point fu

I think the E word was the word of the year at some point recently and yes it's cheesy in the same way the word "adulting" is cheesy but dang if  enshittfication  isn't the theme of the late stage capitalism we're living in right now. I'm sitting here very unsuccessfully trying to check in for my Delta flight and ruminating on the fact that mobile apps replaced thousands of airline customer service agents saving airlines billions of dollars and yet their corporate masters just can't resist the urge to outsource and penny pinch the IT millions that make those billions possible. The Points Guy was doing a bunch of retrospectives for his anniversary and this one  really drove home for me how much decay is just baked into our societal expectations now. Amex (and Delta) built some gorgeous new lounges built on the idea of quiet, calm, luxurious travel and yet we're paying a $700 ( and rising !) annual fee to have an hour wait to get in, no seats when f...

Bank of America giving this card the bougie Out Of Box Experience UPDATE 3/2026 : As I predicted, BofA announced "enhancements" to this card's status tiers. Namely, you'll soon need to have $1 million with BofA/Merrill in order to keep the highest earn rate (3.5/2.65). They're throwing in a bunch of hokey streaming credits and vague promises of "exclusive offers from lifestyle brands" to sweeten the poison but I'm not going to bother with this coupon book mentality. I wish they'd have just upped the redemption bonus to 1.5 from 1.2, but that's something useful , so they're never going to do that.  UPDATE 10/2025 : I'm adding updates in red to the original post as I learn. Long story short: I'm keeping this card but it's definitely not a magic bullet. After several months of having this card and doing a lot of flight shopping it's clear that in 2025 the airlines are all doubling-down on keeping cash fares high despite ther...

UPDATE AUG 2024: Their North America – Korea award availability is still bad. I poked at a bunch of dates and there's 1 or 2 Business Class seats available 330 days from now and that's it. I love Korean Air's Skypass mileage program, and let me tell you the top 3 reasons why: availability, availability, availability . Sadly, booking award travel with most airlines usually involves major compromises on dates. If you want that Saver reward seat on the cool new plane with the lie-flat seat and the fancy champagne and the amazing lounge, it means you're going to have to cut your trip short by several days, or waste a day and a half of your trip flying a 2-stop itinerary through cities you don't want to stop in. With Korean, there was always at least one flight every single day with open Business or First seats so you never had to compromise like that. Furthermore, Incheon airport's luggage storage service meant you could intentionally schedule yourself...

Despite being active on Reddit's credit card churning forums , I don't actually churn very often. Our vacation time is throttled by work, and if I earn too many points beyond what I need, I get tempted to do stupid things with them. The other looming variable on the horizon is that JetBlue's Mint has become so wildly successful that United's competing P.S. service is now occasionally pricing out well below Mint in my husband's employer's travel portal, which might mean he'll have to start flying United again .  Right now I have: Platinum Amex Chase Sapphire Reserve JetBlue Plus Mastercard Authorized User card on my husband's account My husband has: an Authorized User card on my Amex Platinum his own Chase Sapphire Reserve JetBlue Plus card Starwood Luxury card    JetBlue, verdict: Keep The nice thing about the JetBlue card is that it's from Barclays, and it supports a mode called "Chip + Signature with PIN backup". In...

Well the Chase Sapphire Reserve is a year old now , so I figured it was time to look back on a year's worth of spending to see how "worth it" the card was beyond the amazing 100,000 point signup bonus. (We spent our 100k bonuses on our upcoming Japan trip ) I kept my Amex Premier Rewards Gold card, but shifted most of my dining and non-airfare travel to the Reserve to take advantage of their 3x points in both of those categories. So how many extra points did doing that get me? After looking it over I made a total of 29,617 Chase Ultimate Rewards points on dining . If I'd charged that dining to Amex (which only has 2x bonus in that category), I'd have only made 19,547 points. Those extra 9,892 points are worth about $200 (I value my Amex points around 2¢ each). The card has an annual fee of $450, but when you subtract the $300 annual travel credit and Global Entry fee reimbursement ($100 every 5 years), the effective annual fee is $130. So just on dini...

( updated May 2022 ) If you sign up through this link we both get a bonus! It defaults to the Amex Platinum, but if you click through on the 'Personal Cards' or 'Business Cards' links, you can see the referral offers for all of the various Amex Cards.  Brian's American Express Referrals  ↗️

One of the perks of the JetBlue Plus MasterCard is a 10% rebate any time you redeem JetBlue points for travel. My husband and I are in a family pool, and I'm a cardholder on his MasterCard account. I was looking at his points activity, and yep, his 1100 point Even More Space upgrade had a rebate a few weeks later called "B6 CoBrand Card Redemption Bonus". A few months ago, I had redeemed 42,000 points for a trip but saw no such rebate. After a call to both JetBlue and Barclays I can confirm that only the primary cardholder gets the 10% rebate. ☹️ UPDATE (Sept 2018) : The primary cardholder also gets the 10% points rebate when they redeem for other people in their household account. The rebate doesn't happen until the flight is completed.   10% points rebate As I've mentioned before , we set up the family pooling with me as Head of Household, and that was a mistake. The customer service folks at JetBlue were very kind about helping me finally fix...

Looking back on 2016, the travels we got to take were truly the bright spots in an otherwise dismal year. But it also makes me grateful for the health and prosperity that allows us to travel. I started this blog in 2013 largely because I wanted to share the knowledge I'd gained about traveling for less. Travel opens your eyes to the world and ergo to yourself, and I think it generally makes the world a better place when we see how others live.  That said, the most common question I've gotten in 2016 is "love the blog, but how are you making all of those miles?" And to that question, I decided to compile a list of 2016's point earnings and churnings. Earnings: ≈ 550,000 points across six programs Korean Airlines Credit Card  targeted signup bonus  – 40,000 . This came in super handy paying for our flights to and from Japan... Chase Sapphire Reserve  signup bonus – 100,000 . I think half of the United States got this card this year! I recen...

JetBlue has a fairly straightforward rewards program. You earn 3 points for every dollar you spend, and each point is worth about 1.3¢ – in other words, you're getting slightly under 4% as a rebate in point form. (Taxes and fees on airfare don't earn points) If you have the no-fee JetBlue Mastercard, you'll earn an additional 3 points per dollar spent on JetBlue flights, for a total of 6, which  brings your rebate up to almost 8%. But if you'd like to earn yet another 3 points per dollar and get a 10% bonus every time you redeem your points, you can upgrade your no-fee JetBlue Mastercard to the JetBlue Plus card. That brings your effective rebate up to 12.8% . (But beware! ONLY the primary cardholder gets the 10% bonus!) The PLUS card carries a $99 a year annual fee, but also comes with a card anniversary bonus of 5,000 every year (a $70 value), bringing the effective annual fee down to $29. Ergo: If you spend more than $700 per year on JetBlue airfare, get t...

The Sapphire Reserve is the big sister to the Sapphire Preferred ( which I already have ). I think it might be the most hyped/blogged-about card of all time. Like it's so hyped that they've run out of metal cards and are issuing temporary plastic ones.  I don't need to go over the details , but a couple of things made me decide it was worth the $450 annual fee: The $300 annual travel reimbursement is actually easy to use – none of this ridiculous "pick one airline on January first where you could earn this credit, and no changes until next year" stuff that Amex does. So it's effectively $150 a year vs. $95 for my Sapphire Preferred 3 points per dollar on dining and travel . Since those are two of my biggest categories of spending, it's a no-brainer.  Chase's Ultimate Rewards points have had a short-but-useful list of transfer partners but they recently added Flying Blue too – so now KLM and AirFrance are onboard . If I'm stuck on a ...

Using an American credit card in European ticket machine can be hell, just ask anyone who's been to Paris and I'm sure you'll get an earful. The big problem is that almost no American chip cards support the Chip + PIN standard . Barclays has a few cards that support Chip + PIN Backup, which enables the card to use a PIN in situations where a signature isn't possible, like automated ticket machines.  New JetBlue card... Right before we began our Tokyo sabbatical, my new JetBlue Barclay card showed up in the mail (I had the JetBlue Amex and they switched providers). I'm happy to report that my JetBlue PIN worked great in the Japan Railway's Shinkansen ticket machine , where my other American chip cards failed (Sapphire, Amex, Skypass). Not all JR machines require a PIN, but as you'll see from the pictures, a bunch of them do.  I learned this when I was in Nagoya for the day without my JetBlue card, and I couldn't find a single machine that didn'...

We're heading to  Boracay  for a wedding in December and after lots of planning , New York – Seoul – Manila on Korean Air looks to be our best bet. The initial plan was to transfer Chase points to my Korean Air account and fly on their A380 service to JFK.  UPDATE 4/2016: My miles posted a few days after my first statement closed and I paid my bill! But then, literally  as I writing about how these days I'm really only considering targeted, high bonus credit card offers, I received one in the mail for Korean Air and I decided to go for it (the targeted offer was  40,000 bonus miles versus the normal 15,000 ). The card arrived about 10 days later.  New card! The card only earns one mile per dollar on purchases (except those with Korean Air where it earns 2), so I'd prefer to hit the $2500 spending minimum in categories where I couldn't earn a bonus on my other cards. Considering all of the bonus categories my Amex and Sapphire card...

If you don't have a Chase Sapphire yet,  please consider using my  affiliate link  to sign up for one. You get 50,000 bonus points after you meet the minimum spend, and I get a 10,000 mile referral bonus!  I've had one for several years now and in addition to the normal bells-and-whistles, it has two great features that make it my go-to card: double miles on dining and travel , and the fact that it can transfer points to a bunch of places that my Amex can't :  United Airlines, Korean Air, Southwest and Amtrak . Our 2015 First Class trip to Asia happened because of this card. I also use their shopping portal to rack up lots of bonus points on toiletries and household cleaning on Drugstore.com.  in-flight cocktails in the Korean Air A380 lounge thanks to our Sapphire