Kristen
Hello and welcome to The Point Scout! We are new to blogging and hope to fill what we feel is missing in the Points & Miles space. First and foremost – we are genuinely here to help. We have been absolutely blown away by all the travel we have done with our families over the past few years for far less cost than we ever thought imaginable. We want to share that knowledge with everyone – beginners and experts alike! Traveling the world can be within reach with a little bit of learning, planning and patience.
Learning from Others
There is no need to reinvent the wheel so we will be sending you to other websites to cover some of the basics. These are people that we have learned from and think they do an excellent job presenting certain information. We just hope you’ll come back here to find out all the tidbits we have collected along the way from our own experiences.
First Rule of the “Points & Miles Game” – ONLY play the game if you pay off your credit cards each month. Any success you have earning points will be completely negated if you are paying interest on a credit card balance. If you aren’t quite there, follow some finance bloggers, pay off that debt and then come back to us. We will be here waiting!
Sign up Bonuses
There are two schools of thought as to the best way to earn points. First is by earning sign up bonuses (SUBs) on new credit cards. These are usually a medium to big bucket of points that you earn after spending x number of dollars on your card in y number of months. This way is great because you get a large number of points to use after a relatively short amount of time. The downside is that new credit cards sometimes come with an annual fee and sometimes require you to have a pretty big minimum spend that may not be realistic. We love the training put out by 10x travel. They very clearly explain the ins and outs of reward travel and we highly recommend taking the course found here.
Earning Multipliers
Another way to earn points is by focusing on category spend and earning multipliers like in shopping portals. We love earning lots of points on everyday spend because we both shop a lot online. Our two favorite portals are Rakuten and Capital One Shopping. For Capital One Shopping, you will need a Capital One credit card. We hope to share on the blog and on the social channels talking about the amazing shopping portal deals available. Sometimes they even rival sign up bonuses! So they should be overlooked and are an important part of our point earning strategy. One website that follows this earning philosophy is called JGOOT. They have a guide that is (almost) free that describes their principles. You can find it here. The most important part of the book we think is – “The secret of point-stacking”.
Our Philosophy
Christine and I fall somewhere in the middle of these two camps. We have several credit cards in our wallet now, and will continue to add when a great SUB comes along or when we have a big spend coming up that would warrant a new card. We are both big online shoppers and have had amazing success generating LOTS of points with online spend. For instance, I just booked a tour for my next trip through Viator at Capital One Shopping and earned 34,278 points!
The Points & Miles world takes a bit of a time investment to figure out. Don’t feel like you need to learn everything all at once. Pick one area you want to focus on and master that skill and then move onto the next. Follow this blog and our social channels and bit by bit it will start to make sense. And, we are here to help, so please Ask a Question anytime!
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