There are a lot of approaches to earning points and miles. And to borrow from the movie line “ABC – Always be closing,” I don’t think one should “always be earning” when it comes to your everyday sanity, quality of life, and the value. In my opinion, not all earning strategies are created equal. Not all approaches are worth your time.
I want to be clear. This is my opinion. I’m also talking about earning extra points. You are always earning points, but maybe not earning an extra few points here and there. As you’ll see below, I don’t have the mental fortitude or capacity to do it all. I want to make sure other people see that there are different approaches, and you need to find the one worth your time and energy that leads to mountains of free travel, not ant hills.
Quick background. A main tenet of the Travel Freely approach is the strategy for earning points and miles. I think you can minimize your time spent while maximizing your earning. So our approach is a basic strategy for the average person who wants to travel more for less without firing ten thousand neurons a month on every little purchase. I think you can just fire a few neurons and spend 10 minutes per month.
In this article, I want to lay out this approach in contrast to travel rewards enthusiasts who are more like “couponers” who spend way too much time and earn very little for their efforts. Many people do both – the big wins and the couponing. The Travel Freely approach is to forget about the couponing. It’s just not worth it in my opinion.
If you are brand new to Travel Freely, you can learn more about our overall approach in our Getting Started article that shows an overview for earning the most free travel in the least amount of time using the KISS method (Keep It Simple Stupid). Warning: This story below may cause a math headache as it is a tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale about spending and earning.
My personal theory on using the best card for optimal points on every single purchase is that it’s NOT worth it.
For two reasons…
It’s literally not worth the extra points and miles. If you are always doing this, then you spend too much energy on the wrong strategy. You probably miss out on extra signup bonuses because you get the dopamine hits from using the “right card” for a few extra miles instead of strategizing for more cards. It would be best if you went after another signup bonus for tens of thousands of points valued at hundreds of dollars. Getting good at “what card to use where” for a few extra points or miles is valued at a few extra cents for most people.
It’s not worth the mental energy. I hate adding extra stress to a day that is already busy and stressful, especially when it’s the result of my own making. It’s like searching a coupon book to find the best coupon every time you purchase something. The coupon itself is only worth an extra $0.03 – $0.05 cents. Plus, I could have used that extra time to enjoy life, talk to somebody, text a friend, take a few deep breaths, or do anything else. Instead, it’s a bunch of unnecessary decisions throughout the day figuring out what card to use, where the card is, what plan B is if you don’t have the card, and then paying for the purchase.
Personally, I’m normally hitting a bonus and using a new card on every purchase with little regard for the specific earning on every purchase. When in between bonus spending, I recommend finding an MVP card or two that you use for everything. I normally use a Chase Sapphire or Chase Freedom Unlimited card (that I downgraded to from a previous Sapphire card) for my purchases because I always want more Chase points.
Despite this commitment to simplicity and less stress, I fell off the wagon recently while was getting gas. By the end, my work earned me an hourly rate of $0.10 per hour.
I’m normally not like this. I am still trying to figure out what happened. This is fundamentally against the Travel Freely 80/20 approach! I guess my brain was a little too freed up on a Friday.
Here’s what happened…
I pulled into the gas station on a very nice, sunny day after daycare drop-off. I was feeling good. Then temptation struck in a moment of weakness. I fell for the “what card to use?” pitfall that claims so many precious minutes of people’s lives every day. I decided to find the best card to use for gas to earn a few extra points.
I found the card that earns 0.5x more points than the card I normally use when I’m not hitting a bonus. It was tap-to-pay from my digital wallet. Surprise surprise. Tap-to-pay didn’t work. I kept trying it. Then, I got frustrated trying to get it to work. And it still didn’t work. And then I had to use my normal card and I felt like a failure for spending that extra time and not even earning the points! The stress and the pressure were melting my brain. How can I miss out on these extra points?! What an idiot!
Then I realized… To thine own self be true. I’m not a “couponer” when it comes to earning points and miles. I’m not someone who uses a different card for every purchase to extract a tiny amount of extra value when I’m getting ridiculous treasure chests full of points from signup bonuses. But it happened.
I paid $52.33 for the gas. A full tank. So how many points did I miss out on? And what’s that value versus my sanity, embarrassment, and guilt over losing those points? .5x extra points would earn me roughly 26 points. Those points are worth 2.6 cents. I could have transferred those points to a hotel program for 1/2500th of a free hotel night.
The time I spent fiddling around, then feeling guilty and like a failure, was about 20 minutes. This ends up being around $0.10 per hour for an hourly rate of my time and a free travel hourly wage of 1/750th of a hotel night per hour.
What’s the point? No pun intended. I’m (obviously) pretty neurotic about avoiding moments of wasted mental energy and time to extrapolate extremely low value. But all that extra time and mental energy makes no sense to me. I’m choosing a few extra carefree minutes vs. miles over the course of a day of buying things online and in person.
The counterpoint is the alternate strategy of earning just one more signup bonus each year.
So, what if I got one more signup bonus that takes about 10 minutes to apply, get approved, and then put it in my wallet once I get the card in the mail? I can get $800 in value for that 10 minutes, and I never have to think about what card to use. I end up making the equivalent of $4,800 an hour.
The same number of minutes doing the couponing approach gets me $.10 an hour.
To earn $800 in value without signup bonuses using the best card for each purchase would take 8,000 hours of work. That’s 333 days.
I’d prefer to work 10 minutes vs. 333 days.
It was a moment of weakness. I hope it doesn’t happen again anytime soon. Glad I was by myself at the gas pump where no one else could see me. The silver lining was it reminded me that I was ready for another card with a great signup bonus. I got a new card that weekend with a signup bonus valued at $950. =)
