Which leads me to ask a couple questions:
- How much do you spend on travel each year that could possible warrant saving $40,000.
- How come this stuff comes up when I go to the eye doctor?
I still remember things about his ex-wife from my appointment last year.
Well, let's see.
ReplyDeleteNormal airfare reward programs have anywhere from a 1:5 to 1:10 payback ratio.
Southwest, for example, gives one free roundtrip for eight flown.
On American Air, it takes about 25k miles flown to get a free cross-country flight (about 2.5k miles) in Business Class. Economy is about half that (12.5k reward miles for the same trip from LAX to JFK).
Throw in some effort, and I bet you could work the system to get the ratio down to 1:4 or 1:3.
That would still mean a travel budget of $120k or $160k, assuming all of the freebies are based on travel expanses.
You can also get travel rewards as a percentage of standard credit card transactions (anywhere from one to three miles per dollar spent, usually). The same LAX->JFK trip could be obtained by charging $4k (best case) to $25k (worst case) on plastic.
Throw in some incentive loss leaders (10k free miles for signing up for the card, 10k for taking a survey, 5k for using a certain rental car), and you could probably get several thousand dollars worth of travel per year based on the expenditures of an optometrist.