One thing that is consistently discussed at every level of churning and MS is a need to adjust your mindset away from conventional wisdom. Those mental blocks can make it difficult for you to take advantage of profitable opportunities, whether you’re dipping your toes in or approaching dolphin level.
In the neverending “what volume qualifies you as a whale” internal dialogue, I’d say that mastering the ability to be comfortable in the uncomfortable is right up there with raw throughput. The mindset shift from why you can’t do something to thinking why not try is huge.
At the beginner level, the conventional wisdom you’re pushing back on is your garden variety Dave Ramsey advice. Getting too many cards tanks your score, you’re going to go into massive debt if you even think about putting a tank of gas on credit, debit card only even if you’re worth nine figures, etc. etc.
Those are pretty easy to push through, especially once you open a few cards with zero effect on your credit score (maybe even an increase), have no problem paying off your card in full, and maybe even take a couple of free trips.
When moving from beginner to intermediate, the mental blocks will be a little tougher. Why does my dog walking business need a business card with an $895 annual fee? Why does this issuer not care if I spend more than my credit limit? Why is it a bad thing to hold on to all of my points until I find the perfect redemption?
Over time, you’ll figure out new ways of thinking to approach these questions too. The torrent of points you’ll earn hitting intermediate status will make you realize that you have to spend money to make money, and that, in most cases, earning and burning while holding on to an emergency fund is more than enough.
However, it’s a little bit trickier going from intermediate to advanced, and advanced to expert.
The longstanding thinking that you’re pushing back on is less related to how your decisions affect an imaginary number that was made up after many of us were already born, and more actual human nature related to money.
Don’t spend all your money in one day. Don’t gamble all your money away. Don’t keep your money in a place with regulations that may or may not exist.
These are deep-seated beliefs that most people that approach this level of the hobby hold true, because you’re probably financially responsible and well organized. That also means that they’re even harder to override.
But a whale will tell you that there’s no better feeling than waking up on a Monday, seeing that your transfers from late last week have settled, and promptly spending that balance down to zero by the end of the day.
And that money may be tied up in a place that “you from a few years ago” would shudder to hear about.
It feels so foreign because it’s the upside down version of the meme of being afraid to check your account balance. I remember when I was in college and my net worth fluctuated between two and three figures. I was always afraid to look, but I needed to, because that determined how seedy the happy hour spot needed to be that weekend.
While we’re on the subject of weekends – is there a bigger mindset shift than being happy that it’s a work Monday and not a weekend or holiday? Until RTP is everywhere, we’ll have to keep snoozing the alarm while remembering “at least I get to run some loops today”.
At an intermediate level, you can likely already see these mindset shifts coming. It’s clear that spending a lot earns a lot, and that points and money often don’t show up when the bank isn’t open.
But somewhere in that advanced to whale level, you’ll need to push back on some of the hobby’s conventional wisdom you’ve already adjusted to, as well. Otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of time wondering why the heavy hitters sound like Dave Ramsey when they’re talking about spending methods.
Pretty much everything we do as MSers boils down to arbitrage. While it may not necessarily follow the textbook definition that requires buying and selling an asset, it’s still a neverending pursuit of market inefficiencies.
There’s obvious examples – “pay” to earn points at a rate that is lower than the rate that you liquidate at. Move money in a way that earns you money, but costs you very little (or nothing at all).
The way I was taught arbitrage in international economics in college was all about arbitrage in the context of exploiting price differences in foreign markets – i.e. buying currency A, converting to currency B, which then can be converted to currency C and back to currency A at a rate that makes you money along the way. If you haven’t already listened, MEAB speaks to arbitrage and churning on an excellent episode of the Risk of Ruin podcast.
We have the term geoarbitrage now, which is a similar idea, but more based around the idea of earning an income associated with a VHCOL/HCOL area while living in an area that is very much not. It has existed for awhile, but really exploded with the popularity of digital nomading and the pandemic leading to remote workers temporarily leaving tech and finance hubs.
I’m not qualified to speak on that type of arbitrage, and you can go argue with other people about it in leanFIRE related spaces being that it is rather controversial.
Instead, this is more of a tongue-in-cheek post that resulted from a joking conversation I had with my friend mforch around the idea of “the best cities for MS”.
In no way am I suggesting you make lifestyle choices around MS. I’m just providing some breadcrumbs of what to look for when probing, and if you happen to be considering a change, maybe pull up that Kroger brand map?
Here are some of the factors in MS that can be affected by where you choose to live:
Government Policies
This one is multi-faceted and should be extremely obvious from the top. You aren’t playing this game all that profitably if you don’t have some type of connection to the US. Whether that means you live here, you have access to a P.O. box, ITIN, etc, these are essential. As I’ve covered before, for better or worse, exorbitant interchange is a uniquely American phenomenon.
It’s not just federal policy that affects the hobby though – there are plenty of government policies mandated at the state level that can affect you as well.
A decent chunk of the most profitable plays of the last several years all involved emerging markets that didn’t exist until relatively recently, and many states took different approaches to them.
Let’s take gambling for example. Sportsbetting recently became legal in the majority of states in the US, while online legals are only permitted in a handful of states. And of course, there’s our overseas friends operating “casinos”, and even they have different laws actively in motion in multiple state legislatures. It’s gotten so micromanaged that some states have different deposit limits than others on the same platform.
There was a direct relationship between how proactively (if at all) your state approved these new platforms and how much you stood to profit from them. This was actually a classic geoarbitrage play of leaving an area with little opportunity and visiting a place with ample chances to win.
Crypto is another good example. While there is more of a nationwide consensus on crypto, some states are actively excluded from the fun.
For example, New York’s BitLicense is extremely restrictive on new crypto businesses. When a shiny new one pops up on DoC ready to light millions of the Intercontinental Exchange’s money on fire, unlucky NYers (and Texans, in this case) aren’t able to join in.
Even very old school assets are not free from government legislation. Washington state recently passed a sales tax on gold purchases, while a similar bill is gaining steam in New York. These are important things to consider if these plays make up a big part of your portfolio, because a tax renders it useless overnight.
Businesses
On the flip side of the government factors we have corporations. As we all know by now, there are some stores operating in the same categories that are much more useful to MSers compared to their competitors.
For example, there is a family of 19 different grocery store brands that are coveted for making street MS more simple compared to other options. But they aren’t everywhere, unless you’re going to a roundtrip street MS commute the same day (and who knows someone crazy enough to do that?!)
There’s also warehouse stores to consider. Let’s say you were in on precious metals arbitrage – Costco is really the only store that matters because Walmart and Sam’s eat your margin (unless of course you wanted to throw in an overpriced ounce with your Common Project Achilles dupes on a certain retailer).
Some areas are blessed with high densities of good stores, making it feasible to make some very profitable runs, even with limited time in the day. While there are alternatives, the ceiling isn’t as high, and you can’t grab a glizzy while you’re there.
My last business example is banks and credit unions. While the vast majority of georestricted FIs have similar offerings and you can find the call to action this post was referring to fairly easily, there are a handful of true unicorns, and being in footprint makes it way easier (although this one comes down to luck, because unless you have a really good friend, you won’t know until you try).
People
While the first two were super obvious, this one is a little bit more subtle, but still matters, particularly for street MS.
Certain areas (especially cities, obviously) have high concentrations of MSers and optimizers, which means increased competition. It’s frustrating to wake up early before work to an empty Speedway rack or an Executive hour line all the way out to the parking lot on a good day.
The genie isn’t going back in the bottle on this hobby, so if you live in one of those areas, you need to realize you aren’t the only person playing the game.
Anecdotally, even the social norms of different areas can have an impact on your MS. I’m from an area where extended small talk with people you don’t know is normal. Whether you like this or not (I personally don’t), it can be helpful for getting through a large purchase or liquidation with the least amount of scrutiny possible.
Living in an area that is the complete opposite now, the awkward silence while the cashiers argue what the gift card limit threshold is makes a street run drag on and on.
Pictured: P2’s face while the cashiers are arguing over $500 and P1 is on the phone clearing a Citi fraud alert, because she was sold an actual grocery trip
Travel
Isn’t travel why we all started doing this in the first place? While we may have fallen head first down a rabbit hole of loops and insanity, most of us started because we wanted to travel for free.
Many of the challenges presented by the above three factors can be relieved very quickly if you’re a quick flight, train or drive away from an area where these aren’t present. I’m not able to take advantage of 100% of the opportunities that come my way, but I generally am if I travel a short bit from my home.
Additionally, most of the areas facing the challenges mentioned here are also extremely well connected to the entire US and 5 other continents.
Is perpetual easy gift card liquidation worth a long travel day to visit anywhere that isn’t a hub? Does being able to be worldly and fly direct to Tashkent offset that you can’t be worldly and play on casinos based in Estonia?
I have no idea, and like I said, this was more tongue-in-cheek than anything else. There’s a myriad of non-MS related factors that go into where you decide to live.
But in the original spirit of geoarbitrage, there are differences in MS income opportunities depending on where you live. And regardless of where you live now or in the future, understanding the different policies can be really helpful in spotting good opportunities that you are eligible for.
Tl;dr: live where you want to be, based on where you want to be – and if that happens to be a somewhat restrictive area, make sure you have a good VPN (and maybe aren’t too far from a state border).
Rahmat!
p.s. everyone knows the best city for MS is Lubbock, TX
There aren’t too many absolute statements in the churning and MS world, because things are constantly changing. What’s ok today is not tomorrow, and that might be fine because there’s a whole new thing that wasn’t there yesterday.
But there’s still a handful, one of which probably stands above the others in ubiquity – don’t call the bank. It’s reiterated to every beginner over and over. Don’t call the bank. Don’t call the bank. Don’t. Call. The. Bank. We all know not to do it, but it’s not always necessarily clear to a newer person why we don’t call the bank.
While I know a lot of you have been around way longer than me, I have been doing this a somewhat above-average amount of 10 years. I only remember two things from /r/churning in those days.
The first was some person going scorched-earth at the audacity of a community of gamers that they were a member of trying to earn a CU bank bonus, saying that he knew the CEO and was going to rat out everyone trying to earn it.
The second was proof that this universe is one gigantic ironic simulation – the ultimate reddit moment where user /u/DontCallTheBank (you can’t make this up) called the bank over and over and “well ackchuyally’d” them until they let them open another AA card (although the end of that saga is more like don’t call the airline).
Pictured: the bulletproof logic our anti-hero gave the Citi Executive Office
It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with calling the bank – instead, it’s inherently wrong to have a real human looking at your account, especially when you’re asking why didn’t my exploit loophole work the way it said it would online?
Until very recently with the widespread adoption of LLMs, the rules and systems in place by every financial institution were really helpful for understanding what the limits were (and if they actually existed).
For example, if you were under 5/24, or 1/90, or 8/65, etc. etc, you could be fairly certain you would be approved for a new card, and you could be fairly certain you wouldn’t be if you weren’t. The system logic was only looking at that, and if you passed, you passed, regardless of what shenanigans you were already running at that bank.
On the flip side – as anyone that has ever applied for a credit union card knows, there often isn’t that automated review, and you may be subject to a FBI background check level interrogation just to open a 1.5% cashback card.
As AI continues to be implemented and allow banks to automate questions that are much less “how many cards have they opened in the last 24 months” and much more “is this customer unprofitable to keep around because of how they use our products”, the phrase might get a little less ubiquitous because FIs are already looking to weed out gamers.
But that doesn’t mean that you should continue to avoid getting eyes of any level of intelligence looking into your account.
A normal deposit account customer gets 2 payroll direct deposits per month, an ACH out for one credit card, maybe one for rent or mortgage, and a handful of P2P payments.
A churner account with 20 ACHs in and out and a six figure deposit from something called “Patience Always Pays” looks like just another Tuesday for us, but it certainly doesn’t for them.
If you were a random CSR and you got a call about why a promo bonus didn’t post when it has only been hours since the promo was announced and you saw customer activity like that, what would you think?
At best, that you were using a personal banking product for business purposes, and at worst a conversation that is significantly worse than the CU interrogation you were in to get the card in the first place.
It’s best practice to avoid human intervention as much as possible, and it’s not only the context of getting shutdown.
I had a CU that let me deposit in an advantageous way (don’t ask, it’s long since dead, I promise), so I was running that loop with me and P2. We have the same last name – guess who ended up with the other’s deposit more than once? We’re lucky it worked out for us, but that’s what happens when you are hitting a target that is old-school enough to manually credit deposits.
That level of human involvement goes all the way up the food chain, by the way. There are plenty of best-in-class reward redemptions at huge banks that are being dealt with in a very manual, human way. That type of processing means the gamification angle just isn’t there.
One final thought on this, though. There are so many reasons to not call the bank. But there are a couple of reasons to call them. Generally, banks are happy when you call them to complete an action that makes them happy. What would qualify as that? Providing documentation to expand your relationship, or perhaps giving them some money.
In those cases, you’re probably talking to someone who can’t see your full profile – just enough to get the action dealt with. And in perhaps the only case where human intervention is better than machine logic – that is your chance to do a little social engineering and chat up the CSR. Sometimes, the only way to go from “$5,000 per day” to “$5,000 per transaction” is chatting with Tyree about his kids.
Today’s guest post is the second from my good friend and fellow court jester smugdog, who wrote a very-well received guest post last week. Thanks for the post man!
If you hang around this community long enough, you’ll realize that you’re part of a group that looks at the world in an odd lens. For some of us, every interaction, purchase, and minor life inconvenience is run through a mental calculator to determine one thing: What is the Expected Value (+EV)?
In the traditional churning sense, +EV is just the math behind your activities. It’s knowing that paying a small percentage fee to float a cash load is highly profitable when you’re extracting massive rewards multipliers in return elsewhere. But +EV isn’t just about spreadsheet math and calculating the exact cent per point value of a redemption. Sometimes it’s vibes.
For example, a fellow Capital Heavyweight & Ultra Degen recently pointed out that paying for a Discord Nitro sub (gross) is inherently +EV. I had to ask him why because paying $10/mo or whatever it is to make your PFP spin or wink didn’t seem worth well, ANYTHING. Actually, its because the extended character limit lets you shitpost better, write longer guides and provide more helpful information. The +EV is that it builds online rapport with the community, ie whales who might eventually drop a unicorn play in your DMs. Maybe. If they like you. They probably won’t. (But maybe!)
So, beyond the obvious stuff like SUBs and loops we’re all doing, what are the activities that actually generate positive expected value off the usual path?
We’re above board currently: We look at top level +EV plays; the classics. There’s the play of adding a small army of friends to help your business, ideally your Roman friends, to trigger massive point boosts. That’s pretty straightforward. Knowing lots of Romans with similar names is +EV.
We sink a little: You got roped into a cruise, or unwittingly decided to go on one. You realize there’s portions of the trip that are in international waters which means casino shenanigans.
You load up your stateroom credit at a discount beforehand, play through a portion of it through the slot machines or video poker to keep the pit boss happy, and cash the rest out. You potentially get a free cruise, free casino drinks, and walk off the ship carrying bags of cash like a pirate, a very +EV emotional feeling.
Lets go deeper, into the weird and polarizing stuff. The plays that cause ethical division even in our own groups who are already very morally grey.
Someone in a group I’m in extracted +EV from bodily harm. After overextending and injuring themselves at a kids’ ninja gym, they ended up in an ankle boot. The +EV play was using the injury to get a handicapped placard for six months of free metered parking. +EV prime parking at the beach.
Years ago, a major retailer offered daily store credit if you synced up a smartwatch to track your runs. The +EV move was spoofing the GPS data to imply you’re a pro runner, defeating actual runners legitimately trying, and stacking up piles of credits. You then buy video games with the credit, which is the exact opposite of exercise, and then resell them, or keep them. -EV to health, +EV to finishing the battlepass. Net EV+ transaction.
Fibbery is +EV. I have a friend I occasionally sell points to who is terrible at paying me back quickly. If I ask nicely I get ghosted, but turns out if I tell him I need it for the weekend to blow it on liquor and drugs he’s immediately excited to pay me back. Jokes on you brother, all that money is going straight into my dakimakura collection. +EV fabrication.
Ultimately, living +EV isn’t just a strategy; it’s a mild sickness. Opportunities are everywhere if you know how to look for them, whether that means scaling up your point generation to the millions by wandering through the financial system, or just leveraging a sports injury for free parking. You just have to keep poking the system until cash falls out.
Someone swore to me that writing on this blog was +EV. I haven’t seen a single cent of return yet, but who knows? Maybe this post will be the unicorn play that makes it all worth it.
As a result of changes to bank policies and plays dying lately, we’ve seen a lot of folks diving into new ways to continue squeezing those extra drops of juice out of MS transactions.
I’m glad that people are thinking outside the box (and outside the usual suspects) because that skill is only going to become more important as time goes on in 2026.
However, for as much deserved grief as we give the classic MS institutions, there is one big advantage they have over more traditional financial institutions.
That is of course the fact that they understand what MS is and what our goals are. To profit on a loop, you need to send your float in a circle as quickly as possible, and that isn’t the kind of behavior that a normal bank loves to see.
Additionally, they aren’t as cagey when they see traditionally higher risk MCCs like 4829 or 6051, because again, they understand what’s happening (and that they’re getting an ever increasing cut of the interchange).
But the whole reason we’re looking for new avenues is saturation on said classic institutions, so the community is digging deeper into other options with varying levels of success.
One of the first ones that popped up as a viable option has already crashed and burned a few weeks in, but not without some hilarity ensuing. Getting shutdown before getting your first earnings sucks, but you have to admit that getting shutdown after one transaction is objectively hilarious.
Anyway, the takeaway here is that this new world is going to require a different modus operandi. If your new method is being talked about in a relatively large group and it’s not a FI known for being MS-friendly, you can assume that the timeline is going to be relatively short.
Nothing sets off alarm bells quite like a 0-100 explosion of transactions on a merchant category they see as risky, even if what you’re doing is actually completely innocuous.
It’s very possible to stay alive for awhile at FIs that aren’t primarily set up for MSers (sans the above example which was chalked from the beginning), but it requires some patience.
Become comfortable with the idea of (actually fully controllable) float and that it may be difficult at times to tabulate your liquid cash due to all your accounts. I promise it ends up being worth it in the end.
I imagine that the humongous appetite for the next big thing to replace all that we’ve lost lately is going to make the share vs. obscure argument rage on even more intensely, especially as we see potential alternatives crash out before the juice is even squeezed.
For the time being, my advice would be to keep on probing while thinking about what your account activity looks like from the eyes of a compliance analyst. If you look like a customer that isn’t worth the headache to keep around, consider what you could be doing differently.
Iechyd da!
Pictured: The marketing team at a certain bank walking in to celebrate new user acquisition numbers and seeing an 8am “Interchange discussion” meeting on their calendar
I talk about a lot of concepts without concrete examples on the blog, not to be obtuse (but it probably comes across that way sometimes, sorry), but because I don’t ever want to be a contributor to the “bloggers killing plays” epidemic.
I’m not trying to be the next Brian Kelly (and I think that ship has sailed), so there’s nothing to gain in being too specific on a non-private space.
However, we’re in a weird spot with a certain strategy that many of us in the community have employed over the years. It’s very likely that the math changes quite a bit in just a few short weeks, and we’ll be left with some decisions to make.
Since there is a finite timeline and this is more of an admittedly very fun “nice to have” vs. a “give my kids the Gift of College” sort of play, I feel comfortable being somewhere like 5-10% less obtuse in this post.
Traditionally, the general consensus around trying to MS loyalty status has been to really make sure it makes sense for your individual situation. Having top-tier status sounds great (and it certainly can be), but more often than not, you’ll find yourself fairly disappointed, especially when you’re flying and staying domestically.
Before even factoring in whether the airline or hotel chain actually has an operating footprint that fits your travel preferences, you need to consider how much time and money it will cost you to MS it.
If it’s not clear that the benefits of status outweigh both the cost of the MS itself and the opportunity cost of putting that spend elsewhere, it probably doesn’t make much sense to pursue.
However, as with every other aspect of the hobby, this weird post-pandemic world has presented some unique opportunities for savvy spenders. The continued explosion of interest in rewards cards and loyalty programs has led airlines to remove many butt-in-seat requirements for status, in some cases eliminating them completely.
Without the need to hop on some insane mileage runs, it became more feasible for a lot of us (especially those of us with W2s) to reach the highest level of status.
And there’s a pretty obvious choice of which airline was the best choice for this pursuit when you factored in status requirements, award charts, and card issuing partners.
Pictured: The Skymiles cost to fly 2 pax in economy RT from ATL-JAX, a nice little 45 minute commuter flight by way of Zimbabwe’s 2007 hyperinflation crisis
In a few weeks, the math behind MSing status with that airline is probably going to get a lot murkier. At face value, it doesn’t seem like a huge deal. It’s primarily just bad airplane food, a bigger seat, and a free drink here and there – things that you could easily pay for with other MS activities.
But even if the value paled in comparison to cashback loops, it was something that was just fun to chase, and a lot of us are going to miss the status if we do indeed lose it.
So what are the options before this change occurs? Let’s jump in.
Choice #1 – Let it go
While choosing to forego chasing status sounds like the unfun option, it’s the smartest choice for a lot of us. Some of us live in places like DFW and CLT. But others live in places like IAH and SFO, and losing it isn’t a big deal. And if you do live in the former places, you’re competing with a host of actual road warriors for that microwaved omelette.
This airline has a mostly great award chart, but it’s long overdue for the 2026 treatment to bring it in line with its major rivals. Locking your earnings into a currency that can be devalued at any point vs. a flexible one with easy liquidation is something that plays into the decision of whether to pursue or not.
More on this in a second, but if you were debating this choice vs. running it up, this also eliminates your issuer shutdown risk (at least for this angle, it is 2026 after all).
Choice #2 – Run it up
Instead of letting it go, you could do the polar opposite and do a big push to earn status before the changes happen. In the grand scheme of the MS world, the amount you’d need to spend isn’t really that crazy, even on an expedited timeline.
For many of us, the bottleneck here isn’t going to be the actual spend number, but more so how many multiples of your credit limit the spend number is.
For every community member that has a seasoned card account with a fat limit that has already hit status mere weeks into the status year, there’s somebody else that got a shrimpy $5k line that makes it a bit more daunting.
This issuer is pretty YMMV with business cycling as is, and you could quickly cross over into a situation where you don’t earn the status or keep the issuer relationship.
Whether you even still care about this particular relationship is also a hot topic these days, so do your own math about the other cards and transfer partners that you’d lose access to. While nobody is excited to get shutdown, it’s certainly not the setback that it was six months ago.
Choice #3 – Somewhere in the between
It’s important to note that the change this whole post is referencing isn’t to the loyalty program itself, and you can still earn it the same way you’ve been able to over the last 4 years.
You also have the option to continue pursuing it in a way that won’t draw unwanted attention, but it will come with a cost.
Since MSing this status will be more expensive soon, it quickly goes from “no-brainer if you have the card” back to the initial calculus mentioned in the intro.
If you don’t fly this airline or their partners often, it will be hard to justify. When there’s less margin to play around with, you’ll need a really strong spend and liquidation pairing.
Obviously, which one of these you choose depends on your individual situation, and all three could make sense for you. But unless you have a unicorn to keep it sustainable post-Q2, I’d personally be choosing between the first two.
Look at your credit limit, your appetite for risk, and how badly you actually want the miles, then decide from there.
