Companion song: Wait So Long – Trampled by Turtles this one is worth a listen if you haven’t heard it – about as cool as a song with banjos and fiddles gets
Today concludes this goofy folk music-inspired series of timely MS advice. Part 1 and part 2 are here if you missed them.
If you’ve found your way into this wild hobby, you probably have at least some level of personality traits that trend towards responsibility and measuredness. I think those can sometimes lend themselves towards hesitation as well, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Hesitation is your brain telling you to stop and think harder before making a decision, and in so many different scenarios, it is your friend. It’s also very natural to hesitate with financial decisions, especially since so many of us aspire to FIRE.
However, in this hobby, fortune favors the bold. It’s something that’s stressed from the very beginning. If you see a sign-up bonus you’re interested in, don’t wait for it to go away. If you see an award flight that fits your plans, don’t wait for your P2 to confirm they can take off work, book it before it’s gone.
This mantra carries over as you get deeper into MS as well. Some of the most profitable things are only around for days (or hours). In this day and age, you often don’t have the luxury of saying that you’ll “figure it out later” or waiting to apply on a different screen. Things come and go so quickly that you need to strike when the iron is hot.
One historical example is the quasi-famous Aspire link. Way back when (somewhere around 2018-2019 I believe) somebody managed to get their hands on a link for the Hilton Aspire card without the annual fee. That card is already one one of the few cards that makes sense for many of us to keep even with the fee, so getting an uncapped FNC, Diamond status, and a handful of useful credits for free was quite the coup.
As you’d imagine, that link didn’t last very long, and all the people wringing their hands over whether they were going to get in trouble or if the link was legit ended up empty handed.
To add insult to injury, many people had years of not being charged the annual fee via that link. Again, not a home run play. But it was one free night a year at the Waldorf in the Maldives and (at the time) $250 to spend there – aka enough for the famous cheeseburger.
However, there are some other instances where the play is a home run and hesitating on it is seriously detrimental to your bottom line. I can think of a very recent instance where the window to take advantage of the play’s full value was short (and is now closed). In addition, one extremely easy way to meet the requirements amidst a dearth of other options died the same week.
Back in that Aspire example, I hesitated and only got the zero fee Aspire on P2’s account (“sorry babe, you’re Amex shutdown now”), which was a mistake. But learning from that mistake led to me not hesitating on a myriad of other plays, many of which were markedly more exciting than a Maldivian cheeseburger.
The usual disclaimers apply – assess your own risk tolerance, go at your own pace, etc. etc. But if you can clearly understand the value proposition when something new inevitably pops up and you’re stuck on a company all hands, consider taking the initiative right away. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today, at least if it involves churning. Good luck hitting those unicorns.
Živjeli!