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!

Over the weekend, some strong evidence appeared suggesting that a longstanding loophole that was a preferred avenue for many of your local whales may be closing. While we don’t really know for certain if this is the end, the writing has been on the wall for awhile that it was on borrowed time.  

The play changed over the last few years, and took on different forms. But I wouldn’t call this a phoenix play, because it technically never died, provided you weren’t trying to set it up anew. It’s more of a grandfather(ed) phoenix. 

But unlike a lot of other whale plays from the last few years, this one was positioned in a sweet spot of margin and sustainability that doesn’t come along very often.

Think about it – a lot of the high margin plays that generated the outsized profits the last few years generally involved certain spend categories. Those categories are sometimes difficult to scale (and are becoming even more difficult) and are hard to explain if your FI asks what the deal is. 

With this one, as long as you had a decent bankroll, a way to generate a lot of spend of any kind, and a pinch of foresight, you were golden. And it was good enough that it would potentially keep you from diversifying your MS portfolio.

But if there’s anything the last 2 years have taught us, relying too heavily on one avenue (even as great as this one was) is a recipe for getting caught flat-footed, especially given that there were very clear signs that it wouldn’t continue forever.

It would be hard to justify using your float elsewhere at these margins, but it wouldn’t be hard to justify understanding what your options are when the churning war on happiness inevitably finds its next victim. 

Anyway, I hope that it’s a false alarm, but it doesn’t feel like it is. As with the other adverse actions we’ve seen in the last couple of months, this is a prime opportunity to start combing through the signal you may have ignored lately about other avenues that are working. 

The only constant is change, especially in this game. I’ll cross my fingers that this is the only time I post about this topic and will be sending positive vibes to my siren-loving whales. In the meantime, it might not be the worst idea to head back down to the mines.

Pictured: An enterprising MSer on their way to finding the next fintech loop

Today’s guest post comes from one of my favorite churning friends, the truly inimitable smugdog. He is spot on with this post, and this is something i wish I learned much sooner. Thanks for the post smug!

You just booked an ANA First Class suite for the cost of a tank of gas or two, or maybe you casually mentioned that you’re paying your mortgage with a significant kickback with a certain card. A coworker’s ears perk up. A brother in law leans in across the Thanksgiving table.

“Wait, how are you doing that? Can you teach me?”

The temptation is immediate. You see waves of referral bonuses in your mind’s eye. You think of the camaraderie, of finally having someone in your real, physical life who understands the thrill of what you truly enjoy but makes other retch.

But take a breath. Step back from the edge of the boat (blog theme joke)
Because bringing a “normal person” into the deep waters is rarely the mutual windfall you envision. More often than not, it is a massive liability.

The Firehose and the Spoon

The reality of modern churning is that it requires a baseline of obsessive, near pathological dedication. When a newbie asks how to get started, our instinct is to point them to the resources that built us, telling them to read DoC, scour MEAB, or listen to long abandoned podcasts. But to a normal person with a normal relationship to money, this is like drinking from a firehose.

They don’t understand 5/24. They don’t know the difference between 2/90 and 1/8 rules. They certainly don’t understand why you’re blindly probing obscure FinTechs with random transactions just to see how they code.

If you bring them into the fold, you can inevitably become their permanent tech support. You will find yourself dragged into a never-ending cycle of feeding. You will get panicked text messages because a $500 gift card wouldn’t auto-drain. You will spend an hour explaining why they absolutely cannot call the bank when a problem arises that for them is world ending but for you is “the cost of business”

And despite your best efforts, they will still sabotage themselves. You’ll meticulously map out a multi-year strategy for them, only to find out they impulsively burned a 5/24 slot applying for an Old Navy store card. Or, like so many of us have experienced, you’ll convince a friend to get a premium flagship card for the sign-up bonus, and years later discover they are still holding the card, ignoring all the credits, and happily paying the $550 annual fee despite your repeated advice to downgrade or close it.

Expertise is Expensive (And Your Time is Limited)

Your expertise is earned through blood, sweat, and shutdowns, either your own or information confided in you. It is built on the anxiety of floating down payment levels of manufactured spend while praying a wire transfer clears, or navigating the very real risks and diligence required to account for bookkeeping your balances across dozens or even hundreds of accounts. Even seasoned veterans “do a stupid” sometimes, overextend and get burned for several thousand dollars on a bad play. If anything the more you get into this, the more that’s going to happen. I’m being dramatic but it really takes a certain type of person to go beyond “I sign up for a card and close it 4x a year to where we’re all trying to get, and its definitely not a normal type of person.

When you try to teach a friend, you are transferring that risk onto your own conscience. If their bank account gets frozen because they pushed too hard, or they trigger an Amex Financial Review and lose their cards, you are the one they will blame.

Time is your most limited asset. Every hour you spend explaining the intricacies of holding multiple browser tabs open to bypass a certain site trigger or walking back something they did when you told them not to is an hour you aren’t optimizing your own velocity.

The Fork

If you absolutely must involve friends or family in the hobby, consider one of these two viable paths:

1. The P2/P3 Complete Takeover: If you have older parents or a spouse who simply don’t care to understand the game, don’t make them learn it. You apply for the cards, you manage the annual fees, you hit the minimum spends, and you keep the points. They get a kickback on what you both agree is reasonable. When they want to travel, you just quietly book the flights for them. You remain the captain; they get to enjoy the view from the deck.

2. Let Them Be: Let your friends be good at what they are good at, and you stick to what you are good at. They might be brilliant software engineers, incredible doctors, or fantastic chefs. Let them shine there. Churning (or whatever we call it now) is our edge. If they want to truly jump in, give them the starting tools and check with them in a few months. You’ll know if they have that same energy you do or if it was a fleeting interest.

We all want to share the wealth, but the ocean we swim in is deep, filled with compliance algorithms, ChexSystems inquiries, KYC gestapos and sudden rule changes. Let the regular brained people stay safely on the shore fishing off the dock. Focus on your own plays, protect your time, and keep listening for the next whalesong. 

– smugdog

This post was originally part of yesterday’s post, but it was getting a little long so I split it into two pieces. You’ll have to hang in with me with the scuba metaphors, but I’m still riding the high of how good the diving was in Palau last month. 

Yesterday, I talked about finding the right place for your knowledge level and the tactics you wanted to focus on, and how that follows a general progression from very visible, general public places with lots of other people to smaller, more focused groups. 

In a way, it reminds me a lot of progressing as a scuba diver.

When you first begin, the concept is so alien that being in a giant group of divers figuring it out alongside you is really comforting.

Once you’ve picked up a handful of certifications and notched a chunk of dives, you’re ready to dive with a slightly smaller group that is worried less about the bare minimum and more about learning advanced buoyancy, becoming better at spotting macro life, etc.

If you decide to commit and make it a part of your life, you’ll eventually master those skills and decide to scale the hobby by going to remote locales around the world to experience the best diving there is. Because of the effort required to get there, there are far fewer people. Everyone is a proficient diver who is good at spotting marine life (and looking out for fellow divers). 

Once you’ve truly mastered the ability to dive recreationally, one of the most important things you can do is find your 1:1 dive buddy. Having someone you can trust unconditionally underwater (even without a dive slate for communication) unlocks a level of freedom to explore far beyond what’s possible in a larger group. 

This progression maps pretty closely to progression as a churner, too. 

When you’re starting out, you need the size and scale of a public forum or big blog. Since they cover the full breadth of what you’d need to know at the beginner to intermediate level, they give you a chance to get better and start learning what your specialties might be.

Once you graduate from public sources to unindexed ones, you gain access to a smaller group of peers that have the same motivation as you – to keep getting better in a more focused environment. This might be the single most important layer, because it’s where you find the handful of people you actually want to go deeper with.

As you continue to grow and network as a churner, you’ll form the natural connections necessary to build even smaller groups that don’t ever end up being advertised anywhere. Everybody in there will be committed, and the group ends up being stronger than any one person in it.

And lastly, out of those even smaller groups, you’ll have enough trust to work with other MSers on a 1 on 1 basis. Some of the most fruitful plays I’ve been a part of have come from a friendship I made in a larger group. But these only work when you trust each other.

This isn’t to say you need to end up in DMs or a tiny probe group to succeed. But there certainly is value in probing and exploring with people that you’ve been working with for awhile, and that’s a lot easier to do in a less crowded room. 

Getting to a level where you collaborate closely with others (whether that be in DMs or a small probe) doesn’t mean you stop going to more crowded rooms, but it does mean that you have options in where to share your latest find. 

Ultimately, if you ask a diver if they’d prefer to dive on a 30 person cattle boat doing certs in Cozumel or doing 1:1 buddy dives in Bonaire, I think most would choose the latter. At a certain point, it’s about who’s in the water with you.

Good luck on dialing in whatever MS metaphor for diving you’re working on this week.

Kusikisa!

Pictured: When the RATs come for a diving churner

Churners and MSers are a generally shrewd group of optimizers, within reason. There’s not enough hours in the day to run every possible play you can think of, especially if you work a 9-5. 

There aren’t enough hours in the day for keeping up with the torrent of churning information that comes out every day, either. 

Before you even proactively seek information, your inbox is likely filled with hotel bonus point promos, airline sales, award notifications, even rants from some crazy blog called Chasing Cetaceans.

At the blog level, there’s thousands and thousands of blogs out there, many of which post multiple times a day (sometimes about the same thing).

On public forums, reddit, Flyertalk, USCF, and a wealth of Facebook groups (of varying levels of usefulness) there are thousands of posts made per day. 

Finally, private groups can ebb from being quiet to on fire 24/7 depending on the group, the day of the week, and what news is coming out of 200 Vesey St.

Regardless of what level of churner you are, you have a veritable firehose of questions, chatter, data points, and (maybe) signal hitting you daily. 

Today, I woke up to over 3k unread WhatsApp messages, 800 unread Telegram messages and 200k+ unread emails (although I’ll admit I don’t practice inbox zero) and I’m far from winning the “most churning communities” award. And that’s before catching up on Discord, Slack, etc. 

That’s an insane amount of information to sift through, especially when you don’t know if an unexpected spike of messages in a normally quiet group is discussion of a time sensitive opportunity or chatter around marketplace drama. 

So, what’s the best way to prioritize your reading, especially if you don’t have unlimited time to devote to stare at a screen? 

For me, I’ve always tried to identify the channel or platform that hits the perfect balance for my knowledge level at that point in time (with a goal of leveling up in mind) while remaining (somewhat) easy to digest. 

For example, as a beginner, I prioritized reddit over Flyertalk because /r/churning was more about initial card strategies vs. advanced fuel dumping and even the DD/DQ threads beat the hell out of the Flyertalk forum structure. 

In theory, as time goes on and you grow in that community, you’ll eventually hit a point that you’ve learned enough to move up a level while also making the connections necessary to do so. 

Once that happens, you’ll find yourself checking the previous source a little bit less and less, and your new one will become your daily driver. This doesn’t mean you ignore places that you once found helpful, but just that you wait until you have a few slow minutes to see what is being discussed. 

You can continue to rinse and repeat as you grow in the hobby and make more friends – that way you can ensure that your community is focused on the things most relevant to you. Let’s illustrate this using our good friends at aforementioned Vesey St. address:

• Amex eliminating a coupon would be discussed ad nauseam by big blogs and public forums and be largely undiscussed in private groups
• Amex changing their application rules would be covered everywhere, because this is relevant to everyone playing the game
• Amex shutting down a large group would be covered in both public forums and private groups, but would be covered by only a couple of blogs

There’s nothing wrong with belonging in some of these groups and not others – for example, the /r/creditcards crew is aggressively optimizing their share of wallet. Losing access to Saks or Dell might make the math change, and that is something that needs to be discussed. The big blogs need to talk about it because it affects their affiliate income. 

And on the flip side, if you’re a big fish and it’s a bad day to be a big fish, you need to be in the right channel to discuss what happened. But if you aren’t a big fish, this isn’t going to affect you, and there’s no need to stress out about it, even if it’s blowing up in public channels. 

Finally, one other thing I’d consider is the culture of the community. Some people like to banter and make friends, while other people are treating this as a business the chatter. Again, there’s nothing wrong with either of those, but I’d choose one that fits your personality best. 

Good luck headed into Q2 friends.

Emweir!

Pictured: a churner after sharing a high-level whale’s isolated shutdown DP in the Daily Discussion thread

Pictured: A good enough meal for butterboy – only he would invoke Rockwell on a churning blog

A special thanks to CU-whisperer, new father and all around hilarious dude butterboy for today’s post. For the TDCers reading this, don’t forget to go roast him today on his AMA with Kai.

I recently welcomed a daughter into this world, and I’ve had the last four months off work. Despite being sleep deprived, smelling vaguely of spit-up, and finding normal ways to hit $25 minimum grocery purchases for Publix GC deals (diapers), I’ve had more time than ever to pursue churning since I first started ramping up.

During these four months, I’ve taken what I’d call a maximalist approach, within reason, with respect to time. I have made more grocery store runs than I can count.

Sure, I could probably spend more time driving to grocery stores, but beyond a certain point I’d be cutting into time with what truly matters most: my wife and daughter.

For the sake of this mental experiment, let’s assume this represents 100% churning output. Most systems are non-linear. Muscle growth is a good example. If 40 sets per week per muscle group delivers optimal gains, you might assume that 20 sets would produce roughly half of those gains.

But that’s not how it works. Studies suggest that as few as four sets per week per muscle group can yield about 60% of your potential gains. I think churning behaves like a non-linear system as well.

In the gift card space, there are good brands with limits and supply issues, which can make sourcing difficult. At first glance, grocery manufactured spend seems linear with respect to time: more stores visited equals more profit.

In reality, the returns start to diminish quickly. If you’re rigid about manufactured spend costs, time becomes the only variable left to optimize. When time isn’t a constraint, it makes sense to chase the lowest-cost brands.

But these days, I’d rather go read to my daughter. As I return to work, I’m more willing to accept higher costs in exchange for saving time. I’m getting good rates, though explicitly not optimal ones, but I’m getting time back.

A simplified example might look like this:

• 0.8% fee but 10 minutes (minimalist approach)
• 0.2% fee but 90 minutes and three stores (maximalist approach)

For me, slightly worse rates in significantly less time is the equivalent of doing four sets of bench press to get decent results at the gym. It’s not optimal, but it’s efficient. I expect that in the future I’ll be able to return to a more maximalist approach.

One of the best things about this hobby is that you can scale it up or down depending on what life requires.

-butterboy