even if you can regularly find ways to get two or even 10 cents of value, booking, business class travel, staying at luxury properties, you probably shouldn't use those points values when you're comparing the points values you earned on credit cards with cash back because you can always find ways to effectively buy those same points, whether it's buying through airline and hotel programs when they go on sale, and then you can actually get that same two to 10 cents of value.

So this was a really big change in the way I thought about things because the reason I loved credit card points in miles was that they let you take travel that would otherwise be much more expensive and get access to it for much less, but it's not actually earning the points in miles that makes it the better deal, it's actually just having them.

So if you could go out any time of day and just buy chase points for one cent per dollar, which you can't, but if you could, I wouldn't need to earn chase points at all 'cause I would just buy them right before I was about to book a flight, and if for some reason I wanted to take a trip and the points weren't an option, then I wouldn't buy the points and I would have to pay cash.