Various members of my family always told me to pick up every penny I saw on the street, regardless of how small the perceived value was. I stuck with that philosophy for a while, especially since as a kid, adding a cent to my net worth was a meaningful increase.

I think that ethos is something that a lot of us carry over into churning as well – a need to squeeze as much value as possible out of every situation is just coded in our DNA. 

Picking up the low-hanging fruit in the MS world is generally worth it. Running a loop that pays out $10-$20/day sometimes seems dumb, considering how much money you have to move to net that. But it takes mere seconds to do and compounds quickly, especially if you can scale horizontally. 

But today’s post isn’t about true low-hanging fruit – it’s about medium-hanging fruit with the perception of low-hanging fruit.

The end of a new quarter and the start of a new one (and month, and year for that matter) means it’s time to work your way through a quagmire of coupon book benefits. 

If you’re reading this, you not only need to figure out how to work through them all, but you need to figure out how to work through them all 10 or 20 times. 

My advice to all of us would be to weigh which ones are worth working through and which ones we can just learn to let go of. After all, some of the coupons with a high perceived value are extremely difficult to use except in certain situations.

For an example – let’s look at the personal Amex Platinum. The Uber credit is a perfect low-hanging fruit – pretty much everybody needs a ride or a meal delivered once a month. 

As for Equinox, good luck if you don’t live extremely close to one and are willing to shell out on top of the credit. 

But every churning blog has already covered this ad nauseam. What I’m really talking about today are some credits that people are spending much more time contorting themselves to use – namely Amex Hilton credits and airline incidentals post-UATB changes. 

As you likely know, the loophole to buy Hilton gift cards online with the credit was closed over a year ago, leaving us to figure out how to actually spend organically at a Hilton property. 

My call would always be to treat yourself if it worked out and forget about it otherwise, but the general consensus has been to probe whether Starbucks locations that are commonly in Hiltons sell gift cards. 

My understanding is that it worked sporadically at one point in time, but doesn’t anymore? None of the Hiltons near me have a Starbucks, so I never paid much attention to the DPs. 

But I also didn’t pay attention because it’s not a good return on effort. You could either sell for somewhere around 85-90% or just use them organically at Starbucks.

It’s one thing if you can work through a stack of ABPs and HHBs in one visit, but if you’re doing these mental gymnastics for $45, you’re probably undervaluing your time. Whether that means spending that time probing or upskilling at your W2, either one will be more fruitful in the long run.

I truly realized how pointless chasing credits like that was a few weeks ago when I was in Tokyo and staying at the Conrad. I had a huge stack of Hilton gift cards pre-nerf ready to use on the expensive restaurants and bars there. We ended up spending like $75 over 5 days there because it’s Tokyo – why spend time at the hotel restaurant when you’re somewhere like that?

As for the airline incidentals – those are a bigger value, and I understand trying to recoup them in some way with the death of our favorite loophole. I’m going to try and use them, but that means spending 5 minutes checking DPs on Flyertalk and shrugging them off if it takes more time than that. 

I got some helpful perspective from everyone’s favorite wolverine whale the other day. In between talking about pho, we were discussing a play we were probing involving United. That’s when he mentioned he never used the Amex coupons (airline credits included) because “it takes away the fun.”

The classic blog formula for finding the value on the first year of a card was something like (SUB x currency valuation) + (credit 1, 2, 3, etc. x valuation) – annual fee. That’s certainly good for juicing your affiliate numbers, but with the low-hanging fruit ways of cashing out coupons dying, it’s not realistic anymore.

The way that most heavy hitters think about it is more like (SUB x highest liquidation avenue) + (“business growth” offers x % possibility of receiving offers x highest liquidation avenue) – annual fee. 

Removing the credits from the equation removes the tendency to go through the mental gymnastics to justify spending time to get something for free that you don’t actually want. And if you happen to get some free lounge passes, discounted gym memberships or mediocre coffee then it’s just the cherry on top. 

It takes some mental reframing to move away from worrying about something that feels like recouping some of your cost on an annual fee, but I promise there are bigger fish to fry. 

Amamas!