I know this is way off the topic of this thread but now I’m more curious about your travels. The wife and I would like to travel at least 2-3 months a year. Do you mainly travel in LCOL countries? We were thinking of getting an AirBNB for 1 month at a time to get the monthly discount and keep our accommodation costs low. It would be more like a “slow” travel experience. We have about 500k points/miles accumulated to keep airfare costs at a minimum. How are you managing your expenses? Where have you been? How long will you travel? Feel free to PM me.
@Mrbeardedbigbucks , So far, in 14 months of travel we've been to Japan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, New Zealand, and now we're in Greece. Some of the countries we've been to more than once. For example, Malaysia, which we used as a base to travel around SE Asia. In each country we've stayed between 1 - 3 months.
Normally we do what you said, book Airbnb apartments for at least 28 days to get the monthly discount. Some hosts offer really attractive monthly discounts, others, not so much, so you have to search the site to find the good deals. Right now, we're staying in a beautiful two bedroom apartment in a nice, walkable neighborhood in Athens where we're paying only US$738 for 31 nights.
It's funny, we also started our travels in late 2016 with a few hundred thousand CC points. Before we left home, my wife and I each opened Chase Sapphire Reserve and Chase Sapphire Preferred cards to get the sign up bonuses. It was so cheap to fly all around SE Asia and even down to NZ from Kuala Lumpur on Air Asia, that it made more economic sense to pay cash for the tickets than to use our CC points. Since we left KL, though, we've been booking all of our flights for free through the Chase UR Portal. So far, we've gotten free flights from KL to Chengdu. From Chengdu to Beijing and Beijing to Athens. Next month, we'll fly for free from Athens to Paris. In May, we'll fly for free, again, from Paris to Norway and then from Norway to Croatia. In July, we'll fly using our Chase UR points from Belgrade to London, and then, at the end of July, we'll fly from London all the way back home to Hawaii, all using our CC points. As soon as we get home, one of the first things I'm going to do is start opening more CCs to start building our points back up again. :)
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask here or you can also PM me. Happy travels!