Start here
Start here: travel for less with points
You don't need to spend more money to start earning travel rewards. You need to learn how to make the money you already spend work harder. Here's where I'd recommend starting.
Step 1
Start with your normal monthly budget
Credit-card welcome offers are one of the fastest ways to build up a points balance. If you're already spending on groceries, gas, utilities, insurance, travel and the rest of everyday life, you may be able to earn a whole welcome offer on spending you were going to do anyway.
The key is that you never spend more just to earn points. You're only redirecting your normal spending to the right card — and paying the balance in full every month, so interest never eats what you earned.
A simple way to check: take the minimum spend, divide it by the number of months you're given, and see whether a normal month covers it. If it doesn't, that's not your card yet. Visit my cards page to see my top recommended cards.
Step 2
Understand that not all points are created equal
This is one of the most important things to learn early: 100,000 points does not automatically equal the same amount of travel.
Different airline and hotel programs value redemptions differently, so the same pile of points can get you very different trips depending on where and how you use it. Transfer partners and transfer ratios matter too — a card that earns points you can move to several airline or hotel programs gives you a lot more flexibility than miles locked to one airline.
Don't worry if that sounds complicated right now. I'll break down how points work, which programs are genuinely useful, and how to figure out which points will take you furthest toward the trip you actually want.
Step 3
Get organized
Once you start opening cards, staying organized matters. I use the Travel Freely app to keep track of my cards — when I opened each one, and when an annual fee is coming up.
When a fee approaches, you have three choices:
- Keep
- The benefits you actually use are worth more to you than the annual fee.
- Downgrade
- You don't want to pay the fee, but you'd like to keep the account open.
- Cancel
- The card no longer makes sense for where you are right now.
I'm putting together a guide that walks through how to decide between them. In the meantime, my other guides cover the cards those decisions usually come down to.
Step 4
Learn 5/24 and business cards
5/24 means five or more personal cards opened in the last 24 months. Chase uses this rule, and while other banks don't, Chase has some great offers you want to stay eligible for.
Business cards can help you earn more welcome offers without using up one of those slots. They also widen your options — instead of only looking at personal cards, you have both personal and business cards to choose from, which is a much bigger pool of offers to work with. And you might already have a business — selling on Facebook Marketplace or Poshmark, babysitting, dog walking, freelancing, content creation and other money-making activities can count as business activity.
Sitting at 4/24? Consider keeping that last spot open and exploring business cards instead. I'll show you how to understand 5/24, find business-card opportunities, and build your application strategy.
And you don't have to figure all of this out yourself. My goal is to make points understandable, show you how the pieces fit together, and help you make informed decisions based on your own travel goals.
Come along for the next trip
I'll email you when there's something genuinely worth knowing about — an offer I'd take myself, a booking that worked out really well, or the real numbers from wherever we just went. Nothing more than that.