Category: Guest

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m on an annual blogging vacation for the last two weeks of the year. To make sure you still have content, some of the smartest members of the community have stepped up with guest posts in my absence. Special thanks to today’s anonymous author, who candidly shares his story on the dark side of credit card churning for writing this post. I’ll see you on January 1!

Opening a credit card a few days after I turned 18 was one of the stupidest financial decisions I’ve ever made in my entire life. (Partly because my dad saw it and took away the credit card he had given me – but that’s not the story I’m here to tell today.)

In December 2017, I opened the Discover IT card. The sign-up bonus was only $50, but it was also still eligible to be included in the first year double cash-back match promotion. In Q1 2018, the card’s 5% category was gas stations. I was in college and got my first taste of manufactured spend (MS) by doing midnight cigarette runs to get 10% cash back. 

The problems started with Discover’s generous offer of 12 months at 0% APR. I began to spend money I didn’t have with only vague plans how I could pay it back. I would never borrow money from a friend or relative like that, but somehow to borrow from the bank didn’t feel like I owed anything to anyone, and nobody knew about it either. 

I also had some friends in the credit card game that were making decent money, which to me seemed like an easy route out of my own credit card debt. Six months after opening my first card, I applied for the Citi AAdvantage Platinum Select. It was declined. I begged reconsideration, hand wrote letters describing in detail why they should give me the card, but never got an approval.

Discover has a practice of raising your credit limit whenever your card is maxed out for several months in a row, probably because there’s a good chance that they’ll earn 29% APR on your balances. I’m embarrassed to say that in 2019 when my promotional 0% APR ended with Discover, I was accruing big interest charges and I was scraping to make minimum payments. 

My great grandfather called his credit cards “The American Thieves” for good reason.

In April 2019, I opened my first American Express card, a Cash Magnet. I hit the $300 sign-up bonus by paying my dad’s car insurance, and I promised myself that I wouldn’t touch the 0% APR offered with the card. Then, I paid off my Discover card, and the joy of making that final payment to clear my Discover balance is indescribable to someone who’s never been in credit card debt. Finally, I found a steady manufactured spend (MS) route and began to make a couple hundred dollars a month from 1.5% cash back opportunities and opened an Ink Preferred with an 80,000 point bonus. 

Somehow though, when 2019 ended I owed quite a bit of money to American Express, and unfortunately the credit line was considerably higher than my Discover.

So for the second time, I made the mistake of thinking that more credit cards were the answer to my problem. I opened an Amex Business Platinum with a 100,000 point bonus which was considered high at the time (wow times have changed). All was going well until a Financial Review froze me out of the bonus. I was out of options and ready to drop out of college to go to work and pay it off, but when my dad found out, he bailed me out but with a stern warning to quit the credit card game.

For the next couple of years, I stayed away from credit cards and out of credit card debt. Life is much less stressful that way. Then the Sapphire Preferred 100,000 point bonus came around, and was too tempting to resist. I followed shortly afterward by getting an American Express 150,000 point Business Platinum stacked with employee card offers. 

Unfortunately, the Business Platinum had a 0% APR and the debt cycle started again. I did manage to earn a few good bank bonuses with the money floated from the 0% APR offer, but when the year ended I was still short by several thousand dollars. I took a “My Chase Loan” at 8% interest (again times have changed!) I slaved and scrimped to make the payments on that loan.

I again swore to stay away from credit cards, but the Chase Ink 90,000 point offers broke my resolve fairly quickly, and the vicious 0% APR cycle started up again.

In mid-2024, I crossed the line from casual hobby MS’er, to MS as a side job. In Q3 and Q4 I’ve sold over 7 million points and used plenty for travel as well. (I know some readers are laughing at my low volume, and some jaws are dropping.) I can say that I almost definitely would not be in this position today if I hadn’t opened those first cards back in college.

Was it worth it? If I had instead invested all the money I spent on things I couldn’t afford, as well as the money I paid in interest payments, I would be a lot more financially stable than I am today. But would I have worked so hard if it wasn’t to pay off debt? Probably not. I did enjoy my college years by riding on credit card debt.  If I had never started with credit cards, chances are that by now I’d have a different side hustle and some more savings. A side effect of manufactured spend is that handling so much money that belongs to the banks but is revolving through your accounts greatly devalues your mental picture of money. I’d probably spend less in everyday life if my side job wasn’t manufactured spending.

In short, I got started with credit cards very early on in life and quickly fell into the 0% APR trap, resulting in many financially irresponsible decisions. I now make a solid profit each month off my credit cards. Was it worth it? I would say not. You can’t turn back the clock though. I hope my taking the time to write this posts saves at least one person from making the same mistakes I made.

– anonymous churner

Sometimes the churning cup of sunshine and rainbows leaks.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m on an annual blogging vacation for the last two weeks of the year. To make sure you still have content, some of the smartest members of the community have stepped up with guest posts in my absence. Special thanks to today’s author who is infamous enough to not need an introduction but get one anyway, SideShowBob233. I’ll see you on January 1!  If you’re interested in writing a guest post, please reach out!

So it’s been about a year since my Chase post, which has been mostly well received.  I’m a year older, a year wiser (really you’re thinking, are you wiser SideShowBob233 – and yes you’re still saying the 233 part), have a lot more rakes behind me (but still too many in front of me) so do you still think Chase deposit accounts are a bad idea?  

The answer is yes.  After my post I continued to hear many people report shutdowns with deposit accounts, including quite a few shutdown within a couple of weeks of opening the account for a bonus.  Each one makes me want to put a rake in front of them and watch gleefully (which is how I do all my watching, sometimes with only my clown shoes on – get that image out of your head!) as they step on it.  Why people risk their Chase relationship over less than $1,000 is a mystery to me, as is how to walk past a rake without stepping on it.  

What really gets me mad (about this – I’m not talking about my anger over Bart and definitely not about my anger over people who spell “lose” as “loose”) are the people who argue with me that it’s fine and that I’m making a big deal over nothing.  Some people took issue with my characterization that you are more likely to get shut or that you will get shutdown, which is a fair argument if you take my posts as fully serious, which is something only a clown would do.  

When I say you will get shutdown I’m talking odds, but with odds there’s never a guarantee.  However, my trusty buddy Chad ran the numbers for me and there is a 420.6969000000000012% increased chance of being shutdown by Chase when you have a deposit account (I believe Chad had some assistance with his calculations from the Fluz interns).  Now that doesn’t mean you will be shutdown, but I don’t like those odds (OK maybe I like parts of the odds, but not all together).  And again $1,000 is nice (I could get a gold-plated rake!) but you can get that from a single Ink card bonus so why risk it?  Not to mention Chase deposit accounts report every penny to Early Warning System (EWS).  

“So SideShowBob233” you’re thinking (let’s face it you’re not thinking that you’re saying it out loud and your family is wondering whether your meds have worn off and you’re talking to your imaginary friends again), what if I haven’t heard of a single Chase shutdown ever caused by this?  To that I say you need to get out more, especially out of the rubber room they keep you in because it happens often, both to people who know better and to people who don’t know better but should (and even to random people who don’t churn at all, because Chase really doesn’t care if they screw you over for no reason).  Even if you don’t hear about them, I hear about them, and if you dig enough you will too (or they’ll restrain you for trying to dig in your rubber room, if that happens definitely don’t mention the clown with the orange hair and rakes, it won’t help your case).  

I’d like to end this by pointing out there are tons of banks and credit unions (and I weighed them all to confirm there are in fact tons, not just metric tons) all of which are not Chase, do not report to EWS, and also have bank bonuses.  So please stay away from Chase (and Citi) bank bonuses.  There are even some lovely fintechs that are not banks and for a fee (but often for free!) will lose your money for good.  

Now I’d really like to end this (and I can hear you muttering SideShowBob are you ever going to really end this, but you left off the 233 this time because the elf on the shelf told you to stop saying it because it makes you sound crazy) by suggesting you use a business bank account for anything you can, especially one that does not report to EWS (some do, like BOA business checking for some sole prop businesses). Stay tuned for more.

– SideShowBob233

SideShowBob233 (pictured) dictating this article to MEAB (pictured?)

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m on an annual blogging vacation for the last two weeks of the year. To make sure you still have content, some of the smartest members of the community have stepped up with guest posts in my absence. Special thanks to today’s author, a hilarious demi-whale with a penchant for writing, irieriley for writing this post. I’ll see you on January 1!  If you’re interested in writing a guest post, please reach out!

If you’ve managed to find your way to this little corner of the Internet full of award hackers, manufactured spenders, degenerate gamblers, and various other scallywags, chances are you’re drinking from an uninterrupted firehose of information. 

There is just so much content and media to consume (and that was even true before the era of AI slop), even in the churning space, that it can be difficult to stay on top of what’s going on.

Between public blogs, private groups, reddit, neverending Doctor of Credit comments sections and hundreds of pages of Flyertalk discussion on the proper Maldives soundtrack when flying to Conrad Rangali, it’s impossible to read everything.

I don’t think you should, either. If you only get your share of churning news from one source, you’re in the right place. Matt is very good at getting the point across succinctly (unfortunately, I am not), and understanding some references here requires reading between the lines. Some of the plays shared here and elsewhere aren’t spelled out 100%, whether for brevity, sensitivity, or both.

Due to this (and the general deluge of noise in the space), you likely find yourself skipping past posts and comments talking about cards you don’t have, airlines you don’t fly, and plays you aren’t playing. 

In some cases, that makes sense. I care much less about Kroger than someone in Ohio. But when there isn’t a clear geographic or similar barrier to something, you’re likely making a mistake by not taking the time to understand the play. And sometimes, even geography doesn’t matter – as long as you “live, work, or worship here”. 

Pictured: Vincent “irieriley” Adultman explaining his local business to a CSR at a credit union in Twin Falls, Idaho

Things change really fast in manufactured spending, and some of the most profitable things don’t last long*. The amount of plays I decided to ignore over the years because I wasn’t already doing it are up there with my penchant for calling my very-not suave self  “Rico Suave” in high school in the annals of irieriley’s regrets. 

While I believe you should do your best to understand an angle, there are definitely levels to it. If the DQ thread on reddit is delving into a trivial change to an Amex coupon benefit or Doctor of Credit comments are discussing free Hawaiian BBQ sauce, you can probably safely skip learning more, unless you really like Audible (or BBQ sauce).

But if you’re in a smaller community and someone is discussing the intricacies of how to complete a fuel dump mistake fare or how a new fintech fits into a liquidation strategy and you don’t understand the conversation, you should be trying to figure out why. 

It may not even be a conversation – it could be an observation that you make yourself as part of probing and think to yourself why on earth does this need to be spelled out as company policy?

Some examples of things I’d probably want to look deeper into if I came across them and didn’t understand them:

  • Why, oh why is MEAB’s favorite credit card a Sears store card?
  • Why does a cash back fintech not pay out on certain vendors? And for that matter, why do they not pay out on a subscription to a churning podcast?
  • Why does the Android app store say everyone who downloaded a different fintech’s app downloaded the app of a random credit union in Lubbock?
  • Why are people talking so much about the timeframe for the 35% rebate on cash business fares booked with MRs via an Amex Business Platinum? I thought transferring was always the best value?
  • Why does the new group I’ve joined talk so much about Costco gold?

It might not necessarily even be some big, hidden secret. If the blogosphere is to be believed, the slowdown on Amex NLL offers and continued prevalence of pop-up jail was probably one of the biggest negative trends of the year for the hobby. 

But I’d argue that the most negative news of the year, especially for our friendly cetacean population, is the cap on Schwab cash out and subsequent cap on 4x dining MR points on the Amex Personal Gold. There’s not much to parse through here – no need for a SUB when you’re a whale that’s gonna whale. 

Ultimately, it’s up to you how much time you want to spend on this hobby. It can be like a full time job, but with the right knowledge, it can pay like one too. Sharing finds and data points and making friends in the community can go a long way towards finding your like-minded group of maximizers.

– ireriley

Pictured: a whale with a mentee regaling on the days when you could cash out $50k $44k of Membership Rewards points per week. No, I don’t know why it has both legs and a tail, and yes, I am extremely afraid of it.

*Footnote: While I am advocating for you to put more effort into understanding plays, I am not advocating for you jumping into a new play without doing your due diligence and assessing your personal risk tolerance. I regret missing a lot of plays, but I don’t regret missing Hardbody, The Plastic Merchant, etc.

EDITORS NOTE: In 2024, I’ve introduced Guest Post Saturdays. Today’s guest post is from the omnipresent dawnzerly from ShareTraveler.com.

Introduction

When I first got involved in travel hacking I thought it was a hobby primarily of information. You have to find the best opportunities (research information), and keep track of what you’re doing (track information). Over the years I’ve learned there’s a lot more to it. One skill I’ve come to realize is important for success in this hobby is social networking and social engineering.  (Subtitle for this post might be: “Don’t be an asshole.”)

Social Networking for Information

We’re all out there trying to find the next great exploit. The thing that’s going to generate big spend for a $0 fee. The fintech that’s paying 50% cashback on debit (there is one, but it’s a scam). The trick to generate big NLL SUBs. Trying to find these things is time consuming. But you don’t have to fly solo on all this research. Build up a trusted network of people with whom you can share knowledge and information.

How do you find this network? You cultivate relationships. A lot of this info sharing happens in smaller private groups. And to get into these groups you need to meet people.

There are a lot of ways to find travel hackers. Online you can join public discussion groups (WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, various forums, etc.). In person I’m a fan of local groups. It’s easier to trust people you meet in person. Lots of networking and information sharing happens at local and national meetups.

Once you join some groups you need to build yourself a good reputation. For starters, when you have questions in any written forum, try searching through the history before asking. No one wants to spoon feed you answers that you could have easily found for yourself. And find ways to contribute. Maybe you don’t have any big tricks to share (yet), but when you notice people mention the need for a spreadsheet to keep track of something you could volunteer to create and maintain that spreadsheet. Rule of thumb: Don’t be an asshole, be helpful.

Social Engineering for Smoother Transactions

Some people can walk into a Safeway and be best friends with the manager in 5 minutes. Resellers make friends with store staff so they get texted a heads up about useful closeout sales. Gift card liquidators bring coffee to their local post office employees.

Social engineering might be the wrong term, because most of the time we’re not being manipulative. (Though knowing when to deploy your young child to throw a strategically distracting tantrum could be considered manipulation.) Cultivating these good relationships makes the in-store MSing so much easier. And I’d argue it’s also much more pleasant to operate this way.

I’ll admit this one is hard for me. I feel awkward. But I know from experience that chatting up the staff while MSing, and even explaining what I’m doing, can make the transactions go smoothly. At the very least, don’t be an asshole, be nice.

A pretend doctor social engineers his way into a stack of money orders at Walmart.

EDITORS NOTE: In 2024, I’ve introduced Guest Post Saturdays. Today’s guest post is the second post in a series of at least two from the witty, inspiring, and definitely-not-a-giga-chad irieriley, his first post can be found here.

When to share the wealth

My grandfather was a gregarious man who loved more than anything to pass life advice down to his grandchildren. A lot of it centered around outlandish ways to get noticed in the job search (he once told me to send a pineapple with my resume inside to a hiring manager), but he also loved advice in the form of a good adage. His all time favorite is one we’re all familiar with: “irieriley, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

We’ve all accepted this as the truth, although MS and travel hacking allows us to get a consistent 90% off lunches, provided you are ready to decide on what you want to eat 355 days in advance. Therefore, it’s only natural to want to share this steep discount with family and friends. 

Chances are, you’ve long been known as the “points expert” among your friends group and family. In my case, it’s so extreme that it’s generally the sentence after explaining my relation to the bride and groom in a wedding party bio. 

And who can blame them? They see you agonizing over the choice of the Western or Japanese menu on ANA first or relaxing in the “base room” aka “bigger than a McMansion” at the Waldorf Ithaafushi and decide they want in on it. 

However, most bright-eyed travel hackers aren’t going to hit the SUB on their first card, achieving breakage just like your favorite coupon book vendor intended. So, how best to set others in your life up for success? Here are some strategies that have worked well for me:

Provide starting direction

Not everyone is cut out to get super deep into the game, and that’s completely fine. There’s a plethora of reasons why it makes sense to target a SUB or two max a year. And thanks to the generosity of Chase and Amex, there’s generally always an elevated offer worth going for when your coworker Slacks to ask what card to get. 

It’s a perfectly even exchange – you help people get a couple of free flights a year, and in return, you get fodder for Frustration Friday when they forget to use your referral link. 

Add a partner in crime

Because of the collaborative nature of the hobby, helping your friends and family with the savvy to handle it can be a win-win. 

I have a friend that I knew could make it as an advanced travel hacker, so I gave her some helpful hints a few months ago. I couldn’t be more proud of her progress, as she dove in head first and has already redeemed RT tickets to Asia for her and her P2.

If you have friends or family that can handle it, you’d be surprised how nice it is to have someone you know IRL to swap stories with.

Add P3, P4, P5 and so on

Most MEAB readers that are in a serious relationship likely count their significant other as their P2, since miles and points can be earned quite easily without all that much active participation. 

It doesn’t need to stop there – some of us are earning and burning for much more than 2 players. This is more complicated than helping a friend and is a better fit for immediate family since it requires SSNs and financial trust, but it’s an amazing way to spread the wealth for those that have the time for it. 

For what it’s worth, my P3 and P4 get stressed out about opening cards or the idea of MS, but they sure weren’t stressed when they flew Emirates first to Milan. 

Book for them

For the truly advanced (or truly risk averse) earners out there, you can sidestep involving your loved ones in your shenanigans entirely and just let them enjoy the spoils. 

Being able to treat family and friends to shared bucket list adventures or arrange emergency flights and hotels in a pinch are truly the most fulfilling way to use points. 

This option can also be fantastic for things like group travel with your friends – a multi bedroom Vacasa is no big deal even post-devaluation when you’re earning 8x Wyndham on all of your “gas purchases”. 

I’ll end by channeling my late grandfather with an adage – teach someone to use TPG referral links, and you’ll feed them for a day. Teach someone to responsibly MS, and you’ll feed them forever.

– irieriley

Pictured: DALL-E’s nightmarish rendition of my grandfather and I preparing the well regarded ‘resume in a pineapple’ method of standing out in the job search

EDITORS NOTE: In 2024, I’ve introduced Guest Post Saturdays. If you’re interested in contributing, please reach out! Today’s guest post from community member George, who excels at automation, charity, and is an expert at bridging gaps. Donations for the 501(c)(3) non-profit Girls on Fire can be made online.

One thing I like to do in my free time, when I’m not working at my 9-5, churning, MSing, writing and sharing automation scripts for MSing, or going on trips because of churning and MSing, is mentoring student robotics teams. 

Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this, and it’s probably not where you think.

You may or may not be familiar with FIRST, which is a global robotics community preparing young people for the future. My favorite thing about it isn’t the robots or the coding or the competitions but how diverse the program attempts to be in what it teaches. They say they are “more than robots,” and that’s definitely true. 

One concept I particularly have learned to love is coopertition, which fosters innovation by promoting unqualified kindness and respect in the face of intense competition. I have been inspired by watching teams help each other during competitions and by helping other teams myself. Imagine Duke helping Carolina in the middle of the Final 4. Anyway, if you want to learn more, get in touch.

Now, here’s where I’m going: we should be more like these kids. We should cooperate.

Yes, there are reasons to be secretive in this game. It’s possible that if you give too much away, your plays will die out. However, have we run out of plays yet? Don’t new ones pop up all the time?

I’m not recommending radical transparency, but I do think we should share more. Certainly the more private and insular the group, especially if they are paid groups, the more information there is being shared. However, what credit unions were good for PPBP or what banks take credit card funding are still the kind of thing people often hold close to the vest. And again, yes, one just stopped allowing $15,000 in credit card funding pretty quickly after offering it, and that was probably our fault. But was that going to last forever without us? At least one person reports they were told that it was offered because of us.

Personally, I’ve found that at the right time and in the right venue, revealing sensitive information has come back to me positively multiple times over. Indeed, isn’t that the usual thinking when it comes to charity? Maybe you believe sometimes what you receive in return is some kind of “karma,” but sometimes, you get a new play from the person you helped.

Here’s what I recommend: next time you see someone, maybe someone new, asking for help…. help them. Oh, and if it isn’t obvious, this doesn’t just relate to churning.

Establish trust, then maybe give them a tidbit you wouldn’t share publicly. Even if they share it later, the chances aren’t so high that it will get out into the DOC comments or Reddit or wherever and ruin it, and if nothing else, you will have done a good deed. You may even get something better in return.

Waiting for a Chase Ink card application to stop spinning already.

EDITORS NOTE: In 2024, I’ve introduced Guest Post Saturdays. If you’re interested in contributing, please reach out! Today’s guest post from community member Hank, who’s least memorable travel experience was flying 70 hours of AA economy with an unknowingly broken kneecap.

Continuing our “study the past to know the future” theme lets see how the miles world has evolved over the last 15 years.

  • Affiliate marketing payouts. Banks pay hundred of dollars per credit app a website can lob their way. That’s actually quite new. Historically there wasn’t any money in blogging, so the tiny crowd in it did so as a passion project. Ben was a broke college kid with an insane tolerance for mileage runs.  Brian Kelly was still a marketer at Morgan Stanley.  Gary was…. pretty much exactly the same.

    Because there was no financial incentive to spell out deals they lasted years, not weeks or days. There were no spoon feeding mega blogs, just arcane hints on Flyertalk. There were under 1% the current number of people in the miles space because everything was smaller…
  • Scale. Back then earning 1.2 million miles got you written up in the WSJ and a movie deal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Phillips_(entrepreneur) For some people nowadays that’s a bad month. The highest signup bonus was 20,000 miles, not 200,000. All that means…
  • Award space everywhere. There were 20+ interesting ways to go to Asia every day. Cathay Pacific had 6 daily flights from NYC by itself, usually with F award space. No one had any miles. That means if you did you likely enjoyed some amazing travel experiences because…
  • Things were harder to monetize (a good thing). If you had 120,000 US airways miles you were heading to Hong Kong in first class for lunch because there wasn’t anything else to do with them. They’d be devalued in a year, award space was plentiful and liquidation wasn’t a serious option.

    Now that same trip is costing you 300,000 Amex or Chase points. Those have real cash value, at minimum $3,000. Would you spend that on a lark for weekend lunch? A passionate hobby has evolved into a successful business, but as is often the case the magic and allure sadly begins to fade.

– Hank

“A duck looking sadly back at a small pond with a Lufthansa first class duckie in it, while a giant ocean filled with dollar signs fills the background.”

EDITORS NOTE: In 2024, I’ve introduced Guest Post Saturdays. If you’re interested in contributing, please reach out! Today’s guest post is from a new travel blogger but seasoned financial hacker, Graham, who offers a unique insight in many aspects of the hobby. His prior post on applying churning to changing jobs can be found here and should probably be required reading for any churner switching W-2 jobs.

Traveling for work doesn’t need to be a break-even operation. There are plenty of won’t-get-you-fired tricks to earn a little extra personal return when jet-setting your way to Lubbock Texas to get your barrels cleaned at Scrub-A-Dubb Barrel Company. Here are a few that I’ve found:

  • Meeting Credit Card Sign Up Bonus Spend: Many companies allow you to put corporate travel spend on a personal card, and then reimburse that expense. This is one of the ways I meet my minimum spend requirements for sign up bonuses. I consistently manage to get a few thousand dollars of spend per trip (mostly from hotel stays, occasionally from having the privilege of expensing team dinners).
  • Loyalty programs: Many companies will allow you to put your personal hotel, airline, and rental car loyalty program numbers on work reservations. If your company uses Concur, you can even add those programs to your profile and have them automatically added when you book travel. If your personal travel portal doesn’t support adding the program during booking, you can usually add it after the fact on the provider’s website.
  • Credit Cards Offers: If you can put corporate travel on a personal card, you can take advantage of offers from your bank for spending money at a given company. The more cards you have, the more offers might be available. Instead of looking through the offers on every one of my cards individually, I use offer.love to look up the hotel and rental car companies I’m considering using. After filtering by companies that meet my requirements and are within corporate policy, I pick the one with the highest offer. For example, right now Hertz has a $90 back on $350 offer at Amex and Westin has $98 back on $980 at US Bank.
  • Promotions Directly with Travel Companies: Companies periodically offer promotions directly on their website. For example, Marriott is currently offering 1k points and 1 elite night credit per night and United has a Mile Play promotion offering me 2,900 points for taking one flight. I always make sure to add these promotions to my account before booking corporate travel. 
  • Amex Corporate Advantage Program: If you have an Amex corporate card, you might be eligible for Amex’s corporate advantage program. This program lets you save on your personal card annual fees. You save $150 on the Platinum Card, $100 on Gold, $75 on Green, and $50 on Blue. The sign up bonuses when signing up through this program are terrible (eg. a Platinum card comes with an 80k point bonus through this program vs the 150k points you can easily get by opening the application page in incognito mode), however, you can link an existing card to the corporate advantage program after you’ve already opened your card. Just talk to a customer service representative using the chat support option, and they can add it in a few minutes. The fee discount won’t work on the first year’s annual fee if you do this, but it will apply in every subsequent year, making it perfect for cards you intend to keep in your wallet over the long term.
  • Combining Work and Personal Travel: Not all companies allow this, but my company’s travel policies explicitly allow combining personal and work travel. Say, for example, I am traveling from New York to California for work, and I want to go to Hawaii for vacation afterwards. Rather than booking a round trip work trip from New York to San Francisco, and then a round trip personal trip from New York to Honolulu, I’m allowed to book a New York to San Francisco to Honolulu work trip. My company’s policy requires our travel agents to price out the work-only option and the work + personal option, and I only pay the difference. This can often net out to hundreds of dollars of savings when doing personal travel in the vicinity of a work destination.
  • Corporate Discounts and Promotions for Personal Travel: Every company has access to various corporate perks for personal travel. For example, my company gives me access to United’s Break from Business discounted fares. We also have status match offers with United and Delta available internally, which are better than the public ones (eg. the public United status match is valid for 120 days, vs our internal one is valid through January 31st 2025). We currently also have access to a promotion to earn Explorist status with Hyatt. We also have a ton of discounts on rental cars, flights, and hotels through fond.co. It’s worth taking a poke around your company’s internal wikis / slack / mailing lists to see what kind of benefits you have for personal travel.

While corporate travel can be personally profitable, I should add a few notes of caution:

  • Know the Policy; Stay Within It: Odds are that your job pays orders of magnitude more than the tricks I’ve outlined in this post. These tricks are allowed at my company, but may not be allowed at yours. For example, some companies require all business expenses to be put on a corporate card, if you have one. Getting fired for violating your corporate travel policy to earn a couple hundred bucks would be a very bad return on investment. So make sure to read and understand your corporate travel policy, and never do anything you wouldn’t be comfortable explaining to your director / VP / CEO / misc. corporate overlord.
  • Beware the Cost of Messing Up Reimbursements: Many of the tricks above rely on putting corporate travel expenses on a personal card. If you mess up and forget to submit one expense (or it gets rejected; see point above), it might outweigh all the personal gains from your trip and put you in the red. Make sure you have a reliable system for tracking and submitting your expenses before putting work expenses on a personal card.

About the Author

I love understanding systems, and optimizing for the best outcomes within the rules as implemented (rather than as written, which is a distinction all churners should be keenly aware of). This love has led me to a career in cyber security, to churning, and also to a general obsession with optimizing all things finances. I’ve recently turned that last point into a blog where I write posts like this one (with many more in the pipeline). If you’re interested in that kind of content, there’s a subscribe box at the bottom of the blog.  And if you think I’ve missed something, gotten something wrong, or should write future posts on a particular topic, please drop me a line.

– Graham

Yes, cruise ships have morticians. Side benefits include free travel and reimbursable expenses.