Hey y’all! Jacob and I had a blast in Bangkok and now we’re in Siem Reap for a few days. In the spirit of my earlier post, I figured I’d share a photo trip report of my most recent flight between Bangkok and Siem Reap. Without further ado…
Oh wait, did I say first class….?
I can’t believe it’s been a month since we’ve had a post around here! For my part, I’m gearing up for my crazy opulent, international first class flight on Cathay Pacific that I booked as an American Airlines award prior to the devaluation. Â For 67,500 miles (less a 10% rebate), I’m going to fly in…let’s just say ‘style.’ Of course, I’ll have trip reports for that and my return flight on Singapore Airlines (sadly, no suites), which I will be sharing with my friend Jacob.
Travel hackers are a really weird bunch. After all, who in their right mind would spend their time chasing deals that earn 1000 miles here or a slim 1-2 points per dollar spent? This doesn’t even count for all the time we spend feeding various obscure routings into award flight searches in order to find that “perfect” redemption that includes the newest plane model or an amazing lounge stop (you know who you are).
Busy day today.
Many people are logging into their Ebay accounts and seeing the following:
Thankfully, Ebay will be giving us one quarter to cash out our current bucks for gift cards, but earnings will stop next week.
/ht to Doctor of Credit readers, who prompted me to check my account.
Another one bites the dust….
Currently, Ebay is offering $50 Hotels.com gift cards for $40! Hotels.com has the best inventory of any OTA that I’ve seen, so this basically nets to an extra 20% discount on any hotel that you want, in addition to portal cashback and any other promotions Hotels.com may be offering at the time you book. You can find the deal here:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/50-Hotels-com-Gift-Card-Gift-Card-For-Only-40/152242949031
In my most recent post I explained how I’ve started to think about travel hacking in relationship to my finances. As my rate of credit card approvals has slowed drastically, I have shifted to other means of earning miles, specifically by manufactured spend.
Unfortunately, manufactured spend is not with out some real cost. If I spend more than I can put on all my cash back cards, each transaction is no longer cash-flow positive: on average, I spend $60 for every 10,000 miles I earn. That’s $60 I could be using to go see a concert of my favorite band, or $60 I could be putting towards my nest egg for when I decide to have a family. To put it in starker terms, in order to manufacture 1 million miles, it would cost $6000! Yes, that’s a lot of future free travel, but it’s also a hefty chunk of change.
I’ve been spending the last few weeks reading about financial independence and early retirement (colloquially known as FIRE; there’s a good subreddit for it) because of their natural intersection with travel hacking. Roughly, if the goal of financial independence is to save more, then travel hacking is an incredibly useful tool for those who travel a lot or have large families because of the way it can minimize expenses and free up money to save or invest.
I’ve been having a (private) love affair with fixed-value airline miles over the past few months, and I even went so far as to sign up for the JetBlue credit card in wake of the ridiculous promotion they were offering (from which I netted 75,000 JetBlue miles for a round trip flight that cost me $75). Doctor of Credit explains it well, but the appeal for getting the card was the combination of an (unlimited) 10% points rebate as well as the opportunity to earn Mosaic status after spending $50,000 on the card in a single year. Mosaic status offers unlimited free cancellations of both cash (refund to voucher) and award flights, which is amazing for planning domestic travel since I can speculatively book flights without fear of either not being able to take the flight or finding cheaper flights later on.
Last year, Bank of America started heavily marketing their “Preferred Rewards” program, whereby you can get increased rewards rates on credit card spending by holding certain balances with Bank of America and Merrily Edge. Doctor of Credit goes into all its gory detail (linked below), but roughly, you get bonuses of 10%/25%/50%/75% for having balances of $0/$20k/$50k/$100k.
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