5 Points and Miles Missteps I've Learned From

A Cloudy Day in SoCal December 2025

Hello! I'm here with a very wordy post. If you like numbers and are interested in some of the nitty-gritty details of my points and miles journey, read on. Note: One thing you will not find on this list is the "mistake" of redeeming points at less than 2 cents per point. While I have mentioned that 2cpp is the goal, I have also redeemed points for as low as 1cpp and as high as 3cpp. I can consider something a bad redemption and still not consider it a mistake, especially if the bad redemption makes it possible for a trip to happen! Also, I'm calling these missteps instead of mistakes because I've already learned from them! Here they are, counting down from least to greatest :)

5. I messed up the timing of some of my card applications. This has happened two ways: missing out on an elevated bonus and missing a big purchase (that could have made a serious dent in the minimum spend requirement for a welcome bonus).

The thing is, timing really is everything. When it comes to this game, there are times to hold back, pause, and wait. For example, if you want to get back-to-back cards from Chase, you have to be patient. If the applications are too close, you might get denied. For those in-between times, I have labels on my cards to remind me about multipliers, and I just focus on those: 1 card that gets 3X points on dining out, another that gets 2X points on gas, etc. That might go on for about a month or so until I am ready for my next card. One time, it worked out for me to get two cards (from different banks) at the same time because the minimum spend requirement was doable. Last year, I applied for the Chase Ink Unlimited ($6k in 6 months) on the same day as the Amex Blue Business Plus ($3k in 3 months). Great!

Other times, I've been impatient and just wanted to start working on my next welcome bonus, so I've opened new cards and missed elevated offers by a month or so. In reality, I have rarely benefited from elevated offers. Yes, my very first card had an elevated offer. I got the Chase Ink Preferred when it was 120K bonus after spending $8k in 3 months. It's normally between 90-100K bonus points. Those points funded a lot of our hotel stay in Maui, so I am very glad I got that card! But out of the 10-ish cards I've opened since starting this game, I've only received 2 elevated offers, so I should just accept that sometimes I will get lucky, but most of the time I will not. I can think of 2 specific times that I really missed out: one month after Isaiah got the Sapphire Preferred, the welcome bonus jumped from 60K to 100K points. The other time was one month after I got the Ink Cash, the welcome bonus jumped from 75k to 90K points. Missing elevated offers can be a real bummer, so I let myself be bummed for a moment, and then I move on reminding myself that at the end of the day, I am still earning transferrable points! 

It also helps to look at the math. For example, I just got the Chase Hyatt Business card, earning 60K welcome points after spending $5K in 3 months. The very next day, Chase announced an elevated offer on the card: 80K points after spending $10K in 3 months. I probably could have called Chase and asked them to match the offer, but I didn't want to. Only 20K more points for double the spend? No, thanks. I will wait until the offer goes back to 60K/$5k/3 months, then Isaiah could apply, and we'd get 40K more points for that same $5k in spend. See what I mean? 

Also, the Amex Business Platinum is at "up to" 300K bonus points -- I got it when it was at 200K, which was already an elevated offer (because before that it was at 150K for a while). Although I missed the extra elevated offer by 6 months, the reality is, I got it when I got it because the timing was right. I had big expenses then that would help me meet the minimum spend requirement that I wouldn't normally be able to meet. I don't have those same expenses currently, so we wouldn't be able to meet the requirement if I were to get the card today.

Finally, it's happened a couple of times that we had a larger expense that needed to be paid, and we weren't working on welcome bonuses at the time, so we earned only 1 point per dollar for those expenses when we could have earned 15-20 if working on a bonus! To avoid that, at the end of last year I made a myself a list of larger expenses throughout the year (outside of our normal monthly household spending) to make sure we time opening our cards to align with those expenses. Here are a few examples:

February - bi-annual car insurance premium
March - spring afterschool activity registration fees
April - federal taxes owed

LESSON: Make a game plan for the next year or so, even if it's skeletal. Think about bigger, one-time expenses that may be coming up as well as others that are consistent (think: yearly, bi-annual, quarterly, etc.). A little patience and using this guide for Amex and this guide for Chase can also help increase your chances of timing applications around elevated bonuses.

4. I opened a personal card with an airline (a.k.a. a card that earns airline-specific miles or points instead of earning transferrable points) because I got seduced by low points prices and low taxes for an upcoming trip. In theory, this strategy could work. In fact, it worked for my mom. Nine months before her trip, she asked me to help her find a way to pay for her flights to New Zealand with points instead of cash. When I used Google flights to look at her options, they were pretty slim. Nothing with airlines that were Chase transfer partners. It was a flight booked with either Alaska or American Airlines miles. She decided to open up an American Airlines personal card because the AA points price was lower than the Alaska Airlines price, and the welcome bonus would be exactly the amount she would need to book two one-way flights. On top of that, she would meet the minimum spend requirement with just one transaction. Although there was no guarantee that the award fare space we were seeing would last for the next couple of months while we waited for the miles to post to her account, we figured we had some time, so we took a chance. During the wait, I saw the award space disappear and reappear a few times. In the end it worked out. Phew!

In October of 2025, nine months before our big trip to Europe, we booked our outbound flight to Germany via Air France. I set up an alert and waited for the price to drop to 25,000 miles. As soon as it dropped, I booked the flights. As for the return flights, we had a good stash of points, but I didn't like any of the redemptions I was seeing. The points prices as well as the taxes were too high. For kicks, I decided to see what was possible with Alaska or American Airlines, even though I had no miles with either airline. When I saw that some flights out of Milan were as lows as 20K miles and $50 in taxes and fees, I considered getting an American Airlines card. 

The problem? We were already working on the welcome bonus for a different card with a huge minimum spend. We wouldn't be able to open the AA card for a few months. Once we could finally try to open an AA card, I got denied for the business card. I decided to open a personal card, though I chose the one with the biggest minimum spend amount, highest annual fee, and the most bonus miles. We were just $300 shy of hitting the minimum spend after the 2nd statement closing date. We hit the requirement a couple of days into the next cycle, and now I have to wait for the next statement closing date in a few more weeks before the welcome bonus miles hit my account. Of course that 20K award space disappeared months ago. Now I have just a few months to book our return flights, and no good redemptions have been popping up. I even passed on a great Air France redemption out of Milan (18,750 miles for economy) because I was holding out for the low taxes with American Airlines. Ugh.

LESSON: When "strategically" opening an airline card for a specific redemption, do it as far in advance as possible and have a back up plan for how you can use the miles in case the original plan doesn't work. In other words, make sure there is more than one "sweet spot" redemption with those miles. Could you use those miles for another trip coming up and get a similar value? 

3. I've missed out on $200+ in credit card perks. One thing you need to keep track of is not only what benefits, perks, and credits you have but also when they expire and renew. For example, the Sapphire Preferred card has a $50 hotel statement credit if you book through the travel portal. It is not a calendar year credit, but an anniversary year credit. That sort of credit comes in handy when you aren't aiming for loyalty with a particular chain or don't want to use points. For example, each of my children has hosted a big sleepover at home in the last six months. We have a small house, so we decided that one parent would take the other child away for a night while the other parent stayed at home with all the guests. We didn't want to use points to stay at a Hyatt in the Seattle area, so we booked a nearby hotel with cash. The first time, I just used Expedia, completely forgetting about the $50 credit. Thankfully, the 2nd time I remembered about the credit and used it. 

On another card, I have a $150 statement credit with Dell. That one is a calendar year credit, but I didn't realize it. I opened that card in October, so I had only a few months to use it, and I didn't realize that mistake until it was too late.

LESSON: Keep a list of each card's perks and credits, keep track of deadlines for using them, and know when it makes sense to use them and when it does not.

2. I booked award fare flights before checking award space on ALL the alliance partners' sites. Some airlines use fixed award fare charts for their partners that offer lower points prices than other partners. I booked our flights to Hawaii via British Airways but on Alaska metal. Booking directly with Alaska was not an option because I did not have a stash of Alaska miles (now called Atmos points). Besides that, the prices are so dynamic. Sometimes I saw them on Alaska for as low as 17K and as high as 30K for the same flight. I got lucky and found award space with BA and quickly booked both legs. At the time, I did not realize that Qatar Airways uses the same currency as BA called Avios. 

Three weeks after booking with BA, I read a tip from my favorite points and miles expert, and that's when I learned about all the other airlines that also use Avios, so I searched for my same flights on those airlines and actually found the same route on Qatar for 4K less each. I cancelled that leg with BA, got back 80,000 Avios, transferred 64,000 to Qatar, and now I have 16,000 Avios for future travel. Normally, you pay a cancellation fee when cancelling an award fare, and you get the rest of your taxes and fees refunded less this fee. However, since the taxes and fees we paid were lower than the cancellation fee, we did not get a refund. Instead, our cancellation fee was basically the loss of the taxes and fees, which in this case amounted to $22.40.

LESSON: Check for award space on all the partner airlines' sites before booking. It's tedious but could save thousands of points and miles!

1. This one is more like a regret than a mistake: My number one misstep is that I waited too long to get started. Sometimes, I can be a dive-right-in kind of person. But because my credit and our finances were involved, I wanted to be really informed. I wanted to know as much as possible before diving in. I wanted to feel sure that I could make this work. That I wouldn't mess up. Well, I did wait until I knew a lot, and I still messed up. But as you can see from mistakes 2-5, I learned a lot from those mistakes, and I still have more to learn. 

I didn't apply for my first travel credit card until 4 months after I had learned about transferable points. In the meantime, we went on a big trip to Denmark that we paid for with cash. If I had just signed up for the number one travel card that was recommended to me, I would have met the minimum spend on that trip alone, which means I missed out on 60K points! It wasn't until after that trip and after watching a couple of online classes that I finally applied for a card. You don't need to take a whole class to know that with the right card, every time you feed your family or put gas in the car, you could be earning transferable points. The main thing I wanted to learn was how to spend the points and how to maximize them -- all of which I could have learned WHILE spending money to meet the minimum spend requirement.

LESSON: If you don't have credit debt and you pay off your statement balance each month, start funneling all your regular spending to a card that earns transferrable points ASAP!

The Getty, Los Angeles, December 2025