[sam2426679]

I was also intrigued by that quote and find it rather dubious. Coincidentally today, I and 5 other family members are boarding business class international flights worth ~$60k cash, paid for with signup bonus points. This doesn’t even include the other tens of $thousands of redemptions we’re doing on both this trip and the rest of the year. This is also just side hustle/hobby-that-pays-for-itself “money,” in addition to the (not) “three orders of magnitude” faang income.

This was otherwise an interesting article.

[DrammBA]

I find it hard to believe you're getting almost 6 figures of value out of signup bonus points and other card reward redemptions in a year.

[MattGaiser]

A lot of that depends on how you value the flights (a lot of the benefit comes from being able to do international business class one way with points very easily, but those tickets being very expensive in cash), but it is pretty straightforward if you both optimize the earning, optimize the spend, and optimize the points programs.

To give you an example, a business class ticket from Seattle to Taipei with EVA (a very nice airline) is about $8000 round trip or $6000 one way. You can book it for 75,000 Aeroplan points one way. That is 1-2 credit card signups.

But Aeroplan also lets you have a stopover in the middle of a trip and lets you string together up to 6 flights and only pay based on the distance.

So you could do Seattle, do a layover in Taipei, have a stopover in Manila, stay a day in Singapore, and then land in Darwin Australia for 92,500. Which is closer to 2 credit cards, but still easily achievable in a month or two. But the value of that trip when I did something similar was closer to $12,000. Prices out at around $9000 for my test dates for the flights I did.

Now, you need to take many trips a year to do that as a single individual (which I am), but the referral streams for credit card signups are also very powerful, so get a Player 2 as it is called, and you can easily get 20-30% more on your signup bonuses and each person can also do the bonus.

And that is just business class. Once you start getting into First Class redemptions (hard to do, but the serious people manage it), the value can easily be the equivalent of a 12K for a simple round trip, yet alone stacking First Class products as many programs let you do.

Some of the pricing is also probably last minute. Points costs fall last minute, but cash prices rise. That boosts your cost per point, or CPP as we call it.

[bombcar]

Those $60k flights are almost certainly list/last minute pricing.

It’s even mentioned in the article that the airlines love flight miles because they can play with the redemptions to sell unused capacity for what the customer sees as real money. It also encourages loyalty.

[sam2426679]

Not last minute, booked a year out when they were ~$10k+ per ticket.

[jt2190]

The point is not “nobody on Reddit can ever make out well financially by chasing points, etc.” it’s “people who do this are sophisticated enough at trading that they could make even more money in the financial markets”. (We can debate whether that’s as fun as getting great plane tickets with points.)

[sam2426679]

IMO there’s a large overlap in the venn diagram of Redditors who are good at churning and Redditors who spreadsheet their way to retirement. For example, the podcast I linked to in another comment is from a guy who is FIRE’d.

[Spooky23]

It’s totally doable. I got my wife into this when we met in 2001. We vacationed 6 weeks a year through these various schemes.

If you have a source of business expenses, it’s easy. With regular consumer spend it’s more challenging but doable.

We empathized time at destination. If you’re going for value, you target airline and other upgrades. Our focus being time, we usually targeted hotel redemptions. There used to be a path to “launder” AMEX points and convert to a multiple of Hilton points through airline programs.

[sam2426679]

It's very possible when you play in 2 player mode and maximize your "pennies per point" redemptions. We're doing the $60k in flights to Japan, hotels for the extended family for 2 weeks (another several $thousand), and then multiple weekend trips throughout the year for a suite in an all-inclusive resort that goes for ~$2.5k per night (roughly another $20k total).

[soared]

How?

[sam2426679]

Everything I know, I learned from /r/churning. Although it can be pretty intimidating as a newbie; I was a lurker for a ~year before I was comfortable enough to start hitting SUBs.

If you're specifically interested in Japan flights, I recommend checking out this podcast: https://thedailychurnpodcast.com/ep-58-how-to-book-ana-japan...

As far as general advice, many people acquire Chase UR points predominantly for Hyatt and acquire Amex MR predominantly for flights. If you're in 2 player mode then you earn points a lot faster because you can refer each other.

[rexf]

It's not trivial to do. You have to save rewards points, learn transfer partners (and their booking sites), and be willing to book ~330 days in advance for certain flights.

[ghaff]

The value of points is sort of hard to determine.

I'm guessing (but could be wrong) that you would not actually have paid $60K for business class seats for your family had you not had points that would cover. (I have gotten really good deals using points for something I'd have paid for anyway--but it's been rare.)

[margalabargala]

Only sometimes. Depends how you use them.

If you have some specific flight that you pay for regularly, e.g. to visit family, then replacing that flight's average cost with points gives a concrete number on point value.

If you are using points to fly first class on a trip you would not be taking at all but for the point redemption, then the value gets a lot more muddled.

[ghaff]

Absolutely. If you use points for something you'd pay cash for otherwise, they're typically worth something like 1 to 2 cents per point. But a lot of people (and I've done this myself with upgrades now and then) treat them as more of less "free" money. Presumably the upgrade or whatever has some incremental value but we wouldn't have paid for it out of pocket.

[woobar]

Is $60K cash split between these 6 people? Then it is not that impressive.

If you want higher ROI on spreadsheet hobby start using it for your own financial/retirement planning. Playing with numbers in that field can change outcomes by hundreds of thousands dollars.

[sam2426679]

Don't worry, I'm doing that too. Mega backdoor, etc.