expense. How do I prioritize it? Should I prioritize that just card a gives me more points than any other card?

And I think that's one way to do it. But I think it's also really valid to ask, huh, for what I want to do with my points right now, what's going to be the highest yield for me? So being really comfortable, not always doing again, whatever you think everybody else is doing with their cards, but being really clear on what are you trying to accomplish?

And then what are the tools you have available to you that's going to help you accomplish that? Yeah, I think about this a lot of times. And you know, I recently opened up a city card. And I have a little bit of a struggle here, because I just wanted to get into the city ecosystem.

I hadn't been able to talk about it on the podcast. So I probably have a business reason to go. But now I'm like, oh, this card might be better for this purchase. But I don't have enough city points to really do anything. Versus if I put them somewhere else, they can contribute towards a trip.

Now, I think that's just an example of there might be some card that earns an obscure amount of points that's higher than other things. But if you don't spend enough in that category for that total number of points accumulated to be meaningful, or if you're going to earn some obscure number of Wyndham points on gas, but you don't even need Wyndham, or your total gas spend is small enough that it's not enough to even book a vacation, think about whether that matters.

So I like that approach. And let's get really tactical with a few things. You mentioned earlier, paying a fee towards using your credit card. Let's talk about that and break that down, because I get a lot of questions about that. Especially right now. It's around tax time. But but I don't know if this will come out before the 15th.

So broader than that. What what how do you think about that decision? Yeah, I love thinking about this so much. And again, as I will probably preface everything I say, it's that you always want to hear whatever it is that someone offers, and then put it on yourself and say, Okay, does this actually apply to me?

Is this useful for me? Because the answer may be no. And when I think about certain expenses, in my life, the expenses that I think offer oftentimes really, really amazing points earning opportunities, because they tend to be high, usually one time, or only a few times a year expenses are ones that don't take a credit card directly without my having to pay a processing fee.

So in my life, this looks like things like tax payments, my husband and I are both self employed, we have the lovely advantage of having quarterly tax payments. So we're paying taxes, you know, every couple of months. And when we look at the things we spend money on over the year, our tax payments are probably our single highest expense category compared to something like dining out, you know, or compared to something like even online shopping.

And so one of the things that I think is helpful is to first look at, in your life, do you have expenses, where you could pay them with a credit card, but they would incur a processing fee in order to do so, and get a very good sense of, okay, but what impact would that make on your overall points earning landscape, if you could earn points for that, right?

Is that 1% of your overall annual spend? Or is this a significant amount of your annual spend? Because for folks who have a significant amount of annual spend, whether it's personal or business spend, or both, where they could pay with a credit card, but would have to pay a processing fee.

I think that's the first question that needs to be answered. Like, what is the impact of this going to be right? I love to optimize points, but I am not a maximizer, I will not chase every single points earning opportunity, it has to be high yield. And so first, you want to get a general idea of what is the scope of the yield of this activity going to be.

So other things that I know folks can pay using a credit card, but also get charged a processing fee that could potentially be very high yield points earning opportunities for them. Many, many people, if you have children, and they're in a daycare, perhaps they go to a school that has a tuition, maybe there is some sort of activity that a child is involved in.

In my area, there's a lot of summer camps that people could theoretically send their children to the camps charge a processing fee in order for you to enroll your kids in them using a credit card. You know, we can talk about other opportunities, too. There are a lot of vendors or services that may not accept a credit card outright.

And so you may be looking into a payment platform, something like plastique, or milio or zill money that basically allows you to pay a specific service or vendor. And then you have to pay them, you know, processing fee, so that you have the luxury of using your credit card.

So one of the first things that I always want to look at is for any given single big expense. And we'll take the tax payments as an example. But again, this could be daycare, it could be tuition, could be you're doing a home renovation, and your contractor does not accept your American Express business platinum card, and you want to earn the sub.

So you want to go through one of these payment processing platforms. The first thing I always look at is what is the actual amount of this expense itself, you always, always want to know what is the exact processing fee that you are going to be charged if you do want to pay by credit card, because this can vary, right?

Sometimes it can be something like 1.7% or 1.8%. Depending on the service or vendor that you're using, it can be much higher, it can be 2.9% or over 3%. But you have to know what that processing fee is, because you are going to pay that percentage of your total bill amount, in addition to your total bill amount.

So let's just pretend you know, you have a $10,000 bill that you want to pay. And the processing fee that you would have to pay in order to use your credit card is 2%. Right? So you're not just paying your $10,000 bill, you're paying $10,000 plus the 2% processing fee.

So once you know that, you know, the total amount of points that you would theoretically earn for this expense. But here's, for me, the critical part of evaluation is that I don't think any of us would ever consider using a credit card to earn points and pay a processing fee, if we were not going to come out net positive on the other end, right?

None of us wants to just spend money that we don't have to spend. So the question is always going to be the number of points that I earn by using my credit card for this expense. Am I going to get significantly more value out of these points out of the way I use them, then the cash cost of that processing fee.

And this is where the answer is going to be variable. I do not recommend for folks who are beginning in this hobby to take this approach because I think it's very challenging for them to be able to break even and my ideal is not to break even it's actually do much better in terms of the value of these points.

But for people who are feeling a little bit more comfortable, maybe they're a little bit more experienced in using their points, you look at the total number of points that you would have earned for that expense. And you probably have a sense of how much value do you tend to get out of your points, right?

If you're only using your points to book travel through a credit card portal, that may look like something like one to one and a half cents per point. I'm not saying that's a terrible use. But that's why you have to know what percentage fee are you paying? What is the actual cash cost of that processing fee?

Are you going to do better than break even, you know, one to 1.5 cents per point, you're probably not going to. But let's say that you feel a little bit more experienced using your points. If you're really confident that you know how to use your points, you're familiar with transfer partners, you know, you're really comfortable searching for award flights, let's say, and you feel pretty confident that you're going to be able to get four or five cents per point or more out of your points, that can be so much more value than the cost of the processing fee.

But the last little variable that you always want to take into consideration as well is when we're paying any expense by credit card, of course, we have tons of options of what card do we want to use to pay that expense. And we have cards, of course, they give us different levels of return on our spend.

So the other thing that you need to know is not just what is the cost of the bill and what is the cost of the processing fee, but in terms of the number of points you could potentially earn, that's going to depend on the card you use and its earning rate.

So are you going to be using a card that earns one point per dollar spent and only earn effectively one point for your expense when you're doing this? Or do you have a card that actually offers you one point five or two points for every dollar you spend? You know, interestingly, some of these payment platforms that I talked about, depending on which ones you use, and which card you use, you can actually get three points per dollar spent, you know, if you're using a payment platform that codes as shipping, and you have a business card that has a shipping bonus category, potentially, you're going to be earning three points for every dollar you spend on that expense, and especially want to factor in if you are going to be able to earn a welcome bonus by paying that expense as well.

And so I think for everybody, one of the things that I think is really important, the more you get into this hobby is to realize that there's probably some foundational kind of basic teaching and guidance on everything in points and miles. I think it's great to learn that first.

And then you can start looking at the nuances, then you can start looking at the exceptions. So I never tell people, you should always pay a processing fee in order to use your points just because a lot of times I do. I also don't tell people you should never pay a processing fee in order to use points.

Because I don't actually think that's true either. I think what makes a lot of sense is start with what is kind of the safest, most conservative approach you can take. And then when you kind of understand the basics of this, and you can understand how to evaluate it for your own personal scenario, then you can start looking for those exceptions.

And so it starts with math, but it also comes back to what are your goals? And what is your comfort level in earning and using points? I love that. There's two things. One, to the extent that this is a question related to a business, it is often that that processing fee could be treated as a business expense.

So keep that in mind for any business owners. But two, since I'm guessing you've done this a few times, are any of the more common, you mentioned plastic, milio, do any of those transactions actually code as anything interesting that earns multiples? Yeah. And that's why I think this is so valuable to know.

And also take this with like a huge boulder of salt. Because if you've been in the points and miles world, you're probably aware that this is a very dynamic landscape, things can and do change overnight. So one thing I always, always, always tell people is, if you hear something that I'm about to say, if you hear something on another, you know, platform, please do your due diligence and double check because these are the types of things that can change overnight.

So as of the time that we're recording this, I have been told I have not tried this personally, but I run a Facebook group of about 28,000 people. So we have some good data points in there that Plastique, which is one of these online payment platforms that it can code when you use specifically the chasing business preferred card.

This is one of several chasing business cards that chase offers. The chasing business preferred card has shipping as one of its bonus categories, you can earn three times points on it, up to about I think $150,000 spent over a calendar year. So again, for business owners, this can be a really great option for a card to have, I have been told that Plastique can code as shipping, even when the vendor the service that you are trying to pay is not FedEx or is not UPS.

And so that can be a very interesting way to leverage your shipping bonus category on chase. Now, the third platform that I mentioned is called Zill monies, Z I L money. This is specifically for business owners. It's a really fascinating payment platform. It is probably the most dynamic one.

And I mean, changes all the time. So by the time we even finished recording this conversation, this may be different. For a little while, Zill money was coding also is shipping, meaning that you that you could earn 3x using your chase Inc business preferred card. And Zill money is a fascinating platform because not only does it allow businesses to pay services or vendors for their business, you can pay payroll for your business through Zill money, you can pay commercial rent for your business through Zill money.

So some of these expenses that some business owners may be encountering that right now we don't have a lot of other avenues to easily earn points like we love built right for residential rent. Most business owners cannot get away with paying commercial rent on their built card to earn points.

And so it is always really fascinating to find out about some of these avenues for points earning. And also, I want to throw it again as a word of caution, just because it worked today or it worked yesterday may not guarantee that it works another time. But that is an example of a way that you can really leverage one specific bonus category on a credit card for some of these payment processors.

Yeah, I have not played with Zill. But given the fact that we have a business and we have expenses, if you treat an expense as a deductible expense, the fees often are lowered enough that you really could make a case for putting 100% of your expenses on a credit card.

I haven't played with the payroll one yet. So we typically run our payroll like once a year. But I so I have some months to figure this out. But it's on the docket right now. This episode is brought to you by NetSuite. What does the future hold for business?

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Okay, so I generally adhere to a similar philosophy of trying to make sure you're earning enough to make it worth paying this fee. The tax payment fee has gone down. So it's among one of the most reasonable. In a way, you could argue that you're kind of buying points.

And so if you figure out the rate at which you're buying, you can figure out whether the rate at which you're earning them makes sense. You've talked about how you took a couple trips with children. One of the questions I get a lot is how does this game change when you have multiple people?

And now when I'm looking for flights with four people, it's gotten so hard. So I'm wondering if you are a few years ahead of me in that process, how do people looking for three, four, or more seats start to better be able to take advantage of award travel, especially if they're looking for premium cabins?

Absolutely. And I was actually going to couch this entire answer, like with that caveat specifically, I think if your priority is to find economy seats for domestic or international flights, you are going to have an easier time than if your preference is to find international premium cabins. So I'm not even going to talk about first class because oftentimes you are not reliably easily going to be able to find more than one first class award seat on many international airlines, but business class is possible.

It's definitely not as easy as if you are a solo traveler or traveling with two people, but it is definitely possible. So I will kind of tell you what my approach has been, which again, sometimes it works and sometimes it's a little bit less reliable, but it's a really good starting point.

So first things first, you know, we talk a lot in award travel about when it comes to getting potentially as much value as you can from your points, using them to transfer them out of your transferable points currencies and into specifically airline transfer partner accounts for flights, that there is so much importance that we place on flexibility, right?

That you need to be aware of kind of what are your zones of flexibility, because you might be able to get a lot of what you want, but you probably are not going to be able to get everything you want. And what I mean by that is, if you're looking for multiple premium cabin international flights, you may not be able to say I want to fly on these specific days, these specific Saturdays, right around my kids spring break, or my kids winter break, you know, you may not be able to say, Hey, I want to fly from my local airport all the way to my destination.

And I'm not willing to look at any other departure airport, especially if your local airport happens to be more local or more regional. And you may not get the best absolute bargain basement deal price. If your priority is to find, you know, four or five or even six premium cabin flights together.

So the first thing is actually not strategy in terms of go to this airline or do this thing. It's I always really recommend to people know where you can be flexible and know where you can't be. You don't have to be infinitely flexible, but you do have to be aware of where are you willing to bend if it's the difference between finding a good flight option and no flight option.

And for me, what that looks like is I'm lucky. My local airport is a huge international airport. So I naturally have a lot of options for international flights, but I have a family of four. And when we travel with our kids, we do try to travel around their spring break, their winter break, when many other people are traveling and probably want to go to similar places that we want to go.

And so inventory may not be very high. And so first of all, along with flexibility is I tell people, if you can, I get it. Maybe it's a milestone trip, or maybe you just don't want to be flexible about your destination and you want to go to one specific place.

I can understand that. But if you do not have your heart set on one specific place, then allow yourself to follow where some of the best opportunities are instead of saying, Oh, I know I specifically only want to go to destination a for this trip, because award availability can and will fluctuate.

There can be times there's no award availability, let's say to Japan that has been so insanely popular recently. But you can actually find award availability to somewhere else that you would also love to go. And then let's talk about actual tips, actual strategies, where to look. I think there are certain airlines that reliably have more business class, especially award space than other airlines.

And so I think it's best start where you have the highest chances of success. That used to be Air France flying blue, especially for flights between North America and Europe. They used to have amazing award availability for multiple people in business class. One discouraging trend this year is that that has not been the case recently.

And so now I'm telling people, okay, don't depend on Air France flying blue to get your family to Europe. But there are other airlines that do still reliably have multiple business class awards that are available. And so maybe just the fact that these are available will help determine where you're willing to go.

So one airline that tends to have really, really good award availability on specific routes is Emirates. So Emirates is an amazing airline is based in Dubai. Maybe you never thought about going to Dubai. It's an incredible city. But specifically on flights that Emirates operates that don't start or end in Dubai, there is amazing award availability.

So these are known as fifth freedom flights, they actually operate I think three, they operate four from North America. A lot of people are familiar with the routes that fly out of the New York area. So Emirates operates a flight from JFK specifically to Milan. They also operate a flight from Newark to Athens.

So people are familiar with that, that can have amazing award availability over to Europe. But one of the the fifth freedom flights that I think is underrated underutilized for getting to Europe, especially depending on where you're based in the United States, is that Emirates operates a fifth freedom flight that leaves out of Mexico City, and flies directly to Barcelona has amazing award availability in terms of the number of seats they make available to book using points.

And with Emirates, if you're booking round trip, specifically, the points price of those flights can be incredibly, incredibly competitive. So that is one airline that I think it makes sense to actually price flights out round trip rather than looking at them as one ways. But Emirates can be fantastic for families.

And again, if your goal is to get to Europe, okay, great, maybe you fly if you're East Coast based, maybe you fly to Milan or Athens, and then separately, you take a train somewhere or a more, you know, local or regional flight, you don't have to get to your end destination all in one go.

But another airline that I love in terms of award availability, this is another one for folks who are interested in going to Europe is Condor Airlines. And that's an airline that not a lot of people talk about a lot. It's based in Frankfurt, it used to be more of a leisure kind of airline versus, you know, a heavy business type of airline, but they have incredible routes.

If you look at the number of airports that are serviced in the United States by Condor, I think you would be shocked because it's not just the huge big international airports you would expect like JFK and you know, Chicago, things like that. They also service a couple of smaller regional airports.

They have amazing award availability through Alaska Airlines, not only good award availability, but good award availability for multiple people. And this can often be the crux for families or for groups. You know, it's great if an airline releases one business class award seat. But if you're a family of four, especially if you've little kids who need supervision, it doesn't matter if there's one award seat, you can't book it for anyone in your party.

So knowing where some of these high yield places to find multiple business class awards can be great. And so Condor, I recommend to so many people trying to get to Europe, and they've got a great route network even beyond just their base in Frankfurt. It was one of the airlines my family took when we, the family of four, took a trip to the Maldives just a couple months ago.

We flew on Condor from Frankfurt to Malay. Fantastic use of points. The one thing I'll add on Condor, a lot of people hear Alaska and think, okay, well, I don't have Alaska miles. Yes, you can get there from built, but I don't have a lot of built points. At least right now, you can transfer from Amex to Hawaiian.

And no one knows how long Amex will allow transfers to Hawaiian after the Hawaiian-Alaska merger completes. But for now, you can transfer up to 999,000 Amex points at a time to Hawaiian and move them over to Alaska. We just did one transfer and cashed out that full amount, 999,000, because I've just been seeing more and more incredible uses of Alaska points.

It's how we got to Iceland last year. It's how we are getting to Hawaii on Hawaiian. And we've seen these Condor flights for flights this summer. And so, if you're sitting on a stash of Amex points, I normally don't like to speculate. And when I do, I normally like to speculate with huge transfer bonuses.

But transferring from Amex to Hawaiian and thus to Alaska has been a speculation that, I have a lot of Amex points, just to be clear, so it's not like I'm burning all of them. But I think we put about a big chunk, a double-digit percentage of Amex points into Alaska this year because of that opportunity.

I'm so glad you brought that up because I wholeheartedly agree with you. Going back to the very first question that you asked me about, what are some of the things that I think are due with points that maybe aren't traditional? I'm all for speculative points transfers, again, with very, very certain parameters.

I also speculatively transferred about a million of our Amex points way back in September when that pathway first opened up from Amex to Hawaiian and then Hawaiian to Alaska because I have not had access to Alaska miles easily from any other pathway. And they do have some really, really wonderful award redemption opportunities.

And so I think that that can be, again, for certain people under the right circumstances, a great use of points. But the last kind of idea I'll mention for people who are really looking for multiple premium business class award flights is if you are based on the West Coast or you don't have a problem getting to the West Coast, I love Singapore Airlines for their award availability.

You know, they operate out of the major international hubs on the West Coast. They tend to have really, really fantastic award availability for multiple people. You may not be getting the absolute kind of quote, lowest price you could theoretically get for a given route by going through Singapore. But one of the things that I think we always have to take into consideration is, okay, if your priority is the is the lowest price possible, may not be your best option.

But if your priority is I want multiple business class flights tickets together on the same flight, and that I can reliably find and not have to spend days or months, you know, tracking down manually a bunch of potential awards, Singapore is just a really great reliable place to go first.

And so clearly, if you have an interest in Singapore, wonderful, that's their main main hub. They also operate a flight that you know about Chris that goes from LAX straight directly to Narita to Tokyo. So that can be a great option. I also recommend Singapore for a lot of people who are really interested in going to Australia or New Zealand to find a direct flight using points on business class for a competitive i.e.

not extortionist points price directly from the US to New Zealand or directly to Australia from the US can be really, really, really challenging. And so if you are willing to be flexible and take a longer itinerary, getting to Australia, New Zealand from Singapore on Singapore Airlines can also be an incredible way to be able to make your points stretch pretty far and to have a wonderful flying experience when you're trying to go somewhere that's quite quite far away.

So those are just some of the, you know, really specific places that I look that I recommend people look, because I think it can be very confusing, especially if you have multiple points currencies, maybe theoretically, you've got 25 airline transfer partners that you have access to that doesn't mean that all 25 of those potential airline partners are going to be high yield based on what specifically you're looking for.

The one that we're kind of exploring, which I know you have a worksheet on that we can link in the show notes is when do airlines open up their schedules. And this is one where I had to start learning, because I didn't do this. But certain airlines might release award inventory reliably at the schedule open, but you might need to book it right when it opens.

And so I can't off the top of my head talk about all of the airlines and their rules. But some airlines release things reliably. And so I know that Japan Airlines is pretty reliable at releasing two business class seats. So one of our plans is to book two business class seats on Japan Airlines for me and one child, my wife and another child, and they fly two flights a day to Tokyo.

And so one of the things we're going to be willing to do to make this work, because instead of being flexible on route, we'd rather not be that we'd rather fly direct, but we're flexible that maybe we'll split up and take two flights. Then what we will do is we'll try to find an award search tool with alerts, set those alerts so that we have almost an entire year for two more seats to open up.

So the other parenting kind of large family travel strategy is book something that's doable, and then set lots of alerts throughout the year to make it better. And so for us, we're going to book something we're okay with. For other people, it might be booking two seats in business class and two in premium economy.

And you know, waiting to see if two more open up. So it's like no matter what we can get there. But this doesn't work. Booking a route that's less ideal, set the alerts and all that. And obviously setting alerts and using all these tools we've talked about in the past, it's it's another skill to learn.

But I would encourage people that want to learn it. Even if you don't have a trip in mind, pick a route, set an alert and see what happens before you need it. And you can start to learn that that tactic. Absolutely. It's such a low pressure way to start really getting more comfortable with some of these approaches.

I can tell you it can be quite stressful when you're actually in the heat of the moment when you know you're ready to book a trip, you have the points there. If you've never run one of these searches before. So do yourself a favor, right? Like how can you maximize your ability to be successful in this?

I don't enjoy working under pressure. And so to take some time before a trip even exists in reality to say, hey, how could I potentially get you to this destination? What are some of the routes that I could be searching? It's so much more enjoyable to do that when you're not actually panicking that all those seats are actively getting booked up at that very moment when you need them.

So I'm a huge fan of running practice searches. And you don't have to do this for hours on end. You know, you can do this for five minutes, for 10 minutes when you have little breaks in your day. Yeah. I also love volunteering my time sometimes to help friends because I don't mind telling my friends, hey, you wanted to go to Italy in the fall.

Let me see if there's any award flights. And I'll look and I'll be like, couldn't find any. Sorry. Like this is, you know, for myself, if I can't find it, I'm stressed out. I want to try other ways, but at least for them, I can at least try. And if I find them something awesome, great.

And if not, you know, then I can say, sorry, I didn't find anything. You know, here's the tool I used. You could try again later. And it's a little bit low pressure. I did an episode on all the award search tools with Greg from frequent miler. So I'll link to that in the show notes.

One other one that I think we've talked about stacking and using shopping portals, but I loved how you talked about using Rakuten bulk ordering as a way to really maximize those returns. How do you how do you think about using Rakuten as a way to earn flexible points in really large quantities?

I think this is going to depend on what is your actual reality? What is your scenario? Admittedly, my family is personal spend. We have high personal spend. My husband and I, we both own businesses. We have high business spend. So I feel like that is a luxury when you just have higher spend.

It's easier to earn points, but you can still inject specific strategy into this. And one of the things I do, I love Rakuten. They pretty reliably have certain time points throughout the year when they will have really elevated bonuses on that shopping portal. They tend to be around traditional holidays.

One of the most popular and reliable ones is, you know, that sort of end of the year holiday shopping period around Thanksgiving. That seems to be extending, you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, but you can usually expect to get 10, 15, 20 times points earning opportunities, you know, around that time of year from Rakuten.

And so I'm also a planner. If there are things that I know I kind of need on a regular basis, but I don't need them immediately and they are not perishable, I will specifically just have, you know, like a note in my phone, a running note of things that I know I will want to buy by the end of the year.

And as much as I can concentrate my buying of those things, when Rakuten is having a huge bonus, I will absolutely do that. You know, my kids grow. I know they're probably going to need snow boots every single year because we live in a place where it snows. I know they're probably going to need the next size up in clothing for a certain amount of clothes or for two bathing suits, you know, for the year.

And so I'll just keep this running list. What are the things we need around the house? If there are things that I know we will get through in terms of inventory and they're not going to perish, so I can just keep them somewhere in my house, then we will go ahead and we will will strategically wait to buy things or buy multiples of things that we know we will get through at a certain point when we can really capitalize on those shopping portal payouts.

And that can also be really helpful for trip planning for anybody who likes earning extra points through Rakuten. I've also seen this through Capital One Offers. If you have a Capital One points or miles earning credit card, you log into your account, scroll down to the bottom of that first page.

And hopefully you'll see an area. This is Capital One Offers where you can actually shop at stores online and get rewarded in points. So this is totally different than the Capital One shopping portal that's actually rewarding you in cashback. Capital One, when they first started offering their offers, which was very recently, they had incredible points earning opportunities that were very competitive with Rakuten and actually out earned Rakuten for a lot of things like sixth car rental.

You can get sometimes 30 times Capital One miles for a sixth car rental via tour, which is very popular also on Rakuten for booking tours or booking activities when you travel. My favorite thing is that you may have a trip planned out nine months from now. But if you're looking around on one of these shopping portals, and you see that via tour or sixth has a really, really high bonus offer at any given time, you can book a tour nine months out, right?

You can book a car rental eight months out. And then when you're finished with your trip, you're still going to earn all of the points as of the day that you reserved that car or that activity. And so I think to the extent that someone enjoys or wants to be intentional about planning, there are ways that you can really turn some of these shopping portal offers into just thousands and thousands of points without it being super labor intensive.

Yep. I've recently been playing around with save wise, which is another similar to cashback monitor, where you can kind of look at all of them, except they have alerts. And so we were in the market for a Peloton tread. And I just went in and said an alert when when some cashback or points earning opportunity crosses this threshold, let me know, because I'll go purchase it then.

I think by the time this comes out, maybe I will have done an episode on that exact Peloton purchase and how we thought about it. But I did get an email from the founder of save wise. And I believe I have to check my email, but I think there is a promo code he gave for people who want to sign up.

I will put it in the show notes if I find it. And, but it's, it's really cool that you can set alerts to be able to say, I know that I need to purchase from whatever the retailer, let me know when it crosses that threshold. I don't know if they have Capital One Miles, but I will find out.

And if there is, then I'll definitely be setting alerts. And for people who missed it in the past times we've covered it, the reason Rakuten is so interesting is that you can link your Rakuten and your Amex membership rewards account. And instead of earning cashback, you can earn points.

And so it might say 5% cashback, but that would be 5X Amex points. And, and like you, we have earned a ton of Rakuten powered Amex points by doing similar things, but I've never really kept the running list. And I'm like, we have two kids. They're going to need another, you know, a jacket, a snow boots, shoes, all this stuff.

So I want to come up with a list. And I'm sure when my wife hears this episode, she's like, I'm going to make that list and we're just going to bulk order it. And, and we're probably going to buy, get the gift cards and stack the gift cards and all of those things.

So I love that. Such a great point too, is that there are stacking opportunities. So it's not just, Oh, Rakuten might be 20 X for a store. It's like 20 X for the store, but then you can also, like you said, go out, get a gift card on discount or purchase a gift card for extra points from a different location and add those things together.

And I think that's why it is so really interesting that there's so many different ways to earn points. It doesn't just have to be one way. And depending on what your spend patterns are, and also depending on your personality, where do you want to put time? Where do you want to put effort into certain things?

You identify the ones that are the highest yield for you. And for sure, Rakuten Capital One offers, those have been enormously high yield for our points earning. This episode is brought to you by Green Chef. I'm excited to kick this year off right. And if you want to start creating better eating habits that last, you should be looking at Green Chef because they make it easy.

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Yes. I think one of the things, you know, in terms of the earning side of it is, I think there are so many things that people just automatically assume they can't earn points for. If they've had the experience where they go to pay for something and that service or vendor says, we don't accept credit card.

A lot of folks in my community pay for things like malpractice insurance. They might be self-employed physicians or just other forms of insurance. What I want to say in terms of points earning is really be willing to challenge and be curious about any time you're spending money, especially for represents, you know, a decent amount of your monthly or your annual spend.

If the vendor or the service says they don't accept a credit card, that may absolutely be true. But get really curious about what are alternate pathways where I could still use a credit card in order to pay this expense in order to earn points. And does that actually make sense for me?

Is that actually justified? A lot of our points earning that comes over the course of a year, it's not from our online shopping. It's not from our groceries, even though, of course, we spend money on that, right? It's on these more single, but very, very high expense items that we have figured out these alternate pathways for earning points.

So that is what I would say on points earning. And then on points redeeming, this is not a specific strategy. But this kind of ties into what we've been talking about this whole episode, which is that I think that there is conventional wisdom in terms of points earning, and points redeeming, that makes a lot of sense.

And I know that sometimes people can take what is intended to be a really good piece of advice and use it against themselves. And I will say this on the points redeeming side is that so many of us who love points who love teaching about it, we, of course, want to teach you methods where you can get more than one or one and a half cents per point of value from your points, we want to share with you, what are the ways that you can get just extraordinary value.

But I think one of the things that sometimes can get lost in that conversation is that what people hear is because it's possible to potentially get some crazy amount of value from your points. Anytime they decide to not do that, again, they're doing it wrong, or they're making a bad decision around points.

And one of the things I really like to tell people is, no, no, no, learn all the potential options out there for you. Is it really, really fun to book a first class flight on JAL through American Airlines for 80,000 points and fly first class from the States to Tokyo and quote, unquote, save, you know, $20,000?

Yes, that's amazing. If you want to do that, I will applaud you the whole way. I've done that. And it was incredible. And also, I've made quote, unquote, bad redemption where I'm trying to fly somewhere specifically with my family, or I'm not that flexible. And I've booked a redemption that got quote, just, you know, whatever 1.7 2.1 cents per point.

I don't beat myself up about that whatsoever. So in terms of points redeeming, I really want to encourage you all continue to learn continue to understand what is possible strive for that if that's what you want. And also, if you love the way that you are using your points, I really don't think that there is a horrible or a bad use of points.

So please don't think that it has to look one way in order for you to be doing this hobby the right way. Because I just don't believe in that. Yeah, on the high, high earning high spending side, something I've noticed recently is there have been some really competitive business class fares.

And historically, I would always tell people, hey, you know, you can get better than the portal if you transfer your points to airlines. And depending on the portal, right on Chase, if you have a Chase reserve, you can get one and a half cents. If you have an Amex business platinum, you can actually get a 35% rebate.

And I mean, if you had a Amex Centurion, you'd get even higher rebate. But I don't think we have a ton of black cards in the audience. And that ends up being 1.54 cents. There are some business class flights where I've seen round trip from the West Coast to Europe for $3,000.

And if you're getting one and a half cents per point on a $3,000 fare, that's 200,000 points. And that's the equivalent of 100,000 points each way, which sure, have I gotten 50,000 points on Air France? Absolutely. But when you're looking for a family of four, 100,000 points for a flight to Europe is not that unreasonable.

Add on the fact that there's no extra taxes and fees, which oftentimes you're looking at, well, it's 70,000 points, but plus $250. Add on the fact that those flights you're booking in the portal are earning points. And depending on the airline and the way they calculate earning, a $3,000 flight could earn you 20,000 points.

There are a lot of cases where that's true based on the earning rate or the distance flown. And so if you say, wow, I'm going to spend 100,000 points each way to get a flight that's going to earn me 20,000 points and have no taxes and fees, it might not actually be a bad redemption.

And somehow in my mind, spending 100,000 points on a flight seems more reasonable, but I've trained my brain to say, but using the portal, I can do better. But at this point, it's about taking the trip we want to take. It's about having the experience we want. And I'm increasingly being more comfortable burning points at really like portal level redemption.

If it lets us take the trip we want in the class we want, you know, to the place we want, I really like it. And so I'm just going to challenge everyone to also think that way themselves and be more flexible with what they're doing. And the only little tip I'll give that adds on to what you said about asking people who maybe say they don't take cards to do it.

One of the most lucrative things I've found here is setting up a business profile on Venmo is very easy. And obviously things change. But at present, when you pay someone on Venmo from a consumer account to a business account, and you use a credit card, the current fee as someone who's received is 1.9%, which is a really reasonable fee.

So if you need to make a payment to a tutor, a nanny, like if they can set up a business Venmo account, and you can make that payment and offer to cover the cost of the fee, there can be a really great opportunity at much lower than the typical 3% fee.

So that's the one I'll add there. But I really wanted to close on the note of, you know, don't beat yourself up, try to find the thing that works for you be happy with that. And if you're getting any value out of this, it's awesome. We could keep going.

You know, we recorded back to back. So we've been going for almost three hours at this point. For anyone who wants more, where can they find all the stuff you're working on? My name of my business is point me to first class. It's a little bit of a misnomer.

I will happily, happily teach you all how to fly in first class. But my belief is that points and miles can make any travel experience come true. And what's first class for me doesn't have to be literal doesn't have to be literal for you either. But at any rate, you can find me on my website is just point me to first class.com.

And I also have a podcast by the same name point me to first class. And this is where I talk about all things points, miles, credit cards, especially for folks who do tend to have high business, high personal spend, what the game looks like sort of a different level and how you can continue to really leverage your expenses, turn them into unforgettable travel experiences.

So those are the easiest places to find me. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure. I appreciate it so much.