It was yet another tough week in churningland, punctuated by (fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things) fintech shutdowns and some ominous A/B testing.
Instead of worrying about things we can’t control, let’s start the weekend early with another churning and MS mini crossword. I’m linking out again because embedding it directly starts the timer as soon as you open this post or email and that’s just not fair.
Good luck with the crossword, let me know how fast you complete it, and have a good weekend.
Throughout each year, there is a (somewhat) predictable flow of transfer bonuses from both banks and loyalty programs enticing you to move your flexible and somewhat liquid bank points to rigid and somewhat less liquid program-specific points.
The value proposition is often compelling – reducing an already appealing saver award rate by up to 30-40% is the kind of cents per point fodder that the affiliate blogs love to share en masse. However, unless you get extra lucky, a transfer bonus won’t line up with a booking window for upcoming plans.
So, what is one to do when an award program you’re fond of is offering a bonus when you have no immediate need to book? The general wisdom is to completely ignore the bonus – after all, “don’t speculatively transfer” is an axiom that is probably only a few pegs below “don’t call the bank” in churning lore.
For most churners, this logic is sound. However, I’ll offer the contrarian opinion that there are a handful of reasons to speculatively transfer when you’re hitting plays hard and aren’t relying on sign up bonuses as your main source of points and miles.
A psychological push
I’ve written about why I think MSers should treat themselves occasionally and a speculative transfer during a bonus period is the perfect opportunity to do so. Over time and experience gained, the average “rainy day fund” of points for a MSer will grow smaller and smaller. Once you start to see points as an asset with a market value tied to them, it’s less than ideal to have them sitting around earning nothing.
The team cashback people can probably ignore this advice, but I believe there’s something to be said for keeping a (relatively) small stash of points in your favorite loyalty program as a form of withholding to remind you to do something fun with them.
It gets a bit more difficult psychologically as time goes on to redeem for flights (especially in premium cabins) when you can no longer pretend it’s free and can assign an accurate opportunity cost on the redemption. It’s a bit easier if the points are already locked into a program, especially if said program frowns on third party bookings.
Ironically, flexibility
As we all know, churning and award travel are no longer niche hobbies confined to FlyerTalk forum posts. While I know we all have a good laugh at the NYT comment section whenever they post an article about churning, there will always be a handful of people who read that article the same week they see an “influencer” posting a TikTok about ANA F and put two and two together.
To support this growing demand for “free” travel, a cottage industry of tools has popped up to make finding an ideal award flight easier than ever. Between search tools that make ExpertFlyer look like COBOL in comparison and an array of monitoring services that are constantly looking for big award drops, it’s never been easier (or more competitive) to book a bucket list flight.
And just in case Trey, Tiffany, Jared or anyone else in said industry is reading this – I’m not hating at all (and I pay for a bunch of them). That being said, this new landscape necessitates being ready to book something in hours (if not minutes), compared to the relative lifetime you had back when ExpertFlyer was the primary game in town. Having miles in a loyalty program removes at worst a few minutes of processing time, and at best a glitch or error that kills your chances of getting the space completely.
A unicorn like JAL releasing multiple F seats a few months ago doesn’t last long – if I hadn’t already speculatively transferred Avios during transfer bonuses, I’m not sure I would have succeeded at booking it. Having your “rainy day fund” in a loyalty program allows you to jump on a bucket list flight as soon as the Thrifty Traveler alert hits.
A hedge against adverse action
It’s probably fair to accuse me of burying the lede in this post because this last reason is much more tangible than the first two and is likely the most relevant for this audience. It’s possible to get largely neutered from earning points in a given program if you’re shutdown by that program’s issuing partner. Is this the end of the world? Probably not, but it can hurt, especially if you live in certain geographic areas.
For example – let’s say you accidentally had a couple of returned payments with Amex, and they decided to shut you down. That would be quite tricky if you were a Delta loyalist – you’d no longer be able to transfer Membership Rewards to Delta, and you’d lose the ability to earn on the Delta co-branded cards as well. Delta isn’t always the easiest to book on partners, either. What are you going to do – actually pay for flights to earn miles? Come on now. I sure hope you don’t live in Atlanta or Minneapolis.
If you’re into shenanigans and hijinks on a certain bank and they are the issuing partner or a transfer partner (or both) of a loyalty program that is valuable to you, consider preemptively transferring, especially during a bonus period. Getting shutdown sucks, but it sucks a little less when not all is lost.
Frequent Miler has a helpful database of transfer bonuses – take a look every once in awhile and see if there is a match between a bank you may be on borrowed time with and a loyalty program that you like using.
Anyway, that’s my spiel for today. It’s probably an unpopular opinion, but I think it’s a minor behavioral adjustment that can pay dividends. Whether that means booking a unicorn first class flight or just saying “f it” to a long weekend to cross another ballpark of your list, having that extra 20-40% helps. Happy travels, and good luck with the shutdowns.
Will’s guest post last week got me thinking about my own churning and MS origin story and how that shaped my approach. This is an extended version of a story I shared at the MEAB meetup in June, so apologies if it sounds a little familiar to some of you!
The origin story
Somewhere in between the organized chaos of Usenet servers and early P2P clients that the uncs and old heads are familiar with and the shiny “may as well be Netflix and Hulu and Spotify combined” interface of a fully loaded Plex server that we have now, we had private torrent trackers. Private trackers were a welcome respite from the relatively unmoderated high seas experienced on the big trackers back in the day like The Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrents and Torrentz.
I’m getting nostalgic just typing this, thinking about how much time I spent as a teenager and young adult building a reputation to get invites to niche trackers like Kraytracker, Brokenstones and PunkTorrents. Being chronically online before that was a term shaped my musical tastes and developed the skills that turned into both my career and my MS skillset.
As great as all of those private sites were, there was an undisputed holy grail private tracker for people that were really into music: what.cd. Born in 2007 the same day that spiritual predecessor Oink’s Pink Palace was shutdown, what.cd was a cornucopia for music fans. Beyond that, it functioned as a lively community full of banter and a strong competitor to last.fm.
The major reason that an invite to what.cd was such a hot ticket was the barrier to entry. Signups didn’t periodically open like they did on so many trackers like that back then – you were required to take a fairly comprehensive interview on audio formats, spectral analysis, general torrenting and more. I read the official interview prep guide front to back, and eventually gained entry.
The site essentially looked like a better version of the iTunes music store at the time, where you could search by artist and find every single version of every single song they’d ever released. Plenty of artists even openly uploaded their content, knowing that the potential new exposure was worth any loss in digital download proceeds.
Pictured: An example of the thoroughness of a what.cd album listing – every release, in every format.
The only reason that the site was such a utopia was self-moderation derived from strict adherence to a minimum download to upload ratio – essentially, that you were sharing as much as you took.
While that was easy to do on a “private tracker” like Demonoid as you just had to leave your PC on, that didn’t cut it on what.cd. A balance credit on upload to download ratio was extremely valuable, so competition to earn it was fierce.
Smart folks rented “seedboxes” aka remote servers to ensure that they were the chosen seed when a new person downloaded a torrent. I was a kid when I got into what.cd, so that wasn’t feasible for me.
However, I was able to keep my account in good standing and well above the minimum ratio for quite awhile until what.cd’s untimely demise in 2016. Why? One of the most fun parts of what.cd was the bounty system – users with a surplus of upload credit could offer it as a bounty in return for a file that wasn’t on the site already (although this situation was few and far between).
This bounty system probably led to the eventual seizure of the site due to certain high profile bounties that were fulfilled like law enforcement tools and unpublished J.D. Salinger manuscripts, but it was also what kept me alive. For some reason, a true audiophile wanted a FLAC lossless version ripped from a fairly obscure album that I had already preordered because I had found the band on one of those other niche trackers.
I probably checked the tracking on that CD 1000 times in the week it took to get there, terrified that my best shot as a kid of building upload credit would be gone before it got there. Thankfully, I was probably one of only a handful of people that preordered that album, so I secured the bounty that tided me over for the next 7 or so years.
The MS application
Now, what does any of this longwinded story have to do with MS and churning? I’d wager quite a bit. It’s easy to draw parallels between the “high stakes” world of 2000s/2010s torrent trackers and the private spaces where MS knowledge is now shared.
Regarding barriers to entry, most of the valuable places to openly discuss the game aren’t exactly open to new people anymore. Whether that is a public advertised place like a private group associated with a blog or podcast or something unlisted like a like-minded probe group, you aren’t going to be able to find exactly what you’re looking for with zero effort like you could with the Pirate Bay or Demonoid back in the day.
It’s even easier to tie the upload to download ratio idea to MS. This game operates exclusively on reputation and trust – people are much more likely to share sensitive things with you when you can show you’ve brought original ideas to the table yourself.
One thing I hear often from beginner and intermediate MSers is that it can be intimidating to share something in a group or room with people that are more advanced than you. I understand that feeling (and it’s why I’m such a big proponent of finding a probe group at your level to grow together).
But in the spirit of my own story – sometimes you don’t need an expensive seedbox or an extensive collection of music to share something that is extremely valuable to someone. Even the biggest whales can’t check under every stone.
Whether that means probing a credit union, uncovering an esoteric quirk in an award travel program, or something else, don’t assume you don’t have something valuable to share. And if all else fails, do the MS equivalent of the what.cd interview prep guide – read as much as possible to understand as much as you can before asking questions.
I’ll leave you with the quote on the homepage of virtually every torrent tracker built using Gazelle, a framework originally built by the what.cd team:
You’ve stumbled upon a door where your mind is the key. There are none who will lend you guidance; these trials are yours to conquer alone. Entering here will take more than mere logic and strategy, but the criteria are just as hidden as what they reveal. Find yourself, and you will find the very thing hidden behind this page. Beyond here is something like a utopia.
Editor’s note: I’m extremely lucky to have some younger MSers in my circle that became heavy hitters in a short time and are wise beyond their years. Thanks to one of those, my buddy Will for today’s great post. Enjoy!
I used to be addicted to Destiny 2. During the pandemic, with my first remote job out of college, there wasn’t much else to do. With that game and many MMO-style titles, it can become a part-time job if you’re spiritually unemployed: completing the weekly time-gated challenges, grinding the dungeon for the latest meta weapon, watching raid guides, reading Reddit for tips and tricks. I’m ashamed to say that during certain times I clocked forty hours in a week.
My overarching goal during those years was to complete a raid (a group challenge with puzzles and fighting mechanics) on Day 1, running the activity blind, with no prior information, racing to be the first to complete it for a WWE-style belt.
I eventually found a ragtag group of people and, to my surprise, we skated through the Day 1 raid. It turned out to be comically easy compared to what we’d prepared for and was widely considered the easiest Day 1 raid of all time.
All the hundreds of hours of prep and max-armor grinding, and any Jimmy with an Xbox and a season pass could get carried for the same clout of a Day 1 clear. That realization hit hard. I’d spent years spinning my wheels for a game that, in the end, gave me nothing tangible to show for it.
Around the same time I fell out of love with Destiny 2, I started looking into credit cards as a young adult with a proper salary. I fell down the standard pipeline of watching YouTubers rank their “GOD TIER TRIFECTAS” (MrBeast thumbnail included) or “5% everywhere setups” (they spend maybe $10K annually on organic spend, by the way). I eventually started reading r/churning daily, subscribing to MEAB, and trying to learn everything I could to the point of obsession. I joined any group I could find and started reading pages and pages of Slack and Discord threads (unknowingly saving myself from future spoon emojis), listening to podcasts, and trying to figure out how to play this new game.
At first, it felt familiar. Destiny and churning had the same penchant for spreadsheets, stacking multipliers, meta builds (plays), and weapon rotations (loops). But instead of flexing to your clanmate on Discord after farming a boss for fifteen hours, now the payoff was seeing the world and doing it for “free”.
Recently, I was sitting at the restaurant in the Thompson Central Park after getting the free breakfast (thank you, Globalist status – no one should ever pay cash price for the food), and my friend, the same one who introduced me to Destiny 2, looked at me and said, “Man, you really just quit Destiny 2 and started playing this credit card game.”
A concept that often comes up on financial planning and FIRE podcasts is “memory banking.” It always resonated with me because, given my age in the mid-20s, it’s rare that ten years from now all the friends and family I have will still be able or willing to travel. In ten years, my peers might be married with children, and in fifteen years, my parents might not be as healthy or active.
Points have real cash value, and I’m not suggesting you blow your retirement savings on trips. But if you’ve ever run the FIRE calculators (and let’s be honest, if you’re reading this you probably have), ask yourself: would you rather use those points to take a trip with your closest friends, fully present and in the moment, or move your retirement date up by three months?
Some of my favorite award travel redemptions weren’t the craziest “CPP”, but they made a real impact on others:
Booking flights with 100K Aeroplan for my brother and his girlfriend to return from studying abroad in the Netherlands when cash tickets were $5K
Redeeming some stranded British Airways Avios (tried to book AA metal like a rookie, pre-deval) so my friend could stay an extra day in Brussels to attend a festival
Getting (6!) friends to open a few credit cards so we could fly round trip to Japan together for “free”
Using my Hyatt and AA miles to fly my brothers and dad to Nashville to see one of their favorite bands of all time
Booking several back-to-back-to-back-to-back FHR credits to stay for a week somewhere I’d never think possible
When I look back at the time I spent playing Destiny 2, I don’t resent all of it. The game taught me how much fun it is to master systems, learn mechanics, figure out the meta, and chase that feeling of progress.
The systems I once obsessed over for digital trophies now let me build real memories. I still get that same itch to optimize, to min-max, to see ‘number go up’ – but at least now the rewards live off-screen. And that feels like a much better kind of game worth playing.
In a resounding continuation of the theme of the year thus far for churners and MSers, a fresh wave of shutdowns hit this morning. As always, sorry to those affected, especially to a very well respected member of the community that was creating a lot of win-win opportunities.
But the blog isn’t called chasing shutdowns (although it may be soon), so let’s get back to some actionable advice. This one is more for folks in the beginner to intermediate range, but is a helpful thing to keep in mind for more advanced people as well.
As you work your way up the MS ladder, you’ll eventually find yourself in a situation where you have to float money. The most common occurrence is with something like a buyers group – you are fronting the money you paid for the item until they get around to paying you out.
Normally, this isn’t a big deal since only the worst buyers groups take so long to issue payment that you have to pay your credit card bill first (or they have a cashflow problem and you should stay far away), although it’s not fun from a psychological perspective.
There’s other less obvious things that could kind of count as a float risk – even an asset like points that haven’t been cashed out yet that were earned in a way likely to cause ire with a bank is floating, in a way.
However, this post isn’t about floating – it’s about the perception of floating and a mindset you need to get out of unless you want to get shutdown for kiting (but let’s be honest, you’re probably going to get shutdown for something else because it’s 2025).
Another aspect of becoming a bigger fish is that your money tends to be spread out. Between a myriad of targets, the multitude of bank accounts you probably have open, maybe even parked funds for a bonus, there’s a lot of places your money could be.
Earlier in your churning career, that’s going to feel uncomfortable. You’re used to a hub account where the displayed balance is what you have – no need to break out a calculator to determine your cash reserves.
Keeping track of a bunch of balances is annoying, I won’t deny that. Using a budgeting tool like Monarch can help to a degree, but once you’re advanced and have a new car’s worth of money tied up in some obscure fintech you’re not sure even physically exists, it’s going to take some actual manual math to determine your net worth.
But here’s the thing – obscure fintechs and memecoins aside, the vast majority of banks, credit unions and other places you are moving money between do show up on budgeting tools, while money owed to you by a buyers group or precious metals dealer does not.
That’s because you aren’t actually floating money in this case – while it’s not in your hub account, the money is still yours, and you can control it. That’s not the same as floating the dollar value of 25,000 Amazon Fire Sticks to a rented warehouse in New Hampshire.
The reason I say all of this is to help you keep these intermediary accounts and targets alive longer. I see a lot of people losing valuable liquidation options and helpful bank accounts, and it’s often due to erroneously feeling a need to get it back into a hub account as quickly as possible.
Again, I understand the psychological urge to run the loop and have your money back where it started. But you need to resist that urge – ironically, the true way you’d lose control of money in a separate account is doing something suspicious to get your account locked.
So what’s the move? Well, most normal people do things like pay bills or buy stuff with an account – not deposit and withdraw in quick succession like you’re trying to take part in this famous festival in Ahmedabad.
Next time you pull up your hub account and cringe at a lower than expected balance, take solace in the fact that you’re keeping your plays and loops around longer by practicing patience and being thoughtful in how you move money around.
Heeding this advice will help you keep some of the secondary platforms that are often low hanging fruit around longer.
With all of the crazy stuff going on in churning and MS right now, I wasn’t planning on posting anything this week. But hey, it’s Thursday, we’re more than halfway through the week, and most of us still have all of our fingers and toes.
Instead of talking about what’s going on, I decided to go with a little bit of Thursday levity in honor of Halloween.
I usually start my day in my home gym, affectionately known in my household as “the house that H1 2025’s favorite deceased debit loop built”. In between sets, I play Wordle, the Mini Crossword and Connections on New York Times. But not Strands, because Strands is the worst.
Today, I made a fun little churning/MS themed version of all 3 to play. They’re designed to go from pretty easy (Wordle) to fairly diabolical (Connections).
I’m not embedding them in the blog post because I’m not sure that would work, but you don’t need an account on any of these sites to play / sorry it’s driving elsewhere.
For anyone who can solve the Connections (without playing it twice) or can do the crossword quickly, let me know! I’ll hook you up with 5 whale doubloons. What are whale doubloons you ask? You’ll see.
