60+ Stops on the Way to Becoming a Credit Card Arb
Go somewhere mid, take a walking tour. Have the continental breakfast. Have two.
One frustrating thing about trying to explain the credit card game is how sensitive it is to personal preferences. The things that I choose to do with my points might not be attractive at all to someone else.
And yet, despite the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy, I bet the overall trajectory of becoming a credit card hustler will sound familiar. I think it goes something like this:
Open a credit card. Get a $200 bonus.
Book a Holiday Inn through the bank’s travel portal.
Go to Des Moines1.
Start shopping on Rakuten.
Realize there is no law against opening more credit cards.
Open a card and get a 75,000 point bonus.
Check your credit score daily. Double and triple check that autopay has been set up for every card.
Transfer some points2.
Get the Southwest Companion Pass3.
Abuse the Companion Pass4.
Have a Rainman-like recollection of every point multiplier, for every card.
Book a points hotel where you would never pay the cash price.
Go to Hawaii5.
Tell your friends about your free trip.
Make a resolution to never explain this to your friends… ever… ever.. again6.
Get a little tipsy in the Centurion Lounge.
Status match your way from an Amex Platinum, to Caesars Diamond, to some free-ish cruises7.
Stop reading The Points Guy.
Research the ANA Around the World fare.
Start reading Doctor of Credit.
Sprinkle in some bank bonuses.
Create a tab in Google Sheets titled “Bank Bonus APY Calculator.”
Open a business credit card8.
Stay at Ventana Big Sur.
Call the Turkish Airlines booking line9.
Have a near mental breakdown because TSA Precheck isn’t showing on your boarding pass.
Get a 200,000 point sign-up bonus10.
Walk the tightrope that is: explaining to someone that you’re not in mountains of debt, while also trying not to seem overly defensive on the matter.
Become a Hyatt Globalist.
Have an application denied, call for reconsideration, get approved.
Book a business class flight.
Get a little drunk off the airline’s free booze… then sleep it off… and end up slightly hungover. All before you land.
Go to the Hyatt Place Los Cabos.
Trawl Dell for products that aren’t e-waste the minute they hit your porch11.
Realize that you forgot to set up autopay. Have a mental health event that makes the “no TSA on boarding pass” anxiety seem tame.
Watch in-flight movies, with no sound, over the shoulders of other passengers. “Crazy Rich Asians” on the way to Singapore, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” for flights to Hawaii, and “21” for flights to Las Vegas.
Order some employee cards12.
Swear off bank bonuses.
Call to inquire about your missing points, even though you know you flew too close to the sun this time.
Meticulously optimize your backpack full of travel accessories. Leave your headphones in Mexico.
See the Blue Mountains.
Talk yourself into a Spirit flight because, even if your tastes have become wildly inflated, a $35 flight is still a $35 flight.
Get a 2FA that requires knowing the CVC for a seldom used credit card. Spend an hour looking for that card. Realize that you lost it. Fix your system for storing seldom used cards.
Find yourself wondering if [INSERT SHITCO SUBSCRIPTION] is churnable through [INSERT SHOPPING PORTAL]. Ex: I wonder if Blue Apron is churnable through Mr. Rebates?
Bitch about the chicken in the Centurion Lounge. Eat lots of it anyway.
Cash out thousands of dollars in points.
Get backed off from a cruise ship casino ATM13.
Join a private churning group.
Try to figure out how something like Fluz is even possible.
Make a power ranking of Hyatt Globalist breakfasts.
Resell some electronics.
Resell some gift cards.
Put in 30,000 steps tracking down a Montreal bagel.
Miss the date to cancel a card, then furiously talk yourself into the idea that actually another year of the annual fee isn’t purely -EV.
Get the Amex popup14.
Worry that you might be going too hard.
Go even harder.
See Yosemite.
Get invited last minute to an event halfway across the country - that no one expects you to show up for. Go anyway.
Have an account closed, not on purpose.
Spend hours thinking about how to earn points that you can’t even spend.
Become a fuel points sicko15.
Go to the Maldives?16
Enter the wonderful world of cash back debit cards17.
Forget about point multipliers outside of blatant shenanigans.
Have a Rainman-like recollection of the self-checkout infrastructure for every retailer.
Go back to Des Moines18.
Your first trip will be mundane, with due apologies to the great city of Des Moines.
The difference between people who regard this stuff as stupid, and the people who really get into it, tends to come down to whether they start transferring points out of the credit card program. Human flourishing relies on volatility, and getting a reliable 1.25 cents for each point will not make you feel sufficiently alive. Transferring points means that they could be worth anything from 0.5 to 3 cents per point. Now we have access to some variance.
As a testament to how spoiled you will become, the SW Companion Pass is both an incredible deal, and also eventually you will move past it, and regard it as “just for beginners.” Sign up for two cards, get 125,000 points + BOGO flights for a couple of years. It’s such a good deal that people are often surprised that you don’t pay for the BOGO with the points. You get both the points and the BOGO.
I’m sure Southwest will be fine, but the last time that we had the Companion Pass we took 24 Southwest flights in a 12 month span. We would literally pull up the Southwest route map and use that to figure out where we were going. Although… that was enough for my wife to cry “no mas!” Now we employ the barbell strategy of: longer trips every four months, short trips as often as we can handle them.
Your second trip is likely to be much better than the first. Again, with apologies to Des Moines.
It’s not just your friends that won’t get it. I have explained this stuff to other advantage-minded people and the first question they asked was: Do you mean like fraud?
The route for status matching that I mention above is now dead, although it’s always worth keeping your eye out for interesting matches. You never know when you might be able to match from something you already have, to another program’s tier that will come with a concrete benefit like waived resort fees.
Business cards have some attractive features including the way that they show (don’t show) on credit reports, as well as how much spending they can handle.
The canonical use case for Turkish points is for United flights to Hawaii. Because we live on the West Coast those flights are actually of questionable value for us. Although… if I had never used Turkish points to book a flight to Hawaii, then I wouldn’t know the joy of talking to the Turkish customer service people.
Eventually your mindset shifts from “I’m not sure if I spend enough to hit this bonus” to “well there’s no doubt I can hit this bonus, but do I want to go to the effort?” Eventually you will end up at: “I could probably do this multiple times if I wanted to.”
If credit card arbs are playing a game, then they have a worthy adversary in Amex. The bank puts nearly constant pressure on its opponents, by dialing up the effort needed to harvest the various card perks. That’s how you get sophisticated people talking themselves into their fourth pair of off-brand earbuds purchased through Dell.
Another attractive aspect of business cards is that sometimes the issuers will pay you just to create and use employee cards. Their requirements related to employees are very customer friendly.
This advantage is super simple, bordering on stupid. I could tell you all about it, but then I would rob you of the satisfaction of discovering it on your own.
My wife took it personally the first time she submitted an application and Amex didn’t treat her like her farts don’t stink. Explainer on Amex popup jail in case you’re not familiar.
I can’t figure out which fuel points people are the sickest. The people who fill auxiliary cans, or the people who know “fuel points brokers.”
This is the most on-the-nose churning thing to do. I’m sure there’s a reason it’s widely hyped, but I don’t know if I’ll ever do it. I don’t think I’ll like it, and I don’t want to take a 20 hour flight to find out for sure.
Normal people have never heard of Taekus. So if you meet someone who knows a lot about Taekus, then you can update your prior to: this person is into some shenanigans.
One of the cool and also kind of weird things about traveling is realizing how much of the world is part of a monoculture. For instance, the “hip neighborhoods” in Singapore and Mexico City will be very similar. They will have similar coffee shops, and clothing boutiques. Also, I always thought that I liked pizza because I’m a fat American, but it turns out that pizza is pretty popular everywhere. In the U.S. this monoculture is even more pronounced, where every city is aiming for something like “Portland in 2012, but we swear this is unique to our city and we definitely did not copy it.” All middle-sized cities have the same breweries where only the names have been changed. Of course there are “authentic” areas anywhere that you might visit. And I’m sure that someone is reading this screaming: Of course if you go to the places in Singapore and Mexico City that cater to Americans, they will all seem the same! But I also think that “authentic” just reduces to: not trying to be anywhere else. When viewed that way there are lots of places that don’t care to be someplace else. Places like Des Moines. Also I’m originally from Iowa… so maybe not 100% objective here.
Why is op attacking me and how does he have detailed logs of my life for two years
When you’ve bought a 14 gallon gas can…