Fly round-trip to Europe for 48,000 United miles here (coach only).
American Airlines Day
- Earn elite status with American Airlines faster here
- 30 miles per dollar at FTD
- New dining members pick up 1,000 miles with their first meal
- 2,500 miles from Netflix
- 1,000 bonus miles on car rentals with Alamo
- Latest bonus for purchasing miles here
- 500 American miles for $100 Hurricane Sandy donations here
- You can also get 6 JetBlue miles per dollar donated here
Stay More Organized
I live in a city (Los Angeles) where lots of people are independently wealthy. Unfortunately, I’m not one of these people. I do things like hustling miles to help my budget work. Most of you, as readers of this blog, are not insanely rich either. So it blows my mind how much some of you spend on annual fees. When you keep paying annual fees on a card, it kind of defeats the purpose of doing all this. And the most common reason is, “It’s so hard to keep track of all these credit cards.”
Is it really? Not for me. I spend 5 minutes a day with my spreadsheet and know exactly when an annual fee is coming. I also know when it’s time to apply for a new batch of cards. I plug in the basic information (the date I apply for a card, name of card, amount I need to spend, how fast I need to spend it, and amount of bonus miles). Then I color-code it:
- Yellow means I’ve earned the bonus miles, but the card is still open.
- Green means I’ve closed the account.
- Blue means there’s no annual fee, so I don’t have to worry about closing it.
- No color means I haven’t earned the bonus miles yet.
When To Churn
Churning (verb): When you apply for a credit card you’ve already had and earn the bonus again.
I was asked about my “churn schedule.” Again, this means re-applying for an identical card. Your credit history and relationships with banks can make this vary, but based on emails and my history:
- Citibank cards seem to be churnable 18 months after the original application.
- Chase cards have to be closed 2 years before getting another bonus on the same card.
- American Express cards need to be closed a year to get a bonus on the identical card.
- Bank of America can be much more churnable if you have a good history there. I’ve gotten a card, closed it after 6 months, and collected another bonus a month later. With my Hawaiian Airlines card, I actually forgot to close the original and still got another one within 9 months.
(I did the same thing with the Bank of Hawaii version of the Hawaiian Airlines card)
- Barclays can be easy. I had my US Airways card closed 3 months before applying again. I’ve seen people get the card, not even close it, and get a second one within 6 months.
Reminder: It’s a good rule-of-thumb to keep cards open at least 6 months. I close most of mine between the 6-month mark and the 1-year mark.
