{"id":6790,"date":"2023-05-24T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-24T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/?p=6790"},"modified":"2023-05-23T23:21:25","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T05:21:25","slug":"wednesday-wisdom-swimming-with-the-whales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/24\/wednesday-wisdom-swimming-with-the-whales\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday Wisdom: Swimming with the Whales"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>What defines a whale in the miles, points, and manufactured spend game? It&#8217;s hard to quantify exactly, but it&#8217;s easy to use a relative definition so let&#8217;s cheat and use one of those. For my purposes and for the purposes of this post, a whale is someone that&#8217;s spending 10x what I&#8217;m spending or more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In my career as a manufactured spender, I&#8217;ve met dozens of whales, and the deeper I get into the hobby the more frequent my encounters become. I&#8217;ve learned something from each of them, and usually that boils down to a single lesson:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>The limits aren&#8217;t usually what I thought they were.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s not to say that limits don&#8217;t exist, they most certainly do. Banks will shut you down when you go too hard, credit card companies often don&#8217;t tolerate heavy cycling, and too many wires or money orders can lead to the FBI, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flyertalk.com\/forum\/manufactured-spending\/2070375-visit-irs-special-agent-criminal-investigation-4.html\" class=\"ek-link\">IRS<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flyertalk.com\/forum\/manufactured-spending\/1740749-funds-transfer-report-buying-mo-post-office.html#post26060928\" class=\"ek-link\">postal inspector<\/a> showing up at your doorstep (which will probably turn out to be a nothingburger, but not before you have a few sleepless nights stressed out about what might happen.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;re like me though, limits are often quite a bit higher than you think, and whales can be your data-point for how much further you can push things. Whenever possible, seek out these whales and their data-points, learn from them, and step-up your game as appropriate.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image is-style-editorskit-rounded\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/image-2.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-6793\" width=\"512\" height=\"512\" srcset=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/image-2.png 512w, https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/image-2-300x300.png 300w, https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/image-2-150x150.png 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"font-size:14px\">I mean, you can&#8217;t tell me that this whale teacher looks less weird than your high school english teacher, and you learned something from them too, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What defines a whale in the miles, points, and manufactured spend game? It&#8217;s hard to quantify exactly, but it&#8217;s easy to use a relative definition<\/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":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wisdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6790","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=6790"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7659,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6790\/revisions\/7659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}