This month was an interesting one because I spent about half of it away on work training. As a result, much of my normal expenses were reduced because the company was paying for my lodging and food. Well, technically I paid for it and I will be reimbursed sometime next month. No complaints from me because I still get to collect all the points and miles that come along with travel spending at no cost! Since I will get reimbursed, I don’t include them in my spending reports because they are not representative of my normal expenses and including them would skew my averages and therefore my projections. On the other hand, not including them also skews my averages and projections in the other direction because some of that spending is money that I would have had to spend on myself anyway! Still, by not including the spending, the numbers are affected less because I wouldn’t have spent nearly as much as I did if I had to pay out of pocket!
In other news, I applied for yet another card this month (the Chase British Airways card) because it is the last Chase card that I want which isn’t subject to the 5/24 rule (as I discussed in my previous post about credit cards), and it currently is offering a pretty good sign-up bonus of 50k miles after spending $3k in the first 3 months, an additional 25k miles after spending a total of $10k in the first year, and an additional 25k miles after spending a total of $20k in the first year. So, assuming that I use this card for the majority of my expenses over the next year, I will earn 120k BA miles! Since I travel to Japan every year, that is enough for over 13 round-trip domestic flights in Japan at current redemption rates! Or, if I choose to redeem those miles in the US, I can get 6 round-trip tickets to visit family! It’s tough to beat BA miles in terms of pure utility. I just hope that they don’t change their award structure before I can use up all my miles!