Ballin' on a Budget - travel hacking edition

Something we absolutely love is travel - and my boujee side loves to travel in style - our wallet, however, grimaces at the sight of 4 figure round trip first class tickets. Here is a quick guide to travel hacking and a real life example of how I was able to secure us round trip business class tickets to Europe. Enjoy!

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First Things First: Be in the know

Daily Drop

The world of travel hacking can feel really overwhelming, especially because a lot of deals happen for a limited time. So my first (and arguably most important) tip is to be in the know. The way I stay up to date in travel hacking news is simple: I subscribe to the Daily Drop newsletter. This newsletter is 100% free and comes to my inbox Monday through Friday. Not only that, but there's also an entire (also free) Facebook group of other people who are interested in travel hacking, sharing their own tips/deals, and tons of free education.

Simply from reading this newsletter, I have found deals to snatch the Southwest Companion Pass for 2023, get awesome credit card sign up bonuses, secure the highest status with IHG hotels, get gold status with Marriott and Hilton, and it's where I learned how to find and book us our business class seats to Europe and back.

Second: Customized flight deals

FareDrop

From the creators of Daily Drop comes FareDrop - the customized flight deal finder. You can set up to 10 departure airports that you'd like to keep an eye on and you'll received flight deals from domestic economy, international economy, and international business. You can even set destination preferences.

This type of flight deal finder is best suited for people who have some flexibility on dates and location. That's not a prerequisite by any means, but I notice that travel hacking in general is best maximized when you can chase the deals rather than being locked in on hyper specific dates.

Because of the price, I do recommend FareDrop to anyone. At $99 a year, just more than a Costco membership (and frankly more than I pay for my dang icloud storage), this is an excellent and no effort way to get some of the best deals to some of your favorite destinations.

Now the fun: Travel Credit Cards

Credit card points are the gold currency of travel hacking. The most effective way to get the most points is through sign up bonuses (SUB). A SUB is a reward from the bank issuing the credit card to you for A) opening a specific card and B) meeting a certain spending limit within a specific period of time.

Now before we go on, I would be remiss if I didn't explicitly say: if you are prone to credit card debt or are not in a financial position where you can pay off the balance each billing period, do not open more credit cards. Credit cards have very high interest rates and if you're accruing interest by not paying them off then any points and hacks you earn will not actually be saving you any kind of money.

So now to the fun part, here are all the cards in my and Elliot's current line up and how we use them. You'll notice that these are all American Express or Chase cards. That is because the reward points for these cards go far and wide (meaning they have a lot of different transfer partners). This is not to say there aren't other awesome cards out there! We just don't currently have them in our wallets.

Please note that I am highlighting how WE use these cards and not going in depth on all of the benefits for each card. To see all the details, please click on the card name or picture.

American Express Gold

This card is our staple spending card as it earns awesome points on everyday spending categories. How we use this card:

• Dining (4x points on restaurants)

• Grocery (4x points up to $25,000)

• Uber ($10 uber cash per month, doesn't roll over)

If you don't know where to start, I LOVE this card as the entry point. It does come with a larger annual fee ($250) but considering you earn 4x points on pretty major categories plus $120/yr in Uber credits, I think it is more than worth it. I don't know about you, but Elliot and I spend the majority of money on food so earning 4x on dining and grocery is a pretty big deal. This is the card we're reaching for most often.

Chase Sapphire Preferred

Having a Visa card in your line up is something important to us because it is much more widely accepted than American Express is. How we use this card:

• Hello Fresh (3x points on online grocery)

• Rental Cards (primary rental insurance included)

• DoorDash (free DashPass subscription if activated before 12/31/24)

This card is great because it has an accessible annual fee ($95) and gets pretty good points for things like dining (3x) and streaming services (3x). The car rental insurance is also a huge deal. Generally, credit cards provide you with secondary coverage but Chase gives you primary coverage. Why does this matter? Because you can decline the rental companies insurance and still have the same caliber coverage, saving you $$ without compromising coverage.

American Express Platinum

This card has a pretty hefty annual fee but an absolutely massive list of perks that makes it totally worth it for us. How we use this card:

• Centurion Lounges + Priority Pass Membership

• Hotels & Flights (5x points)

• Uber ($15 uber cash per month, doesn't roll over)

• Disney+ ($20 monthly credit for select digital entertainment)

• CLEAR ($189 annual CLEAR credit)

• Global Entry (credited after enrollment)

This is not even all the perks of this card! Because our home airport is Denver, having access to the Centurion Lounge Collection alone makes this card worth for us because of how much we travel. The Centurion Lounge is an airport lounge that only platinum card holders have access to. Inside the lounge you get things like this food, drinks (alcoholic and not), wifi, nice bathrooms, showers, and a comfortable place to sit. All of this is FREE (see why it's worth it for us?).

This card we keep in our lineup NOT because it earns great points (we're using the gold card to rack up amex points) but because of all the awesome perks that come alongside it. So my recommendation for this card is for someone who can afford the hefty annual fee ($695) and travels often enough that alllllll the perks can be maximized.

Southwest Rapid Rewards Card

I primarily got this card because there was an irresistible sign up bonus at the time and fly Southwest almost exclusively domestically. How we use this card:

• Southwest purchases (2x points)

I really only use this card for the perks on Southwest. There are spending limits to earn some big perks like A-List status and the coveted Companion Pass so I like to break out this card for purchases up to the A-List threshold, not necessarily because it gets great point values in certain categories. This card would be excellent for someone interested in Southwest specifically. The downside of a card like this (a co-branded credit card) is that ALL your points are locked in Southwest. This means that you can only redeem the points you earn with this card on Southwest.

For cards like American Express, Chase, Citi, Capital One, etc. (all the other cards on this list) you can transfer those points out to transfer partners. You can read more about this in my real life example near the end.

Chase Ink Business Preferred

If you have a business, opening a business card generally gets the largest sign up bonus. The catch here is the A) you need a business and B) the spending requirement for the huge sign up bonus is usually very high. How we use this card:

• Lyft (5x points)

• Phone bill (3x points)

• Internet & Cable bills (3x points)

• Advertisement (3x points)

Real Life Example: How we got business class flights to Europe

I told you that the easiest, fastest, most common way to earn points is through credit card sign up bonuses. Ultimately, the way you earn points after you've redeemed those initial sign up bonus points is through your day-to-day spending. It can seem like every aspect of travel hacking is 100% free and honestly, that part of travel hacking annoys me because when it comes down to it, you can only earn (most of the time) a SUB from a credit card one time. You simply have to spend money to earn points after that.

With that said, we signed up for all of these cards in about an 18 month period (except the gold which we had for a very long time). We did NOT sign up for all these cards at once - we timed it strategically. I was getting lasik surgery so we opened a card and used that expense to get us to the spending requirement for one card. We were moving and needed to buy a ton of new furniture and home items so we opened a different card to put those expenses on to reach that SUB spending requirement. Southwest had a crazy promotion for their credit card so instead of opening that card "just because," I waited for a promotion that piqued my interest and pounced when a great one come along.

Exactly what I did:

Step 1: Open new credit cards strategically based on expenses and/or promotions.

Step 2: Meet the minimum spending requirement. Pay attention to these requirements and where you stand against them because this is sole thing standing in between you and your shiny SUB.

Step 3: Find a sick deal.

Step 3 is where it can feel overwhelming. This is why I love following the Daily Drop. It makes me feel like I don't have to know it all and when there's something important happening in the travel world, they'll tell me.

Elliot & I knew we wanted to go to Europe and the Daily Drop let me know that Flying Blue (the points program of KLM and Air France) was having a 25% transfer bonus promotion. So I kept my eye on Air France. Then, Daily Drop announced that Flying Blue had released new promotion flights and I knew that here was my change to act.

Step 4: Transfer credit card points

I went to Flying Blue, I searched for business class seats from the US to Paris in the month of August (when we knew we wanted to go). Now here is where my own research came in - I researched direct flight paths US to Paris on Air France. It turned out that Denver wasn't a great starting place at all and there really weren't great deals leaving from Denver. So I adjusted my search to US airports on the list of direct US to Paris paths and I found our first leg: Houston to Paris! Since I had racked up Southwest points, I redeemed them to get us Denver to Houston and then transferred Chase points AND American Express points to Flying Blue so that I could redeem the award flight Houston to Paris in business class.

I did the exact same process coming home. Could I have done round trip? Probably? We we traveling around Europe and not returning home from Paris but from Prague so that required me to book us 2 one way flights rather than the single round trip.

I repeated the process in my search for our return flights and found an even better deal Prague to Chicago on KLM. This is still Flying Blue so I transferred my Chase and American Express points in the same way.

This is a LOT of information so I feel it's a good place to wrap it up. I am ALWAYS down to nerd out so if you want to dive down the rabbit hole, shoot me a DM or an email and I would more than happy to nerd out with you :)

Go be golden,
S