You don't say. I just spent half of my morning reading milesdividendmd's posts and navigating around other blogs, and it's still not super-clear to me what all the steps are.
Yeah, and MDMD is one of the more clear ones. Some of them are so opaque I have no idea what they're saying.
If I can "spend" 37k in the next 3-6 months though, the wife and I will have around 530k miles combined for a real cost of ~$650 USD (most of that being CC annual fees that aren't waived the first year, a little of it being estimates on what the MS will cost me).
That's probably worth 5-10k in travel, depending on how it's redeemed. So something like 90% off my travel costs.. or, in other words, for the price of less than one round trip ticket to Europe, I can get about 10 round trip tickets to Europe, or more during the off peak season.
I mentioned this in another thread, but let me add it again here:
Brad at Richmond Savers does free (literally free) coaching on travel hacking. He emails you, will chat with you on the phone, etc. He recorded three 5 minute each screencasts of his computer the other day to show me how he might look for flights out of Vegas to various cities based on a question I asked.
He has nothing to sell, all he asks is if you sign up for a CC to use his referral code (but he doesn't push them).
By far the most amazing resource, and a very friendly and awesome guy to boot.
http://www.richmondsavers.com/He doesn't really do the manufactured spending stuff so much, but if you want to know the best way to earn points and redeem them, talk to him!
It came to my mind because I was mentioning how many points I'll have, and what they're approximately worth (5-10k USD), and it reminded me that he showed me a trick to fly to Seattle (where I'm from, and where all my family lives) by going through British Airways points (to Alaska Airlines, but they also work with American and United or US Airways, I forget which), which let you book based on Distance "zones," so I can book for 15k miles round trip instead of a more typical 25k miles (if I didn't go through BA, but went directly to Alaska, it'd cost 25k). Little tricks like booking through British Airways instead of Alaska to make the flight 40% off in terms of mileage is huge. That'd be like if I used all my miles to just go to Seattle and back to get 35 flights instead of 21, or 14 extra for free! Ridiculous.
Can you tell I'm excited about all this stuff? ;)
I'm excited to try all these new tricks and hopefully reduce my Christmas airfare to Europe, though.
You should be able to get to Europe basically free, and without having to do much MS at all (at least should be able to do all free MS, like Amazon Payments). Email Brad about what you're trying to do.