Intro to Travel Points
Picking the Right Cards for Points
The video above is a full podcast episode. What follows are the highlights, in case you'd rather read, or want to come back to the key points later.
You're About to Start Seeing Card Offers Everywhere
Once you start paying attention to travel points, credit card offers appear everywhere you look. Some of that is how internet advertising works. Some of it is that you're simply tuned in now — like buying a new car and then noticing that car on every road.
The first thing I recommend is putting some blinders up. You are going to have to tune out the noise, because the people making that noise are very good at their jobs.
Why Everyone Wants Your Attention
Airlines want you to sign up because banks pay them for those miles. Banks want you to sign up because they earn on interest and on every swipe. Source
A Bigger Number Isn't Automatically a Better Offer
How far a point goes varies enormously between loyalty programs. There are 150,000-point offers that won't take you as far as some 60,000-point offers — and knowing which is which takes time. I've been doing this for over a decade and I still had to build that sense slowly.
Offers on the same card also move throughout the year. It isn't unusual to see the same airline card range from a 50,000-mile welcome offer up to a 90,000-mile one.
You can't rely on banks or airlines to show you their best offers.
Where I Tell Almost Everyone to Start
My recommendation is the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card — and this is one of the few things nearly everyone in the travel points world agrees on.
It has a low annual fee and earns a flexible points currency. That flexibility is the whole reason I can recommend it to everybody: whatever you value, there's a way to use these points for it.
And Why Chase First
Chase has the clearest rules of any bank about when they'll approve you — known as the 5/24 rule. It isn't published anywhere; it's been worked out over years from people's data points.
That rule is exactly why you start with Chase. If you don't focus on Chase cards early, you can lock yourself out of getting them later.
This card also carries some solid travel protections, like baggage delay insurance, plus the basics I think everyone should have a card with, such as extended warranty cover.
Don't Wait Until You Understand Everything
It's tempting to hold off until you feel like you've learned it all. But if you open a card today, you have three months of spending ahead of you before the points even arrive — three months of learning built in.
Yes, yes, yes. Start somewhere. I waited eight to nine months thinking I needed to learn everything first. I wish I would have just tried one card.
— a reader, on Instagram
I heard about credit card points a decade ago, but thought it was too good to be true.
— a member of the Facebook group, who has since booked flights and ten nights in Hawaii on points
Eight or nine months of waiting is three card offers you could have had! That's a few thousand dollars of travel that you missed while waiting to jump in.
The Short Cut
Follow the Three Year Plan
People assume credit card strategy needs far more personalizing than it actually does. After advising thousands of people, I've found the same strategy works well for almost everyone — which is good news, because it means nobody has to reinvent the wheel.
That's exactly what I put into my Three Year Plan: sixteen years of doing this myself and eight years of advising other people, turned into one plan that's easy to follow and easy to keep going. It shows you, in order, the cards I'd open over your first three years.
You can absolutely build your own strategy if you want to. But if you'd rather have a solid, proven one handed to you — start here.
Read the Three Year Plan →Your Action Steps
- Brand new to points? Open a Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card.
- Already have one? Refer your partner or spouse to it, if they don't have their own.
- Further along than that? Read the Three Year Plan and find where you already are on it.
Prefer to build your own plan? My Best Offers page lists anything I think is notable.
Quiz
You see an ad for a card with a 150,000-point welcome offer. What does that tell you?
