We have been playing the two-player credit card game for the past few years now. During that time, we’ve earned well over 1 million points and then redeemed those points for over $40,000 worth of free travel spending. And I know those numbers sound crazy. So, in this article, I will explain how to travel for free using credit card points.
I want to break down exactly how we did that as simply as possible and then, of course, explain how you can do some of the same things that we do now. Some people out there tell me they’re using credit card points, but they’re not really getting anywhere close to the same value that I get, and then there are other people out there who assume we’re spending a fortune to rack up all these points.
What we’re doing isn’t very realistic, but the truth is that we don’t personally spend a lot of money in our budget. Most people are actually just making a lot of common mistakes with this stuff, like using the wrong credit cards, earning bad points, and then redeeming those points the wrong way. I also want to clear things up by going over the five most important tips and secrets that we’ve been using to find success with the whole two-player credit card game.
How to Travel for Free With Credit Card Points
Now, tip number one is going to be something that I see most average credit card users need to do, and that tip is to focus on earning bank points first, not airline and hotel points. Now, when I say bank points, what I’m talking about here are the credit cards from major banks that earn flexible rewards that basically give you multiple options for how you can redeem them. But specifically, what we’re looking for are going with points and miles currencies that provide you with access to numerous transfer partners, which is going to be super important when redeeming points for travel.
These currencies include ultimate credit card points rewards from Best Chase cards, membership rewards points from Amex, miles from Capital One, thank you points from Citi, built points from the built MasterCard, as well as Wells Fargo points now from their new and updated rewards program. The reason why we want to focus on earning these bank points first is that by having multiple transfer partner options, we can transfer and redeem our points with a number of different airline and hotel programs instead of just being locked into one single program, which can definitely be a mistake.
So, for example, you’d like to stay at Marriott properties. So, you should get a Marriott credit card to earn points on all your spending for future stays. But now let’s say you’re looking to spend a night in New York City next month. So you want to stay somewhere near Central Park, and you’re looking for hotels that you can book with points in that area.
You do a quick search, and you find that the cheapest property that’s somewhere around there is going to be the Sheraton Times Square, which costs 52,000 Marriott points or around $270 per night. And that is a terrible redemption of around 0.5 cents per point when we do $270 divided by 52,000 points.
However, if you were earning flexible bank points instead, like Chase ultimate rewards, then you would have multiple transfer partner options for hotels here. You could transfer 52,000 Chase offers points over to 52,000 Marriott points to book that Marriott for the night. Or you can do another quick search in the Central Park area for Hyatt, who is also a Chase transfer partner. And with that, there’s a nice Thompson hotel going for $464 per night or 25,000 Hyatt points, which you can transfer from 25,000 get chase points.
The difference in this example here between paying 52,000 points for a Marriott and then 25,000 points for a Hyatt all came down to just having options with flexible bank points instead of being limited to just one specific hotel program. So the idea here with this example is to show you guys that by having multiple options, you’re going to have a lot more power just to pick and choose different ways to redeem the fewest amount of points for the most value possible.
And that’s something that, again, has allowed us to stretch our points out to tens of thousands of dollars over the past few years. Also, when you’re only using hotel or airline credit cards to earn points in all your spending, the spending multipliers are not going to be as good as you might think. And by only earning one point in currency, you’re just leaving yourself open to a lot more devaluation risk as well, because hotel and airline programs are always changing award prices and just increasing the amount of free points required to book things.
So, by having multiple redemption options with bank points instead, if one transfer partner devalues your points, you can avoid that program entirely and look for higher-value transfers with various other programs.
You can always add certain hotel and airline cards later on, like we have with cards from Hyatt, Marriott, and American Airlines. Still, by adding those hotel and airline cards, we’re mainly looking to get them just for the benefits they might give us, like how to earn free travel nights, free checked bags, status, and other stuff like that. So again, focus on earning bank points first if you’re looking to travel here because I can tell you from my experience that they’re a lot more valuable.
How to use Credit Cards to Travel for Free
Now, this next big secret here really explains how I have been able to earn so many points so quickly without spending a fortune like a lot of people think we do. But first, with all this money that we’re going to be saving on travel, obviously, we want to put some of that to good use by investing. So, if you’re looking for a new brokerage account, I would like to mention Moomoo here quickly. Moomoo is a great zero-commission brokerage that can give you some of the most detailed information and data when it comes to buying and selling stocks.
So, in their app, you can read any news about what’s going on in the market or with different stocks. You can also get access to a ton of stuff, including charts and visualized financials, to do some deep research about any company. Right now, Moomoo is running a new offer where if you transfer assets over to them from a select group of other broker-dealers, like Robinhood, Weeble, CashApp, and a few others, then you can get a 1.5% cash reward match for up to $300.
So, for example, if it transferred $20,000 in assets to Moomoo, then that amount times 1.5% would max out that $300 cash reward. You could choose to receive a different reward instead. If you deposit $100 or more, you’ll receive seven fractional shares of Microsoft, Tesla, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and/or Apple.
But make sure you read the terms and conditions because you also have to maintain an average asset balance of $100 or more for 60 days. On top of all that, any uninvested cash sitting in your account will still earn 5.1% APY after enrolling in Moomoo’s cash suite program. Thanks to the program banks that Moomoo works with, this also comes with FDIC insurance of up to $1 million.
Purchase Everything On Credit Card
Now, back to the second tip about how I earned so many points from our credit cards without spending a fortune. That is by taking advantage of bonuses. There are really two main types of bonuses that we try to earn as much as possible in the whole two-player game, and it’s kind of shocking how much value is actually up for grabs here when I ran the numbers that we’ll go over next.
The first type of bonus, of course, is a welcome bonus, otherwise known as a sign-up bonus, and with this, it’s a pretty simple concept that banks want to draw you in to get you as a customer. So what they do is they offer some incentive in the form of a large number of points in exchange for you spending a certain amount on the card in the first three to six months or so.
For example, there are cards like the no-annual-fee Capital One Saver One, which earns $200 cash back after spending $500 in the first three months, and that can later be converted into 20,000 Capital One miles if you pair this card with something like the Venture X and a Capital One Duo setup. So when we do the math there, that’s a return on spend of 40x miles per dollar as we’re completing that minimum spend requirement, or there are slightly more premium travel cards out there like the $95 per year Chase Sapphire Preferred that’s currently offering 60,000 best Chase card points after spending $4,000 in three months.
So, doing the math there, I see that there is going to be a return on spending of 15x points per dollar on that minimum spend. Earning 40x miles per dollar or 15x points per dollar as you’re working towards welcome bonuses like those is going to greatly outpace the typical one to 5x back that you can earn from regular spending multipliers. Generally, as the annual fees on these credit cards go up, you’ll be able to find larger welcome bonuses.
So if our goal is to earn more points for travel at a faster pace here, then taking advantage of these higher bonuses on cards with annual fees is something that can really help us to do that. But don’t worry if you’re afraid of paying a lot in annual fees like I was because, in a minute, I’m going to go over three ways to reduce or sometimes even eliminate some of those fees greatly. So I counted 25 possible free flight credit card right now, and I could be missing a few, but from what I counted, those cards are currently offering a combined 1,630,000 points from sign-up bonuses alone.
Obviously, you’re not going to get all these cards, and Jackie and I don’t have all these cards either, but still, even if you’re able to capture just a fraction of those bonuses, then you’ll be able to receive thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars in points and miles for travel, depending on how you redeem them.
Now, that also does not factor in all the points you’ll earn from the everyday spending multipliers. Here are a few other tips and tricks that we’ll talk about in just a bit as well. Plus, when you’re running a two-player credit card free flights strategy like Jackie and I do, when you find credit cards out there that you both are going to get value from, then you can basically multiply these bonuses by two because each person can get that card and that sign-up bonus.
Earning Credit Card Points With Refer Your Player 2
Additionally, the other type of hidden bonus that we like to take advantage of is referral bonuses. So with these, if you log into your credit card account and then take a look around, you’ll see that most major issuers out there will give you a special link to refer friends and family. And in exchange for referring someone else, they’re going to provide you with another small bonus. So in a two-player strategy, if we take the Chase Sapphire Preferred, for example, I first got that card back in 2019 with a 60,000 point offer, but then I referred my finance in 2022 to get this card when there’s a limited-time deal of 80,000 points.
And because I referred her, I was also able to get a referral bonus of 15,000 points for that. So, in total, that’s 155,000 points from that single credit card alone. And we’ve been able to continue repeating this for other cards out there as well. But to do those things, as I said, we’ve been getting a lot of premium free travel credit cards over the past few years that do charge annual fees.
Redeeming your Points
My third tip here is don’t be afraid of those annual fees. And again, I got three methods here that we’ve been able to use to reduce or even sometimes eliminate those. First, each premium card out there has its own set of features, credits, and benefits, so we like to get cards that give us long-term positive value. Take the Amex Platinum card, for example. It has a $695 annual fee, but then it has dozens of credits and other benefits that fit into our normal spending habits to offset that fee. So, it’s $240 in digital entertainment credits, and we get $20 back per month on our Hulu subscription.
There’s a $200 hotel credit and a $200 Uber credit as well that we always manage to use whenever we travel every year. We also get up to another $200 back in airline incidental fees, of which we probably use about half on average. So, in total, that’s $740 in value that we just get back from credits and stuff that we already spend money on anyway.
That means that all the other benefits on the Amex Platinum card, like airport lounge access, status, earn free travel protection, and other stuff like that, are just going to be extra value. Of course, we also got a big welcome bonus when I got this card a few years ago.
Because the value of all these credits and benefits exceeds that annual fee, I can confidently say that we get long-term positive value from it, which is why we still choose to pay $695 per year. The second way to lower your annual fees is by asking for what’s called a retention offer whenever your annual fee comes up for renewal.
So, basically, credit card with free flights companies don’t want to lose you as a customer when you close your card, especially the ones with higher annual fees because that means they’re going to lose a customer that they paid a lot of good money to acquire through marketing and those welcome bonuses like we talked about.
So sometimes, instead of losing you, they might just try to retain you by waiving your annual fee, reducing that fee, or maybe even giving you a set amount of bonus points to keep you. For example, I got a retention offer on my Amex Platinum a few years ago for 40,000 points after spending $3,000 in three months. But it is not something that’s guaranteed. These offers do vary from person to person because I still need to get a retention offer from last year.
And then this year, they could only offer me the option to use how to get free points to pay for my annual fee, which I definitely declined. Now again, the Amex Platinum is worth it for me with all those credits and benefits that we just went over, but still, it’s $695 for that fee. It never hurts to ask for a retention offer because the worst thing they can do is say no. And to me, the way that I view it is that it’s a negotiation where, in the best case scenario, I can save on my annual fee or get a little bit more value, and then, in the worst case scenario, nothing changes.
The third way to lower annual fees is to get rid of them on certain cards. That is by doing what’s called downgrading, which is essentially when you change a product from one card out there with an annual fee to another card in the same product family with no annual fee while still keeping the same account open. I did this the other week when I took my Chase Sapphire Preferred card, which was costing me $95 per year. By doing that, I kept the same account open that I’ve had for the past four years.
I also have to keep the same credit limit, which is good for my credit score. But at the same time, I got rid of the annual fee. Now, downgrading is an option that also varies from issuer to issuer. Again, typically, you can only downgrade within the same product family. So my advice is that before you get a card with an annual fee, first, see if you’re getting a long-term positive value, but then second, make sure you have some backup plan in place just by reading what people are saying online on places like Reddit.
That way, you can learn about whether retention offers are even possible on that card and what downgrade options you might have as well. Also, as a bonus tip here for active duty military members, if you didn’t already know this, issuers out there like 10x best Chase cards and American Express interpret certain laws like the Service Members, Civil Relief Act, and the military lending act by just actually waiving annual fees entirely if you’re active duty. So do some research on that as well if that applies to you.
Saving on Every Trip
Now, tip number four, which we followed in our whole two-player credit card strategy, is to earn points from spending. I know that sounds very basic, but there are so many forgotten ways out there to earn points from spending that some people don’t even think about or might not even know about. So here are a few of my favorites.
First, there are obviously the everyday spending multipliers where you can earn, for example, one built point per dollar on rent with a built MasterCard, two X miles on everything with the capital one venture X four X points on restaurants and groceries with the Amex gold card and other stuff like that, just depending on what cards you’re using. Over time, we’ve slowly built out what I call our core credit card setup. That way, we’re earning at least three to five X back on most spending categories and 1.5 to two X on miscellaneous spending.
And then again, one X back on rent with the bill card. Now, a level-up from that can sometimes allow us to double dip on the points that we earn effectively by going through online shopping portals from issuers like Chase or Capital One. We even earn Amex points by using the cashback site Rakuten Lot, which is a great website. So we’ve just gone into Rakuten settings and chosen to be paid out in membership rewards points.
The cool thing is that any points you earn from these online shopping portals are actually going to stack on top of the regular points multipliers on whatever card you use, which is why it’s kind of like double dipping. Plus, you can find a lot of good offers inside your credit card accounts that you can then add to your card. Those offers stack on top of that as well. It’s almost like triple dipping sometimes. And finally, another way to think about earning a lot more points here is through business spending.
And this can work if you’re self-employed like me, if you have some side hustle, or even if you have more of a corporate setting that you work in with a larger employer or something like that. So if you’re self-employed or you have any side hustle or a small business, then what you should definitely do is look into getting business credit cards because those cards out there are going to have much higher signup bonuses and also business-optimized multipliers.
So, as I put more and more of my business spending on my business credit cards, which also earn all those flexible bank points, I’ve been able to grow my business. Still, then, I’ve also been able to earn a lot more points at the same time, which are very, very valuable, obviously, for all the travel that we do, even if you don’t have an LLC or you’re just doing simple side hustle stuff like driving for Uber or DoorDash or tutoring content creation and other things like that, you can definitely still qualify for business cards.
But also, if you work for an employer that depends on your company’s policy around expenses and then get reimbursed for that stuff, you might be able to use your credit cards to pay for all those company expenses. Then you earn points that you get to keep, and your company pays you back and reimburses you. So, there are no out-of-pocket costs. So make sure you’re getting the right credit cards around categories with higher multipliers like dining, gas, and travel. And then, of course, make sure you stay very organized and report those expenses so that you get reimbursed by your company.
Still have questions?
- What Are the Best Credit Cards in USA for Travel?
- How can I increase my credit card points?
- How Credit Card Works?
