[willstrafach]

Not sure how much "willingness to pay" makes sense. This is more about taking advantage of money which would otherwise be left on the table. If you aren't going out of your way to spend on cards, and all you need to do is shift spending onto certain cards for certain purchases during the first X months in order to get a nice point bonus, seems like a nice way to get a free vacation.

[dwaltrip]

It isn't accurate to count it as $18k in realized value from cc points if you would have never spent that much on the thing without the points.

The actual realized value is the amount that one would have been willing spend on the thing with their _own_ money, if they didn't have the points.