Showing posts with label Getting Started. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Getting Started. Show all posts

January 4, 2014

Getting Started: Online Shopping Portals


This the third in a series (posts one and two) of posts on getting started earning, managing, and redeeming points and miles.  Everyone shops online and it’s one of the best ways to earn incremental points and miles.  Most airlines (United, American, Southwest, etc…) have shopping portals that enable you to earn points by clicking through their affiliate links.  Many Chase issued cards also have their own shopping portal through Chase Ultimate Rewards called the Chase Ultimate Rewards Mall.

Sample United Shopping Offers

It’s really simple…click through one of the links above, login using your AA/United/Southwest/Chase credentials, find a retailer, click through to their website and shop as you normally would online.  During an especially big promotion earlier this year, we spent a few hundred dollars at eBags when they were offering 35 miles for each dollar spent.  We earned over 10,000 miles in about ten minutes buying Christmas presents and a new suitcase for Emily.  

Holiday Shopping yielded a ton of AA miles

In some cases you can “double dip” to really maximize the points earned.  I’ve been able to go through a shopping portal to buy a gift card earning 4x points.  Then I used that gift card to pay for something I was going to buy anyway through the same portal earning another 4x points.  Everyone has a different “valuation” for how much their miles are worth.  I value most of my airline miles at $.02 each.  So earning an incremental 8 miles per dollar spent is like getting 16% off your purchase for a few minutes of work.

January 3, 2014

Getting Started: Award Wallet


This is the second in a series of posts (Here is the first) on getting started earning, managing, and redeeming points and miles.  One question I often get is “how do you keep track of your points?”  I have over thirty points/miles accounts all with different usernames and passwords.  Emily has another twenty or so accounts.  That is 50+ unique numbers, usernames, and passwords to manage representing 1,500,000 miles and points.  That would be pretty impossible without some sort of system.   
 
Easily add/manage multiple accounts













Award Wallet is a free service (there is paid version as well that provides some incremental functionality) that enables you to manage all of your accounts (for your family as well) in one place.  Part of making this work is staying super organized.  AwardWallet makes that part really simple and easy.  Award Wallet enables you to add all of your accounts, keep track of the balances, automatically update balances, add your travel planes, and see which points/miles are about to expire.  You can even add things like Opentable or Starbucks to your account.

It's a pretty intuitive (create an AwardWallet account, add the usernames and passwords for your miles/points accounts and that's it) system but please let me know if you have any questions on getting setup!  It's a similar process to setting up Mint or any other financial aggregation system.  There are a few airlines that have prevented AwardWallet (i.e. United and American) but you can manually update your balance - something I do on a monthly basis.

Keep track of accounts, account numbers, status, balances, and expiration dates 

Getting Started: Credit Card Bonuses


2013 was a great travel year for us.  Emily and I took trips to Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, Istanbul, Hawaii, and London!  Many of you have asked us how we afford to go on all these trips.  The answer is pretty simple…we don't usually pay for them.

I started looking into ways to save money on our honeymoon in early 2012.  We both wanted to go somewhere really special but didn’t want to completely break the bank.  So I started researching ways to use our existing miles and points, build on those balances, and then redeem them for our honeymoon.  There is a ton of information online (favorite blogs coming soon) that I consumed early on and blogs that I read on a regular basis.

Over the past 18 months or so, I’ve built up our point balances, redeemed for several ridiculous trips, and managed to train Emily to use the “right” credit card when going out to dinner, buying gas, or shopping online.  Since so many people have asked us about our trips, I’ve put together a top five list of sorts for those of you that are interested in learning more.  Here is the first post.