category: travel-hacking

What good are earning credit card rewards if you don’t use them? Here’s how I have used my points to save money on travel since I started earning them a year ago. Since I have focused mostly on earning points, I haven’t had as many opportunities to spend them yet, so this post will be considerably shorter than Part 1. Note that I don’t count travel expenses covered by the Sapphire Reserve’s $300 annual travel credit as a redemption as I view it more as a rebate of the $450 annual fee, making the card effectively $150 annually....

As part of my ongoing quest to optimize my finances, I took up credit card churning almost exactly one year ago today. Let’s start from the very beginning (a very good place to start!) What is churning? In order to attract new customers, banks often offer lucrative sign-up bonuses to those who open up credit card accounts and then meet a minimum spending threshold on the new account within a few months of signing up....