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Best Funding Source for Earning Miles? (43)

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I was reading a blog post of people who use their affiliate ad spend
money on credit cards that give them cash back rewards.

I thought that was a pretty cool idea. But I also think it's pretty
awesome to use it on mileage cards.

Least I think it can be, haven't done it.

For those frequent travelers out there, do you do this?

How many miles are you racking up monthly and what is the best
card for it for all carriers or most?

I was looking at general mileage stuff. A chart I found said
20,000 to 25,000 for domestic within USA
30,000 from USA to Canada/Mexico
35,000 for USA domestic to Hawaii/Carribean.

No idea how accurate it is.

I can vouch for Hawaii in that I spent about 35,00 miles
going there from Alaska that I had built up from years of
flying in the oil fields.

Anyhow, just thought it be kind of neat to one day
get up to $50k adspend a month and always
have a ton of free tickets open up to me to go
out into the world

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Funny you mention this, I'm about to sign up for a new CC for miles today and was doing some hw last night. Goal is to be a complete loser this year, learn a lot in AM and make $, and then travel a lot next year.

An ecommerce entrepreneur I know recommends these two:

- Capital One Venture Card: http://www.capitalone.com/credit-cards/venture-rewards
- Barclays Arrival: http://www.barclaycardarrival.com

He uses all the rewards points he racks up to pay for not only flights, but also hotels, rental cars, dinners, you name it... anything that you could label as a travel expense.

Also very cool is the Fidelity Visa Card (https://www.fidelity.com/cash-manage...signature-card) - get 2% cash back, another ecommerce guy I know funds his entire Roth IRA with this.

Very curious about other peoples' input on this here... what do you guys use?

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SPG Amex is the best travel credit card IMHO. You can earn free nights (and suite upgrades) at top luxury hotels around the world like St. Regis. You can also transfer points to major airline programs.

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They also have agreements with a shit ton of flight carriers. I remember seeing an article somewhere claiming they had the highest point/dollar ratio.

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Very intriguing.

I have heard of the Barclay one, but only cause of a precursory google search. Of course, that 14.7% SEO industry average conversion rate was working its muscle on me, but I figured I'd post here and see what other people thought on this subject before following the Google rabbit hole I fell into lol.

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depends where you are going to go -- I've racked up a few million points already in 2014 and do a fair bit of traveling so I will summarize:

If you fly coach/don't care about a high class seat, get a fixed rewards card like the Barclay Arrival. You end up netting about ~2.24% return on all travel, and you still earn miles on the tickets you buy. On a pure cash back rewards card, earning 2% cash back with your 1099-MISC at the end of the year for all the "interest" you earned on your card would cut the net return by half.

If you fly business/first and/or like to leave the US when you travel, get an SPG or Chase's United Club card. 1.5x points per dollar on ALL spend for the club card, effective 1.25x points per dollar spend on the SPG card, which you can transfer to a ton of different airlines.

If you don't spend more than ~50k/year on adspend, go for churning credit card signup bonuses. Citi's AAdvantage Executive platinum should still be 100k points if you spend 10k in 3 months, and the 110k points will get you a roundtrip business class trip to Asia worth ~ $15k if you paid in cash.

Lookup my presentation on this very topic on the STM @ Bangkok thread if you're curious

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Curious about this, what's the options for non-US citizens?

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I live outside USA and still have a Visa and a Mastercard with all these benefits (flights, hotels, stores, foods, you can even trade the points for money).

Look for a bank that has branches in another countries. Mine has the main branches in Panana, NY, and Cayman Islands.

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Chase Sapphire is my top pick for US based affs. 40k bonus points. 1:1 transfer to United (Star Alliance) and some other companies/hotels. I would say points are highest leveraged in terms of value when getting upgraded business class seats. If you travel INTL it is a godsend. If you have United status, you can leverage even more value out of them. I've gotten first class flights from LAX to JFK for 12.5k points ($125 cashout value). I get about 80k+ points a month.

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I like my Amex here in Canada, I can use it with Aeroplan, Avios, Alitalia, Starwood and I think another one or two different companies. Either way between Air Canada and BA Avios that covers me for *A and OW, the two major partnerships on the airline front.

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Be careful not to mix personal with business, unless you are running some sort of one man show where you're not incorporated. You're not going to have much fun when the IRS decides to dissolve your LLC or corp because you frivolously mix personal and business. When that happens, NONE of your expenses will count as expenses in the IRS's eyes and instead of making $100k/year profit, you may suddenly find yourself OWING a million dollars in tax revenue. The Sapphire's only a personal card.

Chase Sapphire's pretty pointless of a card too for most expenses related to AM. You're only going to get a dollar per point for most categories. You get double for travel and dining out -- both of which generally aren't AM expenses. You could make a case for travel, but then you can get triple the points for airfare on the AMEX gold. I assume you mean you spend $12.5k for 25k points to redeem for saver level United BusinessFirst. None of that spend would have anything to do with AM though, whereas with the United Club card you'd get 1.5x points per spend, giving you 18750 miles. This is on ANY AM expense (Trafficjunky, POF, hosting, etc)

Better yet, if you knew how to maximize your miles on a lower budget, you would be getting the SPG card and you'd book that LAX to JFK biz class flight for only 17k miles on Lufthansa, without any fuel surcharges instead of 25k on United itself. Those 17k Lufthansa miles would only require $13.6k in spend, for 13600 SPG points, which transfer at a 1.25x rate.

AMEX MR points are losing more and more ground, they don't run transfer bonuses as often as they used to, and a lot of the more lucrative partners like AA or United are either crippled transfer ratiowise or nonexistent.

SPG has you covered for multiple Star Alliance (*A), One World (OW), and Skyteam Airlines.

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Im curious, what do you guys do if you incorporated offshore (ie. outside the US)? Your company is in seychelles, HK, SG, etc... What options do you have for cards?

I was talking with BoA and they said that if incorporated offshore, no taxid in the US, they cant do or help with anything business wise... If you go bank overseas, do they extend credit with mileage like this?

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HSBC HK will let you get one credit card per company as long as you fund it first. i.e. if you want a 75k HKD limit, you need to deposit 75k in the deposit account first, AND you can't use it to pay your bills or anything. The AsiaMiles ratio you earn is abysmal, something like 1 mile every TWO dollars you spend.

I believe Hang Seng will give you a credit card upon bank account opening.

In short, credit cards are few and far between and MUCH harder to get everywhere in the world besides the US. The sophistication level of financial tech is one of the very few things we definitely have any other region beat. Either live with it, do more research on flyertalk forums, or figure out a transfer pricing setup like a real multi-national corporation

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On this topic, just listen to whatever timtetra says.

He is Mr. Airmiles.

He has got this game down to a science.

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Any Canadian's know of US$ Cards with good points? I bank with BMO and I don't get any rewards on my US$ purchases...which is all my ad spend and anything related to IM.

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learn something new everyday, good looks timtetra!

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@adrien23 - Check out the RBC USD VISA Gold. Not a stellar points program but better than nothing: http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/credit-c...edit-card.html

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Does anyone have any recommendations for the UK at all?

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Yes I would suggest the American Express Platinum Aeroplan card.

https://www.americanexpress.com/ca/e...platinum-card/

It's 1.25 to 1.5 points for every dollar spent... I do all my ad buys and business expenses via this card and it adds up to a lot of points monthly. I try and use these points for family vacations and things i cannot write off (ie. Disney trip with my kids last year). Plus it gives you a ton of other good features like first class check in (even if you're flying coach), first class lounge access, baggage and travel insurance and a bunch of other shit i don't use haha!

Anyways hope it helps!

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This definitely helps. My current US card doesn't get me much, and most i looked into didn't.

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The only business card you can get with points is American Express. I just got one of the Small Business Gold Cards the other week. You get 20,000 points bonus if you spend £3k in the first 3months, then its £1/point.

If its personal cards then theres loads to choose from (a lot of them via amex).

I searched to ages for business cards and was suprised that the amex one was the only available in the UK, thought there would have been a bit more choice.

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Do you get charged in USD or do they auto convert to CDN?

Currently using http://www.capitalone.ca/credit-card...l-world-elite/
for all my travel needs. But looking for something where the conversion rates don't suck ass!

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SPG is the best in my opinion. I stay in their hotels typically over 100 nights a year. Awesome service and very powerful point can check out transfers to Airlines here: http://www.starwoodhotels.com/prefer...em/travel.html

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Forget the miles, get Spark Business from CapitalOne with 2% cash back.
http://www.capitalone.com/credit-cards/business/

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@TimTetra,

Can you weigh in on Chase Ink Business cards?

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not as good as miles for tax reasons.

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If you are based in the uk Amex is the best and only option

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True, but if you don't travel a lot, miles are kinda useless. They have 2x miles Spark Business card, too, if you don't want the cash one.

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Amex Business Gold Rewards card!

They recently changed things and you can select a category to earn 3x points on. One of the categories that you can choose is for advertising in select media. They do not have a definitive list posted that I have been able to find but I do know that it includes spend on Adwords, FB and Bing. If you run on any of these traffic sources then you can rack up some serious points at 3 points per dollar.

This card bought me first class tickets to London for the STM meetup

You can check it out here

-Aaron

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wow with 3x the points thats over 1 mil miles for me per month.. that would be sick if they had it in the uk

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Chase Ink Plus is a great card to have because of the 5x points categories. I know Wiredtree and Exoclick(you can get your paypal limit increased) charges get 5x points. You can rack up some serious miles with that card but there is a 50k annual limit on the 5x bonus.

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I never tried to use my Chase Ink with Exoclick -- I'll have to try that next time. Previously, I was just using it for all my utility-related stuff like DSL/cell phones etc and/or if I went to Staples etc for office equipment.

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Good find dude 3x points for advertising expenses is insane I have never even seen a card that gives anything extra on advertising expenses I'm going to have to ad this to my collection of credit cards. Unfortunately it looks like they limit the 3x points to only the first 100k in spend in each category then it drops to 1x.

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That tells me it's probably worth starting multiple businesses with dunn and bradstreet scores.

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Good idea jennatalia but I believe it takes a significant amount of time for a new company to establish enough credit to get approved for a CC. For this reason I know some places exist where you can buy an existing established corp with a D&B history and a credit history so that may be an option.

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Takes 1 year minimum. Better than no cc

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Used to travel in the US every week for my corporate job I would pay out of pocket and get reimbursed, which rocked b/c I could rack up the miles for myself.. I don't think there's a 1-size fits all here.

Everyone's going to have different preferences on what to do with their rewards. All that said, if we're on the topic of "earning miles" then I think you should plan it based on where you live, as you can really line up your miles with the airline that serves your home base the best. (i.e. Alaska Airlines for Seattle, Delta for NYC - two of the places I've most recently had my home-base)

I've heard really great things about the AMEX platinum, if you want something more generic one-size fits all. (I think it's $399/year) But you get reimbursed on shit you lose that you buy with it, plus you rack up great miles etc. (more broad for any airline if I'm not mistaken)

But if you're really want to take advantage of miles the best I'd do a search on which airline provides the most flights out of the airport you travel most from, typically one or two own that city's airport. For example almost 40% of the flights out of Seattle are from Alaska Airlines, so their miles program worked really well for me when I was based there. Then I found out Delta owned a large market share of the NYC LGA and JFK flights. So I switched to their platinum business miles card and took advantage with that.

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I see most of those creditcards are US based. Can I apply for those if my firm is based back in Belgium? Creditcard benifits here are way less then those described above. Anyone based in Europe experienced in this?

Thanks!

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Buy a us business and get business cc through that entity

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Yeah.., but then you would need to pay the taxes? You can't somehow combine US entity with offshore entity like Seychelles to not pay taxes, right?

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Us businesses make money, pay expenses, then pay tax on whats left over.

1m revenue with 900k expenses leaves 100k profit. Tax at 30% is 30k tax expense.

So tax comes out to 3% revenue. Not too shabby imo.

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I just open new credit cards as often as I can to hit bonuses. You make more back that way than just getting the normal 1-3% you'd get from just earning points.

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From Asia and apparently the Amex card is killing it here too. Probably they are trying to penetrate into the market here so I get 5 points for every $0.25 dollar spent, and now my travel is not completed without a business class seat at least.

I would say this is the best part of being an affiliate, the credit card benefits

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