Travel Hacking & Credit Card Churning 101 - How to travel around the world for free, forever

1. Travel Hacking explained in (approximately) 5 minutes: Hello, and welcome. My name is Josh, and I am so excited to show you how to travel around the world for free by getting hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions of frequent flyer miles and hotel points through this amazing thing called credit card turning. Instead of getting a measly 2% cash back like you would through most credit cards, I'm going to show you how to get thousands all the way up to tens of thousands of dollars of value. Just through credit card sign up bonuses. I've done this exact same thing for three different round the world trips over the past ten years. And by doing this, it saved me upwards of $40,000 worth of flights over all of these really long trips, and I can't wait to show you how to do the same. I believe strongly in sharing information as freely as possible, no matter if you've paid for this course or not. So I'm going to put as much juicy, wonderful information in this free intro video as I possibly can. And then if you're interested in this topic, you can feel free to sign up for the course. But I'm hoping to give you some value just right here right now. Speaking of right now, I believe that this is the perfect to start accumulating a ton of points and miles. The world has been by and large closed for the past year plus, and I think that there's a lot of pent up demand for travel. So, as soon as the world starts to reopen, guess what? Flights and hotels are going to be more expensive than ever. Because everyone's going to want to be going on that trip that they've been dreaming of, Well, they've been stuck inside for as long as they can remember. There's this huge amount of pent up demand for travel, and that's going to result in more expensive prices than maybe we've ever seen before. If you start collecting points and miles right now, you're going to be ready to take the trip of your dreams once the world reopens, and you're going to be able to offset more of these travel costs that are going to be higher than ever. And you'll be able to take this trip for free. You're close to free. And that is amazing. Okay, enough context, let's get into this thing right away. First of all, what is credit card churning? This is a great question. So there are various credit card companies in the United States that partner with hotels and airlines to give away large sums of points and frequent flyer miles for people who sign up for their new credit cards. Basically, big bonuses to get you to sign up for these new cards and then possibly fly these airlines more. What churning is is signing up for these credit cards and getting their large point bonuses. An example of this is this American Airlines credit card, which gives away 60,000 American Airlines miles. Now, you don't have to spend on anything special or just on American Airlines flights. You would just spend this on just normal stuff you'd buy anyway. Turning is doing this and then say, getting that first American Airlines credit card, spending that initial minimum spend amount to get the big point bonus, and then signing up for a different credit card, spending the minimum amount, getting that point bonus, and so on and so forth until you have so many points that you don't even know what to do with them. Let's go over quickly just how valuable these points can be. Okay. Let's start with this quick example of this old American Airlines offer, which was you'll get 60,000 American Airlines miles if you can spend $3,000 in the first three months of opening your account. Let's say you get this new credit card, you spend that $3,000 on groceries, going out to restaurants, whatever you normally buy. You now have 60,000 American Airlines miles. How much is this worth? Let's go over to American Airlines and see what we can spend the 60 k points on. Let's say that we want to go from San Francisco to Tokyo. Redeem Miles, and I don't know. Maybe we'll go later on this year. All right. What we see here is that for 60,000 points, we can fly in business nonstop from San Francisco to Tokyo. Great. Let's take a closer look into this. Looks like it costs a big old 60,000 miles plus $5.60. Highway Robert tell you. Now the way that we figure out how much this flight is actually worth is we need to see how much it costs in the real world. If you were to buy it with just regular old US dollars. We're going to head on over to Google flights and do this exact same search. Let's say we're going from San Francisco to Tokyo. One way in business, and we need to find this exact same flight. Okay. We found it the exact same flight that we would have booked at points. Wow. $5,200. Now, let's compare this value versus the value that you'd get from a 2% cashback credit card. I'm going to go here, and let's say you spent that same $3,000 and you got 2% cashback, which is pretty standard to get for a credit card these days? Yeah, that'll get you $60 worth of value. Now, I'm no mathematician, but it looks like $5,200 is a little bit more than 60. In fact, this is such a good deal, such a good redemption, such a good use of your money that you're actually coming out of this ROI positive. On just buying things that you would have bought anyway in normal life. You would get $5,200 worth of value just for spending $3,000 on groceries and everything else that you normally buy in life. This is the type of value that you should be getting from credit cards that you sign up for consistently over and over. So if you value travel as much as I do, or if you're looking to take this trip of your dreams that we were talking about before, once the world reopens and everyone can go wherever they want again. Man, I hope that happens. It's been too long Turning and signing up for these large credit card bonuses over and over is just the best way that you can spend your money. It's so outsized from the amount of value that you would get compared versus the other cashback credit cards that honestly, there's no comparison. Now, there's some warnings and some things to think about before you really get into this and start churning, especially around your credit score. We're going to talk about this in the next lesson and just go over all the things that you need to know before you start this, just to make sure that you don't get tripped over anything and that you know what you're getting yourself into. Without any risk, there wouldn't be any reward in this. So there is definitely some risk. And I want to talk about that, make sure that you're very clear about the types of risks that you can get into, as well as ways that this churning thing can go wrong. We're going to talk about that in the next videos, as well as a bunch of other topics ranging from finding out how much your points are worth, how to do this with a spouse, goal oriented churning as a concept as in first figuring out where you want to go and then figuring out the right points to get to go there. And other topics such as manufactured spending, credit scores, avoiding points expiration and incredible once in a lifetime redemption opportunities. I'm also going to show you how to actually spend these points is then we're going to go and literally book real flights using points on American Airlines, Delta and United. Just to show you the entirety of the process from start to finish, as well as where those sweet spots are in each of their award charts, where you're going to get the most value for your points. Either way, I hope that this was valuable for you. I hope you learn something. And I hope you sign up for the rest of the course. The next lessons are just jam packed with great information that I think will really get you to the point where you feel comfortable and to start traveling the world for free. That's what this is all about, anyway. Thank you so much for watching this. See in the next one. 2. Who isn't this course for?: Okay. Before we get too much further into this course, I just wanted to quick make a video telling you who this course isn't for. Unfortunately, credit card turning is just not for everybody, and it's totally okay if it's not for you. I just wanted to explain some of the risks and some of the things that you should think about before you really start signing up for a bunch of credit cards. First of all, and most importantly, if you do not pay off your entirety of your credit card balance, no matter how many credit cards you have in full every single month, this hobby is not for you. If you currently hold any credit card debt for more than one month, credit card turning is not for you. I hate to be so exclusionary, but I just want to be careful. As in, if you keep signing up for new credit card accounts and then not paying them off, guess what? The credit card companies are going to get way more money from you than you're going to get points from them. If you cannot meet the minimum spending requirements on a credit card in cash that you have right now, as in $3,000 in the first three months for, let's say, this credit card, for example, don't start stop, hold on, pay off all of your other credit card debt, and then come back to this course, and we'll get started again. Point number two, if you're planning on purchasing a house or a car within the next year, do not start credit card earning. You're going to take these five point hits every single time that you sign up for a new credit card, and that will temporarily lower your credit score. Now it will recover, and it will go higher at the end of all this. But if you're thinking of purchasing something big that you need a big loan for, you want your credit score right now to look as high as it possibly can. So, don't start churning just yet, get your loan for your house, buy your house, get your loan for your car, get your car, and then once you're done with all that, come on back here, and we'll get started. Third, and most importantly, if you're just a generally anxious person who worries about stuff a lot and is just going to keep thinking in your own head that like, Oh, what happens if all these points disappear? What happens if I don't meet the minimum spend? What happens if these credit card companies disappear? What happens if American Airlines just disappears out of the world overnight? If you feel like you're a generally very anxious person, Credit card turning is honestly probably not for you. This course is generally for people who are very confident and have a good handle on their personal finances. If that's not you, that's totally fine, no judgment here. I'm just saying this probably isn't the course for you. With all that being said, let's get started. 3. How much are all these points worth?: I know how much these points that I'm getting from the credit cards that I sign up for are worth. This is a really good question, and one that can be best explained by this concept of sense per point. Sense per point is this metric used in the churning community to give a value for each individual point, let's say one frequent flyer mile with American Airlines. How many cents is that worth in the real world? There are a lot of different resources that you can use for this, but I'm just going to use the points guy as an example. They have this big spreadsheet that shows you how much you can expect each one of these different points to be worth? They update this every single month. You could do it yourself, but honestly, just use the stuff that's available on the Internet. So if we go down here, we're going to keep scrolling down until we get to American Airlines, and it looks like this is worth 1.4 cents per point. So what that means is that if you had 1,000 points, this would be worth 1,400 cents or about $14. 10,000 points, $140. Is this making sense? I hope so. The reason that I'm telling you all this is that we're going to go through a couple of different examples to show you why this cents per point metric is useful in knowing whether or not what you're spending your points on is actually worth the points that you're going to spend on it. I'm going to go through a bad example, a pretty good example and then a great example, all using American Airlines. All right. Let's get started. Let's say we wanted to fly from San Francisco to New York City and we wanted to spend points to do it. Let's take this flight for example. 26.5 thousand points plus $5.60 from San Francisco to JFK on American Airlines flight 16. Okay, great. Now the next thing that we got to do is we have to compare how many points this cost versus how much this exact flight would cost in the real world. So to do that, we're going to go to Google Flights. Search for the exact same things from San Francisco, New York City. Does search through all these until we find American Airlines flight 16, which happens at 1:00 P.M. American Airlines flight 16, it looks like the cost of this flight is $239. We're going to calculate our cents per point off of this. The way that you calculate is you're going to take the amount of money it would cost $239. We are going to divide that by the amount of points that it costs, which is 26,500. At the end of this, you're going to get a value. Then what you need to do is multiply this by 100 to get it to cents per point. Right now, it's just in cents and then we need to move the decimal place over two times. What this is showing me is that this particular valuation is about 0.9 of a cent per point. What we're going to do is we're going to look back at our valuation chart, and it looks like we should be getting 1.4 cents per point for each one of our flights. That means that this 0.9 is less than 1.4, which means that this is a bad use of our miles. We should just buy this one in cash instead of spending the points. Okay. So for our next example, we're going to look at a pretty good redemption. What we see here is that from Dallas Fort Worth to Hong Kong in the middle of November is 32.5 thousand miles, right? We see that this is a non stop from Dallas to Hong Kong takes about 17 hours, 17 hours, 32,500 miles. Now, we'll go back here. We'll find the exact same flight on Google Flights Dallas to Hong Kong, November 12, and it looks like it's about 1044. Bring up the old Handy Dandy calculator again, 1044/32500, multiply by 100. We go. You're getting 3.2 cents per point. So that makes this a great redemption, as in you're getting more than twice as much as the average value that you get for an American Airlines redemption. This one you should definitely spend points on. Okay. Let's do this exact same flight but in business. So you might look at this and say, Wow, 70,000 miles. That is a ton. But when we go and look at how much this actually costs in real life in business class, it costs $4,625. Let's do this math again. So we take the amount of cost, four six, two five divided by how many 0.70 thousand by 100. Okay. Look at that, we're getting almost twice as much as the other redemption, just because we're in business. Business class is incredibly expensive. But you're going to be flying American Airlines business life flat seat, getting the sweet champagne as soon as you get on board, getting to hang out in the business lounge, all this other stuff that makes this flight very valuable. So those are three quick examples just to show you how valuable these points can actually be. The first one is a really bad use of your points. You'd be getting less than $0.01 per point. The second one just flying regular economy gets you a great redemption. It's not the best you could ever get. It's not the best use of your points, but it's good. And then this third one, flying in business class, getting this amazing once in a lifetime experience for just 70,000 miles. That's great. That is a Josh approved redemption. You're getting great value out of these points, and you're getting to go somewhere amazing for absolutely free. As you can see, the value of these points start to stack up pretty fast. I've gotten at least $40,000 worth of value out of just churning credit cards over the past handful of years, and especially during those three one year round the world trips that I took, pretty much for free. So that's real quick, how you get a valuation of these points, how you figure out how much each of them are worth. Next up, we're just going to go over some real quick recommendations of what cards I would get if I was starting totally fresh, didn't have any real travel credit cards. Which ones would I get first. Okay. Coming up in the next lesson. 4. The single greatest class project on Skillshare.: Welcome to the introduction of the class project. Now, I know you're hearing class project, and all you can think is, Oh, no, some homework, and this is going to be boring and terrible. But I can tell you this class project is going to be different. It's going to be more fun. And I think, honestly, it's going to be one of the few on this platform that you actually do. And that's because this class project is just planning your dream vacation and then figuring out how to get it for free. That's all you have to do. And I think that's a pretty good project. And at the end result of this, you're going to end up with hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of frequent flyer miles and points, and you're going to be able to take your entire trip for free, no matter what it is. So, let's get started with this. Over the course of this class, you're going to see me plan a couple of trips all the way from start to finish, including picking out destinations, deciding how long I'm going to spend in each of these destinations, and then determining which credit card offers to take advantage of. That we can take the entirety of the trip for free. That's exactly what I want you to do with me as you're following along through this course. I want you using the spreadsheet provided, as well as the custom maps that you're going to make to plan your perfect, amazing dream vacation. It could be one week just going to New York City or three weeks across Europe with your entire family or maybe a three year long nonstop travelthon where you go to 100 countries and just never come home for the entirety of the trip. It doesn't matter what your trip is. It just matters that you have a plan first before you start signing up for credit cards. This is called goal oriented turning, and this is a really important concept that we're going to talk about a lot throughout this course. The reason that this is important is because without a goal, you're just going to be collecting points like Pokemon. You're not really going to have any good plan in mind. You're just going to be getting sort of random credit card offers and random hotel points and things like that. And you'll end up with a bunch of points that you might not even use. And that's the worst case scenario. So what you want to do first is come up with the plan for where you want to go, what you want to do, figure out the right credit card offers to get exactly the amount of points that you need to take the trip that you want to take. So what I want you to do now is open up your link to the dream trip planner spreadsheet that's down below. This is a Google document. So once you're there, you're going to have a couple of options of how to actually use this. At first, when you open it, you won't be able to edit or change any of the values inside of there. And that's because this is a template that's going to be used by everyone in this course, so I can't have you editing the template. So what I need you to do is make a copy of this or download a copy of this. So, for those of you who have Gmail accounts, this will be super easy. All you have to do is click file on the top, go down to make a copy, and then just click Okay, and this will make an editable copy for you of this template. Then you can change whatever you want. For everyone else out there who doesn't use Google, you're just going to click File, download, and then just choose whichever format is best for you. I would imagine most of you are going to be using microsoftic el, but there's also all these other open document formats. Whatever works for you, there's a way to use it. Okay, great. So now that you have a copy of the spreadsheet, the next thing that you're going to do is probably the most fun part of this class. And that is creating your dream trip map. For this, I'd like to use the service Google My Maps. But again, this is only available to people who have Gmail accounts. For everybody else out there, I'd really recommend that you use the service Trip Happy. This is a super simple service to use. It's available for free on the Internet. You don't have to sign up with an e mail or anything like that. Just go to the link down below for trip happy and entering in all of your destinations one after another, as you sort of scroll around the map and just do a little day dreaming. So what I want you to do now is go around the map and put all of your destinations in and then connect them all with a line. How about seeing the Colosseum of Rome or the Eiffel Tower or maybe just soaking in the amazing onsens of Tokyo? And then you can come home after that. Why not all of it? This is your dream. So whatever you've always wanted to do, that's what you're going to put in here. So don't be afraid to dream big because all these flights are going to be free anyway. Might as well go big. So make your map, connect all the destinations in the order that you want to see them, and then go back to the spreadsheet and enter in all the destinations in that order. And then follow along over the next couple of lessons, and I'll walk you through this entire process of how we go through adding in the destinations, figuring out which points that we need to get to get from one place to another, and then we'll match that up with the right credit card offers to be able to get the right points or miles, to be able to take this entire trip for free. We're going to do all of this together. And at the end of this course, I want you to have this project completed as in a fully filled out spreadsheet listing all of the destinations for this dream trip that you want to go on, how many points each of the flights cost in between, how many points you want to spend on hotels in the area, and then a list of which credit cards you're going to get in which order to get the points to be able to take this trip for free. The next lesson is going to be showing you an example solo around the world trip of doing this entire process top to bottom. This is super exciting. I can't wait to get started. I think we're going to have a blast doing this. Let's get going. 5. What cards would I get first if I was just starting out?: Today, we are going to become points millionaires, and I'm going to show you exactly how. I get asked all the time, Josh, if you were just starting out and you didn't really have a particular trip in mind, what credit card would you get first? Where would you start? And how would you accumulate points as fast as possible? I'm still a big advocate for just getting the points that you need to take the trip that you want to go on. But let's say that I was going on a big round the world trip. And I knew that these points were going to be valuable, no matter where I went, at some point, I just needed to get as many as possible as fast as possible. What would I do? This is a good question. To understand the strategy, we first have to understand Chase's 5204 rule. This is Chase's anti churning rule. This is a rule that Chase created because honestly, Chase Bank has most of the best credit card offers. And if they didn't build in some sort of way to prevent people from just getting credit card after credit card after credit card and slow it down a little bit, they'd probably start losing a lot of money on their credit card offers, as we've already seen with how valuable these points are. So the way that this rule works is you can only apply for a Chase credit card if you've gotten less than five credit cards in the past 24 calendar months. So the way that this looks in real life is, let's say that apply for credit card one here, Chase card, credit card two, another Chase card, three, a city bank card, for a Barclay card, and then number five, another Chase card. These would be my five credit cards, and it doesn't matter if they're chase cards or not, they still add up to this 5204 rule. If I want to go to apply for a Chase card, I would be automatically denied because I've just applied for too many credit cards in too short of a period of time. The only way to get out of 5204 is just to straight stop applying for credit cards entirely. And that's not really a thing that us Turners like to do all that much. We like to accumulate these point bonuses and these points as quickly as possible and as often as possible. So let's say for this example that I spend $2,000 a month every single month like clockwork. I spend this on my gas, groceries, restaurants, Anything else I buy for that month. But for me, every single month, I spend $2,000 a month. The first card that I would want to get is this Chase A fire Preferred card, and this is a great place to start. These points can be transferred around to a ton of different partners. They can just be used for almost anything. They're like the Swiss Army knife of points. So right now they have their best ever offer of 80,000 bonus points after you spend $4,000 in the first three months. I'm spending $2,000 a month. That means this is going to take me about two months to get these points. If we go back to the spreadsheet, you'll notice a second tab at the bottom called churning credit card Tracker. And that's why I'm going to document all this information to show you exactly which credit cards I'm going to get until we reach 1 million points. Let's say that we applied and we're accepted for the Chase Sapphire preferred 80,000 point bonus card today. The minimum spend requirement is $4,000. The bonus is 80,000 points. Great. So now, two months pass, I've spent $2,000 a month. I fulfilled that minimum spend requirement. It's time to get a new credit card. So remember, because of 524, we're going to be only applying for Chase credit cards for the foreseeable future. So next up, I think we should probably get this Marriott card that seems really valuable. It's 100,000 bonus points after you spend $3,000 in purchases, right away. Okay, great. So again, we're spending $2,000 a month, so we're going to finish this one up in two months. That means that on September 1 of this year, we're going to be getting another credit card. I remember this great United Quest card. This credit card has a kind of high minimum spend requirement of $5,000, but the points, the United points are really, really valuable. So I think we're going to go for that one next. And plus this is over the Christmas time, we're probably going to be spending a little bit extra. Okay, great. We're all done with that United card a couple of months later. As you can see, we're already a quarter of the way there to how many points we need to reach 1 million and become millionaires in the points game. So let's keep going. More Chase cards away. All right, let's get some more United miles. This is 65,000 bonus miles after you spend $3,000 in the first three months. So pretty typical pretty typical card. One more Chase card to go before we move on to something else. I think we're going to get this IHG Rewards Club premier credit card. This is honestly a great deal, 125,000 bonus points, and you get a reward night. It's only got an $89 annual fee. This is a great card and we're gonna be able to stay at really nice hotels for a pretty long time. Okay, great. We are all done with Chase cards for probably a very long time. We're already at 450,000 points. Let's keep going. What I'd do next is I'd probably start getting a bunch of American Airlines miles. As you can see here, Barclay card is basically giving them away for free. You can earn 60,000 American Airlines miles for just making one purchase. That's all you got to do. There's no real minimum spend. That means that we can apply for two credit cards back to back. Okay, at the exact same time that I got that A card that had no minimum spend requirement, City Bank American Airlines card. You'll learn 50,000 advantage miles after spending 2,500 in the first three months. That looks great. We're over halfway there. I think next, we should probably start going for American Express. There's this Hilton honors American Express surpass. You get 130,000 points for spending 2000. Sue. After that, we're going to go for more Marriott points with American Express Sue. 125,000 points after you spend $5,000 in the first three months. Seems like a good deal to me. All right. Let's keep stockpiling Hilton points. We can get another 80,000 for just spending $1,000 in the first three months. Let's do that. Okay. There's one more Hilton credit card that we could still get, so might as well. It gets you 150,000 Honors points after spending $4,000 in the first three months. Okay, we are officially points millionaires. Just a bit over a year after we started this little hobby. I'm going to quick add up the expected value of all these points, and then I'll show you how valuable this is versus how much our minimum spend was for the year. And then we'll compare that once again versus cashback. Okay, all done with the math there. It looks like for all of our Chase points, we're going to get about $1,600 worth of value, Marriott and 800, United, a little over 800 IHD about 600, American Airlines, about 1,500 and Hilton a little over 2000. Now, these are just the expected values. We can stretch these a lot further by booking more expensive things or using any of the other strategies that I outline in this course of how to really make these points go as far as possible. This is about the baseline value that we're going to get with them, the lowest. I just want to be more conservative. As truthful as possible about the average values of these. Now, We spent $32,500 getting all these credit card point bonuses over the past about year and a half that netted us a bit over 1 million points, and we've gotten about $9,610 worth of value out of this. That's just about 30% cash back on just these credit card purchases. Getting close to $10,000 worth of free travel on just buying stuff that you would normally buy in your regular life anyway. This is how I would start. This is how I would think about credit card churning if I were starting totally new, totally fresh today. I hope this was helpful. If you have questions or other things, throw them down below in the discussion, and we'll see in the next one. 6. A solo trip around the world for free : This lesson is where the rubber starts meeting the road. This is where we start really figuring out how many points to get, which credit cards we need to get. A lot of the juice is in this lesson. So what we're going to do is we're going to take this example round the world trip. We're going to go through each of these destinations one by one and figure out if we should spend points on this flight or if we should just buy it with money. And if we are going to spend points, which airline we're going to spend those points on, and get as few as possible these credit cards so that we can go on this trip as quickly as possible and get the most value out of our money that we're spending anyway and get the most value out of the points that we're spending. You're going to get this idea of how to do this pretty quickly, and then you're going to be able to start doing this for your own trip. And at the end of this, we should have a good idea of which flights we're going to want to spend points on, and which ones we should probably just buy with cash. And we'll know which airlines points we need to get so that we can get the right credit card so that we can take this amazing trip as close to free as possible. So, the trip looks kind of like this. We're leaving from Chicago. That's where we're starting. And we're flying from Chicago to Sydney. Okay. Sydney up to Tokyo, Tokyo to Singapore, Singapore to Rome, Rome to Paris, Paris, all the way back to Chicago. That sounds like a pretty great trip to me. We're spending just over three weeks on this trip. Now, there are two ways to figure out how much a flight would cost in points. One of those ways would be to go through each individual airlines website and just click a bajillion buttons and actually go through the entirety of the booking process to look for the exact dates and the exact times and everything. The major problem with this is that it's going to take you forever. You're going to go through American Airlines and you're going to go through Chicago to Sydney. On the first search. Wait a while as it's loading. Okay. Just waiting for it to load. Just waiting. It's got slower. Okay, great. Here we are. Looks like it'll cost us about 40,000 miles to get there, and it'll be an incredibly long flight. Okay. That's one way to do it. Or you could use a tool like award hacker. Now, what award hacker does is it brings in all of the award charts for basically all of the airlines on Planet Earth and puts them into one website so that way you can just quickly search from any one destination to the other destination. How much would it cost to fly this route using points across any different airline. And it'll sort them from cheapest to most expensive, which is really helpful. So it looks like for this one, from our first flight from Chicago to Sydney. It looks like the cheapest is either going to be United Airlines miles or American Airlines miles. We don't really have any place to start, but it looks like we'll just go with United Airlines for this one. Okay, so 40,000 points. That's what we're going to put in back in the spreadsheet. Airline is United Airlines or UA for short. Now we've got to figure out what the real world value of this is. Now, this is important to figure out if this flight is something that we should just pay for with money as then we're going to get a low cents per point or if this flight is very expensive and it would be valuable for us to use points to book it. Let's check it out. Chicago to Sydney. It looks like this is around 800 to $1,000 for any given time of year, so I'm going to put it somewhere in the middle. Let's say $900. This one is where 2.2 $0.05 per point, so that's a pretty good redemption. We're probably going to want to spend points on this one. All right. So from Sydney to Tokyo. Okay. Now, from Sydney to Tokyo, it looks like it's only going to cost 20,000 Japan Airlines miles, which is pretty good. But getting Japan Airlines miles is next to impossible. I don't live in Japan. I don't really have access to any Japanese credit card. So that's probably out of my reach. But what is in my reach is British Airways miles or United Miles. Either of them would be just fine. We're already getting a United card for the first one, so we might as well spend some more United miles on this one. It looks like it's 30,000. Great. Let's figure out how much this one costs from Sydney to Tokyo. 600 to 700. There are some cheaper ones that take longer. Looks like we're right around this 550 to $600 range. $600. Okay, $0.02 per point, a pretty good redemption. This one's right in the middle where we might want to just buy this one using dollars or we might want to use points on this one. We'll figure that out in the next step. Okay, Tokyo to Singapore. Probably starting to get the gist of this. So if you just want to speed ahead, that's what I'm going to do with this video and show you the end result of all this. I just wanted to stop here for just a second to show you this example. So one of our flights is from Rome to Paris. And once you start getting into Europe, getting from one major hub in Europe to another is usually really, really cheap and honestly not worth spending points on. Here's a perfect example of this. The cheapest flight that we can find from Rome to Paris, using points is about 9,000 British Airways miles. In the real world, it only costs about $40 to get from Rome to Paris. So we're definitely just going to spend money on this one, and we're not going to use points. It's just not worth it. It's only 40 bucks. All right. And for our last one from Paris to Chicago to complete our full round the world trip experience. Looks like about $500. And how many points would that cost from Paris to Chicago, what you want to do now is for anything that has a very low cents per point, as in things that are kind of not worth your points. You should just delete those out of the spreadsheet because you're just going to spend money on those and you're not going to spend points. I'm going to toss these two here. As in Singapore to Rome wasn't a very good redemption, and Rome to Paris wasn't a very good redemption. So what that leaves us with is we are going to end up using points for almost all of the flights here, most of them to complete around the world trip. And those legs are from Chicago to Sydney, Sydney to Tokyo, Tokyo to Singapore, and then at the very end from Paris to Chicago to come back home. So this 25 day trip, the flights that we're currently looking at booking are worth about $2,350. We're going to spend just under 100,000 points to do it. And that leaves us with our overall cents per point value of about 2.3. I think we can do a lot better on this particular itinerary, but I wanted to show you a very typical trip and how you could really stretch your points. So what this is looking like is that we're only going to really need to get two different credit cards to make this whole round the world trip happen, which is amazing. We're going to need to get a United Airlines credit card and an Alaska Airlines credit card. I'm going to show you the exact deals that we're going to pick out to make this happen, as well as answer some of the more common questions that some people might have around turning credit cards. In the next video. And then right after that, we're going to start talking about hotels, which is a very interesting, very deep topic, but one that can be explained very simply in a way that I think you'll understand. So if you haven't already finished up your spreadsheet, go through all the different destinations that you want to go to on your big dream trip and figure out which ones are worth spending points on. And then for the ones that are under, just delete them out of the spreadsheet, and just remember, we're just going to spend cash on those. Okay. I'm really excited for the next couple of lessons, and we're going to start on those right away. See you then. 7. Credit card offers to take a free trip around the world: Okay, now we're going to go and pick out exactly which credit card offers that we want to apply for so that we can get the amount of points that we need to fly around the world for free. So, it looks like if I add these up, that's 32,500 Alaska miles. Alright, if I'm doing that right. And 70,000 United Airlines miles. That's our target. That's our goal. That's how many points that we need to be able to fly around the world for essentially free. And we're going to focus on two particular credit card offers for this. But you're probably asking now, where do you find these credit card offers? How do you know which ones are the best? And how do you know which ones are still relevant or Where do you even get this information? So every single month, I'm going to add a new video to this course. That is going to tell you all the best credit card offers that have happened in that past month or things that are going on right now. If you're wondering how to find the best credit card offers to get the points that you need for your trip, scroll all the way to the bottom of this course. Each one of these are going to catalog the five best credit card rewards offers for the month, as well as having a bunch of other links to other websites that'll tell you about the other credit card offers that are kind of okay? But for the most up to date information, go all the way to the bottom. Right now, we're just at the very beginning of May 2021. And the best credit card offers for what we're doing are going to be this Alaska Airlines credit card, and you'll get 40,000 bonus miles if you can spend $2,000 on just stuff you'd buy normally in the first 90 days of opening your account. This is perfect. 40,000 miles. We only need $32,500 Sue. And it comes with a companion pass. We'll talk more about all those fringe benefits in a different lesson. And then for the other one, the 70,000 United Airlines miles. We're going to go with this brand new United Quest card. So you can get up to 100,000 bonus miles. This is the biggest best United card out there, and it's got a pretty hefty annual fee of $250, but it offsets that fee really, really well. So if we can spend $5,000 on just regular stuff in the first three months of getting this card, we'll get 80,000 bonus miles. So that'll give us more than the 70,000 that we need to travel around the more free plus a little bit extra. And if we spend another 5,000 on this card, we'll get an additional 20,000 bonus miles. That's pretty cool. I don't know if we're actually going to make it there. That's a lot of money to spend on just one card. We could complete two or maybe three more cards with that amount of spend. So it might not be worth it. But for the annual fee of $250, 125 of that half of that is offset immediately with getting $125 of annual United purchase credit, plus you get two 5,000 mile anniversary award flight credit. So that means that you're going to get 5,000 miles back whenever you book an award flight on nited.com. So that's an additional 10,000 miles for us that we're going to use right away. This is the perfect credit card for what we're doing. Plus, you get all this other stuff like you're going to get global entry, TSA pre check. Again, more stuff that I'm going to cover later on in the course. Very important things. But these are all very valuable things, and it more than offsets the $250 annual fee. The way that I would think about this is I would probably apply for the United Quest card first because it's the biggest point bonus and it has the biggest minimum spend. I know that this is going to be the hardest one for me to get the points from. Then after I finished the minimum spending and I got the points on that Chase United card. I would then go back to that Alaska offer and apply for get it, spend the 2000, get the points, and then we'd have enough points to book this amazing 25 day long trip around the world that we would have gotten for spending $7,000 on credit cards. Remember, we got that $7,000 figure from needing to spend $5,000 on the United card and then another $2,000 on the Alaska card to get the points. $7,000, multiply that by 2%, which is the normal cash back amount that you'd get anywhere else. $140 of value from that. Not great. Now, if we take the same amount, the 2,350 of real world value as in the amount that these flights would actually be worth in the real world for the points that we're going to spend for them. Divide that by 7,033%. That means that, essentially, you are getting 33% cashback on these two credit cards that you're getting, which is way, way, way more than you'd get on any other cash back credit card. And honestly, this is just an okay redemption. This is nothing special. Okay, so you've watched me figure out exactly which two credit cards I need to take my trip around the world. Now it's your turn to do the same. Add up all the points you need across the different airlines that you need them for and then scroll all the way down to the last one in the course and find the most recent month and the best credit card offers for that month down there in that video. We'll also have links to other great credit card offers down there. Everything that you're going to need to put all your trip together is in that video. I just want to make sure that you have the most up to date offers. These credit card offers change all the time. So it's really important to keep up to date. So that's it for flights. We're moving on to hotels next, and a bunch of other great topics are coming up really soon. Thanks so much for watching catch you in the next lesson. 8. How to think about hotel points: When you look online for hotel credit card offers, you'll often see them touting insane point offers, 125,100 50,000 point offers. They're crazy. They're giving you this many points because honestly, Hilton points, IHG points, Marriott points, they're just not worth that much. We'll go back again to the Point sky average valuation chart, and we'll see that ISG is worth half of a cent per point on average. Marriott just under $0.01 per point, Hilton not much better than IHC. Most of these hotel points are not very valuable. With that being said, there are two ways to really squeeze a lot of value out of your hotel points. Option number one, finding a really cheap hotel by points and staying there a very long time. There are hotels that you can defer as cheap as 5,000 to 7,500 points per night. Let's take for example, the best Marriott credit card to offer that's available right now. If spending $3,000 in the first three months, you could get 100,000 mayo points. And what you could spend those 100,000 points on is staying for more than two weeks at one of the cheaper mayo properties. For example, this one here in Penang Malaysia, you could book this for 14 nights for 90,000 points per stay. As in you'd still have 10,000 points left over to use after this. So that's my personal favorite way to really make my points go a long way. I'd like to say at the cheaper hotels so that way I can travel for longer. And honestly, any of these Marriott, Hilton or whatever hotels, they're all going to be better than the hostels that I usually sleep in anyway. Now, the other way to think about getting a ton of value out of your points is staying just a few nights, but at their most incredible once in a lifetime, insanely expensive hotels. A great example of this strategy is at the wonderful, amazing epic Park Hyatt Tokyo. This is actually where they filmed Lost in Translation. This hotel is incredible, beautiful, right in the middle of Tokyo and about 60 stories in the air. It's a pretty expensive hotel. The suite here goes for about 800 to $900 per night, and this is even in the off season, or you could spend 30,000 points to get a night at this hotel and get about $900 back for your points and have some leftover. These two things just about sum up how I think about hotels. I'm either going to take them and stay in a cheaper hotel for a very long period of time to really stretch out the value of those points. Or I'm going to blow it all on these once in a lifetime experiences like staying at the Park High at Tokyo, which I did stay at, and it was magical. There's significantly less nuance when it comes to booking hotels with points. As in, you're just spending these points to book hotels, and that's just how much they cost. There's no way to really spend marry out points on non Marriott hotels. There's just not as much nuance as there are with flights. So that's about all there is to say. Either stay in one place for a really long time and get a lot of value out of your points for the amount of time that you can spend there or book an incredible once in a lifetime experience. Anything in between is just going to be a total waste of your points, and you're not going to get very much value. See the next one. 9. How to keep track of all your points: Might be thinking right about now. Josh, I've got 1 million points. And they're across a bunch of different places and a bunch of different airlines, a bunch of different hotels. They're all over the place. How do I keep track of all these points? How do I make sure that they're not about to expire? And how do I remember all these little benefits that each one of these credit cards gives me. Let me introduce you to award Wallet. I'm going to show you exactly how the interface works here. So I'm going to go into award wallet. I'm logged into my account. I'm not trying to break here. I'm just showing you that I actually do this stuff and that this is actually the tool that I use. So here we are on the award wallet home page. And from this, you can see all of my different accounts. I have a Chase credit card. I have some old Alaska Airlines miles. I got a bunch of American airlines miles. Things like that. All of this adding up to just over 1 million points. What this service award while it does is every night, it goes out and connects to every single one of these. It goes into your United account, it goes into your American Airlines account. Everything, logs in, pulls out all the information in there, for example, how long you have until each one of these points expires, how many points you have right now, how many points have been added since last time it went out and checked, as well as reminding you that you have these free night rewards that sometimes come with different credit cards such as my Hyatt free night, as well as my IHG free night. It's just a dashboard for all of your different points, miles, everything, no matter where they come from. And after you've applied for a handful of credit cards, it just honestly gets pretty difficult to keep track of all of these different points all the time. I'm going to put a link down below for award wallet. I would highly, highly recommend the service for keeping track of all of your various points, miles, and everything else. There's not really any other tools out there that do it as well as award wallet does. And honestly, I think it's the perfect tool for bringing all of your points into one dashboards that way you know how much of everything that you have. Award wall is great. That's all for this video, keeping it short. This is how you keep track of your points and miles. 10. Let's talk about credit scores: Modern credit score is essentially black magic. And honestly, it dictates way more of your life than it should. I think people put a lot of their own self worth into what their credit score number is. But, in fact, this incomprehensible, unclearly calculated number, called the credit score is actually just a number that tells lenders how likely you are to pay them back if they lend you any money. And a credit card is just an extension of this. It is a way to lend money in small amounts rapidly to individual people like you and I. As we were talking about at the beginning of the course, what happens when you apply for a new credit card is that your credit score will take a small hit of five points. And it doesn't matter whether or not you get approved or declined for this credit card. The reason this happens is that your credit score is being checked by an outside third party source. And it just takes this little hit, essentially saying, we're going to ding you a couple points because now you are going to be applying for additional credit. It's a conservative way to ensure that you can apply for a whole bunch of different lines of credit from a bunch of different places without eventually your credit score going low enough to prevent you from just applying for 500 credit cards and three houses and two boats and two car loans all at the exact same time. What then happens over time is your credit score will slowly recover. And then, due to the way that credit scores are calculated, you will eventually have a higher credit score than when you started before you applied for this credit card. A credit score can range all the way from 300 all the way on the high end to 85850 being an absolutely perfect credit score. 300 being incredibly low, nobody would ever lend you any money under any circumstances. Mine usually sits at around 800 to eight 15 at any given point in time, and seven 50 is a pretty average to good credit score. Seven 50 is the minimum that you'll need to be at to start credit card turning. So let's go over exactly how a credit score is calculated. Now, about a third of it is based off of your payment history, as in how often you have paid off the full balance of any loan that you've had for your entire life. The way this shows most often in real life is, how often do you pay off your full balance on your credit card at the end of the month every single month, as in how many times have you done. And if you've gotten a home mortgage or a car payment, how frequently you pay off the amount that you need to pay off. Now, with this being one third of your credit score, this can take your credit score really, really quickly. If you miss even one or even worse two payments in a row, your credit score is going to be reduced by 50 to 100 points. And that is a ton. That'll essentially put you out of the range of being able to get any of these credit card offers that we've been talking about this whole time. Just like I said, upfront, you have to pay off all of your credit cards in full at the end of every single month or else churning is not for you. The second part of the way a credit score is calculated, and it's about a third of your credit score is your revolving credit usage or how much you owe at any given point in time. It's how much you borrow each month, as in how much you spend on your credit cards each month, versus how much total available credit that you have. Now, this is why getting a significant amount of credit cards does not negatively impact your credit score. Let's say that you're borrowing only $2,000 each month, But you have $200,000 of available credit. That means that you're only using 1% of your available credit every single month, even though you've been allowed to have $200,000 of credit. So even though you could buy a couple of cars every single month if you wanted to, you're not. So that shows you as being a more trustworthy lender. It means that you're getting more and more available credit over time, but you're still spending that same amount. So this is how applying for a bunch of these credit cards won't actually take your credit score. It'll make it better. The next up is about 10% to 15% of your credit score, and this is the average length of your credit history. The way this is calculated is it just adds up how long you've had each credit card or mortgage that you've had for your entirety of your life, over time. So let's say that you got one credit card ten years ago, and then the only other credit card you got was today. That would mean that the average length of your credit history is five years. Let's run a different example. Let's say you got your first credit card two years ago, and then you applied for five credit cards just in the past couple of months. That would mean that your average length of credit history is just a couple of months, which means that you're going to be losing a lot of credit score points just on this one particular category. A clever way to get around this is just always keep the oldest credit card open, no matter what your first credit card that you ever got. Maybe you got it right when you got into college. Just always keep the oldest one open. And that way, your average length of credit history will always look like there's at least a couple of years of average length of credit history, no matter how many new credit cards you get. That way, this particular part of the credit score calculation won't take your credit score once you start applying for so many new credit cards. The remaining 20% is honestly a bit of black magic. I'm not convinced that anybody truly understands how these things are calculated. And I think that each of the three major credit reporting bureaus all do this kind of differently. Some places will report that this is about how mixed or diverse your accounts are. As in do you have a home installment and a car loan and a bunch of credit cards, or do you just have a bunch of credit cards? As in the more diversity that you have in your credit report, maybe the better credit score you'll have. And some other people say that this last 20% is just all about your recent credit history. Are you spending more than usual? Are you spending less than usual? Have you been applying for a lot of credit cards recently or have you been canceling a lot of credit cards recently? There's no real consensus on this, and none of the credit score companies are at all going to divulge how they actually calculate any of these things. There's not a lot of transparency in this industry, and I think they're all trying to keep their own secret sauce to themselves. So for this last 20%, honestly, if you just do the other three things well, your credit score is going to be just fine. I haven't really noticed any major changes on my credit score in a pretty long time. It's been very stable, even though I've applied for about 40 or so credit cards over the past five years. So to summarize this whole thing up, to have a good credit score, make timely payments, always, never, never, never miss a payment, have a long history of doing so, and keep the oldest credit card that you have and keep it open for as long as you possibly can. I really hope that this helps out. So that's it for credit scores. We'll see in the next one. 11. How do I actually spend these points? 101: Welcome back. We've got a brand new venue. It's very exciting. I'm up in my parents' Cabin in Wisconsin. The class continues today. And one of the most common questions that I get out of everything is just, how do I spend these points? Isn't how do I actually go on to American Airlines or Delta or anything else and actually spend the points to book a flight? It doesn't matter if it's a fancy flight and first class to Japan or just a flight from Chicago to Minneapolis. What we're going to do today is we're going to go over that exact process with the three major airlines in the United States, American, Delta, United. We'll probably go over how to spend your Chase points directly in the portal. And also where the buttons are for actually just transferring your points from Chase to any of the other airlines. So, let's get started with American A. We're working on my computer here, we're going to be switching back and forth between computer view and then back to me and back to computer. You know how these things work. You've seen a scale share course before. So before you can even start searching for flights or anything like that, you need some points, and the only way you can get points is by having an account with them, and yeah. You get the idea. Right on their home page, they have a button that says join a advantage. What this does is it brings you to sign up page, and then once you finish with it, it'll give you your American Airlines number. Process is the exact same for literally every other airline on planet Earth. It's probably just worth your time to go through most of the airlines that you might use and just sign up for an account with them. It just asked for your basic information, your e mail, first name, last name, your address, what city you're in, and a password to sign up for your account. I'll just show you an example of let's say that we're looking for a flight from San Francisco. To Paris. Now, if I want to spend miles on this account, I just have to click this little button up top here that says Redeem miles. I'm going to do all these as one ways, not round trip just for simplicity and time sake. One passenger departing, I don't know, let's say, September 8. Great. Si hit search. And what will pop up next are your available options for booking a flight. And you'll see that there are options in business class, there are options in main cabin. And you can sort by duration, departure time, or arrival time. So let's say that we just want to take the shortest flight that's also the cheapest. We're going to sort by duration. And it looks like this one has a stop over in Chicago. It's only 13 hours from San francisco, all the way to Paris, which is pretty good. And it's only 30,000 points one way. So I'm going to click on and then what it does is it gives you a summary of how many points this is going to cost. So 30,000 miles plus a big old $5.60. And that'll get you a flight all the way from San Francisco, California to Paris, France. All you have to do next is hit continue. And it'll ask you for your passenger information. So this is where you'd put in your your name, your frequent flyer number, your known traveler number, your birthday, everything like that. The same stuff that you'd put for booking any other flight. And then from here, all you got to do is pick out your seats. So let's say we want to sit. Here. You can use a website like Seat guru to find out which seats are good or bad on any given flight. All you got to do is enter in the flight number and the airline that you're flying, and it'll give you a map of where the good seats and the bad seats are on the airplane, and then you can pick up now. Here's our final page before we actually book the flight. It just summarizes everything in here. And we're leaving at 10:38. And our flight from San Francisco to Paris. The last thing that we would have to do is give it a credit card and then just hit Book now or pay now on this website. And we're done. Okay. That's American Airlines. Let's move on to Delta. Same process here, logging in first. We're going to look for the same flight San Francisco to Paris. Okay. So for this next flight, it looks like it's 35,000 points plus $6. It gives you this nice little map here. Going to click on this one and say, yes, I do want to travel on September 8. It just lays it out because some days it'll be like twice as expensive as other days. So it's worthwhile to look at that calendar to maybe fly on a different day or fly on a weekday instead of on a weekend to save yourself a bunch of points. So it looks like Delta has a nonstop, which is awesome, and it's 35,000 points plus $6. You're flying on Air France on this one. So this is a partner award. And this works very much the same as American Airlines. Just slightly different interface. The buttons are kind of in different places. So from here, we're going to select our seat, and there we go free seat. Save an exit. You always got to watch out for that. The airlines are always going to try to get as much money out of you as they possibly can. So just pay attention to your seat selection and to other things that you're doing while you're booking. They'll try to sneak in some fees or some other things inside of any book. Here's all the information that I'm putting in, as well as my method of payment. And then all I'd have to do is just hit complete purchase and we're booked. Alright. Let's Delta. Moving on to United. So first thing, sign in. And we are flying one way from San Francisco to Paris. Book with Miles. And we're flying on September 8, though. It looks like there are a couple of pretty good options. I'm going to once again sort by the shortest, but it looks like the shortest is about twice as many points as some of the other options. So I should be looking for around 30,000. This one looks like it's around 70,000 because it's got to stop in the middle of it. So, this particular flight is just more expensive. So let's keep going. Let's try to find one of the cheaper ones. Here we are. It's only about half an hour longer, and it's only 30,000 miles. Sounds good. Let's select that flight. Okay, so much like the same process as before. Except for this one's telling me that I don't have enough award miles to actually book this. Ignore that for a second. As you can see, it's got pretty much the exact same thing. We're going to go through review, and then we're going to give it our information about who I am, who's traveling. You can use award miles to book flights for somebody else. If you want to fly your grandma over to visit you while you're in Paris on your frequent flyer miles since you're going to have so many, that's totally possible to do. All you have to do is just enter in their information in the traveler section instead of your own. This is a way that you can gift flights to other people, family, friends. Someone really special to you, you know? You get the idea here. Now, let's solve this problem real quick of not having enough United points. It looks like I'm about 8,000 miles short. No problem. I do know that I can transfer miles from Chase to United. So I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. And then I'm going to show you the booking process of using Chase points to actually buy a flight or a hotel. All right. Logging in. So you get to this portal the same way that you would log in to pay your credit card. And you can see here, I've got my ultimate rewards points on the right side. So we're going to click that. Got about 90,000 of them right now. I've been spending them like crazy for this upcoming trip we're about to take. All right. And then you get to the ultimate rewards portal. Excellent. What we're going to do here is I am going to click on this little hamburger menu here in the upper left. I'm going to scroll down to transfer to travel partners. Now, as you can see here, United is one of the transfer partners. As in, I can transfer my Chase points one to one from Chase to United. So if I'm just a couple of thousand miles short on United, I can just eat up some of my chase points and send them over there. They'll be able to book that United flight. Now, I've already entered in my information, but the important thing to know here is that this transfer is instant. As in, it happens right away. So if I were to hit continue and transfer here, it would send 8,000 points over to United. And I could do the same with any of these other transfer partners that are in Chase. British Airways, world of Hyatt, IHG, Bonvoy, plus all of these other options. And we're going to go over this more in depth later on with the best use of your Chase points. I'll give you some of the hints, tips, and tricks that I use to get the most value out of my Chase points. And honestly, the best value of your Chase points is almost always transferring somewhere else. So there are lots of options. There are lots of places that you can transfer these points to. So that's how I would send 8,000 points from Chase to United. Now, the only thing that you have to know is once you do this, the points will not show up in your United account until you go back to United, click the sign out button, fully sign out of your account. And then sign back in. The points transfer is automatic. They just for some reason, don't show up with any platform unless you sign out and sign all the way back in, is how it is. Now, let's just go through using Chase's travel portal to show you exactly how to just spend Chase points directly for flights without having to transfer them to anywhere else. So here we go. It says that my 90,000 points are worth $1,360.25. What this adds up to is 1.5 cents per point. So that's how much these are worth directly with Chase. Now, if you were to transfer these points to almost anything else, you would definitely get $0.02 per point or even more. Generally, spending them directly on the Chase Travel portal is not going to be the best use of your miles, but it is really convenient. Don't be afraid to use it. Just know that you could probably get better value somewhere else. It's probably worth looking at these other transfer partners first. F you actually spend it directly with this Chase travel portal. All right. Let's say, we're going to go one way again, same flight, San Francisco to Paris. Nobody said this would be fast. It takes a while. Okay, great. Looks like we can fly the prestigious West jet for 33,000 points to be able to get from San Francisco all the way to Paris. It doesn't look like a great flight, but it is about the same price as most of the other flights. Now, an important thing to know about booking things directly with the Chase travel portal is that these same flights that you'll see in Chase are usually cheaper if you book them with cash directly with Google flights. They mark these flights up a little bit. So that way they can get more of your points when you're booking directly with them. In a sneaky thing that they do, but this is the only way that you can spend these points. From here, it's the exact same process as the other airlines. All we're doing is we're entering in our personal information is and who's traveling on this flight, and then we're picking out our seat right before we book, and then we're getting our confirmation number. Once you're done booking these things, you're going to get an e mail from whoever you book to us saying, Congratulations on spending all of your ward points to get this flight, and then they will email you a trip confirmation, which we'll have the information that you need to actually take your flight. As well as an e mail just saying, this is how many points you spent and how many dollars that you had to spend for the fees on top. So that's it. I hope that was helpful for you or anybody else out there who really has never spent these miles before, who has never bought an award flight before. I know, for me, the first time that I ever did this, I had no idea what I was doing. The process was pretty overwhelming and a little bit confusing. So hopefully, this was helpful. That's it for this lesson. Thanks so much. Seeing the next one. 12. A family trip to Europe for 4 for FREE: It is time to put it all together. Everything that we've learned, the whole course, all the stuff we've gone over, every single flight for an entire three week long trip to Europe for a family of four. I know from most people that I talked to that this is their dream trip as in getting every single flight for free for an entire trip for their whole fan. So that's what we're going to do, and I'm going to show you exactly which cards we're going to get in which order, and which flights we're going to book, and just do the whole process top to bottom. Let's get started. So before we get too far into this, I just want to explain to you what exactly this trip is. When we're taking it, where we're going. This is going to be a really cool trip to Europe. So, for this example, we're starting in Dallas, Texas, and we are going to head all the way over to Paris is going to be our first stop. Beautiful Paris, Eiffel Tower, amazing time. After Paris, we're gonna head down to Rome, see the coliseum, eat some delicious, Italian food. It's gonna be a great time. Right after that, we're gonna go see the amazing canals of Venice. It's beautiful there. Ah, I can't say enough good things. After that, we're in Munich, and we're in late September, so we might just be able to make it to October Fest. If we can get a table. October Fest is a blast. It's crazy. And Munich just bustling during this time of year. There's just a lot of cool things going on. All right. After Munich, we're heading to Dublin, Dublin to London, and then from London, all the way back home to Dallas. That's our full trip top to bottom. This is what that looks like in spreadsheet form, right? So we're going to start on 10 September on a Friday. Let me show you that on a calendar. On 10 September, on a Friday, we're leaving work, we're heading out early, and we're going to be traveling for this week this week and most of this week and coming back home on October 3. Weeks away for a family of four. That's what we're shooting. Be we're starting on the tenth. We're departing Dallas. And then we're staying for about four nights in every location except for the last one. So four nights in Paris, four nights in Rome, four nights in Venice, four nights in Munich, four nights in Dublin. Three nights in London and then flying from London all the way back home to Dalla. So right now, there's this absolutely incredible deal that Barclay cart is offering for 60,000 American Airlines miles for basically nothing. It's just off of your first purchase, and that'll give you 60,000 miles. So there's really no minimum spend requirement, which means you can go off and buy a cup of coffee or an ear of corn or anything that you can think of, and you will get 60,000 American Airlines miles. This seems like a pretty good place to start. So let's assume that you and your significant other each get this card, which means you're going to apply for this card, and each of you are going to get 60,000 points. So you're going to have a 120,000 points total. Looks like that's the exact amount that we're going to need to get a family and four from Dallas to Paris. Now, the flights look pretty good. There's no nonstop options, which is a little bit of a bummer. But still, we're getting there for. Let's figure out how much value we're getting out of these 120,000 points. Looks like on Google flights, if we look for this exact same flight, same day, same everything, that for four people, it costs about $4,133 or just over $1,000 a ticket. We're getting just under three one half cents per point, which for American Airlines is incredible. This is a great deal, great way to start things off. Now, it looks like on Google flights for these flights in Europe, that there are a lot of really cheap options. As in, we probably don't need to get a specific credit card with an airline to cover all these. We can just book these straight through the Chase travel portal. So for this Paris to Rome leg, it looks like that's only going to cost 60 or $70 a ticket. That's really cheap. Total all these up, we're spending about 18,000 points to get our entire family from Paris to Rome, using just our straight up Chase points. This is a really simple way for these really cheap flights. And honestly, if you transfer your points to somewhere else, you probably wouldn't be able to get this kind of value. I think this is the best deal that we're going to get right now to get all these flights for free. Remember, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to fly this entire itinerary for free for four people. All right. Let's move on and check out Rome to Venice. It looks like this is also a pretty cheap flight. We're gonna use Case points for this one. Total is just over 15,000 points. Now, we're starting to see that there are lots of good options for using Chase to book all these flights, I think we should probably get a chase Sephi preferred for both myself and the significant other that are going on this chair. Right now, it's one of their historically best offers, 80,000 points for just $4,000 in spend in the first three months. So since our minimum spend for the Barclay card was a big old zero to get 120,000 points, now we're just going to spend our money on the normal groceries, restaurants, everything else that we do in our lives, and get 160,000 Chase Sephi preferred points. Both of us will sign up for the card at the same time, and we'll just both spend the minimum spend over the next three Right now we have 160,000 Chase points. Excellent. A couple of months later. We're starting to accrue a bunch of points. Have these points, we can really start using them. Next up is from Venice to Munich. It looks like this is a bit more of an expensive flight, probably because of the proximity to October 1. The Germans call it October Fest, but it's not actually in October. It's in September. It's to celebrate the coming of October. These flights are going to be a little bit inflated, but still they're not that bad. It looks like we're going to spend just over 33,000 chase points to get this. Remember, we have a bank of 160,000 from the two credit cards that we got. So if you take a look at this, this one's worth about $500 for four people to get from Venice to Munich. Chase looks like a pretty great. Just do that. It's simpler. It's easier. We have a ton of Chase point. Okay. Next up is from Munich to Dublin. Again, these are really cheap flights. We're just looking on Google flights. It looks like these flights are about 62, $120 per person. Some of them on those really cheap airlines like Ryan Air, and some of them on slightly more expensive airlines that have a little bit more features and treat you a little bit better. So if we find a reasonable flight in here on a pretty good airline, we're spending about 37,000 points to be able to get a family of four from Munich to Dublin. This is a great deal. I think we're just going to book it on Chase. It's simpler this way. Again, this really shows the value of the Chase points. We're only getting 1.5 cents per point. But the flexibility of this chase travel portal means that we can book any flight on any carrier without having to transfer it to anybody or do anything fancy. And since we have so many, why not spend them. From Dublin to London. This is our second to last flight. So we're almost home. We're almost at the end of the trip. And so far we've gotten every single flight for free. So these are really cheap flights, like $50 a seat, something like that. Again, going with Chase points. We're just going to spend a few of them. All right. Now for the last one, this one's a little bit tricky. So we need to go from London to Dallas for a family of four, and we've got to figure out what the cheapest option is. I'm just going to quick search on award hacker to see who has this route, the cheapest. We're going from London. To Dallas. Looks like the cheapest route for this by a mile is British Airways, which is great. Let's take a look for these British airways flights and see how much it would cost for a family of four. Okay, great. Only 65,000 miles. No problem. How do we get these? So we're just going to look up and see, and see what a British Airways card would get us. All right. So it looks like their best offer right now is 50,000 vios is in their frequent flyer mile, if you spend 3,000 within the first three months. Well, no problem at all. We'll pick one of those up, and that'll get us most of the way there. The flight for four people costs 65,000 points. So for the last $15,000, we're just going to transfer 15,000 Chase points from Chase to British Airways to cover that remainder. All right. Transfer to travel partners. And all we've got to do is go to British Airways, hit transfer points, type in $15,000. And when I hit this button, what will happen is it'll transfer 15,000 points from Chase to British Airways. Now remember, to make those points actually show up in your British Airways account, and this is the same for any place that you transfer any points to. We have to sign out of British airways and sign back into it. Just is what it is. Alright, now we have 65,000 points, but it looks like this flight comes with some pretty hefty fees. Plus, at least make sure that this flight is going to be a good deal for us before we go all the way booking it, right? We're pay $1,400 for these flights. We're booking with points really saving us any money. Oh, wow. So it looks like four tickets on this flight and not just on this flight, but on any flight at this particular time to get from London to Dallas is just super expensive. So it looks like four tickets here is over $10,000. So this 1,400 fees that we're paying to British Airways is honestly not that bad. All right. That's it. We have booked a flight for every single one and gone through all the different credit cards that we need to get it. Let's review this whole thing top to bottom and see how much actual real world value we get. So the first one from Dallas to Paris saves us $4,000 right after that, Paris to Rome, saving us about 300 Rome to Venice, saving us about 250. Fenice to Munich, saving us 500 Munich to Dublin, 500. Dublin to London, about $200. And then the real world value of this London to Dallas flight is $10,000. Now, the order that we're getting these credit cards in is Person one, let's say is me, and Person two is my significant other. I would get the Barkley A red card, get 60,000 miles at that same day, same time, significant other would sign up for the same credit card. Get those 60,000 miles. Now, on this exact same date. You might as well get started on the next couple of cars. So we know that we have to go with that British Airways card. Let's get started on that right away. So it means I would get the British Airways card. Significant other would get this chase hire preferred. We would both pay off these minimum spends over a couple of months. And then once we got the points deposited, then I would go back and get this second Chase Sapphire preferred. Okay, so what that means is that for $11,000 of minimum spend as in spend on just stuff you'd buy anyway. Your groceries, your gas, this random stuffed animal you'd buy on Amazon, anything else. For all of that over a couple of months is and we don't have to do it in a hurry. We're planning in advance for a trip that we're going to take later. So we don't have to spend all these $11,000. Right away, we can spend it as slower as fast as we want. And what this all adds up to is a $16,000 worth of value interest. Let's do some quick calculations here. Let's figure out what the cents per point of this is. Means, on average, we're getting 4.8 cents per point, almost $0.05 per point. This is incredible. This is such good value. The most important thing out of this is that we've actually gotten more value in travel than we spent on the minimum spend. This is like getting 146% cash back. On a credit card. 146%. That's incredible. So that's the end of this video. And this was just to show you how simple it is and how valuable it is. There's five different credit cards signed up over a couple of months, spending on stuff that you would normally spend on in your regular everyday life means that you can get something crazy like 146% cash back as in more money back than you spent on the minimum spend requirements for any of these. And the end result of this, the most important thing that comes out of all of this is that you've gotten enough points to take you and your family on a three week trip to Europe for free. For totally free. And I got to tell you that feels amazing. You don't have to worry about the incredibly huge amount of money that you would have had to spend on flights for all these different locations. It's just all covered by the points that you got. You'll have all this extra money to be able to spend on hotels or incredible restaurants or other great experiences. Stuff you probably would have done if you're worrying about spending the $16,000 for all these flights for you and your family to go around Europe. So that's how we pull this whole thing together and just another example of just how incredibly valuable these points are. I hope this was really helpful for you. Seeing the next one. 13. The end.: Okay, so that's it for this course. I hope by now that you've completed your class project is in filled out that entire spreadsheet, created the map, and then figured out which credit card offers that you need to get to be able to take your entire trip for free. Now, if you got stuck anywhere along the way and feel like you need help, just throw that in the discussions, and either myself or someone else will hop in and help point you in the right direction of either which credit card to get how to think about redeeming the right award flights, throw it in the discussions because I'm sure if you have this question that probably other people do too. Now, this course is going to be constantly updated. Every single month, I'm going to make a new video and add it to this course about my best credit card redemptions for that month. And based on unanswered questions in the discussions, I'm going to keep making more and more videos about topics kind of around award travel, but also just getting the most value out of travel that you possibly can. So, if there's anything else that you'd like to see, please leave that either in the discussions or in a review. Speaking of reviews, if you could leave this class of review, that would mean a lot to me. Just be honest with the review. Tell me what you thought of it. If you think there were some really good parts, let me know if you think there were some parts that were missing, also let me know that. This way, I can make this class as useful as possible, which is exactly what I want it to be. I hope this course was very useful to you, and I hope you had fun along the way doing this, planning out your dream trip, figuring out how to get it for free, and just kind of realizing the value of this new hobby of credit card turning. Hopefully, this will lead you to a lifetime of travel where you don't have to worry about paying for expensive flights and maybe even be able to experience some once in a lifetime things like flying first class on Singapore airlines, flying in one of those crazy sky suites or something like that. Something that was totally out of reach for you before. I hope is now very much in reach for you. I would love to see the kind of trips that everybody's done here as well as how you actually got it, which credit cards you chose everything. So please post your final projects down here, and other topics are going to be below this video. But as far as the main course and the project, this is it. Thank you so so much for watching and for following along through all these lessons. I really appreciate it. We'll see in the next one. 14. Most Recent Best Credit Card Offers: In Chiang Mai, Thailand? Yeah, it's been a few months, benefit months. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but we're back top five credit cards of this month. And since last time we did it since the new year, basically, everything has changed. Let's get into it. The number one spot is one that hasn't changed, but it's become a lot better just because a lot of the other credit card offers that were really good at the end of last year are now gone. This is the city premier card. You can get 60 thousand city points if you spend $4 thousand within the first three months. This one, as always, his great transfer partners, including some of the really rare ones that aren't available with the Chase. It really small ninety-five dollar annual fee that is unfortunately not waived for the first year. I know it'd be amazing if it was, but next up at the number two spot is a US bank altitude or reserve. This car gets you 50 thousand points if you spend $4,500 in the first three months and you might be thinking to yourself, US Bank points, what do I use those four? That's a really good question. These things are basically used one for one to offset travel costs. So the amount of points that you'll get just from signing up for this card is worth $750. But where this card really shines is in all the perks is your cheapest way to get priority pass and TSA pre-check plus go-go inflight, wifi plus all the money that you get just from the points. It's a great deal. It's a great card. $400 annual fee offset every single year by those $325 in annual perk. So what's not to love here? It's up in the number three spot is the Chase British Airways card. Two unused to be amazing and then kind of fell off for awhile with incredibly insanely huge minimum spend requirements who's just made it unreasonable, but it's back in a much more reasonable level and it's honestly the best it's ever been going to get 100 thousand British Airways miles for spending $5 thousand in three months. These points are amazing for flying everywhere except for Europe. You're planning on going to New Zealand, Australia, anywhere in Southeast Asia, Hawaii from the United States. These points are incredibly valuable. But if you're gonna fly to Europe, that means you're going to end up paying a whole bunch and surcharge. So just keep that in mind before you apply this one. It's got a $95 annual fee, which is great for this card. Moving up the newcomer in town, the Capital One Venture x. This one has a very high minimum spend of $10 thousand in six months. But for that you get a 100 thousand Capital One points. They're also offering a $200 onetime sign-up bonus right now, as well as an annual $300 travel credit. You also get lounge access with this one, which as we all know, is an amazing got a pretty hefty $395 annual fee. But due to the offset of the $300 credit that you get every year through travel is not so bad. What you're really getting out of this thing as those 100 thousand Capital One points that are flexible, you can use them almost anywhere. They're amazing. Next stuff, this has been on the list for awhile because this is one of my personal favorites. It's a great card, it's a chase. Ihg premier. It was one of the best intro cards is in the first card to get when you're just starting out churning because of how simple and straightforward it is. No annual fee the first year at all. All you gotta do is spend $3 thousand in the first three months and you get a ton, a 125 thousand ISG points for us in Southeast Asia that would allow us to stay for about three weeks to a month at one of the lower-end hotels here or go crazy on an over water bungalow and get a night or two there. So that's it for this month. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next month. 15. Q&A #1 - When To Cancel Cards? What To Do if There's No Availability?: Mexico City. So I had noticed over time that there were a lot of people asking the same questions down in the discussions. And scarcer doesn't really give you a good way to like surface the answers to those questions that way everyone can see them. And I also want it to be able to interact with all of you out there as you're going through this course a lot more. So that's what this is. It's a Q&A. You get it. Alright. First one, and this is the one that I've seen a lot throughout the discussions here is when, if ever should I cancel those credit cards that I've signed up for? This is a really good question because you don't just want to keep accumulating them and then just end up with like 40 different credit cards at the same time and then be like, I'm paying like $3,000 per year in annual fees that you probably start cutting this down a little bit. So to answer this question, yes, definitely, you should be canceling the credit cards. But the real important question is when general rule, after I get the points for a credit card, unless those points are stuck to that particular credit card, e.g. like Chase, if I canceled my Chase card without spending all my chase points, those points just disappear. Nobody wants that, unless it's one of those cards is the thing that I do is just wait until right before the annual fees gonna come up and then I just cancel it. And then I'll wait another two or three years. And then reapply for that exact same card, The same sign-on bonus again, rinse repeat indefinitely, and that's the basis of credit card churn, and that's how the whole thing works. A great example, this is the hotel and airline cards like these ones, you get the big point bonus and then they transfer all of them like from your credit card to American Airlines. And then all the points are stuck in American Airlines no matter what you do. So unless you really need the extra check bag or maybe some status that you get from the hotel thing, just cancel those right before the annual fee comes up for the chases, the amex, I really love keeping just one of these around that I spend on every single day. E.g. this is our Chase Sapphire reserve. We've had this thing forever for five years now, really long time, much longer than I keep most of my other credit cards. So I'm keeping that one basically indefinitely. Really, really liked the benefits on it, right? Like you get the lounge axis and you get like three points most of the year on stuff that you're buying anyway, these chase points are super flexible to be able to move them to different airlines like I just spend them on United when we went to Japan a little bit ago and then also transfer them to high it to be able to get some good hotel stays. It's just, it's really nice to have this very flexible thing and that's worth the foreign and 50 dollar or however much it annual fee it is now more than enough valuable cars really kinda keep this churning going on forever. Like you sign up for an American Airlines card and then you cancel it 11 months later. And then you wait a couple of years after that, and then you sign back up with that same car to get an in-between that time, you're just signing up for new credit cards, getting the new point bonuses and just kinda accumulating this massive treasure chest of points that you can spend on almost anything that travel for free kinda indefinitely the W back from the trip and ready to travel again, cards will have gone past. They're kinda like turning expiration date, which means that you can sign up for them again and get the point bonus again. And then you just keep doing it and keep traveling for free, hopefully forever. So the next question is, this sounds great, but what about when you have a travel goal and then go and get those points within the tickets aren't available for those points when and where you need them because of dynamic pricing or just they're not available. This is an awesome question and something that I struggle with all the time. Perfect example of how I solve this problem just happened like two days ago. I was trying to fly from Hawaii back to Wisconsin and I was trying to do it for free. There were a ton of different points, options. There's plenty of availability, but most of them were terrible deals. We're talking like 50,000 Delta miles, totally not worth it or like 70,000 American Airlines Mileage just couldn't find the right flight to go exactly where I want it. So I started looking at other city pairs nearby. The super cheap flight for only 7,500 points on Turkish Airlines going, going from Honolulu where it was leaving from Milwaukee instead of Chicago. Now, walk is only like an hour or two from Chicago. Not a big deal. It's not exactly where I want it to go until it got me 95% of the way there for free. And then I just took the train or maybe I'll rent a car once I get down there to drive the rest of the way. Now when you're flying into the United States is generally less convenient than flying almost anywhere else because we don't really have good public transportation in this country. But e.g. if you're trying to get a free flight over to Europe, all you have to do is like fly generally to the area that you want to get to. Like let's say you wanted to go to Munich, but the only free flight available with points that made any sense was to Berlin. No problem finding Berlin and then you're only like a three hour train ride away. Or there's like 7,000 other options that you could use to get there, including probably a flight for like 15 to $20 on something like Ryanair saying is that flexibility is the most important thing if you can't find exactly what you're looking for. And not only that, but flexibility is going to get you a lot cheaper options. And I know it's going to add maybe an hour at the beginning or an hour at the end of the trip where you're actually getting to the place that you want it to go in the first place. But you could also just like rearchitect your trip. And instead of starting in one place and then going to the next place is a nice way to start at the end and then just do the trunk backwards if that happens to be where the butterflies. We've got another question here from Megan Henderson and says, I am brand new at this, so I'm still trying to wrap my head around all the info before knowing any of this about a year ago you on an amex Delta Sky Miles card, been using it ever since and have the bonus miles plus some extra about 83,000. If I want to start getting some other cards like the chase preferred while I only be able to combine points if I fly with delta, wondering if it's too limiting to try to do that. And if I should find a Delta flight for the miles already have and start from scratch with some new cards. I hope that makes sense. There's a one-year definitely asking the right questions, right. Like you're trying to figure out, how do I best spend these mile, things that I have and how do I make it like not a pain in my life? So generally the way to think about this is that if you're miles or within individual hotel or an airline, that's kinda their final destination, that's where they'll live forever. But something from Chase to say United. Once they're at United, they are there and you can't transfer them anywhere else. That's where they live. This is exactly why I think of points like Chase or Amex as the most valuable point currency because you can transfer them to any of the airlines at anytime to get the best deal possible. And I think it's really important to not transfer those points from say, chase to anything else until you're absolutely sure that they have the right availability and what you're looking for there, just so flexible, so useful. And the perfect example of this is that Hawaii flight I was just talking about. I hadn't ever booked a flight with Turkish Airlines. But since Turkish Airlines is part of star lines, that means that you can actually book a united award flight using Turkish miles. And it turns out there's some pretty great deals in there, especially to and from y 7,500 points. One way to get from Hawaii to literally anywhere in the United States. There's no cheaper option that you can find on any of the airlines that way, I would've never thought to move my miles there in the first place if I didn't see the Capital One had the ability to transfer directly to Turkish Airlines to be able to make this thing happen. But I think two more directly answer your question. The thing that you should do is just assume that those delta miles or their use them to fly on something awesome on Delta Airlines, but also start getting credit cards that give you a little bit more flexibility to be able to move them to any airline whenever you want. It's really not all about trying to like, get all of your points into one bucket. In fact, it's much more about diversifying where all of your points are. So that way you can always have the best deal and the most flexibility. And it's much less about trying to get them all in one place. Totally understand that. And you feel like your points are just all over the place and it's really hard to keep track of. It would be nice if it was just in one spot and then one spot was the best spot, but there is no best spot. There are some tools to help out with this. The one that I use all the time, It's called award wallet, a word wall. It just automatically logs into all of the different point buckets that you have, like logs in a delta at Chase and everything else. And tell you exactly how many of each of these points that you have across all these different places that we don't lose track of them, which I do pretty frequently. Alright, that's it for this one. If you have more questions or want more clarity about any of the answers that I've given here for free. To leave that down in the discussions below, and then I'll just answer them in another video like this. Alright, thanks so much for watching. See you soon.