Here’s another reason why I love credit card points. Eight months ago I didn’t even know I wanted to go to Puerto Rico, and now here I am, having just returned from a great little trip with the family. Ok, that’s maybe only half true. Puerto Rico had been on my mile-long list of places…

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: one of the things we’ve loved most about points and miles is that it helps us save significant money on trips we would have typically paid cash for to begin with. So, it’s not just about the dream trips to Hawaii and Europe, it’s also the…

Isn’t she lovely? When I was in first grade, I “published” a book about going to Disney World. Even though we had never been, I wrote and illustrated a vivid tale about our family’s trip, which may have involved winning the lottery in order to be able to go. Even as a first grader, I…

A few months ago, I kept seeing this same-ish Instagram reel (old person Tik-Tok) that showed a bunch of beautiful views and then instructed scrollers like me to just, “take the trip.” I have to admit, it annoyed me a little when I first saw it. Of course I want to “take the trip,” but…

This is Tom’s continuation of his series wherein he is pretending he is just starting out in miles and points… So, I’m back from my Chase in-branch appointment and was approved for the Sapphire Preferred Card! I added Melissa as an authorized user so that we can eventually transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR) to either…

Our family loves DC. That’s it. That’s basically the post. Ok, there’s more. My mom just hit a milestone birthday, and we decided to meet up for a party at my aunt’s house, which is right outside of Our Nation’s Capital. Naturally, the kids were stoked to cram a little Chinatown and Smithsonian time into…

When I was in my twenties, I visited Rocky Mountain National Park a couple of times and was captivated by the Western mountains. An East-Coaster my whole life, I hadn’t ever seen big, rocky mountains like those, and those couple of road trips out West stick out as inspirational and vastly different than anything I…

Tom, here. Melissa and I have been excited about sharing information about points travel and what we have learned in the last couple of years. One way that we are going to do that is to write a series of posts that we are calling –  Starting Out in Points Today. We are going to…

So how did this happen? How did we go from barely using a credit card at all to opening several new  cards and putting all possible expenses on them? Lets go back to the beginning, maybe 15 years ago, when Tom was back in school and we were living on one very modest income. Guess…

Post updated 6/18/24 We started dabbling in points and miles midway through 2021 and picked up the pace as we got into 2022. We’ve been collecting and redeeming credit card points for over three years, so I thought it would be fun to walk through all of the flights and hotels we booked in our…