Travel hacking is the act of getting free travel via credit card reward points / cash back, or via loyalty miles and points. Please travel hack responsibly and spend your credit card like you would a debit card.
In July, Mr. Save My Cents noted that his Citi Premier Card was up for renewal, and he did not want to pay the annual fee of $95 on the card again, so I should sign up. He had about 50,000 which he earned by signing up for the card and putting some big purchases including tithing on it.
I followed the instructions on The Points Guy for this sign-up offer but alas, after multiple calls to customer service, I was not able to convince them to get me to the 65K point offer for the Citi Premier Card until I had my card in the mail, and by sheltering in place my card was sent to NYC, then I had to wait for my house sitter to send it to me in the midwest… long story short, could have had 5,000 more points.
So, I qualified for the Citi Premier Card, loaded in $4,000 of tithing to the card, and easily got my 60,000 bonus + 4,000 tithing points within a month. Keep in mind that the $95 annual fee for this card is not waived when you sign up. Now, you can transfer your Than You points to anyone else who holds a Citi card. Mr. Save My Cents got his 50,000 points that he had on his card, transferred to mine – but there is a catch – the points expire 90 days after transfer, so now, we need to figure out where to move his points to, in order to make use of them!
The card offers the following points multipliers: 3x on restaurants, supermarkets, gas stations, air travel, hotels. 1x on all other purchases. Some of their airline transfer partners include Emirates, Etihad, Eva Air, JetBlue, Qantas, Qatar, Singapore, but there are no transfer bonuses. Because of the lack of transfer bonuses and no differentiation in points earn between this card and some of the other cards we have (Bank of America Premium Rewards Visa or the Chase Sapphire Reserve), this is not a card that I will be using often. In addition, I’m not the biggest fan of Citi. I find most of their systems and online interface lagging the other big financial institutions, and their customer service is far from helpful or creative. The points are a nice-to-have, considering that it could potentially get us one round-trip international ticket for free.
To summarize:
2x $95 annual fees = $190
2x $4,000 spend to get the bonus points = no impact to our budget, as it was part of our regular tithing
= over 100,000 Citi Thank You Points, but with half of them expiring because they were transferred. The Points Guy values these at 1.7 cents each, so we’ve earned about ~$1,700 in travel
Travel hacking is one way that allowed us to travel for fun and in a luxurious way, without breaking the bank. See how I learned the abundance mindset in order to save my way towards becoming work optional via the Five Weeks to Abundance course, or add yourself to the waitlist for my Save My Retirement Masterclass, which is a crash course in teaching you how to save a retirement in the U.S.
