97. 2024 Year in Review: Points Earning Rundown with Dr. Sujatha Murali (Part 1)

Welcome to Point Me to First Class, the only show for employed professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners who are looking to optimize their higher-than-average expenses to travel the world. I'm your host, Devon Gimbel, and I believe that your expenses are your greatest untapped asset if you know how to leverage them. Ready to dive into the world of credit card points and miles so you can travel more, travel better, and travel often? Let's get started.

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. I hope that you are having a fantastic New Year and are gearing up for a great year of points earning and points redeeming. I love January in the Points and Miles hobby because it represents the beginning of another year of opportunities to turn your expenses into incredible travel experiences and hopefully lifelong memories. It's also the month where those of us with semi-compulsive type A planning tendencies get to lay out all of our top points priorities for the year and construct the strategies that will make those goals a reality. But before I jump into looking forward for the year, one thing I always love to do is to take a look back at the year that just ended.

This is a chance to evaluate how the points planning I did last January played out in reality and helped me reset for the upcoming year of points earning and points redeeming. I don't know about you, but I am very nosy when it comes to other people's points. I love to know what cards they have, how they use them, why they got those cards, and most importantly, how many points they're earning and what they're doing with them. And in what I have now decided is going to be a Point Me to First Class podcast tradition, I've invited another Points and Miles expert to join me for a two-part podcast series where we are going to take a look back at the prior year and break down all the points we earned, how we earned them, and what our 2025 points earning plans look like before we come back next week for part two of this series where we're going to talk about how exactly we used our points last year to book memorable and, as you'll hear, in some cases, not so memorable points trips.

I first did this in January of 2024 when I invited Kelly, the Points and Miles Doc, to join me for a 2023 year in review, and it was so much fun that I knew I needed to do it again this year. So joining me for this year's 2024 Points in Review series is my friend and points expert, Dr. Sujatha Murali. Follow along as we give you a peek inside our wallets, points earning strategies and award travel redemptions. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Sujatha, welcome back to the podcast and thank you so much for joining me today. I have been eagerly awaiting this conversation for months now.

Dr. Sujatha: Thank you so much again for having me, Devin. Last year's episodes with Kelly were some of my favorite of the year. So I have very big shoes to fill and very much looking forward to talking about it.

Devon: I am as well. Like I said, this is one of the most fun things, fun conversations that I get to have all year because part of this is really my deep-seated belief that there's no one right way to do any of this thing in the Points and Miles hobby. There's no one right way to earn points, to use them. And I think it's so fun to compare and contrast different people and what their strategies are, why they do the things they do. And like I said, I'm also really nosy, so I love hearing what is working for other people or what are your priorities? You know, what are you doing to earn the points that you earn and use them the way that you're using them? And so I thought it'd be fun to have another one of these conversations.

So before we dive into part one, which is where we're gonna be breaking down kind of what were our overall strategies in terms of earning points. We'll talk about how many and what type of points we earned last year. I wanted to first start off with just a little bit of context because I think this is important to keep in mind that not everybody's situation is going to be identical. And so just for context, can you give us all a little bit of background just around your spend patterns in general, meaning do you earn points solo? Do you have a P2? Do you own a business that contributes expenses to your overall points earning strategy? So can you just kind of set the landscape for what does your points earning just very generally look like.

Dr. Sujatha: Yes, of course. So yes, I have a P2. I have a husband who's a full-time doc and I am incredibly lucky. In fact, I almost don't even call him a P2. He's really a P1.1. He is 100% on board. In fact, he picks up things I often miss. And so I am incredibly lucky that he could not be more on board with this as far as opening cards, as far as taking advantage of multipliers. I will often find him coming home from work saying I stopped at Staples and picked up gift cards for you. I mean, he is just an absolute 100% partner on this, which has made this incredibly easy. So I think that's an important thing to bear in mind when you all hear totals for me, is that this is not a solo endeavor in this house. This is 100% a partnership. And in fact, I think in some ways he has contributed more to our points earning life than I have.

We have an 11 year old daughter, so we are a family of three when we travel. We are not a family of eight or nine. And so three people is very manageable. You can really piece together three business class flights or try to squeeze into one hotel room. So that makes redemptions a lot easier than trying to squeeze in four or five people into a hotel room or finding business class flights. So that perspective is very important. So we, I think our strategy really has been just very simply starting to get as many points as we can accrue. We have a couple of goals for the year involving status, which we will get into a little bit later, but I don't have specific point totals in my mind. I just let's try to take advantage of opportunities that come up when they come up.

And we can do this because we have a very meticulously organized infrastructure in place as far as keeping track. And I cannot emphasize this enough. I mean, you're going to hear, you know, we have a lot of cards and there is no way to get this done without significantly hurting your financial health without keeping meticulous records and being organized about it. My husband also is very financially minded. He is very much of a finance and math guy. And so this kind of made sense to him from day one, that he was able to see the value in this hobby immediately. So that has been extremely helpful sort of in our points journey here.

Devon: Yeah, I think that everything that you said is so important just in terms of, again, kind of laying the groundwork because I think that sometimes it can be very, very easy to hear an episode like this. And like you said, we're going to be talking about our numbers, and I think it's important for both of us individually to acknowledge, you know, why do we have the numbers that we have, both in terms of earning our points and using our points? And just to reiterate that this is not to suggest that there's only one right way to do this. And certainly, please, if you hear the number of points that Sujatha earned this year, the number of points that I earned this year, please keep in mind, everybody's scenario is different. I think that you can do amazing things without needing to earn exactly the same number of points that either one of us have or use points in the way that you have. But understanding this context is really important.

And so, I'll kind of compare and contrast, you know, my background, my situation, just so that people can understand kind of what are some of the resources that each of us have that we bring into this game. And so, people who've listened to the podcast for a long time probably are not going to be surprised to hear that in terms of my expenses and when I think about my family as a whole and kind of our points earning potential, my husband and I are both self-employed, so we are each business owners of totally different businesses. Those businesses each have significant expenses, and so certainly compared to someone whose primary source of income is W-2 employment who does not own or operate a business, I think we do have what I consider to be the luxury of having business expenses. That certainly opens up opportunities for us in terms of different business cards that we can open and minimum spend requirements that we can meet because we have business expenses in addition to our personal expenses.

So, beyond that, because we are both self-employed, we also are based in Illinois, which, for better or worse, happens to have some of the highest taxes in the entire country, we pay a lot in taxes. And that definitely comes into our points-earning strategy, which we'll get into when we break down exactly kind of how many points we earned and how we earned them over the year. But in terms of earning points, I think it is important to sort of acknowledge that we're starting with not only our personal expenses, but that, individually, my husband and I each have businesses that have their own expenses.

So that is really helpful when it comes to turning those expenses into points. And then on kind of the points redemption side, I love that you mentioned, Sujatha, that you're a family of three, and you've already kind of acknowledged, you know, what are some of just the benefits in terms of travel planning that come when you're a family of three versus a larger family? And I don't consider my family to be tremendously large, but we are two adults and we have two children, and it is really interesting. This is the first year that I feel like in terms of booking travel, at least from the hotel side, we are more and more running into room occupancy, what I feel like are problems. My kids are not that old. My oldest just turned nine. My youngest just turned six. So we're not a family of two adults and a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old, like almost adult children. We still have what I consider to be kid children.

And there are a lot of hotels that, in the process of award booking and award planning for myself and my family for this year and looking into 2025, we were bumping up into what I consider to be a lot of hotels that I would be interested in staying at that have a room occupancy of three. And I can certainly understand that from a fire safety and hazard standpoint when the rooms themselves are very small, which is what we typically see, especially in areas of Europe. That makes sense to me. I've stayed in some hotel rooms in Europe that were 150, 200 square feet. I do think it'd be very challenging to safely fit a family of four in that room. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about, you know, properties that have suites that are easily 900 square feet, 1,000 square feet, and their room occupancies are two or three. That, to me, seems more difficult to believe that that's an actual, you know, safety issue.

And that is something that, again, if you're traveling with four people or if you have more people in your family or your group, I think is a very real challenge to award travel planning. Also, now we're kind of hitting the point, and you'll hear more about how this did not go to my favor for most of 2024, but I remain eternally optimistic contrary to my natural inclinations for 2025. This was kind of the year that I started getting a lot more ambitious in terms of the award flight planning for my family, whereas up until this point, almost all of our family travel has been domestic or what I consider to be close in international, so a place that I can fly or my family can fly to directly within maybe six hours from Chicago.

So Mexico, Caribbean, Central America. I'm starting to now finally feel like I'm more emotionally capable of traveling with my children. They're a little bit more capable of taking longer flights and dealing with some of the challenges of international travel, just in terms of the amount of time that you have to be on an airplane and starting to see now what are the realities of trying to travel plan, especially if we are looking at international business class tickets for a family of four. You know, that is a very, very different situation, presents different challenges than when I'm doing solo travel, where I'm very time flexible, I only have to find one ticket. It's very different than trying to plan family travel around traditional school breaks for four people. And so one of the things that we'll get into are just some of the strategies that have worked for me is I've tried to make some of these travel plans for not a large family, but a larger family.

So that's kind of the background and the context for you all to understand, you know, when Sujatha and I make our travel plans and our points earning plans, obviously they're specific to us, you know, where we're based in the country, how we think about, you know, the resources we have available to us in terms of expenses to turn those into points and then what we want to do with those points. So now let's get into some actual numbers and data for 2024. Sujatha, I'm really curious to hear from you first, coming into this year, kind of what did your rewards credit card portfolio look like in general? And did you have any sort of specific credit card strategy or plan that you knew there were certain cards you wanted to integrate into your portfolio in 2024 and which ones and why?

Dr. Sujatha: Yeah, so I think just as a little bit of more background, I really started this hobby in earnest in October of 22. So we are really just at the two-year mark. And the one thing I sort of say over and over is there are many seasons and ebbs and flows to this hobby. So what I do right now two years into this is going to be very, very different than someone who is eight, nine, 10, 11 years into this. So I am still a little bit in the ramping up phase where now I think for 2025, I'm sort of hitting a little bit of a wall on the subs, but luckily in 24, I was still kind of ramping up with the new cards and subs.

So I think that perspective is important. I also think it is very, very important to do what you're comfortable with. I'm going to throw out some high numbers here because I am comfortable with this. My husband is comfortable with this. I have a partner that is completely capable of following this and keeping track. In fact, he pays all of our bills. I pay zero bills. So he is the person going into every Amex account, every Chase account, looking at when things are due, when statements close. So I really have somebody in the background keeping track of everything along with me. I opened 17 cards in 2023 together. So once again, I did not separate me and my husband because everything goes into a pool for us. So it's almost going to be very difficult for me to even differentiate. So all these numbers are really for two people. It is not one person. So we opened 17 cards in 2023.

Going into 24, I don't think I had a huge overall strategy, except number one, very vaguely, just like I said, taking every opportunity up that I could, number one. Number two, I really thought at the beginning of 24 that I was going to slow down on the opening of cards. I mean, this was really, I was like, look, I opened a ton of cards in 23. 24, let me try to get to globalists. Let me maybe get some at least intermediate status with AA. We fly BA a lot over to London. It's one of the few direct flights from San Diego. And I really wanted to be able to select my seats for those business class flights. So I wanted one world sapphire. So I have these kind of like, you know what, let me try to spend a status a little bit in 24. I was successful on one, not so successful on the other. That is I made the status, but I also opened a lot of cards.

In fact, I ended up opening up more cards in 24 than 23. So we opened a total of 18 cards in 2024. And the one thing I will also mention is that I closed 13 cards in 2024. So really a card a month as all the card subs that sort of came around at the one year mark in 2023, the vast majority were closed. I don't think I had intended on closing all the, a lot of them were inks. And I didn't really think I intended on closing all those inks, but I think the second-half of 24, the ink landscape really changed. And Chase was becoming extremely strict on how much credit they were basically handing out to people. And they were looking at the number of inks and the ink train kind of came to a grinding halt a little bit. So we wanted, I think one or two Chase cards at the end of the year. We were denied multiple times, I kind of was like, look, I'm going to close some of these inks and so I ended up closing them.

The other thing I will mention, and everyone hears all these cards and the accrual of points is very easy when you open a lot of cards. If you do not know how to redeem, there is no point in paying these fees. We paid $7,000 in annual fees in 24, $7,000. Yeah, we are able to leverage this. $7,000 is a single business class seat from San Diego to London on that BA flight. So I am able to look at that 7,000. We don't even think twice about it because we know full well that that number is nothing compared to the amount of value I am getting from those annual fees. But I think that is one of the walls that people run into is, you know, as physicians, we have a tremendous amount of expenditure. We have school fees, we have insurances, we have business expenses, we have taxes. I don't think accrual is a problem for any one of us.

But once people are like, look, I, you know, I don't want to open this part because I'm worried about the $695 annual fee. And all of us are saying, do you know what you could do with 250,000 Amex points? You've got to learn how, what to do with those points. So that is something I would very, very strongly recommend is you've got to learn part two. There is no point in even taking the time to do part one if you don't know what to do with those points. And the grand total for 2024 was 5.31 million points for the two of us, right? For two of us. So we were a little bit right above 5 million points for us, for the two of us. So including subs, spend, various bonuses, and random Amex offers and Chase offers and things like that. So this is across sort of everything.

Devon: Okay, I think you made so many fantastic points in what you were just talking about. And one of the things that I do very quickly want to hear from you, just because I'm curious, and then I'll kind of dive into what my overall strategy was for 2024. Then how that played out in terms of new cards that we opened and why is you mentioned Sujatha that you hadn't really anticipated for 2024 to be a really high velocity year for you in terms of number of cards opened and that you did end up opening 18 in total between you and your husband in this year. I'm just curious to hear, again, at a more broad level, in terms of the points ecosystems that you were really kind of focused on in terms of points earning, was it a little bit of everything? Was it mostly Chase and Amex? Can you just give us an idea of what were some of those points currencies that you really had your eye on in terms of earning in 2024?

Dr. Sujatha: Absolutely. I am a huge, huge fan of transferable points currencies. As you know, my hematopoietic stem cell analogy, where you want the broadest transferable currencies you can to give you the best options that you can. For us, obviously we want transferable points currencies, but we also travel in a specific way where there are just certain airlines and hotel programs that we are going to use 90% of the time. So for me to accrue IHG points is completely useless. So I know that, you know, I have it there in the background if I ever need it, but opening something like an IHG card for us does not make sense. So it may for you. I mean, the Kimpton Seafire, maybe your Holy Grail redemption, and that's exactly what you should go for.

So I'll tell you exactly what we opened this year. I would say, by far, by far, the number one points accruer for us were Amex No Lifetime Language offers. Those just rained down like candy for us this year, and I'm almost hesitant to mention it because I'm worried it's going to come to a grinding halt, but we just got lucky. And just to sort of explain, Amex has what's called Lifetime Language on their cards where where you can really only get a signup bonus once per lifetime. Lifetime, people think, is about six to seven years. It's not really 90 years. But once you sort of have gotten this sub, the only way to get another sub on these cards is if you are targeted for a specific offer that has what's called no lifetime language on it. And Amex has been incredibly generous this year.

And so we opened many, many cards. I'll tell you exactly. opened five business golds, two business platinums and two blue business pluses with these NL offers this year. The other cards that we got this year. And last year, I would say I did not open any brand-specific cards in 2020. Everything was a transferable currency with the exception of companion pass, which my husband got at the end of 23, beginning of 24. So we actually kind of stepped a little bit more in the brand-specific. The two for us that are by far the most useful, we got the World of Hyatt personal card and we got actually the British Airways card. Now, you know, once again, there was a very specific strategy in getting a BA card. And so I'm absolutely not suggesting this is in any way relevant for everybody.

The BA card specifically, if you spend $30,000 on it, gives you a free companion ticket. And these are not the cheapest point redemptions for us. They're about 100 to 100,000 points per person. So a companion ticket for us, we take this flight about six times a year, the companion ticket for us is massively lucrative because we really get to buy one person for free. The other cards that we ended up opening, we opened a Hilton business card for my husband. As soon as I heard that that free night certificate was going away, I got him one. And then two weeks later, they actually totally changed all the terms of that card. So that is I closed my business Hilton business card this year. I will be closing his in one year, but we got the free night certificate for that, which is great. So I kind of planned around what they had announced. Luckily, they gave us some lead time to be able to plan around that.

And towards the end of the year, we opened up several American Airlines cards and a City Strata. We opened two Barclays Hawaiian cards and a Barclays AA Red card. So once the Alaska Hawaiian merger was announced, I think like everybody else, we went completely insane on these offers, especially since a lot of these cards were after one purchase. I mean, you go and buy one coffee and there's your 75,000 AA miles. So that was incredibly helpful. So once again, I kind of immersed myself a little bit in this world. I follow blogs, I follow podcasts, and I really try to take advantage of these opportunities when they come up. Living in Southern California, Alaska miles are incredibly useful for us. AA miles are incredibly useful for us. And not so much for these Q Suite redemptions, but for like little conference trips. Like I go to several conferences a year. I am routinely able to fly business class for 9,500 AA miles. So having a stash of these is so helpful. So that was sort of the summary of all the cards. Vast majority, like I said, is going to be transferable points, but we did get a little bit more grant-specific this year, and we kind of leverage the Hawaiian-Alaska merger as well at the end of the year.

Devon: Okay, one more thing I'm really curious to hear your perspective about, because I know that people can feel very strongly about this and also be all over the map, so I'm just curious where you're going to land on this. Based on the fact that you mentioned you did open up some new personal cards, the Citi Strata Premier, some Barclays cards, American Airlines cards, how much, if at all, does Chase 24 and that rule come into your strategizing, planning? Is it something you care about at all? Do you keep your eye on it? I'm just wondering how that factors in to your overall plans?

Dr. Sujatha: Fabulous question, right? Because everyone in the beginning is so stressed about 524, 524, 524. So I opened a lot of Chase cards last year. And what eventually happened this year, which happened with a lot of people that opened a lot of inks last year, is we basically hit the limit of how much credit Chase was going to extend on us. I also really found, you know, I did find myself fixating a little bit on this number in the beginning of 2024. And then when I sat down and looked at everything, I was like, other than the British Airways part, I have gotten every Chase part I have wanted. The only other Chase cards possibly I could want is maybe more inks, but that was being greedy. Did I need more inks? No, that was being truly greedy.

So I completely stopped worrying about this. And because you're basically two factors in play. Number one, I knew Chase was just not going to extend us any more credit this year for either one of us. But number two, I was like, why am I worried about this? There are so many other opportunities here. For instance, we accrued 250,000 AA miles by opening these cards. Why am I going to stay under 524 and lose out on the opportunity of having miles I'm going to use all the time? So you know, my advice for this is just take a step back and say, what are the chase cards I'd want? Get those cards and move on. These cards are going to drop off at some point. And frankly, after all this, we're both at 524. We're not even at like 124, you know, LOL 24. We're only at 524. And by companion past season in 25 which I'm gonna, it's gonna be my turn for that, where I'm gonna be 224.

So this is my next involvement with Chase in applying for cards is not gonna happen until December of 2025. I have a full year. I do not think twice about it. I have to plan a little bit to make sure that I'm under, but my husband can go well over. He's not due for companion pass for another three years. So this is really my thought process on it. I think the fixation on 524 is very much a new-to-the-points-and-miles-world thought process that we often have to break these old habits from. There is such an incredibly useful world outside of 524. And I think you're going to lose out. You're going to lose out if you just are stringent and draconian about the game render.

Devon: Yeah, I think that that is excellent advice to give to folks. And, of course, it's all context-dependent, right? Like you mentioned, depending on where you are in your journey, which points, miles, or ecosystems you've identified as being the most helpful or useful for you, especially in the upcoming year or two, I think all of these factors come into play. I ask you that question because even though I'm now about 10 years into this journey, I do still care about Chase 524. And I think we'll talk, when we're talking about kind of predictions or what we're looking forward to in 2025. I'll come back to that point and kind of why I keep my eye on 524. It's not something that I lose sleep over, that I feel really, really tied to. But even 10 years in, I am aware of my 524 status, and there are some decisions that I make and don't make because of that. So, we'll get to that point in a little bit.

But in terms of the landscape or the decisions that I made on behalf of myself and my family in terms of what credit cards we were going to get and kind of why we got what we got in 2024, First, I want to give, again, that background that because I've been doing this for long enough and by proxy, I've dragged my husband into this hobby for long enough, we came into 2024 with pretty robust credit card portfolios also. So this is a very different scenario than someone who feels like they are more at the beginning of whatever their journey looks like, where they are still really trying to establish their foundational transferable points earning cards. I feel like we've had those pretty set for a while now. We first got into Chase and American Express cards. We've continued to build out those portfolios. A couple of years ago, I moved into my third major transferable points currency, which was Citi Points. At that time, it was called the Citi Premier Card. Now it's called the Citi Premier Strata Card.

I also have the Citi Double Cash Card. The reason I got into that points currency was specifically to have access to Turkish Airlines as a transfer partner because so far, at least in my experience or my 10 years in this game, Chase and Amex have not been able to directly access Turkish Airlines as a transfer partner. Now, interestingly, I kind of, I wouldn't say I abandoned the Citi strategy, but when Capital One introduced their Capital One Business Venture X card, I shifted kind of the strategy I had around earning non-Chase and Amex points over to Capital One. It was so much easier for me to earn a lot of Capital One miles than it was to earn Citi thank you points. And Capital One is also a transfer partner of Turkish Airlines. So, that was kind of the background, coming into 2024, between myself and my husband, we had, I think, combined around 37 credit cards total. So this is both personal credit cards. Again, my husband and I each have our own businesses, and we have business-specific cards that we only use for business expenses in those respective businesses. And because they are different businesses, we have many of the same cards, but we're obviously using them totally independently of one another.

And so, we already had a lot of the ink cards and the Amex Business Platinums and golds and a lot of the personal Chase and American Express cards already in our portfolio. But I think the one thing that had the single biggest impact on the decisions around which cards, if any, did I anticipate our getting in 2024 actually has to do with a card that I got from my husband at the very end of 2023. So back towards the end of 2023, Chase did something really extraordinary, and my prediction is they will never do this again once they see the fallout or the consequences of this decision. But Chase for a few months was running a very specific promotion on one of their no-annual-fee Freedom cards. It was the Chase Freedom Unlimited card, and it was like a three- or four-month period where they had a very specific promotion on the Chase Freedom Unlimited card that said for the first 12 months after you get approved for this card, you are essentially going to be earning double cashback or double the points earning rate of all of the standard sort of functions of this card.

And I reviewed this extensively, I think back in episode, I think number 43 on this podcast talking about what this promotion was, who I thought could benefit from it, who should stay away from it. But really what it came down to was Chase was giving people an opportunity to have a Chase Freedom Unlimited card that again, when you know how to turn that cashback card into points earning card. For 12 months, that card was going to earn six times chase points on dining expenses, six times chase points on drugstore expenses, and three times chase points on everything else. So essentially a three times chase ultimate rewards transferable points currency earning card for all of your non-category expenses. And I immediately identified how huge an impact that could potentially make on our points earning for the year. I already had some very large personal expenses that I was anticipating that we were going to be making in 2024. And I knew that we could basically set that card on fire and earn a ton, a ton of points, especially for our personal spend.

And so when it came to our 2024 points earning strategy, essentially, I mean, I probably should have calculated this. I didn't. My guess is probably a good 90% to 95% of all of our personal spend for the entire year went on that single card. Because again, I knew that leveraging those bonus categories, especially with our patterns of spend, that that was going to give us such an enormously high return on that spend. And chase points right now are probably the single most valuable points currency for my family because we use the vast majority of our chase points to book Hyatt Hotel stays. And so it's the sort of confluence of chase points being very, very valuable for me and my family. They can be, in my experience, a little bit harder to earn a lot of than, for example, American Express points, and also this amazing opportunity to basically just funnel all of our personal spend onto one specific card.

So our one-year or our 12-month time period, we've not reached that yet. And so I think it's coming to an end towards the end of this month. So Sujatha and I are recording this in December of 2024. So we have not yet earned the bonus points on that card, but it has been way more than worth it for us to have that strategy. So coming into 2024, I kind of knew we're probably not going to be opening up a lot of personal cards. We already have great personal cards, especially with that one specific Chase Freedom Unlimited double points promotion offer. I knew that's where our personal spend was going. And in terms then of our business spend, we already, again, had most of our foundational cards.

And so I didn't really think that we would be opening up a lot of cards in 2024. Interesting compared to your experience, I would have loved to have gotten targeted for more Amex No Lifetime Offers cards. And it's so interesting to me kind of the patterns, you know, of who gets these offers, how often they get them. And in my experience, they've kind of come and gone in waves for me and my husband. Like, when I really want them, they never seem to be around. And then the times when I'm already allocating spend to other cards, they seem to pop up in my account. But I would have applied for more Amex No Lifetime Language offers this year if they had been presented to us, and they just weren't. That being said, I finally, finally found some, snagged some recently. So in terms of our new cards for 2024, I'll start with my husband because he has actually fewer than me.

The only thing that we signed up for for him in 2024 was one Chase Ink Business Preferred card because he actually had not had that card at all in his business. And this is back when Chase was still offering really high referral bonuses for their chasings as well. So I could refer him from my account for the Chase Ink Business Preferred. He got that card around May of 2024, had a great signup bonus. And then just recently, a few weeks ago, we were able to get him a no lifetime language Amex business gold card. So that's his second Amex business gold card at a 200,000 point welcome bonus.

So those were his two cards for the whole year. Again, very, very minimal and nothing on the personal side for him because all of our spend was really going on that Chase Freedom Unlimited, except for some very focused spend. When we do have paid, not paid stays, but paid expenses related to Hyatt stays. We do put that on a World of Hyatt personal card because it's a higher points earning card than any of our other ones, again, specifically for Hyatt expenses, but that's not the vast majority of our personal expenses over the course of a year. And then in terms of the cards that I applied for, I came into this year also thinking that there weren't going to be a lot of cards that I knew for sure that I wanted. I was kind of waiting to see if there were any great offers where it made sense. I ended up picking up two more Chase Ink Business cash cards, one in January, one in June, because the welcome bonuses were really, really appealing. And I was able to get great referral bonuses from my husband.

So those were cards that I'm happy I got. I didn't set out thinking, Oh, I absolutely need those, but they're no annual fee cards. And so I'm not going to turn them down. I'm happy to have them. Finally, I also got a second Amex business gold card. I was very excited about that because we focused, again, all of our personal spend towards Chase this year, and we didn't open up a lot of American Express cards, this year we earned far fewer Amex points than we usually do. And kind of towards the end of the year, I was looking at our Amex points balance and starting to get a little bit nervous. It wasn't as high as I like to see it. And so being able to get a second Amex business gold card for myself and for my husband makes me feel a little bit better about our points balance in Amex coming into the next year.

And then the last card that I applied for was a personal card. And this is one that's similar to you, Sujatha, where you said, you know, the British Airways card for your family makes a lot of sense. Not necessarily the first card you would recommend just as a blanket recommendation to everybody else. That is very much the scenario with the only personal card that I brought on this year, which was the Barclays Lufthansa Miles and More card. And again, this is a card that I would expect the vast majority of folks to never have a need for or an interest in. And certainly, I don't think this is a beginner card in terms of something I would recommend to many people to bring on initially. This is a card that really hasn't made sense for me to apply for until really the last two years.

And the reason that I got this card, there was a couple reasons. One is that it had an elevated welcome bonus of 80,000 Lufthansa Miles and More miles, which I really value that points currency. But that's never been the reason for me alone to look at getting this card. But really kind of what changed it for me is that if you have miles in the Lufthansa Miles and More program, they expire after 36 months. And unless you have status in that program, which I don't think is ever going to be realistic for me to have status in that program, but if you have the Miles and More credit card and you make, I think, one payment or you put one expense on it every single month, then your Miles and More miles don't expire. And to me, that was a really compelling factor that now I don't have to be as worried about my Miles and More miles expiring.

And so that was a card that I brought on that I'm actually really excited about, because again, this is a very niche currency. Don't expect everybody to be chasing after, but as you'll hear when we talk about how we used our points, this is a points currency that has really increased in value for me, especially over the last year. And so not only getting those miles, but more importantly, having a card that makes it so my miles don't expire was really important to me. And so, in terms of the credit card acquisition for this year, I was actually a little surprised when I went back and actually looked because I didn't think that I was going to apply really for anything in 2024, and I ended up getting four cards for myself. My husband got two cards, and for us, that actually feels kind of like a lot. We don't tend to have a really high velocity at this point in terms of getting new cards, but they were great opportunities, and I think that it's also good to keep in mind, like you said, what is your comfort level in terms of velocity, in terms of why you're getting the cards you're getting?

And so I would say that this was a pretty average year for us, but we ended up with more cards than I anticipated when we first came into this year. Now before we get into even more data, total numbers of points we earned, kind of how we earned those points, I'm curious to hear from you, Sujatha, considering that you said this is, you know, really kind of the second main year that you've been in this hobby. Do you feel like in any way your points earning plan for this current year deviated significantly from prior years? And if so, in what ways?

Dr. Sujatha: I would say it did not deviate significantly. I think what really changes is the points and miles landscape. I think the points and miles landscape in 24, especially the latter half of 24, was very different than 23. I mean, in 23, we were getting an ink every month. I mean, it was just a free for all. And all of a sudden, you know, middle of 24, there was sort of Chase just put up this wall and said enough is enough. And so that strategy had to change a little bit and not only change, but there were active things we had to do. If we wanted to get a chase card at that point, we had to close cards. This wasn't just I could just let the ones I sit and not apply for new ones. I had to close cards. I very much wanted that VA card, and I actually got denied twice for it until I was reading a little bit what our strategist people were doing. I was like, look, I think we had nine inks or something at the end, or it actually may have been more. At the end of 23, I closed down all of them except for three ink caches, which are an absolute blockbuster point owner for us. I will take infinity in caches, frankly. I don't need any other inks. And so with the exception of three in caches, two for me, one for him, we just completely shut down. I think I have four chase cards right now, four or five. He has three. And that is basically because of all the shutting down of the inks that we did this year.

I will also say, I think the question of closing cards comes up a lot. Everyone is very worried about, oh, what is the bank going to think of me? Things like that. And this is probably a whole other podcast. I honestly don't think anybody knows what the bank is thinking as far as, oh, she closed four cards and this person closed three, so let us give this person with the three closed cards another credit card. That is all completely made-up and completely obtuse, which is sort of the point. So I don't really care too much about that. I think a little bit about it, but frankly, I am simply not keeping open four business platinums year after year. That's all there is to it. I do not get value out of that.

And so I close it when it's right for me and let the chips fall where they may. I still get NLL offers. I'm still able to get a chase card here and there. And so I basically make decisions on what is right for our family and how much of the annual fees we're willing to spend. But I do not think the strategy changes that much year to year. New cards come up, you know, I think what really changes is the rules and the overall landscape of each bank. And you have to sort of stay on top of it to be able to, I think, continue and progress and generate these, especially these transferable miles year to year.

Devon: Such a great point. I think for me, so much of the way I travel how I plan earning points and using points is really dictated by kind of the phase of life specifically that my family is in. You know, when I first got into this hobby, I did predominantly solo travel. I was married, but I didn't have kids yet. And hotel points were basically irrelevant to me for the first probably three, four, five years that I was in this hobby. And I think since having my kids and especially trying to do more family travel, it is really kind of striking to me sort of the significance that especially Hyatt points have taken on because of how useful and valuable they are for my family travel specifically. And so in terms of my strategy, I think it didn't seem that significantly different for me in 2024 versus 2023, just with that exception that, as I mentioned before, we really just went even more all in on earning chase points for 2024 because of that one specific promotional offer that we were able to get. And so I came into 2024 knowing we recently have, recently meaning probably the last three or four years, really have favored earning at least as many Chase points as other transferable points currencies because of their transfer partnership with Hyatt.

But 2024, I came in knowing, wow, even more than ever, this is going to be the year of Chase Ultimate Rewards points for us. And so I knew that some of those other points currencies that we have earned in the past, we would still continue to earn them, but probably not to the same extent that we had been able to, at least for prior years. And so that very much did kind of bear out. You know, now that we're at the very end of 2024, and I was doing all of my accounting of, you know, what types of points did we earn? How many points? For us, it very much was true that that one specific card promotion, certainly on our personal side, really ended up creating so many points for us.

Dr. Sujatha: Can I ask you, did you run into credit limit issues?

Devon: This is such an excellent question. So, you know, when you're thinking about, especially a card for, I'm thinking personal expenses, right? Obviously, you are going to be limited with a ceiling of what is your credit line on that one specific card? Because our strategy was not let's get multiple different Chase cards. It was let's get this one specific card and really try to funnel as many of our personal expenses onto this as possible. And so that is something that I think needs to be taken into account is, okay, so what is that going to look like in reality?

Now, here's kind of the way that it played out for us is that we opened the Chase Freedom Unlimited for my husband. I can't remember the credit line that was initially issued on that card, but really our goal was how can we get as high a credit line as humanly possible on this one specific card? Because one of the things that I am very nervous about that I try never to do is credit cycling. So let's just talk for a second about that and then how that played into the strategy. So for people who are not familiar with this term, credit cycling is a very specific behavior where you take a credit card, let's just say it has a credit limit of $10,000, but let's say you have $40,000 of expenses you want to put on that card, specifically in one month. So credit cycling is when you max out or you get very close to maxing out the credit line on your card. So you put $9,500 of charges on your card. You pay the card down to zero. And then in the same exact credit card statement period, you then put more charges on the card again. So you pay it off. So it goes down to zero. You put on more charges again.

So in this way, you can take a card that theoretically has a $10,000 credit limit. You can get $40,000 worth of charges on it. But the potential sort of danger of doing that is that type of behavior, credit cycling, can be seen as very risky behavior to a bank. And that can be a reason for them to shut down your account entirely, which is obviously not what we want. When we really care about these cards, we have the intention to use them responsibly, to hold them over time. And so one of the things that really we have to look at was, okay, how can we put ourselves in a position where we're also not going to have to be forced to credit cycle, like it's one thing to have a very large expense, but if you cannot get that expense onto your credit card because of the limit that was issued to you, then it becomes a little bit irrelevant.

So one of the things that Chase has historically allowed folks to do. And I think that we also benefit from the fact that we have been Chase customers for over 10 years now. So not just with credit card accounts, but we do our personal banking through Chase. My husband and I each independently do our business banking through Chase. We have a mortgage with Chase. And so in terms of client relationship, no one from the bank has ever said, oh, you know, here's what we allow you to do or here are things that we're willing to work with you on because you've been a client for so long, but I do think that you can do a little bit more within your request for a bank if you have been a customer longer than three months with a single card, right?

So I think that context is important. But one of the things that Chase has historically allowed folks to do is within your personal cards or within your business cards, you can move credit lines around. So if you have multiple personal cards, you can request from Chase, can I take X amount of a credit line from card A and I actually want to transfer it to card B. And so, for many of us who have multiple cards from one issuer, you may find that you're not using all of those cards equally. So, to your point, the British Airways card, I got in 2014, right? Like, I am the perfect example of the person who does not need a British Airways card, but it was one of my first ones. It had a 100,000 Avio sign-up bonus. I was like, this is amazing. Let's go. Right?

So, I have a BA card. I do actually still have it open. And because it was one of the earlier cards I opened, it actually had a pretty significant credit line on it, and I literally never used that card. And so, one of the things that we were able to do was look at all of the Chase personal cards we have, again, sort of understanding that we don't want to draw down the credit to almost nothing on all of those cards, but we had credit that we could work with and play with. And what we did was we basically consolidated almost all of our available credit on our personal cards that we had to that one card. So we do now, for now, have a very high credit limit on that one specific card. We will probably reallocate that credit back to some other cards, you know, when we're done with this specific promotion. But that really did enable us to be able to put large charges on the card without being forced to credit cycle. So that was a fantastic question.

So that was kind of our approach with that specific card. And so overall, I actually think this is fascinating. We did not compare these numbers. So Sujatha had her homework. I gave her this extensive list of questions and saying, like, these are all the breakdowns that we should go through and look at. But we didn't compare what cards we had, what cards we got, you know, our points earning or any of these numbers. So we're learning this from each other as we are having this conversation real time. So I actually think it's fascinating. You said you earned cumulatively around 5.31 million miles in points in 2024. So interestingly, our total number of points in miles that we earned in 2024. Again, I also look at, this is my whole family combined. So, myself, my husband, our personal cards, both of our business expenses, everything lumped together. We earned 5.27 million points and miles, which is almost identical.

And the reason I think this is so fascinating is because I think we did it in entirely different ways. And we are going to break down how many of these points were transferable points versus airline and hotel specific points. What percentage of points do we each earn from welcome bonuses versus organic spend versus, you know, all these different ways you can earn points and miles. And I think those are going to look very, very different for you and me. But I think it is fascinating that we're in almost the same amount of points as each other this year. So, Sujatha, I want to start with you. Let's start breaking down these numbers. Of your 5.31 million points and miles earned in 2024, can you just give us a little bit more of a breakdown in terms of what percentage of those were transferable points versus airliner hotel-specific points, what were the main points-earning methods that came into play for you? Help us understand what went into that 5.31 million points.

Dr. Sujatha: Yeah. So first, I'm going to sort of start with the broad ecosystems and then maybe get into a little bit of detail for each one. So Amex by far, like not even close, there's not even a close second, is 2.7 million. So a little bit more than half, well, just about half of the total number of points. Chase was 600,000, and I'm going to explain that a little bit. AA was actually 350,000, so 350,000 American Airlines. Now we also earned 210,000 Avios, which we use extensively, and that was not just opening up the credit card, but I also do Avios surveys. That wasn't a huge amount, maybe 10,000 points or something like that, but I am going to make the executive decision to include transfer bonuses here because we killed it with the transfer bonuses this year on Avios. And that was just free money. So I'm going to include that.

Hawaiian and Alaska, same thing, about 210,000, 200,000 Hyatt points, 160,000 Hilton points, 160,000 Bilt points. So Bilt, I'd opened up 23. They had not done their capping on everything until about October. So we kind of leveraged and really exploited the rent day benefits for most of the year. 150 on Southwest, mainly because my husband opened up two cards in January for companion pass this year. 80,000 city thank you points. We just opened up Estrada and only about 40,000 Capital One, mainly because we had opened up the business card for him in 23. So this was just spend. There was no sub capital one.

So I'm going to start with Chase because what's very interesting about Chase for us, you know, absolutely it is reserved for Hyatt 99% of the time for us. But what I am finding and what I have found this year is I use very, very few Chase points for Hyatt because I generate so many Hyatt points on the cards. And I didn't really figure this out, Devon, until I sat down and looked for this podcast. I am sitting on 1.7 million Chase coins. I don't really touch them. Maybe 20,000 points here and there to top off a reservation, but we organically spend about 40 nights a year in Hyatt as far as stays and things like that. But the remaining 20 nights to make Globalist is spend put on the cards. And for some reason, at least for 24, we have been able to generate enough just at a couple of paid stays because for conferences, I get reimbursed, which is awesome. Highly recommend that if you're able to keep those points. We barely touched our Chase stash this year. And this is by opening two Chase parts this year. I'm still sitting on 1.7 million Chase points.

So for Chase, really, the subs for Chase were right around 305,000, most of that was not transferable. The only transferable amount was I think we got 160,000 out of ink preferred. We got my husband before sort of the sub dropped. The rest of that was on the high personal British Airways card. So 300,000 on sub. Non-sub spending was about 511,000. Two-thirds to a little bit more than that was ink cash. I max out three ink caches a year with gift cards. We tend to meet subs. When I open a new card, I strategically open it for specifically a large tax payment, a large some other payment. So we are rarely spending on sub cards day-to-day, to be perfectly honest, simply because we meet those subs within a day or two. So even grocery store and stuff like that spend is going on Visa and MasterCard gift cards. So that has been a tremendous point earner for us. And that has allowed us to earn you are without opening up a lot of cheese carts. And that has been incredibly helpful for us. And then we got about 85,000 points through referrals, actually. So thank you all very much. Honestly, that was total like Jimmy points. People have been very generous with their referrals. And thank you, 85,000 is not a small number.

So moving on to Amex, subs was about 1.5 million, subs alone, not even including the spend on those subs. And this was all NLL. My husband and I can't really work. We have really no more Amex cards we can refer for lifetime language offers. The other very interesting thing that we leveraged a lot this year were these authorized user offers that everyone had. So I would open my account, get 15,000 coins for 4,000 spend for opening an authorized user. I think my husband is an authorized user in about 15 is right now, which he may or may not be aware of. But that was just the AU card and not including the spend. Once again, just the subs, it's not 150,000 points and just accruing these small 15,000 increments. And that we actually used all the time. So we often use those little AU cards for if we didn't, we needed more Amex points, use those for daily spend because it's only 4,000 spend, which we can do really pretty quickly. And it's very often in six months. So we actually, you know, really used a lot of those referrals for 60,000. We have a lot more referral bonuses in 23 because we refer to each other. That has kind of stopped, obviously, because you can't do that anymore. So thank you all very much whoever ended up using my referrals.

Rakuten, everyone's favorite. So interestingly, we I don't think put a huge amount on Rakuten last year. I think we're going to add a lot more this year, but it was $292,000 for Rakuten. So not, I think, sort of the half million a lot of people are pulling, but whatever, who cares? I mean, we don't spend for points. We have plenty of spend. We buy what we need. We try to use a shopping portal. It is what it is, right? So those were kind of like the breakdowns. The actual chase points would spend was more than the subs. Obviously it was 1.24 million. I apologize, I'm going to backtrack for one second because I actually mentioned a couple of Amex numbers and I was in the chase section. So I'm going to go back to chase for a second.

So referrals, I think I mentioned were 85,000. So total number of chase points was 900,000. So that was sort of chase the vast majority where you are, but there was absolutely high at an obvious in there. So that was Chase for me. I'm going to move on to Amex. Amex subs were about 1.5 million just from opening up the NLL cards. AU cards, like I think I said, was 150,000. Referrals, 60,000. Rakuten was 290,000. And SPED was 1.3 million. So right around 3 million Amex points there. And Citi, Capital One, Bilt, these were all obviously a lot less. 

I will mention AA because that was actually my third highest point accrual this year, 250,000 American Airlines points, subs were 220 and spend was about 30. So that was a good haul this year for AA. So I'm going to say a little bit about status here because I think there is a little bit of status chasing. I should not say a lot, but a lot of status chasing that I think everyone really gets put themselves under a lot of pressure to get status on this and status on that. This is really one of these situations where you've got to step back and say, what is useful for me, right? Delta status is completely useless for me. I have not been on a United plane in five years. Completely useless for me.

The two statuses that I absolutely enjoy and utilize all the time for our family, Hyatt Globalist, I don't care what it takes, I'm never giving this up. The free parking alone is like just, I mean, I will never go with Globalist. Number two, A, it's not that we fly AA so much, but AA Platinum, and I don't really get too fancy. I'm never going to be Executive Platinum. I try to stick with Platinum. I really like One World Sapphire. I mean, for the simple reason it allows us to pick BA seats, it allows iFlyAA economy for domestic conferences. It allows me to pick an exit row seat. It allows me to sort of get these things that frankly are really nice. It's not super difficult to get to Platinum. So those are really the only two statuses short of some massive, you know, travel change, strategy change. Those are really the only two that I really try to keep.

So getting these AA cards, putting spend spending in the shopping portal, this is very useful for me. Look at how you travel, look at what is important and chasing other statuses is frankly useless. And I would very much like to accrue those points in other ecosystems. The other thing we did was opened up two Hawaiian cards, so I got 140,000 points up for probably $5 in spend. Those were absolute no-brainers. And frankly, once again, living in Southern California, we utilize Alaska a lot. They also have fantastic fares for AA flights, which is great. So I often use Alaska Miles. They did a total rehaul of their rewards program over the last few months. And we won't get too much into that. But for once, this was not a devaluation when they said we're making enhancements, which usually means it's a massive devaluation.

So they've got some very, very interesting ideas for getting status even on award flights for companion passes. So very much something that we will use. And we generated about 150,000 Bilt points this year. And that is 100% transfer bonus driven. You know, we basically moved all those points over to Avios and just generated, frankly, you know, one and a half business class tickets to Europe just from moving over both points, which is incredibly lucrative. So just sort of as a final little summary for percentages, 49% of all the points we earned was on spend, actually, and only 27% was subs, which I was kind of, you know, kind of interesting to me. I thought it was going to be way more subs, was actually kind of half. 9% were transfer bonuses. So we generated 450,000 points just by transfer bonuses this year. 6% Rakuten, 5% spend bonuses. So what we... Amex had this amazing offer over the summer where if you just basically... One person used a referral on your Amex hold, you were earning 14X on dining for three months. And this was right before summer vacation where people were traveling and really able to kind of utilize that. And then 4% referrals.

I will mention one other thing about spend. So I have incredibly wonderful and accommodating parents who live around the corner from me and they are in their early 80s and they have spent their entire lives traveling. So this is, and you know, taking my brother and me since very early ages on trip. which is kind of unusual for Indian immigrant parents, but there it is. So they very much, even though they were not extensive points and miles utilizers, they very much understand this world. And because they do not travel a lot, I pay all their bills. I pay their property taxes. I pay their insurance bills. I pay their estimated income taxes. And so they are incredibly generous us about letting us pay their bills and giving us checks. So that has been, I have to give a shout out to them. My dad, before any big bill will text me and say, hey, I've got $10,000 bill coming up. Let me know when you want the statement. And that has been an unbelievable point of viewer for us. So not everyone has that gravy train. I understand that. 

But I also happen to have parents who very much understand this and know that I'm not doing anything illegal or, you know, anything fishy. And, and at the end of the day, they like to hear my exploits, right? We come back from trips and they're kind of like, I mean, they travel a little bit, but hear about the business class seats and staying at the mall door. They love hearing about this. So I will mention, you know, if there's some way, if you have someone who's not really traveling a lot, you'd listen, let someone who you trust have a relationship with, if you could pay some of their bills and get a check back, that is a big point earner for us, which is really nice.

Devon: Yes, that is an excellent tip for so many people who are able to take advantage of that. So I'm going to walk through kind of, again, overall kind of broad breakdown of our points earning this year, and then I'll get into some of the specific ecosystems. And then we can kind of compare and contrast anything that sounds interesting based on our two different scenarios.

So, as I mentioned before, our overall points earning for this year was about 5.26, 5.27 million points total. And for us, the way that broke down, I looked at transferable points and then airline and hotel specific points. So for us, about 3.9 million of those points, about 74% were transferable points currencies. So a mixture of Chase, American Express, Citi, and Capital One. And then about a little over a million points we earned were hotel and airline specific. And also, I think this is something that I really like to acknowledge is an important part of my overall point strategy is that we do, we meaning I, actually do outright purchase points almost every single year. It's not always the same exact type of points or miles that I purchase or the same number, but for the past couple of years, actually strategically and deliberately purchasing certain points, especially when they're on sale, has made a big impact on the type of points that we have.

So this year, I purchased 340,000 total points and miles. I'll talk about the ones I purchased and why. But overall, our airline and hotel specific points came to about 26% of the overall number of points that we earned for this calendar year. Now, when we look at the transferable points that I earned, again, even more so in the past. Chase has always been a huge focus for my family, but because of that one specific Chase Freedom Unlimited card promotion offer, this was very much the year of Chase for us. And so total over 2024, we earned about 2.4 million Chase points. And that's taking into consideration the bonus points that I'm assuming we are going to earn from the Chase Freedom Unlimited promotion, which should hit my husband's account probably in January of 2025. 

So we haven't earned them yet, but that's kind of what I'm expecting us to earn total. And again, that's across multiple different personal and business Chase credit cards. So a lot of that came from my husband's cards. So about 571,000 Chase points were earned from my personal and business cards, mostly business cards, and 1.9 million points came from my husband's Chase cards. A lot of it was that one specific personal card, but again, he also has Chase business cards that he uses for his business spend. So for us, about 2.4 million Chase points this year. And I'll get into how much of that was from subs, but not a lot of it was from welcome bonus points earning this year.

And then second for us was American Express. We earned about 932,000 American Express points. That is actually lower than usual for us. And I think that's just a reflection of how much we really focused on specifically earning Chase points this year. City for us was a whopping 7,000 points that I earned over the course of the year. And again, that just goes to show, you know, originally I was putting some of our sort of non-category personal spend on the Citi Double Cash card. Sometimes I would use my Citi Premier card for its bonus categories, but I have almost entirely abandoned, at least at this point, earning Citi Thank You points in favor of earning Capital One points in terms of really focusing in on having some points that can transfer to Turkish Airlines. 

And so this year, we earned about 521,000 total Capital One points, and that was entirely from spend. My husband and I each have one of those Capital Business Venture X cards, and so there are certain business expenses that we will specifically put on those cards to earn those points. This was a big year for Hyatt for us. And the reason for that is, ordinarily, I thought it was fascinating, you said you almost never have to transfer your Chase points to Hyatt, because the opposite is true for us. We almost entirely and exclusively get Hyatt points from our Chase transfers. This year was a little bit different because I ended up hosting an event at a Hyatt hotel.

So the Point Me To First Class conference was held at a Hyatt hotel location this year that had a certain amount of spend in terms of the event space and the food and beverage and all of the things that went into holding an event at a Hyatt hotel. And so from that event specifically, I actually didn't break out what I earned from that compared to the Hyatt points that we earned organically, but the majority of the Hyatt points that we earned this year were from holding that event. And so I earned around 620,000 Hyatt points this year, which is very out of the norm for me personally. And I think the thing that stands out about that that is relevant to people listening to this. It's not so much that anybody else is going to think about holding a conference specifically at an event, but I do think there are a lot of times where you may have a one-time very big event in your life that you are considering holding at a venue that could be a hotel venue, right?

So maybe you are hosting a wedding, you're hosting a bat mitzvah, you're hosting some other sort of big milestone event or celebratory event, and that can be an amazing opportunity to earn tons and tons and tons of hotel-specific specific points or miles. And so, for anybody who is thinking about planning one of these events, I would really encourage you, one, to think seriously about, do you want to hold it at a hotel? Is there a specific hotel property or hotel chain that you would benefit from being able to earn a significant amount of points in, you know, for a one-time event?

And this can also be a great reason to get a hotel co-branded credit card if you don't already have one. So, I already had a personal and a business world of Hyatt card. I put all of our Hyatt-related expenses for the conference on my World of Hyatt business card. So I functionally earned nine points per dollar spent for those Hyatt expenses. And so that was an enormous return. Again, that's not something that I anticipate happening every single year or happening on a really frequent basis. But if and when you do have, you know, a really kind of significant event that you can hold at a hotel, I think it can be an amazing opportunity to earn a lot of points fairly easily.

One of the things that surprised me when I was doing my points inventory was the number of American Airlines miles that I earned. This is, for me, a niche currency. So I consider a niche currency just not a transferable points-earning currency. It's an airline-specific currency, but I get so much value out of American Airlines miles. And this year, I actually earned 333,000 miles, which surprises me because I didn't open up any American Airlines-specific credit cards this year, so none of that was from sign-up bonuses. So I knew I'd been earning American Airlines miles. I didn't realize it was that many. And I think I was surprised because coming back to your conversation about status, there's not a lot of statuses that I chase. Again, even for someone who travels frequently, I think you have to be very, very deliberate about choosing what status are you going to chase, if any, because I think there is significant opportunity cost if you're really going to go all-in on a hotel program or an airline program, in some respects, you really do lose a lot in terms of the amount of spend you have to allocate or the amount of effort that you have to allocate to that one specific program. You want to make sure that the benefit you're deriving out of that status is worth it.

But for me, American Airlines miles themselves are very, very valuable. This is the first year that I've held American Airlines status, and it has been worthwhile to me. And one of the things that it sort of inadvertently did that I love, but I wasn't really expecting in the beginning is that what I found is that when you hold American Airlines status, and if you also have an American Airlines credit card, I happen to have several of them, but one of them specifically, those two things combined make it so much easier to continue earning American Airlines miles at a really accelerated rate. So, for example, I will stay, I will go out of my way to stay at Hyatt hotels when I'm planning travel whenever I can. And there are times when I'm traveling where there are no Hyatts that are available or conveniently located. And in those scenarios, instead, I really like to book hotels through the American Airlines hotel portal.

And because I have American Airlines status and I hold an American Airlines card, what that means is combined, I can end up earning like 15 to 20 times American Airlines miles per dollar spent on hotel stays, which is a phenomenal return. So I had a couple of hotel stays this year that I just ended up earning a ton of American Airlines miles from, specifically going that route. I also earn a lot of American Airlines miles through BASC Bank. So BASC Bank is an online bank where if you deposit a certain amount of money in one of their accounts, you will earn rewards based on the total amount of the money that you hold in that account. So when I first opened up my BASC Bank savings account, the return on investment was two and a half American Airlines miles gets rewarded to you for every dollar you have invested. It’s now been adjusted down to, I think, two American Airlines miles for every dollar that you have invested, but I think that's still a pretty good return.

And so I have $100,000 that is in a BASC banking account that earns me. It used to be 250,000 American Airlines miles a year. Now it's 200,000. So for those of you who do have liquid funds that you don't want to put, for instance, in investments because you think you might need to access them on a shorter timeframe than leaving something invested in the stock market for 20 or 30 years, obviously look into all of your different options. Maybe you decide a high yield savings account is going to be very beneficial to you or a CD is going to be beneficial to you. But if you want to have some of your more liquid funds earning you miles, then BASC Bank can be a really, really great opportunity to do that. 

So I've actually been able to use that to earn a good number of American Airlines miles this year. And then in terms of other miles that I think are significant for me in my overall kind of landscape and strategy is I mentioned that I do purchase certain miles or points depending on if the deal is good, if I know I'm going to put those points and miles to use because I am spending cash money to acquire these. So this is not the same thing as leveraging your existing expenses that you're going to be spending that money anyway to earn points and miles. To go out and deliberately purchase points or miles, you have to really understand the math of when does it make sense, what is the value you're going to get from those.

And the two types of points and miles that I purchased this year, one was Lufthansa miles. I have purchased Lufthansa miles for about the last three years. I have found this to be incredibly, incredibly valuable to me and my family. And this year I purchased 300,000 of those. That cost me a little bit less than $4,000. So again, this is not an insignificant amount of money, but when I take into account the value that 300,000 miles can actually get me, that's four one-way business class flights from the States to Europe. So for me, four one-way business class flights on Lufthansa or Swiss or Austrian Airlines, unless there's some screaming deal I don't know about, I don't think I can ever book four one-way business class flights all in for less than $4,000. And so that's one type of points and miles I bought. The second type, I only bought 40,000, so it wasn't a huge amount, but it's in an airline program that I'm really interested in diving more into in the coming years, and that is the EVA Airline Miles Program. 

So EVA is really interesting in that you can purchase points and miles from them, but they have a clause in their terms and conditions that in terms of using points and miles to book an award ticket through them directly, you can only use up to 50% of the total award ticket cost as purchase points or miles. So unlike other programs like American Airlines or Lufthansa Miles and More or Alaska, you cannot just go out and purchase 100% of the points and miles that you want to use towards a ticket, but you can use up to 50% of an award ticket amount as purchased miles. So there's a very specific award redemption I had my eyes on. And because EVA is a one-to-one transfer partner so far only of Citi, you can transfer Capital One points to EVA, but not at a one-to-one ratio. I didn't want to drain all of my Citi points, and so I wanted to run an experiment where what if for a specific EVA redemption, I bought a little less than half of the total points of an award, and then I use my Citi points for the rest of the award. And so I did buy 40,000 EVA miles and that cost about $1,100.

So in terms of, again, looking at overall percentages for me and my points earning in 2024, of the 5.27 million points and miles that we earned, about 56% of those came from organic spend. So that was putting spend on cards that we already had and really leveraging bonus category earnings. So about just shy of 3 million points and miles just came from organic spend. From non-organic spend, about 2.3 million of those miles, so 44% of my total points and miles came from just not actual putting spend on these cards, and that included about 118,000 points from sign-up bonuses. If I include what I consider to be the bonus from the Chase Freedom Unlimited double cash-back or double points promotion, I consider that to be sort of like a welcome bonus because the way that Chase structured it was that the card would earn its regular points earning for 12 months and then at the end of 12 months it would just—Chase is supposed to give you an entire kind of bolus or chunk of your bonus points all at once, and so it feels kind of like a sign-up bonus.

So when I consider that kind of pulled into the category, that actually puts us up at about 1.5 million points total from sign-up bonuses. The thing that I was really surprised at when I looked at my breakdown for this year, especially compared to last year, is that other kind of methods of points earning played a much less significant role for me this year than it has in the past. You mentioned Rakuten was not a huge kind of aspect of your points earning this year. It wasn't for me either. I did earn a little over 200,000 Amex points, which... I think is amazing. It's better than nothing. But that was very, very little of my overall points earning compared to especially the year prior. Purchasing miles counted for about 6.5% of our overall points and miles earned. But things like spend bonuses, you know, card-specific promotion offers, referrals, that was like less than 1% of the overall points and miles we earned, which I was surprised by. I didn't think it was going to be a huge number, but I was surprised by kind of how little other things mattered for us this year.

Now, I will talk a little bit about some of our ecosystem or transferable points specific breakdown, and then we're going to do a little bit of predictions for 2025 before we wrap up today's episode. So, for us, in terms of our chase points, again, this was about two and a half million of our total points, and a huge portion of this came specifically from that Chase Freedom Unlimited double cash-back promotion. I think all in, we will probably end up having earned about 1.4 million points from that card alone, which is just, to me, astounding. It really took the place of multiple potential other welcome bonuses of cards. And what I take away from that is, especially for those of you who are a little bit newer in this hobby, I think we have to be careful about shiny card syndrome, about jumping on any “elevated offer" that comes along. But I think there is something to be said for when a single time or a promotional offer does come out from any of these issuers, is really taking the time to evaluate that offer and saying, what is this offer actually going to be able to do for me, and in what scenario can I take advantage of this?

Because not every promotional offer is going to make sense for everybody, but when you feel like you can go through those details and you know your spend patterns, you know the spend that's coming up for you in an upcoming year, if there are other cards that you don't feel like you want to bring on, you know, 20 cards in a given year, and you can really focus your spend on one card, I think these kind of once-in-a-lifetime promotional offers can be just hugely beneficial. 

So for us, for Chase this year, it really came down to that one card and just how many points we were able to earn from it. We did earn points from sign-up bonuses, probably around 300,000 Chase points total. So that was great. And that was just my husband and I referring each other back and forth for business credit cards. And then otherwise, our Amex points, a lot of that came from the two welcome bonuses on two Amex business gold cards. So that was about 400,000 points for us. And otherwise, again, organic spend and a little bit of points from Rakuten.

Other than that, our city points, our Capital One points, those all came from organic spend. I already mentioned American Airlines miles, that we got a lot of those miles from Basque Bank. Also got a lot of miles from the American Airlines shopping portal and booking hotels through the American Airlines portal. And then just my purchase miles of Lufthansa miles and the EVA miles. So, Sujatha, I am really curious to hear from you. When you look back, kind of on all of 2024, all of your points earning, what are you just most excited about? What do you feel like was the biggest win for you?

Dr. Sujatha: Yeah, I mean, I have to go with Amarix on this. So obviously, there's a tangible result to all this point accruing, right? Which is your trips. Like what trips are you going to go on? We have an 11-year-old in fifth grade. We are completely tied to the elementary school calendar, which luckily comes out about a year or two in advance, so you're kind of able to estimate when these dates are. My husband and I also have a little bit of flexibility in the sense that we are able to sort of block off those school vacation days a year or two in advance and kind of plan accordingly. So we are, I know many people are last-minute travelers, we are 18-month to two-year planners. I mean, that is just how we get antsy when things are not booked a year out.

So for us in 24, because pretty much all of 24 had been booked in 23, 24 was for us planning for 25. And we just have some epic, epic trips coming up. And so we are able to sort of see the tangible results of what we did in 24. And the other thing is we weren't kind of like, oh, just this is for a summer vacation kind of thing. We were like, we're doing this for summer vacation. These are the places we're gonna go. These are the flights I need to find and I need to have enough points for. So we were able to have very specific, tangible goals as to what these points were gonna be used for. So obviously our plan for this year was to get 25 booked and we'll talk a lot more about that. But what you're gonna find is that because I really only started all this at the end of 22, and most of 23 had been booked, the travel in 24 looks very different than my travel in 25, simply because a lot of the travel in 24 had been booked before I really ramped this up. 

So I am very, very excited about next year. We’re using a lot more points for things than we did, I think, even in this year. We had some great wins this year, but I think primarily we're now very much planning 26. So we are very much a year and a half to two years planner, and that way we're able to kind of say these are the points we're most likely going to need. I also mentioned transfer bonuses. Obviously, this is the opposite of speculative for me. Even if those Avios sit for two years, I know absolutely, well, they'll never sit for two years, but absolutely a massive transfer bonus is going to be well utilized. Obviously, we very much recommend against speculatively transferring. And I think the FOMO is hard, right? 40% to Virgin, every couple of months is very hard to resist. But once I really look at it, I'm like, when am I ever going to fly Virgin? I'm just not. That’s some random trip. It's just not really in the plans. And I just, I think it's, you've got to take a step back and look at this logically. Not everybody can do all the things. That's it.

Devon: I think that was the perfect segue and conclusion to this first half of our 2024 points in review. So I cannot wait to come back for our next episode. And we are going to be getting into exactly what are all of those amazing trips that you have already booked and planned into 2025. We're going to be talking about all the different travel that both of our families did, what we thought were winners, what we thought were maybe some of our misses, and just general tips and recommendations about how we can put these hard-earned points to you. 

So, Sujatha, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for taking, seriously, the enormous amount of time it took to comb through all of your different accounts, do all of your different points accounting. I have loved hearing how you approach this year, how you earn points, and just your thoughts on points and miles in general. So thank you so much for joining me today. I can't wait to talk about how we actually used points on our next conversation together.

Dr. Sujatha: Thank you so much. Yes, the fun part is really going to be part two.

Devon: All right, everybody. So join us again next week to hear how we put all of our points and miles to use for our travel planning in 2024 and 2025. I hope you all have a fantastic week and we'll see you again next time.

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of Point Me to First Class. If you want more tips on turning your expenses into travel, visit PointMeToFirstClass.com to learn more.

See you next week. 

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of Point Me to First Class. If you want more tips on turning your expenses into travel, visit pointmetofirstclass.com to learn more. See you next week.