I’ve never posted anything, but feel pretty awesome about the trip I just went on, so I thought I should share it.
Long story short: my wife and I went on a 2 week trip to Barcelona and Malta. All travel and accommodations cost us $470. We did this, of course, through credit card rewards.
If you want to know the long story:
3 years ago we went on a month long honeymoon to Paris, Florence, and Malta. This, we paid for out of pocket. We had a very small wedding and asked for cash instead of presents because we’re cheap bastards. So the wedding “gifts” paid for our trip. However, during the trip we used the Barclay Arrival card and earned $675 in travel points.
After the trip I didn’t even think about the card. I only used it every now and then to keep it active, so it sat largely unused for a year and a half. Then during one boring day at work, after making the final payment on our $40,000 of private college loans (HELL YES) I realized that just with the Barclay rewards alone, we almost have 2 round trip tickets to London (NorwegianAir has some really cheap flights). So that is when my wife and I started the journey to accumulate as many reward points as possible and go back to Europe.
I read up on credit churning, how to do it without it hurting your credit score, and went at it. Over the next year and a half we took out three more credit cards: another Barclay Arrival Card, and two CapitalOne Venture Cards. Each card gives a signup bonus after you spend $3,000 in 3 months. I budget for $2,800/month, so we didn’t spend anything outside of what we usually spend, and paid every card off in full each month. Between the 4 cards we racked up $2,193 in free travel.
Here is the breakdown:
2 Round-trip tickets from Boston to London: $811 (Paid $136 after points)
2 Tickets from London to Malta: $161.44 (Paid $0 after points)
AirBnb in Malta: $725 (Paid $263 after points))
2 Tickets from Malta to Barcelona: $168.75 (Paid $0 after points)
AirBnb in Barcelona: $549 (Paid $71 after points)
2 Tickets from Barcelona to London: 175.69 (Paid $0 after points)
The wild thing is, we could have probably done t ose to $0 if we decided to stay in really dumpy Airbnb’s. Still, $470 for all of that it pretty great. I honestly can’t believe it worked. I kept thinking something was going to go wrong, they’d revoke my points, or there would be an issue with an airline... but nope. It worked flawlessly -- and it was really easy. It almost felt illegal.
Anyway, that’s the story. Not sure if it goes against the principles of this site, but it was pretty damn awesome.