{"id":14272,"date":"2026-09-23T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/?p=14272"},"modified":"2026-09-23T01:59:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T07:59:21","slug":"weekend-wisdom-buy-points-and-save","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/2026\/09\/23\/weekend-wisdom-buy-points-and-save\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday Wisdom: Buy Points and Save"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Introduction<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Conventional wisdom is often good at the macro level, and frankly terrible at the micro level. Need an example before we dive in? Let&#8217;s start with a doozy: &#8220;If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.&#8221; Street smart, for sure. But also, someone following that advice would have missed out on six to seven figures in Pepper gift card resale profit, <a href=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/2021\/04\/27\/1022-tuesday\/\">$1,000 for running a $1 charge<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/2021\/12\/14\/wacky-tuesday\/\">buying unlimited AA miles<\/a> for less than a half cent each, or hundreds of other churning greatest hits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Today&#8217;s Contestant<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Let&#8217;s go over another of my favorites: &#8220;buying miles doesn&#8217;t make sense except to top off an account&#8221;. There are definitely examples where that&#8217;s true, but especially on the high end of hotels and flights, that&#8217;s often wrong. I guess we&#8217;ll illustrate with a concrete example because reasons:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Let&#8217;s say you want to unlock one of the 2010-2019 achievements in churning: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hilton.com\/en\/hotels\/mlehici-conrad-maldives-rangali-island\/\">Five nights in a Sunrise Water villa at the Conrad Maldives<\/a>, on let&#8217;s say July 1 &#8211; July 6, 2027. As of this writing, that&#8217;ll cost either:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>$5,609.29 <em>with<\/em> the Honors discount<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>640,000 points (160,000 nightly*4, the fifth night is free with Hilton)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That looks like a ton of points! But, Hilton will often sell you points at 0.5 cents each above board, so the $3,200 you&#8217;d pay out of pocket for those points is more than $2,400 savings over the cash price, and with better cancelation terms. Neat eh? You don&#8217;t need to buy points to top off an award redemption, you can buy points as a proxy award redemption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It gets better though, if you&#8217;re buying points from a (churning) friend, rates are quite a bit better than the rates programs will sell them to you at, and you may get that same 640,000 Hilton points for $2,600 or less. Of course, there&#8217;s some sketch involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Tripping You Up<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s not all roses though, sometimes there are road-blocks and speed-bumps. For example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Some programs limit how many points you can buy<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Gray market transactions are gray, unless you&#8217;re in the UK where they&#8217;re grey<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Points aren&#8217;t always on sale<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Award redemptions don&#8217;t earn points like cash bookings, so you&#8217;re forgoing a modest point-earning rebate<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Good luck friends!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"569\" height=\"663\" src=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-8.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-14273\" style=\"width:420px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-8.png 569w, https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-8-257x300.png 257w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 569px) 100vw, 569px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-size:14px\">Next time: Debunking conventional &#8220;buy more and save wisdom&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Introduction Conventional wisdom is often good at the macro level, and frankly terrible at the micro level. Need an example before we dive in? Let&#8217;s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":0,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[64,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-points","category-wisdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14272"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14323,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14272\/revisions\/14323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}