The Points Doctor

I started collecting miles and points in the mid to late 1990's with an American Airlines AAdvantage credit card.  Over the years I earned enough miles for American to give me lifetime Gold status.  My wife is just a few miles short of earning that same lifetime status.  We also belonged to a couple of hotel programs like Marriott and Starwood, but neither of us had any status as our stays were infrequent at best.  While we traveled somewhat frequently, we had no loyalty to any Loyalty program. One year ago, I started getting serious about maximizing our miles and points. A year ago we started with a combined total of around 300,000 AA miles and a few hotel points along with my status with AA.  One year later, we have over 1.5 million miles and points in our combined accounts!  The most amazing thing is the amount of travel we have already done, and the amount of travel that we currently have booked. Here are the totals for the past 12 months: The number of hotel points an

I wrote in the past about the value of points and why I thought the “experts” were wrong.  My position on the subject had to do with how each of us makes an unconscious decision when purchasing an item with cash based on what we intuitively know is the value of a dollar.  Each of us has our own perspective on what that is based on our past experiences.  The value of a point or mile is not so clearly understood by most of us.  Some of the “experts” have tried to put a value of a particular program's point or mile based on the average of the many types of possible redemptions.  The problem with this approach is that there is so much variation in redemption methods, so many ways to acquire points, and different subjective values that each of us place on different types of travel, so as to render their valuations almost worthless for an individual. I propose a different way to look at this situation.  I am a Cosmetic Dentist and have no formal business training, but I do run a

Registration for your Chase Freedom card 2nd quarter (April-June) bonus of 5% cash back began on March 16th, 2013.  Bonus categories for the 2nd quarter are restaurants and movies theaters. If you haven't maxxed out your first quarter bonus for Gas stations, drug stores and Starbucks, get to the stores before the end of the month and buy some gift cards.  Maximum bonus is 7500 UR points or a $1500 spend.  If you have a Chase Ink or Sapphire card already, you can transfer that 5% cash back into valuable Ultimate Reward (UR) points. UR points are best to redeem for United Airlines or Hyatt stays, but they have many other transfer partners as well. Click here to activate your bonus. If you like what you've read, please click the +1 , then join others and follow me by adding your name to our subscription list at the top of this page. About  THE POINTS DOCTOR THE POINTS DOCTOR  is Bruce J. Wilderman DDS of  Artistic Expressions Dentistry . Dr. Wilderman has a practi