There’s plenty of theses out there in the MS community on risk – pretty much every other blog out there has one. Over the course of your churning and MS career, your risk tolerance will fluctuate too. Plays and loops that once seemed daunting will soon become a ho-hum 30 second checklist item each day, week, or month. 

The conventional wisdom in the community is that you should grow and scale your ability to do things that feel risky (within reason, of course). In most cases, this is the correct choice, but don’t forget that risk is only one half of the equation that you should be evaluating. 

Just because you’ve successfully done things that fly in the face of the status quo doesn’t automatically mean you’re invincible and should proceed with another risky idea without considering the reward side of the equation. 

Taking a huge risk can be worth it with a huge reward, and there’s nothing wrong with a low reward when it’s both low risk and low on time spent. But over time, your increased risk tolerance can lead to viewing things as either low risk or high reward when that isn’t true. 

Let’s look at an example in both the churning and MS world to illustrate how you can approach these situations in a balanced way.

Situation 1: Low risk leaked links

Credit card application links sourced from non-official sources have been a part of the game for as long as I’ve been playing it. There’s some level of a spectrum of risk with these, since some are links that are legitimately part of a targeted promo vs. those that are generated via brute force. 

They’ve generally been ok to use, until they aren’t. Using a leaked link is probably low risk, but my litmus test for whether to use one has primarily been weighted by the reward side of the equation, not whether I think there is any shut down risk associated with it. 

There was some drama this year related to a leaked link that was one of the few churning stories to hit the mainstream (and was the impetus for writing my first post on risk). It didn’t end up being a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it also wasn’t worth the trouble it caused. 

The max value of using the leaked link vs. the “official” one was somewhere between $200 and $260. Not an insignificant amount of money, but as you’ve probably learned over time, that is not an amount worth losing a relationship with a major issuer – regardless of the fact that the risk is low. 

There are other links of dubious origin that have a very different risk to reward equation compared to the above example – i.e. the difference between using the link and not vs ranges somewhere more like $2000-$5000 vs $0. That is a much more appealing risk vs. reward equation, especially when the risk was low to begin with. 

Situation 2: $25k of spend

Let’s say you had a credit card with a $25k credit limit and an uncapped 4% bonus category that you had the ability to MS. In theory, that’s a nice $1,000/mo profit. How nice that actually is depends on your ability to acquire quickly and liquidate cheaply, but for the sake of the argument, let’s pretend it takes 2 hours a month and you can liquidate it for 0% (wishful thinking going into 2026, but let’s try to manifest it 🦄) 

You realize that a $500/hr rate to go chat with cashiers and get out of the house is pretty good, so you decide to cycle your $25k limit once and spend $50k this month so you earn $2,000 instead, even though the card is a personal card and it’s unclear whether the issuer is ok with this activity. 

In the spirit of #alwaysbeprobing, this is something I’d recommend giving a try. An extra $1,000 at $500/hr is solid for 99.9% of us, and it gives you valuable data points about where the limits are. And if cycling once is enough to get the ban hammer, you probably weren’t retiring on this play to begin with. 

On the flip side – let’s say you wanted to spend another $25k on your cards to wrap up the year, but your play was a slightly different angle. For the sake of illustration, let’s say it was the precious metals play that most of us are hitting (no, it’s not a secret, but why call it out in public more than it already has been?)

You have the ability to earn approximately 5% on the purchase thanks to the card (and the issuer), the volatility of said precious metal, and maybe you still have some store-issued rebate cap left. 

Buying the membership-linked limit of one SKU would cost you somewhere around $22,000 at current spot pricing, earning you $1,100 at 5%. Not half bad, and if there’s an absence of cycling, it’s very low risk. 

But it’s also the holidays, and you’re traveling. You could try ordering and shipping to wherever you are. But between address related quirks with the vendor, delivery verification, and having limited visibility into who signed for it and where it ended up, this is a lot riskier than it appears. 

It’s great to make four figures with minimal effort and time spent, but this situation is simply not worth the risk of the package ending up somewhere it’s not supposed to. You aren’t losing a random credit union relationship like you are in the above example – you’re risking something between a colossal headache that may mediate in your favor and pouring $22,000 down the drain.  

To sum it up into a tl;dr that I probably should have included at the start of this tome instead of the end, getting uncomfortable with taking risks is a huge part of the path from shrimp to dolphin to whale. However, don’t let an increased appetite for risk cloud your ability to factor in what you actually stand to earn as a result of that risk. Going big is great, but make sure you’re going big for a reason.

Iechyd da!