Another free airline ticket...

If you haven't clicked on the link in the upper right-hand corner and become a Travel Hacker, you're missing out.  The travel cost for my trip to St. Thomas was about $20 because all I had to do was pay the taxes on my Delta SkyMiles ticket.

One of the recent editions of the Travel Hacker newsletter listed an opportunity to pick up 30,000 American AAdvantage miles by opening a checking account.  Not a credit card -- a checking account.  All I have to do is spend $750 over three months using the debit card and have at least two direct deposits made.  Who can't do that?

And, by the way, this is the second time I have done this with Citi.  I closed out the last account about nine months ago.  Look, unless you got lucky in the stock market, your money is earning squat if it is in a CD, savings or money market account.  Put it where you get something for it.

The economy is going to tank big time over the coming few years as the Euro zone finally can't sustain itself and takes the rest of the world with it.  Initially, money will seek a safe haven and the US dollar has always been the reserve currency.  But as the fiscal crisis becomes a reality in the US as well, inflation will go through the roof.  We're going to watch Barack morph into Jimmy Carter... just lacking the administrative experience, common sense and ability to manage foreign affairs that the Peanut had (oh... wait... Jimbo didn't have any of those things either).  I vividly remember the 16.25% mortgage that I had for fifteen months because inflation was so bad.

Good times ahead.  Get your free airline tickets so you can get out of Dodge when it becomes necessary!

More ways to earn miles…

Another card I have had for many years is my American Express Rewards card.  I earn award points for every dollar spent and some retailers offer bonuses for using the card in order to earn your business.  For example, if I’m buying flowers for Mother’s Day anyway, why not use the florist that gives me 3 miles for every dollar spent?  Well, over the years I have built up 66,000 rewards points.  Through the Travel Hacker site I learned that I could get 1.5 miles for every reward point transferred to the British Air frequent flyer program.  You don’t have to be a math prodigy to figure out that by opening a BA Executive Club account I could start out with over 100,000 Avios (their term for the frequent flyer club points).  Done.

But it gets better.  BA had a credit card offer that gave you 25,000 miles just for getting the card and another 25,000 miles for spending $2,500 in the first 90 days you have the card.  Done.  I spend about $800 every month for things like my cell phone, ISP, alarm service, utilities, etc.  Throwing in grocery purchases and other necessity spending makes it easy to get to $2,500 in 90 days without spending money on non-necessities.  I haven’t received the card yet, but my application was accepted and once I receive the card, I will switch my automatic payments from my Citibank Amex card to the BA card.  So… within a very short time I will have a BA Avios balance of 150,000 miles.

I relayed this information to a friend who wanted to know what the heck I would do with 150,000 British Air miles.  Excellent question.  You can book flights on American and many other airlines using your BA miles and avoid paying fuel surcharges at the same time!  This is covered in one of the Travel Hacker tutorials.  I thought I knew a lot about how the airline points programs work, but Chris Guillebeau, the founder of Travel Hackers, and his crew have taught me much more about both earning and spending points.

An important thing to understand about the airlines is that all major airlines and many regional airlines belong to one of three consortiums that work cooperatively to serve each other’s customers.  You’ve probably booked a multi-segment trip before and got onto a plane operated by a different airline.  That’s because of the code-share partnerships between airlines.  This also works on a broader scale for the member airlines of the One World, Star Alliance and SkyTeam associations.

Before deciding on my Panama trip last year, I was toying with going back to Morocco for a ten-day trip.  As usual, I went to Hipmunk to do my initial search for flights and noticed that some of the best flight combinations used Delta and Air France; both airlines are SkyTeam members.  For a period of almost a week, I could have booked flights to either Marrakech or Rabat for only 90,000 Delta SkyMiles.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough miles and by the time I figured out that I could have moved miles to Delta from my AmEx Rewards account the offer was gone.  But this points out the importance of having miles in members of all three airline partnerships.  I now have points built up in American and British (One World), Delta (SkyTeam) and United and US Air (Star Alliance).

All of these tidbits and more are detailed in the tutorials offered by the Travel Hackers web site.  Could you do this on your own?  Maybe, but getting regular updates and reminders from Travel Hackers is helpful and keeps you from going to every site imaginable to stay on top of it.  I encourage you to click the link and check it out.  You won’t regret it and the worst that can happen is that you learn how to get more travel for less.

Some people have concerns about having multiple credit cards.  I understand that and you need to have a plan to keep yourself out of financial and credit trouble.  To make sure I stay within my budget each month, I have an automatic payment made to my current credit card of choice from my checking account.  That covers my regular spending (as outlined above) and then I add up my spending each week and make an additional payment as I spend the money.  That way I don’t rely on the credit card for living expenses and always ensure my card is paid off each month and avoid paying interest.