Last month, I bragged a little on Twitter that we managed to accumulate half a million travel rewards points in 2019 alone and I wanted to follow up with more details here. If you’ve been following us, you know that Travel Rewards is one of the core strategies we use to travel the world for less than staying at home in the US. Do you believe that world travel is unaffordable because of airfare cost? Well we can show you with the magic of travel rewards, we were able to travel to 4 continents, 9 countries and 15 cities for 2 people for under $2000!
If you don’t know what travel rewards are, then you are in the right place as I will start by giving you a quick overview. And once that is out of the way, we will dig into how many rewards we accumulated in 2019, which credit cards we opened, how much money we saved by redeeming these precious points and what our plans are for 2020!
Are you ready to talk about free travel?
Travel Rewards 101
Travel Rewards (also referred to as “Credit Cards Rewards” or “Travel Hacking”) is where you open targeted credit cards in order to get large sign-up bonuses in the form of travel points or airline miles. You can then later redeem your points or miles to fund your flights or hotel stays. (Such sign-up bonuses mostly benefit residents of the United States of America.)
There are 3 types of travel rewards to be aware of:
- Airline or Hotel rewards – These rewards come from credit cards that are co-branded with either a hotel chain or an airline company.
Example: Delta SkyMiles Credit card, Chase United Explorer Credit card. - Fixed value rewards – These rewards are set in value and can sometimes directly be applied to the money you spend on your credit card to erase it (like the Capital One Venture and their Purchase Eraser)
Example: Capital One Venture, Barclaycard Arrival Plus - Transferable rewards – These points are the most flexible (and usually the most valuable) since you can either use the bank’s travel portal or transfer them to many different partner airlines and hotels.
Example: Chase Sapphire Reserve.
IMPORTANT – Travel rewards only work if your have a good credit score, are able to pay your card in full on time and are ok to withstand a temporary 3-5 point decrease in your credit score after applying for such cards. If you don’t feel comfortable with any of these, please refrain from opening a new credit card.
How to get the most out of Travel Rewards
Here are our pro tips to maximize your travel rewards:
- Pay your card in full every month. We can’t emphasize this enough! If you can’t pay your card each month, please don’t open a new card. Getting into credit card debt is not what we are discussing here. Please make sure that your financial situation is in order first. Nobody wants to unnecessarily increase their debt and lower their credit score.
- Understand the Chase 5/24 rule. If you open more than 5 credit cards in the past 24 months (across any credit card provider) Chase will not approve you for a new card. Since Chase is known for having the most valuable rewards points(called Ultimate Rewards), you want to prioritize opening your Chase cards first.
- Only aim to get at least $500 worth of total value (after annual fees) when opening a credit card. Don’t open a credit card that will give less than that (like a card with a one-time $50 credit on your next flight or online purchase). The reason for that is that you are limited by the amount of cards you can open with the Chase 5/24 rule.
- Avoid annual fees (unless is really worth it). Most cards will void the annual fee. After that you can reassess whether or not you still get value by keeping the card open and paying the annual fee.
- Track your rewards in one place. We use a spreadsheet to keep track of every credit card we open. The information that is important to capture are:
- the name of the bank
- the name of the card
- the type of card (personal/business)
- the name and type (transferable. airline miles, hotel points…) of the reward you will be getting
- the day your card will renew (which is usually one year later)
- the bonus you will be getting
- the minimum spend you need to hit
- the date by which you need to hit your minimum spending limit
- whether or your not you have received the bonus
- whether or not you want to keep the card open
- Alternate opening a card for you and your partner (if applicable). This is an easy way to double the benefits. This is especially relevant, when bonuses are part of a limited time offer.
- Open business cards before hitting the Chase 5/24 limit. Business Cards don’t count towards the Chase 5/24 rule. So if you’re trying to stay under 5/24, you can still rack up points and miles bonuses with business cards without affecting your ability to sign up for Chase cards in the future!
How much in travel rewards did we earn and redeem in 2019?
Now that we’ve introduced the basic concept of Travel Rewards and how to best use them, let’s look at how much travel rewards we earned and redeemed in 2019 so you can get a sense of how powerful this can be!
Let’s start with a recap of how much travel rewards we earned from credit cards during the 2019 calendar year (note: we track only the bonus earned in 2019, some of these cards might have been opened in late 2018).
Legend: “Points per $ spent”, is the amount of bonus points you get per dollar spent on the card until you get to the bonus minimum spend limit. “Bonus estimated cash value” is the value of the bonus using the Points Guy valuation’s page (as of January 2020).
| Credit Card | Sign-up bonus / Min Spent / Time to spend minimum spending | Bonus estimated cash value | Points per $ spent |
| Chase Ink Business Preferred (Mr. NN) | 80,000 Ultimate Rewards (UR) Points / $5K / 90 days | $1,600 | 16 |
| Citi / Aadvantage Aviator Red World Elite Mastercard (Mr. NN) | 60,000 American AAdvantage (AA) Points / one single dollar / 90 days | $840 | 60,000! |
| Capital One Venture (Mr. NN) | 50,000 Capital One Rewards / $3K / 90 days | $700 | 16.67 |
| Chase United Explorer Business (Mr. NN) | 50,000 United MileagePlus / $3K / 90 days | $700 | 16.67 |
| Citi / AAdvantage Platinum Select World Elite Mastercard Business (Mr. NN) | 70,000 American AAdvantage (AA) Points / $4K / 120 days | $980 | 17.5 |
| Citi / AAdvantage Platinum Select World Elite Mastercard Business (Mrs. NN) | 75,000 American AAdvantage (AA) Points / $5K / 180 days | $1,050 | 15 |
| Spark Visa Signature Business (Mrs. NN) | 50,000 Capital One Rewards / $4.5K / 90 days | $700 | 11.11 |
| Citi / Aadvantage Aviator Red World Elite Mastercard (Mrs. NN) | 60,000 American AAdvantage (AA) Points / one single dollar / 90 days | $840 | 60,000! |
| Chase United Explorer Business (Mrs. NN) | 75,000 United MileagePlus / $5K / 90 days | $1,050 | 15 |
| Credit card purchases | 37,683 Ultimate Rewards Points | $753 | N/A |
| Credit card purchases | 14,490 CapitalOne Rewards Points | $203 | N/A |
| Referral bonus | 20,000 Ultimate Rewards Points for Mrs. NN for referring Mr. NN to sign-up for the Chase Ink Business card. | $400 | N/A |
| TOTAL | 642,173 Travel Rewards Points |
In summary, for 2019, we accumulated 640K+ Travel Rewards Points (the equivalent of $9,416) using the following techniques (listed by order of preference):
- Sign on bonuses: we accumulated 9 sign-on bonuses between the two of us which have an estimated cash value of $8,460 (or 100K CapitalOne Rewards pts + 80K Ultimate Rewards pts + 265K American AAdvantage miles + 125K United Mileage Plus miles that equals to a total of 570K travel rewards points).
- Referral bonuses: we scored an easy $400 (or 20K Ultimate Rewards points) from referring each other the Chase Ink Business Preferred card.
- Credit card spend: we earned an estimated cash value of $956 from credit card usage (or 37.6K CapitalOne Rewards pts + 14.5K Ultimate Rewards points that equals to 52.1K travel rewards points).
The Citi / AAdvantage Aviator Red World Elite Mastercard offer (from Spring 2019) was by far the easiest one to get because you only had to spend one dollar to get the full 60K American AAdvantage (AA) Points. We could not believe how easy that was, could you? 🙂
Earning is one thing, but spending is where the savings kick-in. So let’s take a look at our redemption in 2019. In 2019 we travel to 4 continents, visited 9 countries and made stops in 15 cities (for a budget of 30K). During this trip we redeem Travel Rewards to pay for 12 international tickets as you can see on the table below:
| Airfare description | Travel rewards used | Any additional cash cost to purchase the airfare | Estimated savings |
| 2 one way tickets from Mexico City (Mexico) to San Francisco (USA) | 35,000 Delta Miles | $143 | $410 |
| 2 one way tickets from San Francisco (USA) to Aruba | 35,000 United MileagePlus miles | $31.20 | $490 |
| 2 one way tickets from Aruba to San Francisco (USA) | 35,000 Delta Miles | $150 | $450 |
| 2 one way tickets from San Francisco (USA) to Lyon (France) | 60,000 United MileagePlus miles | $87 | $1,000 (*) |
| 1 one way ticket from Barcelona (Spain) to San Francisco (USA) | 55,000 United MileagePlus miles | $46.46 | $800 (*) |
| 1 one way ticket from San Francisco (USA) to Porto (Portugal) | 30,000 United MileagePlus miles | $40 | $2,500 (because this was a last minute booking) |
| 2 one way tickets from Dubrovnik (Croatia) to Chiang Mai (Thailand) | 90,000 United MileagePlus miles | $105.40 | $1,100 (*) |
| 340,000 points | $603 in fees | $6,750 in estimated savings | |
| Estimated net savings | $6,150 |
(*) Estimated savings using Google Flight for a similar flight at the same period this year since we did not record the flight ticket price upon purchase.
In total we purchased 12 one way tickets using Travel Rewards in 2019 and spent $603.06 on taxes and fees. This represents a net savings (after any cash cost) of about $6,000 which we would have had to pay out of pocket otherwise. Although we are happy with our savings, there are also a lot of fare deals you can take advantage of that we have not perfected – when we do, we will make sure to share our tips!
Notice that all of the flights were to cross continents because we tend to book flights through discount airlines for travel within Europe, Asia and Latin America. These discount airlines generally do not accept travel rewards but we will also keep you posted if we discover new hacks for this.
What are our plans for 2020?
Obviously we aren’t stopping here, especially as we still have nearly 1M travel rewards points that we plan on redeeming (details below).
| Program | Type | Balance |
| American AAdvantage | Airline miles | 344,775 |
| Chase Ultimate Rewards | CC Points | 321,184 |
| Marriott Bonvoy | Hotel points | 132,531 |
| Capital One Rewards | CC Points | 91,385 |
| United MileagePlus Miles | Airline miles | 47,958 |
| Delta SkyMles | Airline miles | 18,017 |
| Southwest Rapid Rewards | Airline miles | 9,194 |
| Air France | Airline miles | 6,318 |
| Asia Miles | Airline miles | 25 |
| TOTAL | 971,477 |
We plan to keep collecting travel rewards throughout 2020. We have already opened 3 new credit cards and plan on opening new cards as we have important expenses coming up. For example, we will need to pay for our upcoming Airbnb accommodation for this summer which is a great opportunity for us to meet the minimum spend on cards.
We are looking forward to scoring some pretty sweet deals to help us reduce our cost of living even further. And when we do, we will definitely share.
Which cards do we recommend?
We highly recommend that you start with the top Chase cards (Chase Sapphire Reserve or Preferred) to plan against the 5/24 rule.
If you already have those cards and are looking for other suggestions, please check out Credit Cards page where we put the latest credit cards offers we’ve been recently using. And if you’d like to stay updated on our finds, we suggest that you sign-up to our newsletter where we share the latest offer from the cards we’ve been recently opening.
Our bottom line
Thanks to Travel Rewards we were able to redeem 12 international airfare tickets in 2019 which covered most of our international flights. This helped us to fly around the world for under $2000! While we have been accumulating Travel Rewards since 2016, 2019 has been our biggest earning year and now that we travel the world for life, we expect that we will be able to redeem even more Travel Rewards and enjoy the benefits of free travel in the years to come.
Happy & safe travels!
What about you? Were you aware of Travel Rewards before and if so, what is the best redemption you’ve made? Did we overlook something that would help us improve our game even further? Please leave your comment in the comments section below.
Footnotes:
- [1] We are not currently an affiliate for any credit cards that we are mentioning here (including Chase credit cards). We have shared our referral link for opening this credit card ourselves so you can get the opportunity to sign-up as well. If you sign-up using this link, we may receive a referral bonus from the credit card company.
7 Comments
Skip · January 29, 2020 at 12:51 am
Very informative post.
I just started accumulating points/miles this past November. The bonuses I have received so far are Chase Sapphire Preferred (60,000) and Capital One Venture (50,000). I was just approved for the Chase Business Ink Preferred (80,000). It’s a start. The next plan of action is to refer the wife for some Chase cards. We should have a pretty good stash by the time we start our travels this Fall.
The fee for the Capital One card is waved for the first year. Unfortunately, I was not able to get the fee waved for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card.
The part I am having a little difficulty with is knowing when to close cards. Is it as simple as using your points within the first year and closing the card before the next annual fee kicks in?
Is would also like to discuss more strategies for meeting minimum spends for bonus points while traveling full time. I’ve got a few ideas, but I expect our spending to decrease due to lower cost of living when we travel. I think this will be especially true in areas like Southeast Asia where we may not be able to use credit cards as much for daily living expenses.
I appreciate these types of posts very much. Please do keep us updated on any deals you come across.
Safe travels.
Mr. Nomad Numbers · January 29, 2020 at 3:08 pm
Hi Skip! Glad that you are accumulating some significant Travel Rewards points with these cards. We usually close the cards as we get close to the renewal fee. Cards that give you airlines miles usually won’t be able to get the miles back once they have been credited to your account. As for the cards that are tied to the bank (like the Chase UR points), you can always downgrade the card to a free equivalent and keep them. Or transfert them to your partner (if applicable). Ultimately the decision is based of what is your strategy/timeline to use these points.
I’ll keep sharing greats deals through our a newsletter as we get them since we are always on the lookout for new cards!
Skip · January 31, 2020 at 12:34 am
“As for the cards that are tied to the bank (like the Chase UR points), you can always downgrade the card to a free equivalent and keep them.”
By this I’m assuming you mean apply for a cash back card with no fee and transfer all points to that card.
For example, I can apply for a Chase Freedom unlimited card and maintain all Chase Ultimate rewards points because I still have an open Chase account at that point… Then close my other Chase cards. Correct?
Mr. Nomad Numbers · January 31, 2020 at 2:25 am
That’s correct!
Dragon Guy · February 5, 2020 at 6:19 pm
I used to travel a bit for work, and I always found myself chasing status and rarely using miles. But we saved up a ton of points in the meantime. Now that I am not working full time, we plan to use them for our international trips (domestic US is usually so cheap with Southwest that we pay). United has a great benefit called the excursionist perk where you can get an extra segment within a region for no additional miles when using points. We are going to Europe this summer and were able to go US-Malta, Rome-Zagreb, and Ljubljana-US all for just 60K points a person. The Rome-Zagreb flights didn’t cost any additional points, just the taxes.
Question for you on the business cards, do you think there is a minimum of business revenue that is needed to be able to successfully get a business credit card?
Mr. Nomad Numbers · February 6, 2020 at 1:53 am
Hi Dragon Guy. A few comments:
I think it’s wise to accumulate these points now than later (even if you don’t use them) because who know how long these benefits will last, and if you do end up using your credit card to make these payments then it’s just the overhead of managing these new cards which if you are organized as we are isn’t too much work for the great benefit you get in return.
The excursionist perk you mention seems terrific. We should add it to our arsenal and see how far we can go with it!
As for the business card, there might be a threshold under which your application might be declined but from what you can read online you don’t need to make a ton to qualify.
Living on $7k to $16k a Year, Pursuing Freedom through Nomadic Living & the Power of Being Intentional - Nomad Numbers · February 17, 2020 at 10:30 am
[…] 2019 End of Year Travel Rewards Report […]