There’s been a lot of mainstream media press on churning in the last couple of weeks, and whenever that happens, there is collective trepidation in the community that this is a bad thing that is going to cause too much exposure to the hobby. 

I do get that, especially when the publications are household names like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. There will always be some level of journalistic interest in churning, because it’s such a niche hobby that flies directly against standard advice when it comes to credit and finances. 

However, I don’t think churners and MSers have a ton to worry about. First off, the average American isn’t cut out to churn, let alone MS. It’s really hard to succeed if you have credit card debt, a poor credit score, limited credit history, or some combination thereof (unless you love Capital One, of course!). Hell, I knew about churning for years before I could start because I couldn’t get approved with my paper thin credit file.

I also think that there is a tendency to assume that a surface level article in the NYT is going to be some huge lightbulb moment for the big banks that they’re being taken advantage of. They’re well aware – the 2025 war on happiness™ is clear evidence. 

But the big banks are loving this widespread adoption of ultrapremium credit cards. The universal praise that Amex is getting for the (actually somewhat thoughtful) refreshment of the two Platinums is helping to make up for anything they felt they needed to recoup in February. Maybe not all big banks though – Citi gonna Citi, after all.

At this point, I think that Brian Kelly could be Time Magazine person of the year and it wouldn’t really change the game all that much for people in the know. And Amex, Resy and Lululemon would be laughing all the way to the bank. 

If you still don’t agree with me, that’s fine, I won’t continue trying to convince you. The only thing you need to read to understand the gigantic chasm in understanding of what is possible is the comment section on the NYT article. 

I don’t want to paint with a broad brush, but at a very high level, you’d assume people reading and commenting on the NYT would be more likely than average to have the financial tools necessary to succeed at churning. I don’t think it matters with these attitudes.

TDC mod dan_s won the caption contest he didn’t realize he entered: “It definitely helps to read NYT comments with an image in your head of an upper middle class white person sipping their coffee with a slight face of disgust in their 2500 sq ft upper east side condo typing the comment”

Using your discretion

On the flip side – while churning has fully entered the cultural zeitgeist, that doesn’t mean we need to be reckless when discussing it. And while I’ll discuss what I think is my own responsibility as a goober “blogger”, we all have a platform with social media and need to be responsible with it. 

Anyone that is creating public content about the hobby should be using common sense when deciding how explicitly to call something out. It doesn’t matter how small your audience is, especially during an age of brainless LLM indexing. 

There are zero awards given to you for killing a play, and you stand to make way more money hitting it together with your readers or listeners. And if you think I’ve overshared, tell me. I’ll take it down, no questions asked. There’s no need to double (or triple, or quadruple, or quintuple) down that it’s ok to share. 

But we all have a voice and platform to share opinions (or plays) thanks to places like reddit and Twitter. You might think it’s innocuous to post about something that is widespread but not public due to your low readership. But when you’re responding to someone with 300k followers or on a subreddit with 500k subscribers, you’re greatly increasing the chances of blowing that play up.

There is no clout to be gained by sharing something sensitive publicly, although it is a great way to never be trusted with sensitive info again. So many things are on life support at this point that aren’t being talked about in the NYT – what do we get out of shining a light on it?

There’s a particular play I’m talking about that has been the subject of this issue in multiple places the last couple of weeks. It’s not some secret Hardbody 3.0 unicorn by any means, but it’s an important part of the profit equation for a lot of downstream plays. What is there truly to gain from talking about it in a place that is easily indexed? 

None of this is to say never publicly talk about churning, but just to use some discretion when deciding how to talk about it. It’s better for all of us that things stay alive as long as possible, lest the war on happiness claim yet another victim. 

Na zdraví!

Editor’s note: A big thank you to my friend @mforch who wrote this inaugural guest post live from Porto, Portugal. He comes to MS from the real estate and AP world and has a unique perspective on the game. Enjoy the post!

Greetings from Porto! Yeah, I know, you didn’t ask for a guest post, but I’m dropping this one anyway. Why? Because some old-world plays offer real-world similarities that are too good to keep secret. This game has a way of making you see the matrix (great movie), even in the old world.

I was on a tour here in Portugal today. Most of the crowd? Facts in one ear, out the other. Me? I kept seeing the dead plays. It was the most interesting part of the day to me.

First up, the legendary Window Tax. This brilliant piece of legislation taxed buildings based on the number of windows. The Play: People literally boarded up their windows and disguised them as doors.

Even better? We learned how the Port wine shippers set up their massive storage cellars across the river in Vila Nova de Gaia. Why? To dodge Porto’s city taxes. Pure, unadulterated, geographical arbitrage. They physically moved their business to exploit a jurisdictional loophole. Genius.

Look, the past never perfectly repeats itself, but it sure as hell rhymes. If you find yourself in a city with some ridiculous new restriction, if you’re a gambler, flip a coin. If it lands on Tails, scale your operation on the other side of the river. If you have a lot of Windows™, make them look like doors.

Get out there, scope the landscape, build your own cellar. The world is full of loopholes if you know where to look.

-mforch

Editor’s note: Sorry that posts have been few and far between the last week. I’ve been busy at my day job and had some email domain issues. If you’ve ever tried to fix a sender reputation problem, you would know it’s worth trying to figure out before sending again. Anyway, I have a backlog of posts + a couple of really fun guest posts ready, so you’ll hear from me more. Whether that’s good news or not is up to you.

I wanted to share a couple more philosophical thoughts on how I approach MS, churning, and travel, which, much like last week’s post about finding purpose in travel, is also inspired by something random and surprisingly deep I found on the internet in 2013. 

The video’s title is misleading – “You’ve Got To Say ‘Fuck It’ – David Choe” makes little sense because the spoken word in the video is actually a voiceover of an Ice-T interview set over scenes from the David Choe Dirty Hands documentary, also layered in with a M83 song. 

Somehow, it all works perfectly together. It feels strange to take much life advice from the guy who went from O.G. Original Gangster and Body Count to playing a cop on a NBC police procedural, but I’ve found it even more true the longer I apply it.

There’s a lot of “rules” and “limits” that have been written about ad nauseam in churning and MS. It’s almost comical how few of them are actually hard stop rules and limits, but this requires you saying “fuck it, I’ll try anyway” to discover. And as always, there’s a spectrum of YMMV of how hard these rules are to circumvent.

• The most fun ones are the easy ones. Sure, it says there is a limit. But it’s not true. The tale of the mighty deposit limit that was defeated by the bare minimum effort at multiple deposits is pretty common.
• Medium difficulty limit busting requires a bit more thought – for example, you may have a target that doesn’t take business cards. If you say fuck it and try, it doesn’t work. But this target also has other payment methods that may just help you circumvent the rule.
• Difficult ones could look like card limits – those are generally hard coded into the system. While they’re generally an actual rule, loopholes will always exist – especially if you happen to be wearing a green or black shirt. 

Ultimately, it’s just not that serious – we’re playing a game that gets harder and harder by the day, so why not take a chance and try a second deposit or application? Worst case scenario, you are barred from the (lovely I’m sure) financial products at Chocolate Bayou Federal Credit Union, and I doubt you valued that relationship much anyway. 

And next time you wander into your favorite drugstore and see a shiny new money center machine by the counter, try pressing a couple buttons, will ya? 

While it’s a great mantra for MS, it’s even more helpful when traveling. It can be hard to say fuck it while traveling, especially if you are already introverted, don’t speak the language, understand the culture, or some combination thereof. 

Deciding to just go with the flow and wander into some place not meant for tourists or trusting in someone I had just met has led to some of my all time favorite travel memories – the kind you’ll never find in Lonely Planet (or TikTok, for that matter). Things like:

• Spending the night in a TGV train car in Geneva drinking wine and commiserating with some complete strangers because the tracks warped from heat and there was nowhere in town to stay last minute
• Hearing insane stories about working on the volunteer Table Mountain rescue force from a new South African friend while trying not to die myself hiking up the India Venster chains together
• Using my terrible Spanish to chat with an Ecuadorian abuela who ended up giving me some otherworldly homemade pan de yuca in the Galapagos
• Spending half an hour taking never ending selfies with curious young Egyptians on a public holiday in Cairo

I promise this isn’t turning into a self-help blog, it was just a continuation of last week’s post. I hope this gives you an extra ounce of motivation to scale harder (or have more fun traveling) sometime in the near future. 

À la prochaine mes amis!

P2 and I diving with guitarsharks in Morrungulo, a remote town on the coast of southern Mozambique

Preamble

I’ve had the idea for this post rattling around in my brain for a couple of weeks, but I decided to write it down after the sad news posted on One Mile at a Time last week. 

It’s likely been awhile since you spent a ton of time reading OMAAT, but for me, it was a great place to start as a beginner. Additionally, you probably end up there every time you google “[Airline] [Plane Type] business class review” in anticipation of an upcoming award booking because Lucky is the review GOAT and has reviewed basically every product on earth. 

One thing I always thought was cool about OMAAT was how often Lucky endeavored to bring his loved ones on review shenanigans, often telling his father to just pack a bag and meet him at the airport for a surprise. I spent a lot of time daydreaming as a beginner about surprising my family like that.

He also covered the extensive travel he did with his mother after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. They were able to make the absolute most of her last years in a way that very, very few people get to do thanks at least in part to his expert knowledge of award programs.

The first thing I ever wrote about MS and churning was this MEAB guest post, and I feel even stronger now about how important it is to use some percentage of your earnings for experiences like this. MS and favorable award charts aren’t going to last forever, and neither are we. 

Whether it’s family, friends, pets, whatever, make space to do something cool with your stash of points, and bring someone along for the ride. Insert Anthony Bourdain quote here. 

Finding purpose in travel

The first time I ever traveled across the pond was a Spring Break study abroad when I was in college, visiting Lisbon and Porto in Portugal. I think 25% of my phone storage is still taken up by all the photos I took over a 9 day trip. Buildings, statues, food, water bottle labels, anything I saw I took a photo of.

I probably took more photos of one statue or building in Porto than I did in total over 3 weeks in Australia this summer.

I don’t feel bad or guilty about the fact that I wasn’t on the edge of my seat taking photos of everything like I was in Lisbon. Traveling more often (especially outside of a Western comfort zone) means that experiences that would once have been novel aren’t as stimulating.

And that’s ok – there’s nothing you can do about it. The more you travel, the smaller the world gets. And while a hobby involving amassing an absurd amount of points and miles does certainly help you travel more, this feeling is not at all exclusive to churners (albeit I will say that desensitization to the shock and awe of a premium cabin or luxury hotel is kind of a bummer).

My all time favorite writing of any kind on the internet is this frisson inducing post and top-level comment posted in 2012 on /r/IWantOut. While this is in the context of expatriation and vagabonding, it rings just as true for other types of travel and lives rent free in my head. 

“The more places you see, the more things you see that appeal to you, but no one place has them all. In fact, each place has a smaller and smaller percentage of the things you love, the more things you see.”

And while this comes across as solemn, I think it’s just a fact of life. Seeing something like a European McDonald’s or actually competent public transportation isn’t as fascinating the 100th time as it is the first. 

Once the pandemic subsided, P2 and I were chomping at the bit to travel internationally again like I’m sure many of you were. We decided to do a warm weather trip down to Honduras to try scuba diving and see if we wanted to get certified.

While it took some acclimation to truly fall in love, it has become 80% of our purpose for travel, maybe splitting 10% with food and 10% with hiking. For me, the staggering biodiversity experienced underwater was the key to feeling like a college student in Lisbon again.  

Additionally, the majority of the world’s best diving is disproportionately remote – sometimes, the truly unique interactions in far-flung parts of Mozambique or the Philippines or the conversations with fellow divers over lunch on Sipadan Island or a liveaboard in the Coral Sea are even better than the underwater life.

This isn’t scuba diving propaganda – you either love it or hate it. My advice is to find whatever your driving interest is, agnostic of geographic location. Whether it’s something manmade like art, architecture or food or a natural wonder like trekking or birdwatching, there is something out there ready to attract your attention to some unique destinations that wouldn’t be on your radar otherwise.  

If anything, you may quickly find yourself in a similar situation to the beginning of your MS fueled travel – you have the ability to experience the best the world has to offer at whatever drives you to travel, at a rate faster than many other people do. But speaking from experience, sometimes the “world’s best” lists leave off plenty of hidden gems.

I hope you’re able to find whatever that passion is for you.

“None of this is to suggest that one should ever reduce travel. It’s just a warning to young travelers, to expect, as part of the price, a rich life tinged with a bit of sadness and loneliness, and angst that’s like the same nostalgia everyone feels for special parts of their past, except multiplied by a thousand.”

Hey, if you made it this far, leave one of your favorite travel memories in the comment. I’d love to hear them.

This post will be less cryptic than usual, because it’s discussing a play that everybody reading this was at least aware of (and hopefully, you’ve been using it for the last few years). 

It’s time for the weekly reporting on the 2025 war on happiness, as Citi has finally decided to (likely) kill off the legendary Shop Your Way card, a bizarre partnership they had with all but defunct retailer Sears. 

I say likely because the card is discontinued and current cardholders will have theirs converted to some type of Citi Mastercard on November 3rd. However, nobody is 100% sure if the lucrative spending offers will continue or not. 

They have stuck through previous iterations of the card product, but the axing of the Shop Your Way program in general leads me to believe somebody at Citi that actually has a brain started looking into the P&L on these offers.

In case you didn’t have the card, the big draw was a never-ending parade of spend related offers that all stacked and mapped nicely to common MS categories. This past year, most of us with the card had multiple year long offers offering between 5x-10x cashback each month in certain categories, with 1-2 ad hoc offers per month that were generously open categories (i.e. “online shopping”) that stacked nicely with the year-long offers. 

If you had the card at the start of this year and qualified for the two yearlong offers, you likely profited somewhere between $5-$6k depending on how low you could get your cost and number of ad hoc offers qualified for.

It wasn’t a huge scalable play that will pay for your lime green Aventador, but it was essentially as easy as finding $5k on the ground, and especially spicy if you had multiple players. 

For a lot of us, the speculation isn’t “why did they kill it”, it’s “how did it possibly take this long?” – the offers were so generous, widely targeted, and again, stackable. It wasn’t uncommon to be earning 20% back on spend, which simply isn’t sustainable when the card had even become the darling of /r/creditcards. 

There was a theory that financially illiterate folks who were still clinging to Sears’ existence and carrying a balance on the card is what kept it afloat, but who knows – as of this post, there are only 5 Sears left in the entire world and even the most financially misinformed people know it ain’t coming back. 

Anyway, if this is the end, R.I.P. Shop Your Way card, a true unsung hero. 

But I promised that there would be hope for the future in this post too. As much of a bummer as it can be to conduct the autopsy on a dead play, the SYW one is kind of fun because it is the perfect example of what to look for in a lucrative play and illustrates some of the points I’ve made in what to look for in the past:

• A product involving an archaic legacy consumer brand? ✅
• A backend that seemed to be an even jankier version of an already janky backend? ✅
• A baffling mismatch between the motives of the marketing team creating the promos and the finance team responsible for the portfolio’s P&L? ✅
• Hell, even a little boost in +EV (via SYW points) that allowed you to treat yourself every once in awhile? ✅

While it looks like this may be the curtain call for a play that punched seriously above its weight, It’s a great example of what to look out for when probing in the future. I can think of a couple of live plays that share some of these characteristics, too. 

Until next time, y’all!

Back when I was a doe-eyed fresh college grad, I got my first 9-5. The job entailed a certain duty that required an end-of-year post mortem as part of the review process. At the end of that first year, I remember chuckling at my one-year-ago self for thinking I was good at the job. I felt even stronger about it at the end of year two, looking back at the first.

By the end of the third year, I’d learned that measuring self-worth in how efficient I was at generating stakeholder value wasn’t the greatest approach. But I had also learned that even activities without a measuring stick like school or sports can be measured in continuous learning, and it’s not a competition that you’re having with yourself. 

I think about that in the context of churning and MS now. If you asked me 3 years ago (or 2 years ago) if my current scale qualified as whale, I would easily say yes. Today, I don’t feel that way at all. The more you learn and the more people you meet, you realize what is possible.

Unlike my job example, there are clear metrics you can use to measure in churning and MS. But it’s not like there is some magical threshold of spend, profit, premium cabins booked, or combination thereof that automatically grants you access to the super secret upper echelon in the same way that a 4.0 GPA or 4.3 40 does.

In my eyes, the goal you should be shooting for is growth. Whether that means an increase in balances, efficiency, or something else is up to you. 

Taking inspiration from the heavy hitters you know is smart, but comparison is the thief of joy. Everybody’s situation is different, you should go at your own pace, and there may be some other things hampering you.

Here are some difficult to circumvent reasons that may leave you unable to keep up with your cetacean brethren, and not for lack of trying:

• You’re in your early to mid 20s, and banks don’t want to give you big credit limits for lack of credit history
• You don’t have a built in roster of extra players willing to let you scale horizontally
• You don’t live near any of the important brick and mortar stores for street MS
• You live in a state that hates fun, entertainment and/or diversity of crypto platforms

Ultimately, you’ll likely have your best luck finding some friends operating at a similar scale with similar capabilities so that you can scale up together. That’s not to say that you can’t learn a ton from a whale if you aren’t one yet – just that your possibilities might be different. 

Before I go, I’ll leave you with this rather absurd real world example of continuous learning so that you can have a laugh at my expense.  

Having more than one phone is fairly common in the churning and MS world. There’s a myriad of lucrative horizontal scaling reasons to have one that I won’t touch on here, or it could be as simple as having a separate phone to avoid bothering your P2. 

Well, I bought a second phone for a much more frivolous “MS” reason a few years ago. You may remember the “excitement” when AA became the first airline to give you a fairly straightforward path to elite status solely through MS. 

Yours truly wasn’t exactly a heavy hitter back then, and I spent some time in the ol’ AA Loyalty Point Hunters Facebook group. It was a group of people that were spending quite a bit of money to earn status on an airline they rarely flew, and I was no better.

Verizon was offering some trivial amount (8k?) of AA miles through the portal if you signed up for a new plan, and a bunch of folks were recommending a certain refurbished flip phone. The first one I bought was a lemon, and the second one didn’t have the ability to be used on that plan. I took multiple trips to the UPS store and wasted a bunch of time reading for a burner that is probably still collecting dust in the closet somewhere and a grand total of zero (0) AA miles.

Different plays, same tools – all a result of learning more. Stay curious and happy humpday.