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We all love the thrill of optimizing our points and miles, but even the most experienced of us, myself included, slip up. So in this episode, I'm going to share my top five mistakes I've made in my Points and Miles journey. And some of these I realized way too late, and a few of them I'm even still making today. I'm going to go deep on most of them, looking at the numbers, the trade offs, and what I would do differently so you can avoid falling into the same traps and focus on what actually moves the needle. Not every mistake needs a spreadsheet to explain, but in this case, most of mine do. Also, there are timestamps in the show notes, so if at any point in time you want to jump to the next mistake, go back to one. Skip around. Click the timestamps to jump around. And if you're new here, I'm Chris Hutchins and if you want to keep upgrading your money points in life, click follow or subscribe. So before I jump in, you should know that I actually put this whole thing together as a talk that I gave at the Chicago Seminars Conference last week, which is an amazing Points and miles events. There are slides that went along with that talk. If you're watching on YouTube or Spotify, you should be able to see the video and look at the slides. If not, I'll put a link in the show notes so you can click and follow along. You shouldn't need the slides. This could stand on its own all by itself, but in case you're interested, they are there. So let's get into it. So the first mistake that I've made in this game is to just not value my time. And it's very apparent in lots of cases. So here are some examples of how I spent my time. I've driven to Costco to check for gold that was out of stock. I've sat on hold for an hour to get a small refund for a price drop. I have booked flights, hotels, or even entire vacations I never ended up taking. I have compared cashback portals for really small purchases that I probably sometimes even returned. I've endlessly scrolled through blogs, emails, slacks, whatsapps websites to try to find the latest deals, and I've built dozens of spreadsheets to optimize just about everything when it comes to my points and miles journey, and probably even my entire life. So those are some of the ways I spend my time, and I'm going to juxtapose them against ways I probably could have spent my time which is spending more time with my kids and my wife and my extended family doing my job, which might mean researching and recording more episodes, finding more things to put in the newsletter, building another business. If I wanted to start driving for Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, those probably would have been profitable compared to some of the ways I've spent my time. At least if you're only factoring in money, I could be vibe coding some apps that could replace all these spreadsheets and really streamline everything I'm doing. Or I could get more exercise, go for a run, lift some weights, and probably countless other things. So I just want to think out loud with you all and share that sometimes in this hobby I start end up doing things that are not the best use of my time, even though there are things that I'd want to spend my time doing. And so my takeaway from here is that I need to start valuing my time. And one of the things that you can do is you can come up with a minimum hourly rate to make something worth it, and then you can evaluate whether a deal is worth taking advantage of. So, for example, just now there was a deal on a crypto app. It's expired, so I won't go into the nuance, but the return for this deal was about $500 and it took about 10 minutes to do so. If you want to do the math, there times six to get to an hour. That's $3,000 an hour. I can tell you with certainty that that is worth my time. Now, maybe it's actually worth 20 minutes of time because you've got to load some money into the app and then wait and then take the money out later. And there's some overhead in there. But even if we haircut it by 50% and and call it 20 minutes, that would still be 20 minutes of time times the $500 gain. That's 1500 dollars an hour. Haircut by 50%. Seven fifty an hour. That's still way more valuable than I would consider my time. But sometimes these things come down to the point of. There was something that we ordered from Amazon Fresh. We wanted to try to get a refund because it came and it had already spoiled, but it was $2. Is it worth my time to go and refund it? Well, is it one click maybe? So is it worth my time to start live chatting with Amazon to go figure out back and forth and back and forth? Probably not. But maybe I'm sitting on a train, I have nothing to do and I think, oh gosh, I don't really have anything to do. I have two minutes. Why don't I go and try to submit that request to be paid back? So maybe there are times where your time is worth more or less. But in general, if you come up with a minimum rate, which you could at least peg to, what would I get paid if I immediately just hopped in my car and started doing doordash deliveries or Uber drives, something like that, you should always value your time. More than that, you should also regularly just pause to stop and reflect on what's going on. I find myself sometimes going down a rabbit hole trying to optimize a thing, and then I'll just pause. Maybe it's not even intentional. Maybe I had to go to the bathroom. And on my way there, I think, what am I doing right now? Am I actually doing something that I think is incredibly valuable, or am I satisfying some curiosity, but at the expense of going to play with my children or getting something else done that's more important or exercising and all those things I mentioned? So that's another thing I try to do is step. I also try now to consider the mental overhead beyond time. Here's a great example. I was looking at trying to sell some gold I bought at Costco and I was looking at the price and I could sell it now at one price or because it's a marketplace, I could list an ask price and potentially get a higher bid, but it wouldn't clear right away. And the same is true, by the way, if you're selling stocks, you don't have to sell at a market price. Now, for. For a lot of heavily traded things, the market price is very close to the bid ask spread. But sometimes it's not. But by setting your own ask or setting up limit orders or whatever it is for your scenario, you are setting yourself up to have this overhead of thinking about it. And so one time I did this, I saw that the bid ask spread on gold was really high. So I said, you know what? I'm not going to be a sucker. I'm not going to sell at the regular price. I'm just going to set an ask. And then the whole day I was checking in, how has the price changed? Did my sale get cleared? What's going on? And it was so stressful. And the whole Savings was probably $10 for the whole thing. So going forward, unless it seems very obvious and very worth it, I'm just like, how do I get this done now so I don't have to have it looming over my head. I think this way about parking tickets. Sometimes it's like if you get a parking ticket, you think, gosh, could I fight this? What could I do? But if it's a $30 parking ticket, my favorite thing is to just log in and pay it right away so I never have to think about it. I know I'd rather fight it. I'd rather get the money back. I'd also rather get rid of the mental overhead. And then last, I try to set these daily and weekly priorities and deadlines that could just look like a to do list, just sitting on a piece of paper in front of you, whatever system you have. But it just helps me check in and say, okay, I'm spending my time this way, but is there actually something I need to be doing that's more important? The only other thing that I can think of is realizing that I get a lot of joy out of many things I don't get paid for. Right When I watch a movie. No one's paying me to watch a movie. If you go to the theater, you're paying to watch the movie. So entertainment is something that, that has value in our lives. We're willing to pay for it. We're willing to forego driving for Lyft or Uber to have it. And so I do think that a lot of the things I'm doing here are entertainment. Like, I enjoy them a lot. And so I'm willing to accept a lower rate or even no hourly rate for things I enjoy. But sometimes it's like that first hour is exciting, but now you're on the third hour. And I don't necessarily think that it's as exciting as it used to be. And so that's where the regular pause and step away and reflect comes in. And to make sure that it wasn't exciting at the beginning, and now you're caught up in this rabbit hole that is really not worth the time you're spending on it. So mistake one, not value my time. Resolution one, start valuing my time more with a few of these tactics. Mistake two, not considering the opportunity cost. So let's take a simple example. Someone wants to earn United status by spending money on their credit card. And I'm going to assume they're doing this with the United Club business card, because that card earns you one and a half United miles per dollar spent. And so to get this status, you need a number of premier qualifying points that you can get from $270,000 worth of spend on the card. So you might be Thinking that's crazy. And some people that run big businesses might think, well, I could do that in two weeks. And some people might think I couldn't spend that much on a card in two years. Now, there might be other ways to generate spend. That's not the topic of this episode. But there are plenty of things. Whether it's reselling, paying taxes where you pay a fee, using plastique or Melio to pay a bill, there are ways to put chargers on credit cards that come with a cost. So in this case, they're earning 1.5 United miles per dollar, plus let's value them at 1.3 cents. So let's say they're earning $5,265 and United status. Now, if you happen to be looking at the slides, I factored in an average cost of that spend of -2%. Just assuming that maybe you're paying a bill online, maybe you're paying the irs, maybe you're buying and reselling something for a loss, but at the end of the day, you're going to spend $270,000 and you're going to get status plus $5265 worth of United miles. Now, on the flip side, let's say you had the US Bank Altitude reserve card. And this is a card. The person I was talking to about this scenario, because this is a real scenario, they actually had this card and the kind of purchases they were making were ones where they could have been using mobile wallet and they would have gotten 3x on their spend, which with that altitude reserve card, which unfortunately is no longer available and for people who have it will be kneecapped and not be as effective towards the end of the year, but would have earned four and a half percent back because you can make all of those points that you earn worth one and a half cents by using real time rewards to get value from them. So that same $270,000 would have earned $12,150 worth of cash back. So if you figure in one scenario you're getting United status plus $5265 and the other scenario you're getting no status and $12,150, the actual cost of that United status was about $6885. So very, very different from what it originally seemed like. And if you're looking at the slides and you factor in that cost of, well, I needed to spend 2% to generate this spend. You could spend $5,400 on the US Bank Altitude Reserve, earn $12,150 cash back. And so you'd be up 6,750. If you just in isolation look at the United scenario, you might say, well, I'd have to spend $5,400 in fees in order to put this $270,000 on my United card, but I'm going to earn $5,265 in United miles. So it only cost me $135, right? Not if your alternative was earning $12,000. And so I just encourage anyone listening that anytime you're looking at a deal, anytime you're thinking about what you're spending your money on, whether it's to earn status or to earn points, consider what other cards you might have and what the cost of those earnings are. But also consider the limits, because in this scenario, let's say they already had a use case for that altitude reserve card, and it was maxed out. They were hitting their limit every single month. Well, then it's not really an opportunity that they could have used that card. So it's not a fair comparison. But if you have a card that earns 3% cash back, like the Robinhood Gold card, and instead, you're trying to earn United status, and so you're earning one and a half United miles, you're doing that at a cost. And it's totally fine if you value that United status enough to close the gap, right? In this case, I don't think it's fair to say United's platinum status only cost me $135, but I do think it's fair to say United platinum status might have cost me $6,000, and that's okay. And I'll get into chasing status in a second. And why United status might actually be more lucrative to chase than it seems. Because when I think about it at face value, spending $6,000 for platinum status on United seems absolutely crazy. But we will come back to that. So it is okay to ignore this, right? It's okay to know I had an opportunity cost, but I really wanted Hyatt Globalist, so I put all my expenses on my Hyatt card. That's fine. Just understand that there is a cost to not using a card that has a better return. So that's mistake number two, not looking at the opportunity cost. This episode is brought to you by Superhuman, which is absolutely one of my top apps. It's in the dock on my phone. It's my first PIN tabbed on my computer. I've used it for years, and it's hands down, the best way to do email if you like to save time. That's because Superhuman is the best at inbox decluttering and enhanced productivity. It's also the fastest email experience I've used and I'm certain I've saved hundreds of hours a year, if not more. Using Superhuman. They have every feature you could want built into email, split inboxes for prioritizing, keyboard shortcuts and snippets for everything, AI tools to draft responses and summarize emails, automated reminders, integrated calendars. And if you're using Superhuman at work like we do, you can share emails and drafts with your team and all comment on them together. It is so great and saves us so much time. 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Deleteme is a hands free subscription service that removes your personal information from hundreds of data broker and people search sites, reducing the risk of your valuable data getting into the wrong hands. I picked Deleteme because they've been doing this for over 15 years and they use their own tech to continuously monitor and remove instead of outsourcing it to third parties. And unlike other services, Deleteme verifies your data is on data broker sites before submitting removal requests, reducing the risk of unnecessary data exposure. I have already signed up my whole family for Deleteme and I feel much better knowing that we're all so much less of a target online. So if you want to get your personal information removed from the web, go to allthehacks.com delete me and get 20% off a plan for you or your entire family. Again, that's allthehacks.com delete me mistake number three is chasing status. And this is one that I am wildly, wildly guilty of this year. And so let me just talk about how I ended up this year with status. So I currently have United Silver actually from flying last year. I have Delta Gold thanks to the generosity of a friend who nominated me for Delta Gold. I've got American Executive Platinum status from credit card spend on an AA business card. I've got Alaska Platinum status from a combo of flights and spend on the new Summit card and my Alaska business card. And then I have Southwest a list status from a combination of credit card spend, a promo they ran earlier this year and some flights. And then last I did a status match on JetBlue to match to Mosaic 1, which I thought I might go past and spend my way past Mosaic one. But I think I started putting this presentation together in that process and realized I needed to stop there. And that's because I started looking at how often I was flying on these airlines. And so United, I actually did fly 11 flights last year, which makes sense why I earned Silver status on my own and actually got some value out of it. Free checked bags, economy plus at check in, and a few other things. So that United Silver status actually was helpful. I didn't fly Delta once, so I really appreciate the nomination. I did in fact book a flight next year on Delta where because I'm gold this year, I was able to pick some preferred seats. So I didn't get zero value out of that status, but pretty close on American. I flew American three times. But the original reason that I started going for American status was that I was flying Alaska a lot and I thought, I can't earn high enough Alaska status as I wanted from credit cards and flights. So if I could earn American status, they have reciprocal benefits on Alaska. Let's just go for American status. And right as I was almost done with that journey, Alaska releases a card with uncapped ability to earn elite qualifying points for credit card spend on the new Summit card. And I was like, I know ultimately if I'm going to fly Alaska, I should have Alaska status, not American. So for the three flights I took on American this year, they were all after that switch. And, and so I put in my Alaska number. I booked those flights through Alaska, and because Alaska earns elite status on award flights, I earned Alaska status, not American status. So I have American status right now. I've had American status this year and I have never once put my American number in a flight I've booked, which I don't know is Embarrassing, to say the most. On Alaska, I've had 13 flights this year. Funny enough, almost every single one of them was booked and flown before I earned any of this status. And then on Southwest, I actually flew nine times this year. And that A list status was incredibly helpful. We have one companion pass in our household. A list lets you board earlier at the end of the A group. If you have kids, you can board at the end of the A group also, but as they get older, that's not as much of an option. And so that Alaska status was awesome. And JetBlue, I've flown zero times. And if you went back and looked at 2020 or even 2015 to 2025, I think JetBlue and American and Delta would be just a couple flights. So really, this is not a unique scenario for some of those airlines. So then I looked one more at whether I ever flew first on any of these airlines. Paid first class, not upgrades. And so on United, I didn't, which means that status probably came in handy. I got to confirm Economy plus and that kind of stuff. And then on United, I did one time, and every other flight was in economy, which meant status probably mattered. Picking a preferred seat, picking Economy Plus. On American, again, those three flights that I didn't credit to American, I also booked with points in first. And so, yes, I used them to get Alaska status, but status wouldn't have mattered because I booked them straight into first using points. So whether I had status or not, it's not like I'm going to get to board earlier because I'm already in first. I'm not going to get better seats because I'm already in first. So it really started making me think what I'm doing here. Because when you look at Alaska, I flew Alaska 13 times. Eleven of them were in first. And that might seem crazy if you don't live on the west coast, but I just booked another flight on Alaska and it was 209 for economy and 239 or 249 in first. So an extra $40, an extra 20%. I've got a threshold in my mind which is like, anytime the flight is under, let's call it 40, $50 to upgrade to first. Given all the things going on in life, it's worth it for me. I can get more work done. I can get on and off easier. It's a more comfortable experience. And so that's kind of been my mantra. I don't quite have the ability to say, well, all flights under four hours, no, no, no. Like, I Just can't mentally bring myself to do that. But if it's 20, 30, $40, I can bring myself to do that. Southwest doesn't have first, so status really mattered. And so if I look at the statuses and what helped, I can say Southwest and United statuses were really great. Alaska status might have helped, but I mostly booked those flights in first. But maybe I wouldn't have if I knew I would have gotten upgrades I didn't need to and everything else didn't matter. So I wanted to give that context because a lot of the times people, myself included, that are chasing these statuses are doing it in a situation where it actually costs money. And I really wanted to dial in what that cost was. And I went through a big arc thinking about this because the original cost in my mind was really low. And then I started thinking about it was really high. And then I started factoring things in and it got low again. And so I'm going to run through at a level of detail that probably, if you really want to go more in the weeds, go look at the slides. So I'm not going to get as nuanced as the slides do, but I'm going to talk about it at a high level. So for all these statuses, there is some type of thing that you need, whether it's Premier qualifying points, loyalty points, tiles, and by having a certain credit card, whether it's carrying it or opening it, to get a bonus, you can get a little bit of a boost. So United, to get top tier status, you need 28,000 Premier qualifying points. But I have seen signup bonuses that offer you 4,000, so you could bring that down a little. With American, if you have the City Executive Card, at certain points along the year, depending on how many loyalty points you earn, you get, I think, up to 20,000 loyalty points off. So you can reduce the total you need by a little bit. For Delta, you need 28,000 medallion qualifying dollars. But for every Delta card, Platinum or reserve, business or personal, you get 2,500 of those medallion qualifying dollars discounted. Generally, you have an amount you need to earn. You have a little bit of bonuses, maybe from cards or signup bonuses, and then you have how you earn them. And so for all of them, it's a little bit different. And there's no easy way to compare this because for American, top tier status, you need 20,000 loyalty points, and you get one for every dollar you spend on your card. For united, you need 28,000 premier qualifying points. So almost 10% or 15% of that. But you get a premier qualifying point for every 15 you spend. Now, just looking at Delta versus United, both of them need 28,000 of their Premier qualifying currency. But on the United card, you're going to get a point for every $15 you spend. On Delta, it's for every $10 you spent. You don't need to know all that math. I'm just going to break it down. The amount you need to spend to get to top tier status on these airlines, assuming that you hold the card that gets you that bonus or you sign up for the card to get the sign up bonus, is anywhere from $140,000 on Southwest all the way up to $360,000 on United and everything in between. I'd say on average it's 200 to 250,000 for the rest of them. But Southwest is a little easier and United is a lot more expensive. In order to get these statuses, Southwest excluded, it's 2 to almost $400,000 of spend on your card. And most of the spending you do is probably not going to be earning more than 1 mile per dollar or 1 point per dollar. Now, a lot of these cards give you 2x on dining, gas, groceries, maybe utilities, shipping, office supplies, transit. But a lot of those categories are not the kinds of categories that if you have really large expenses, think taxes, business bills, anything like that, where you're going to be earning those bonus points. So there might be a circumstance where someone actually does have incredibly high shipping expenses. And in that case, going for Delta or Alaska might be better because they have some cards that can earn more on shipping. But for the vast majority of people listening to this, they're going to be earning one point per dollar. With the exception of United, the United Club business card earns 1.5 miles per dollar on everything, but the base earn on all the airline cards. Other than that is just 1 point per dollar or 1 mile per dollar. The only other interesting thing here is that at least for this year, who knows if this will continue for next year. If you have the American Advantage business card, you can create an employee card and the employee link to that card earns loyalty points towards status and the main cardholder. So in my case, my wife works at the company. If she were to spend money on her employee card, she would be earning loyalty points, but so would I as the primary card holder. So the one nice thing is if you hit American status using the business card, using employee cards, you can hit it for two people, which is pretty cool. So what does that look like now? I said in lesson two, not factoring in opportunity cost was one of my mistakes. So now I actually want to look at the cost of status. And I'm going to assume, and this is an assumption that always will work, but I'm going to assume for an opportunity cost standpoint that you have some way to earn 3% in value. Now, whether that's a 3% card, a 2x points card like the Venture X where you value your points at one and a half cents, I'm going to leave that up to you. But for the sake of all the math I'm going to talk about, let's assume that if you had an unlimited amount of spend, you could always be getting 3% on that spend. So for all these statuses where you need to spend 140 to $420,000, depending on the card you have. And one more thing of note, I'm going to remove the signup bonuses from the cost to spend these statuses right now, only because you're not always eligible for them. Maybe you already have the card. So for things that are constantly available on a recurring basis, like if you have the City Executive Card, you will get 20,000 loyalty points towards your Executive Platinum status by holding that card. I'll keep that in these calculations. But the United one, where you would need to spend only 360 instead of $420,000 by getting the signup bonus for some premier qualifying points, I'm going to exclude that. So in this scenario, to get status on these six airlines, you would need to spend 140 to $420,000 earning points at a rate of 1 mile or point per dollar, with the exception of United. And so if you look at the amount you would earn in terms of cost in points relative to the opportunity cost of earning 3%, you can run down this list of statuses, but they're all about the same. The cheapest being Southwest at $2,400, the most expensive being United at $4,400, and almost every other one is between three and $4,000. So to earn top tier status, assuming your opportunity cost is a 3% card or a 2x points card where the points are worth 1 1/2 cents, assuming your opportunity cost is 3%, earning all these statuses costs roughly, let's say excluding Southwest, three to $4,000, that's really expensive, right? You have to really value these statuses. But as I was going through this, I forgot that along the way earning these statuses, they often give you milestone benefits or rewards or certain things as you hit the status choice benefits, when you actually factor those in, the math changes quite drastically. And it really changes for United because when you get to United status all the way at the top, you earn 320,000 plus points. And plus points have a tremendous amount of value. So 320,000 points would get you four to eight long haul upgrades, meaning from the United States to Asia to Europe. And there is a pretty healthy market for those plus points. You are not, by the terms and conditions allowed to sell them. There are people online that do. I am not condoning or endorsing that, but if you look at how much people are paying for them in those forums online, those 320,000 plus points are probably worth about $4,500. And that might even be conservative. And so if earlier I said the United status costs about $4,400 and the milestones are worth about $4,500, well, if you were to value them at that value, then the cost of getting to top tier United status is actually almost free. It's actually negative $70. So when you factor in some of these milestones, it really changes the math. For example, Delta gives you choice benefits at the top two tiers. Once you hit, I think it's platinum and diamond. I've never really been a Delta person. So instead of costing about $3,900 for status, if you factor in the value of all those regional and global upgrades or miles that you get from Delta, they're not as valuable as United's, but they're worth about $1,900, which means delta status goes from 4,000 to $2,000American. On the other hand, getting to executive platinum status, the loyalty point perks are not as valuable, I would say, as they are on the others. I pegged them at $650. Your value of these perks is very dependent on how you use them. If you can use two system wide upgrades and save thousands of dollars, then my math is wrong here. But that brings the cost down to 2,400. For Alaska, you get about $1,200 of benefits, bringing it down to 2100 or 2200. Southwest is none, so you're still at 2400. And then JetBlue, you get some minor benefits, but JetBlue actually doesn't have as many exciting milestones from a dollar value. But you can use them to reduce the number of tiles you need. So it actually brings the amount you have to spend from 250,000 down to 190,000. And so it really brings the cost of status down significantly, even though the milestones themselves aren't that valuable. That means that in the old example where status costs three to $4,000 on every airline, when you factor in the milestones you get, it's more like two to $3,000 for every airline, and it's closer to two for almost all of them except JetBlue, except United, where if you value those plus points where the market values them, the status is effectively free. And so this was just something really interesting where I started thinking United was the most ridiculous. But the value of the things you get by hitting that status are the highest, and so it's actually worth it if you can get that value. If you're not going to use those plus points and you get no value out of them, then that's probably not great. Now, United does let you redeem those plus points to nominate status for other people. There's lots of things you can do with them that I think are probably more generous than the rewards you get by hitting the top tier status on other airlines. But if you don't use them, then you're back at having to spend $420,000 earning $8,000 worth of points, but at the opportunity cost of earning, let's call it 12 and a half thousand dollars if you'd been able to earn 3% back. So that was a bit in the weeds. Hopefully you looked at the slide when you saw this or you just followed along, but the short answer is status can be really, really expensive. This episode is brought to you by Element. You know, I'm always searching for ways to feel better, think clear and optimize my life. And Element is genuinely one of the simplest, most impactful upgrades I've made. I drink Element almost every day and I bring it with me anytime I travel. Here's why staying hydrated isn't just about drinking water. Electrolyte imbalances can lead to headaches, brain fog, fatigue, poor sleep, and most electrolyte drinks out there are packed with sugar and dodgy ingredients. But Element is different. 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So if you're ready for a more premium proactive tax strategy to optimize and file your taxes, you have to check out Gilt. And as an all the Hacks listener, you can skip the waitlist. Just head to allthehacks.com Gilt G E L T Again, that's all the hacks.com/G E L T to stop overpaying on taxes. Now the only way this gets a lot better of a deal is let's say you actually do have the ability to spend money in the categories that those cards earn two or in the case the Alaska card 3x points on. Well then that changes the math completely. And I'm looking at this saying what would it actually cost you if you were able to earn 2 or 3x points instead of 1x points on all your purchases, factoring in the milestones, the opportunity cost? Well, with that math, pretty much every status except Southwest becomes free. And if you're looking at this slide live on the video, pretty much every status becomes free or really close to it. And I just realized that I did not update the Southwest number in the slide. So if you're looking at it live in the video, it might still have the old number. But United, if you could earn 2x instead of 1 1/2x, all of a sudden you've got a $2800 profit. Delta, thousand dollar profit. American break even about 46 bucks. $3000 profit on Alaska. Southwest is actually, I think it's about $560. I'm doing the math in my head because I forgot to update this one aspect of this table. And then JetBlue is about $800. So if you happen to have unlimited spend in all these categories, well, then hats off to you, this status can be incredibly lucrative. I do wonder if you have unlimited spend in all these categories. Maybe your opportunity cost isn't just 3% though. Because if I had unlimited spend in dining, yes, I could get status for cheaper. But also I could be putting this on credit cards that earn a lot more than 3% back on dining. And so I'll just flag that this is probably a beautiful concept, but if you actually truly could earn an Unlimited number of 2x spend on office supplies or shipping, you could probably do a lot more with that spend than 3% in value. But this story still stands that it really, really reduces the cost here. So what is my plan for status now that I've thought about this? On one hand I was like, maybe I should just go for top tier United status because the value is really there. On the other hand, just drumming up $420,000 of spend on a United card, not to mention a United card I don't yet have, seems absolutely crazy. So I have a couple paths towards status that I'm thinking about with United, but I'm not really sure. So stay tuned. I will share more if I actually figure out what to do there. So I have it in yellow on this presentation. Delta, we don't fly Delta that much. We do have this one trip coming up. It happens to be a ski trip where I know we're going to check bags, but I have a Delta Amex. So the Delta Amex as a means for checking bags for free is going to be enough for me. American, as much as I went hard to get status this year, I'm just going to forget about it. I'm not even going to use the American card next year. So. So American status, I'm going to let it go and I'm really going to focus on Alaska And Southwest, though, Alaska is interesting because since I put together this episode, Alaska cut a bunch of routes from sfo, which is giving me a little bit of pause. So my current plan was to use the Alaska card to go for Titanium again next year. And fortunately, they're giving everyone who hits it this year a bit of a jump start award. Flights count, and I'm probably going to opt to count them by distance. And I believe next year we're going to use Alaska points to go to Europe, which would be a huge boost. So Alaska status, by the way, if you have Alaska miles and you're using them to book awards and long haul awards like across the ocean, getting status can be really, really fast. So I'll probably keep doing that. And then Southwest, it was actually one of the most valuable statuses I had last year, but it was pretty expensive to get a couple thousand dollars. And so I was like, it's not really worth it. Because if you think about all this, spending $2,000 to get status that you might use four or five times is probably not as good of an opportunity as just buying the preferred seats. So it has to be reasonable enough to make it worth it. Or like I mentioned in valuing my time, enjoyable enough. And so in the case of Southwest a list, there is one alternative, which is what I decided to go for this year, which is on the Chase Sapphire Reserve. If you spend $75,000, you get Southwest A list. You also get a $500 Southwest credit and a $250 shop set. Chase credit. And so I kind of thought, what are those worth? I probably haircut them a little bit. I looked at what it would cost me to spend on that card over the opportunity cost of other cards. And when I summed all the math together, and I'm not going to walk through every line item of it, that Southwest status probably cost me about $300. And so for me, $300 is a better deal, given how often we will likely fly Southwest than paying for the premium seats or whatever we would get. Now, maybe you could argue a Southwest credit card would get you those things, but it would probably come at an annual fee, not that different from 300. And part of spending on that Chase Sapphire reserve card was earning a bunch of Chase points. And using those Chase points at Hyatt has been something I've gotten tremendous value from. So in a way, I'm probably underestimating the value of Hyatt points, which I will talk about next. But in general, I might be thinking wrong about the value of points altogether. So maybe before I get to that note, let me wrap up here. So how am I thinking about chasing status? And how should you. Why would evaluate where it matters? Like where are you actually flying and what kind of impact is it going to have and what would it actually cost you to just pay for the things status gives you? Sometimes you wouldn't do it. You just know your psychology. But. But if you're gonna spend $2,000 chasing a status so you can fly twice, well, you could actually just spend a thousand dollars on each of those flights and you would come out with the same amount of spend. But you might even have a better experience because you're not waiting for a potential upgrade, you're just locking it in at booking. You're not hoping that there's economy plus seats when you check in, you're just booking them when they happen. So I know it's a game. I know it's fun. Maybe you could find something else fun. There are lots of fun things in this world. I'm hoping that next year I don't end up where I did this year, which was I thought I was starting this year without focusing on status and I ended up getting sucked into some of these games of chasing these statuses. And it was fun. I'm going to try next year to not do it. So that is mistake three chasing status. Mistake four is overvaluing points. And I think this is a really big one. I've talked about this recently, but I want to run through it just because it's part of this narrative and it's part of something that I need to change in my mind. So if you look at what most of the blogs on the Internet say, airline points are worth 1.3 to 1.5 cents, hotel points are worth.05 to 0.7 cents, except Hyatt, which are usually worth like 1.7cents, arguably the most valuable single points currency out there. But that's not including transferable points. If you look what I find fascinating at the transferable points ecosystem, you'll see that transferable points almost always, and I'm using the points guys, valuations here get a value way higher than any of the underlying points. So every airline you could transfer AMEX points to is valued by the points guy at 1.3 to 1.45 cents. Yet Amex points are worth 2.0 cents. And so on one hand I agree I would pay more for a currency that could transfer to five or six different airlines because I have a higher likelihood of getting outsized value on the other hand, is flexibility really worth 42% more if you're going to transfer the Amex point to Aeroplan, and Aeroplan points are worth 1.4 cents, are you really getting 2 cents of value from your Amex points by having that flexibility? Now, maybe there are transfer bonuses. There's all kinds of reasons that this math makes sense in one side of my head, but on the other side, I just have to wonder whether flexibility is really worth that premium. But let's move on a little bit. What does the actual data say? So I'm going to be brief with this because if you want to go back to look at the episode on what are points worth, I went way, way deeper on it. But at a high level, the data actually supports a lot of the valuations that sites like the Points Guy have around airline points being worth 1.3 to 1.4 cents. If you look at American, median value of booking business is 1.3 cents. The points guy says Americans are worth 1.55. So there's a little discrepancy, but the average value, you know, is a lot higher at 1.84 cents. And so if you're booking the best flights, you're not just booking the median flights. You know, I could see you getting outsized value here on hotels. The data around Hyatt is actually really surprising. The median value of Hyatt bookings, and this is from Gondola. The previous data was from Points Path, the browser extension. Gondola is a hotel booking site. The median value for Hyatt is 1.66 cents, but that's just the median. The 75th percentile is 2.17, and the 90th percentile is 2.85. My takeaway here is if you're using your Chase points for anything other than Hyatt, you're missing out. Assuming you value hotels. With Chase's points boost, getting up to 2 cents of value for hotels and flights, that's really great. But Hyatt, I have just seen some really tremendous value coming out of these points. That's what the data says. On the flip side, I think this is Hilton. The 90th percentile is 0.54 cents. So Hilton is really tough. But I know a lot of people listening are thinking, okay, well, I do a lot better than this. I get a lot more than 2 cents of value. So even these seem low. I'm going to push back and say, let me challenge your math. And I did this in the water points worth episode. But I have a more concrete example that I've really honed in on. The example that I'm thinking of now for I do so much better is I booked this DC to Abu Dhabi flight that was $18,000 for 130,000 points, you know, 13.9 cents a point. Wow, that's amazing. But would you really pay $18,000? Because if you're not going to pay that amount of money, is it even worth that amount of money? And I think that's a really important question to be asking yourself. Like it's cool to get a $5,000 first class flight for free, but those points are worth something. And if you'd gotten cash back, they would be worth real US dollars you could spend on. And so how much that's worth and whether you got a better deal than the cash back really depends on what your alternative is. And for most people listening, it's not buying an $18,000 one way flight to Abu Dhabi. Also, most people aren't booking one way. And I think that's where the points math really screws things up. So here's the example I want to walk through. I looked at a nonstop San Francisco to London flight, found one on saver availability with American for 57,500 points. Now it had higher taxes and fees. It was $733 of fees and taxes, but the flight was 30 $300. So that's a four and a half cent per point flight. And I think everyone listening is thinking, gosh, I'm going to get a 30 $300 flight for 57,000 points plus $700 in taxes. What a deal. That's not even a fair comparison. Right? One way flights are often so expensive. Is 30$300 the right number to look at? So I looked at that exact same flight and then I looked at booking a round trip with the return in economy and it brought the price down from 3,300 to 2,600. You could still get the one way flight in business from San Francisco to London for about $600 less. So at first glance it's four and a half cents a point. At second glance it's 3.4 cents a point. So we're coming down still really good numbers, but I'm not done. Then it's also fair to say you're probably not booking one way. Most people listening are not flying to Europe and then never coming home. And so if you searched around and found a round trip flight in business to Europe, it was about $4,400. So more than the original one way, more than the one way with the throwaway economy. But it would also cost twice as many miles and twice as many points. And so if you factor in half of a one way ticket in business is like 2,200. So now we're coming down again another four $450. Now we're looking at 2.26 cents a point. So now it's like it keeps coming down as we give a more and more fair comparison. But then I thought, okay, if I'm even going to fly to London or Europe round trip and I was paying out of pocket, would I really book this $4400 flight round trip? Or I could change planes in Seattle and book a 30 $100 flight. I would fly through Seattle to save $1300 if I was paying my own way. And when you factor that price in of a 30$100 round trip instead of a 40$400 round trip, or where we started at a 30$300 one way flight, all of a sudden we're looking at 1.11 cents a point. So just looking at what you're comparing to can really change the outlook on how valuable these points transactions are. If you bought that $3,000 flight on your credit card, you'd earn points from the spend on that credit card. Now you'd also earn points from the taxes and fees, but you'd earn more points on the flight where you're booking it with cash. And that brings the value of those points down to 1.04 cents. But also you would earn a ton of redeemable miles. Right. If you flew Alaska and One World Partners to Europe round trip and you credited those all to Alaska, you would have earned 27,390 Alaska miles, which I'd value at about $350. You'd earn nothing flying with your points. Now the cents per point is 0.73 cents per point. And then finally, if you cared about status, you'd also earn 27,390 Alaska status points flying on that flight, which would automatically get you to first tier status and significantly boost your path towards other statuses that year. And that if you valued that status at what I'll call $0.01 per status point, you're now looking at a cents per point of slightly less than half a cent per point. So an example that looked at face value like four and a half cents per point, which by the way, the Points Path app would have told you it was worth four and a half cents a point. But if you ran through the numbers and you ran through the math and you looked at a better set of alternatives and you discounted those alternatives for how many redeemable miles you'd get, how many credit card points you get, the status you'd get. It's actually a way better deal to book that flight with cash. Now, obviously you have to have that cash, but I would make the case that if you had earned cash back the whole time, you would have had that cash instead of those points. And so I'm not presenting this as an argument that you should absolutely stop earning points and start earning cash back, because points can be worth less. There are a lot of situations where I think they can be worth more. And one of those big situations is getting 200, 300,000 point signup bonuses on credit cards. Most cashback cards have 200 signup bonuses. So if you're focused on signup bonuses, points are going to take you so, so much further and be so much more worthwhile. But I would encourage you to consider when those points actually are worth as much as you think and whether it's as often as you think. And I'm starting to realize that if I were paying cash, I would be getting so much back on that travel and redeemable miles and status and credit card points that the comparison isn't what I thought it was. 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Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack. Right now, get their free business guide demystifying AI at netsuite.com hacks the guide is free to you at netsuite.com hacks netsuite.com hacks thank you so much for being here today. You can find all the links, promo codes and discounts from our partners@AllTheHacks.com deals. These are brands I love and use, so please consider supporting those who support us now. If you are using your points in the portal so if you're using your Chase points to book a United flight with that new points boost feature, you are still going to earn redeemable miles. You're still going to earn status. Same goes for using your Amex Business Platinum to get a 35% rebate booking points in the portal. I'm actually coming around to portal bookings being a much better use of points than I had originally thought, because my big takeaway here is you're getting 5 to 15% off the cash fare when you use cash because you're getting redeemable miles. Depending on how you value status, it's another 5 to 10%. If you're booking in a portal that gives you bonuses, that's another 1 to 3%. If you're putting on a credit card, anywhere from 2 to 7%. So at the high end here, you're looking at potentially up to 30% back, as low as probably 13% back, but I'd say probably average somewhere 13 to 25%. So when comparing, you can go do all the math. You can try to figure all this out or you can pick a number that feels right, whether it's 15, 20, 25% and just discount the cash rate by that amount. And I think you might realize that your points aren't worth as much as you thought. And so an example I've shared before, but I'll share again, is we went to Costa Rica. We looked at this trip. This is a slightly different version of the pricing for five nights, but it was 8,256 for five nights. And you might think, well, I booked this for 120,000 points a night, 480,000 points with fit night free, I got 1.72 cents per point. And you'd say, well, if I booked it with my Aspire card and I paid cash, I actually would have earned. And this sounds crazy, but The Aspire card plus diamond status on Hilton earns 34 points per dollar. So on that $8,000 day, I would have earned 246,000 points, which would have brought that 1.72 cents per point down to 1.14 cents per point. But that still for Hilton is an incredible value. And Hilton points often I mentioned 90th percentile was just a little over half a cent a point. So this is great, except that on the Hilton website, you can buy Hilton points for half a cent each. So if you're looking at this thinking, okay, well, I could pay cash, pay $8,000 and get 246,000 points back, or I can spend 480,000 points that I have, well, you would have been better off never earning the Hilton points in the first place, because you could have just bought them for $2,400. $2,400 would have bought you 480,000 points, which, at the time that I looked a lot of this data up, would have gotten you five nights at a hotel that the rack rate, at least the rate on the website, was a little over $8,000. So in some cases, buying the points is the fair comparison for how much the stay actually would have cost, because anyone could do it. And so in this example, the Hilton points that looked like they were worth 1.72 cents are actually worth half a cent. So that means that if you have a Hilton free night certificate that you think is worth 1650, it might really be worth $600, because it's not actually worth one night at that hotel. It's worth whatever it would have cost you to get that night. Which, if you can buy Hilton points, which free night certificates only work when they're a standard award. So at Most, something like 250,000 points, which would be $1,250, but very often less than that. You'll find that everything feels like it's worth a little bit less. And so what am I going to do when it comes to valuing points? Well, first I'm going to consider how many points I earn with cash bookings, because it really reduces the cost or the effective cost of that booking. I'm going to recognize that historically, I've looked at my math and it's like, well, I seem to always get 2 cents per point or more, but I wasn't doing this math. And so that 2 cents per point is probably closer to 1 1/2, 1.6 cents. And I don't know if you're earning 3% cash back. It's pretty close to 2x points. So this is honestly a lot for me to take in because it kind of assaults my entire strategy for the last long period of my life. But I am really actively trying to do this math every time I book something so that I really understand how much true value I'm getting from my points. And I'm going to share that with you as I do it. And in six months, 12 months, I'm going to reevaluate where we're at. And that's not to say I'll stop earning points, because welcome bonuses are often super lucrative. And 5x points categories, there aren't a lot of 5% cash back categories. So it's still worth earning points when you can earn 3 points instead of 2% or 4 points instead of 2%. But at some level I need to understand what my points are actually worth and then I can use that to make an active trade off on whether I want to earn points or cash with any transaction. So stay tuned on there. That's mistake four. Mistake number five is that I just am not cashing out my points. And what does that mean? I've talked about the value of these points and I want to talk briefly about the value of them for redeeming them faster than waiting for award availability. And so, depending on the points program we're talking about, almost every single one has a travel portal where you can get 1 to 2 cents back. Booking in the travel portal. Now, 2 cents is pretty hard, but with Chase Points Boost on hotels and some airline flights, you can get 2 cents of value on your points. I'm going to talk about that in the next AMA on when I think it makes sense to use portals and how to make that decision. But 1 to 2 cents on travel portal bookings, Booking travel for others. Let's say you have a friend who's looking to book a flight and maybe you could book that flight for them and you could use your points and you could work out a deal with them. You can even just cash your points out. Sometimes you can cash them out for almost nothing and get half a century. But if you connect a Schwab account to Amex, you can get 1.1 cents. Now, I'm not saying that's a great deal, but it is certainly an easy, convenient opportunity. Gift cards probably 0.5 to 1 cent. I probably wouldn't do that. But there are ways to convert your points to cash in some way, shape or form a couple unique ones. On Amex Membership Rewards, they have that business platinum 35% rebate, which means buy a flight. It has to be the chosen airline that you chose for your airline credit each year. But if you book that flight in the portal with points where Normally you get $0.01 per point, you get a 35% rebate on the points you need, which makes your points worth 1.54 cents. And I have a feeling that six, nine, 12 months from now, whenever I'm coming back, reporting what I've been getting from my bookings, I'm probably going to say that 1.54 cents is pretty close to average, right? I know I like to think three, four, five cents a point. But when I factor in a few things that I think are a more realistic way to evaluate their value, 1.54 might seem pretty good. And then Chase also has a few categories where you can pay yourself back. So it might be this quarter. You can cash your Chase points out by reimbursing yourself for gas purchases or something like that for 1.25 cents. So those are a couple of edge cases where you can get a little bit extra value. So what this means is if you have a million points sitting in one of these accounts, it's worth at least $10,000. And so I'm not saying you can't get more than $10,000 of value, but when you think about opportunity cost, you got to consider that if you wanted to cash out 1 million points for $10,000 or 10 million points for $100,000, like that is an option. I'm still making this mistake. I haven't brought myself to do it. I keep looking at the historical earning and spending. I think my strategy going forward should be to keep enough points for two years of travel so that I have the opportunity to do that. But everything else, I'm not sure I need it. Based on how many points I'm earning, I can make a case that you don't even need two years of travel saved up. Because if you're earning fast enough to refill it quickly, maybe it could be one year of travel. It's easier said than done. I know because I've said it a lot and I haven't done it. But my goal is to try and use one of these tactics to effectively book travel portal bookings or cash something out, or just use my points in a way that isn't transferring them to airlines. Even though I say that's how to get the best value. We all know that money sitting in our bank account grows over time. Hopefully, if you're putting in the right place and points, sitting in our points account usually ends up being worth less over time. And so my goal is to try this in 2026. In fact, my 2026 plan to recap this whole thing is to start valuing my time. So to make sure I'm considering opportunity cost, to stop chasing status where it doesn't matter to properly value my points and to start considering at least I got scary to say this to start cashing out is what I want to say. But at least try experiment with cashing them out because I just am accumulating them faster than I'm using them. They're getting devalued over time and the more I do the math on point values, the more I wonder whether I'm getting as much out of my points as I thought. Now I love points. We're not gonna stop talking about points. This isn't the cashback show for the rest of the eternity, but I have to push myself sometimes to think differently and this is one of those examples. So I hope this was helpful for everyone listening, and I hope that it was easy enough to follow along if you aren't looking at the slides. I tried my best to think about this in a perspective that would make sense. If you have Questions podcast@AllTheHacks.com is my email. I read every single email. Thank you to everyone who's always sending things. I really appreciate it. That is it for this week. I will see you next week.