In my most recentĀ 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.