I was fully expecting that the usual suspects like MEAB and myself would be the only people seated in the peanut gallery for yesterday’s big Bilt launch, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that there were plenty of prominent voices calling out that the new program was unnecessarily complicated (outside of the absurd headlines in the Daily Mail, lmao).

There’s still an angle if you are like my good friend Andrew that I forgot to h/t in yesterday’s article (sorry dude!) and both have an existing Bilt card that was product changed sans hard pull and are an advanced MSer that can squeeze strong value out of uncapped 2%. 

However, I also noted in yesterday’s article that one of my major reasons for avoiding this whole launch was the anti-MS slant from both Cardless and Richard Kerr. This was reinforced with the whole banana shtick that was prevalent throughout the press release.

Honestly, the more I thought about it, the banana thing was almost funny in a wink-wink nudge-nudge way because it called back to the fact that Bilt was built (ba-dum-tss) by people who cut their teeth in the MS world. 

Significantly less funny was something else shared by the Bilt team, insinuating (in a non-fitting meme format, of course) that all of Bilt’s customers are “basement dwelling redditors trying to cheat their rent system”. This spread like wildfire, even among the Bilt subreddit full of non-gamers that are just trying to get a leg up on rent and mortgage payments. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never thought of openly insulting my customer base on launch day as the greatest way to aid in new customer acquisition.

But hey, I’m just some idiot in the peanut gallery, so maybe I’m wrong. If nothing else, it certainly distracted from the whole “bro please bro just earn Bilt cash to use it to “unlock” earning points on rent even though the whole point of this card is paying rent please bro”

Anywho, that’s all for today. You have choices about where to bring your spend (and corresponding extreme volume of interchange fees for banks), so choose wisely. 

Живели!  

I write quite a bit about how the hobby has changed as a result of widespread exposure. The evidence is all over the place – for example, when I went to visit my parents over the holidays, I fielded “best card” questions from pretty much all of their friends. It’s kind of endearing in a way.

I don’t have to explain to any of you why people are naturally interested in the idea of free travel, points and money, and there’s neverending churning content out there in every form you can think of. From business traveler blogs down to gen alpha TikTok videos, reward cards have never had a moment quite like they’re having right now. 

To go along with big new benefits, there are big new annual fees, which come with big new customer acquisition budgets and big new affiliate payouts. That’s all well and good – the big banks have marketing budgets so huge that why wouldn’t they make sure to involve the influencers in the space to help get the word out? 

It’s the duty of the Brian Kellys of the world to get the word out when a big bank launches something new and shiny (especially when Brian Kelly is an “adviser and investor” of said program, lol), so it’s not surprising when everybody is abuzz with a new launch. 

You’ll no doubt hear the march of the Bilt PR drum over the next weeks (if not months), and there are some interesting changes. Gone is the absurdly expensive partnership between Bilt and Wells Fargo, and in is fintech Cardless, known for just two weeks ago being so kind as to let people open two whole cards with them in their lifetime.  

Two cards per lifetime is probably fine unless you really need the Qatar card (because Avios are so hard to come by, right?) and since you can’t pay rent or your mortgage on the LATAM or TAP card, the new Bilt portfolio is your best bet. 

I know this started a little sarcastic, but the Bilt cards do have some interesting angles. Mesa spontaneously combusting leaves Bilt as one of few housing games left in town, they have some solid transfer partners (and awesome transfer bonuses on “Rent Day”), and any uncapped 2x card is always worth a quick look by any MSer worth their salt. 

However, I can’t help but feel a little skeptical of this launch. First, they attached plenty of strings to earning on rent while simultaneously adding some weird quasi-currency that is separate from the points you’re used to earning. 

There’s nothing consumer friendly quite like earning two different currencies and requiring specific transactions involving the new currency to use the card for its whole value prop, am I right?

Of course, those are the main drawbacks for beginning churners. For MSers, there’s the more obvious one – that one of the main voices driving product at Bilt is a former MSer that now takes to Twitter to vaguely threaten MSers. While this provides endless entertainment on reddit, it just doesn’t make me froth at the mouth to apply for a card they’re involved with the way that Big Blog would like me to.

Pictured: The immortal legend of Cracker Barrel is invoked to confuse some earnest Bilt users, circa weird Tweeting days

Somehow, I just think the phrase “manufactured spend” might show up in the terms and conditions once or twice. After checking, the answer is 6, which I certainly would have taken as the under if I was looking at the O/U. 

Anyway, I can see some ways to make money with this card, but I’m not sure I’d listen to the blogosphere chorus talking about how amazing it is. In today’s economic atmosphere of apprehension around credit seeking and new inquiries, the napkin math doesn’t do it for me. But that’s just my situation, and if it works for you, go for it! 

This is just a reminder to critically think about the swirl of PR language that inevitably accompanies a new product launch, even on the major churning blogs. Only you can tell for yourself if something new is worth adding to your wallet. 

Ofa atu!

The word loop is one of those many words in the churning and MS world that can mean a lot of different things depending on who you ask, kind of similar to how the whole hobby doesn’t have a universally accepted name. 

In a lot of places, it’s simply used as a synonym for play, which is kind of right, but also not. Play itself is fairly ambiguous and is essentially a single unit of MS, whatever that is. And while all loops are plays, not all plays are loops. 

A loop implies that you’re moving or converting assets from one account or form to another (and possibly even more in the middle) before it eventually ends up right back where it started. 

A common one that all of us are familiar with and doesn’t require cryptic reference is the ‘ol stand-by of street MS. You go out to a gas station, office supply store or similar and buy gift cards with a card that earns in that bonus category. From there, you liquidate those gift cards back into money in your account, that you use to pay off the credit card. Once the card is paid, the loop is complete.

While the bonus category is important, the true measurement of your earnings is how fast and how inexpensively you can get that money back into your account and ready to pay off the card, reset the credit limit, and start the loop again. 

If you can get the funds back in your account a day or two later with something around a 1% fee, you’re doing quite well. If the cards sit in your closet waiting to be used to prepay the next six months of utilities, it’s not as exciting. Earning high bonus categories on things like electricity or your mortgage is cool, but isn’t life changing in the same way that high volume is.

Speed is everything when you’re running loops, and optimizing your ability to move money while staying within the limits of your targets and settlement times is key to big profits. To hear it in a much more succinct and clear way, some of the best MS writing out there is MEAB’s velocity of money series.

Of course, there’s plenty of other loops out there, and not all of them even involve talking to a real person in real life. A true closed circuit loop is ideal, where you can move from funding account to target back to funding account seamlessly. Some do exist, but there is generally some level of asset conversion that occurs that entails slowing down, high cost, regulatory red tape, or some combination of all three. 

True closed circuit loops are few and far between these days, and moving money in and out from the same account isn’t exactly the smartest way to avoid an unfun conversation with a compliance offer. 

A loop being more complicated doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing, and sometimes adding additional segments to this MS roller coaster means increased earnings. Case in point – you have two targets that don’t accept loading in the same way, but there is an intermediary step that helps you earn some extra on the way back into your account, while avoiding the in & and out from the same account that makes you look suspicious. 

There are loops everywhere in this hobby, and it’s not necessarily just the individual loops that you’re running yourself. The loop that is working well for a whole lot of people in the rewards arbitrage space right now is just moving assets in a circle as the various middlemen arb a cut from it, before it ends up essentially right where it started a week later.

In a vacuum, it all sounds rather silly, and it is. But these arbitrage opportunities are real, and grabbing your bit of edge in the equation is the key to being a MS advantage player. 

Generally, closing the loop faster involves things that are somewhat inconvenient. Checking platforms daily, significant obfuscation of how much cash you are actually working with, and spending way too much time at the Fedex store are all annoying to deal with. But definitely not as annoying as earning ⅓ as much as you could be on the same loops because you can’t ride them over and over again. 

There’s one final thought on loops to share. Just because you can run a loop doesn’t mean you should. Rare loops that can be run at very high volume at very high speed at extremely low margin aren’t quite as intriguing when you factor in the risk of the target going scorched earth.

Pictured: MSers with a big appetite for risk who had set the launch velocity too high on their shuttle loop without checking the length of the spike element

Good luck on the ride this week, friends.

Napaykuna!

One of the best parts of the MS/churning community is how friendly and interesting the vast majority of the people participating in it are. Outside of a couple of bad apples, it’s one of the least toxic online communities I’ve personally ever been a part of. For a side hustle that is pretty lucrative and closely guarded, we can all come together over shared success and wins. 

In the overall churnosphere, there’s much more than just the individuals playing the game – a whole cottage industry has sprung up offering tools, platforms, arbitrage and more. From relatively high profile tools like seats.aero and Cardpointers that have widespread adoption to more niche platforms for navigating MS possibilities, there’s a whole little churning economy going on.

In many cases, these businesses are built by members of the community themselves. They first got into churning/MS, and then used their knowledge to build tools that solved real problems in the game. 

I could be wrong, but I doubt any of them are fat FIREing from development of these tools – just compensation for the time spent to build the tool. I’m glad to support people like Teddy and Ian that are helping the community improve their CPH.

There’s other businesses and players out there catering to MSers as well, but it’s a bit less “I’m developing this tool to solve a MS problem” and a little more “we’re going to piggy back on what you’re doing and take a cut”.

These other players are a necessary part of the ecosystem, and I’m glad that (some of) them are here. But lately, I can’t help but feel there’s a perception among the community that we’re dealing with friends when working with these parties, which is false – they are a business, and you are their customer. 

These other businesses earn from your spend, your targets, your points, your credits, etc. etc. They have a vested interest in you going harder and finding new avenues (and in one particular notorious platform’s case, blasting those new avenues to their entire customer base).

Again, (most) of them provide a necessary service and are an important part of the ecosystem. But we should all be cognizant of the fact that they are not our friends, they are a business, and we are the customers. 

They are not trying to help you streamline your time spent in wholesale stores or award searches – they are small and medium businesses trying to squeeze every last drop of margin from a transaction or sale. It’s awesome that MSers have options for earning/spending/liquidating at better rates, but these services are only being offered because they’re making money too. 

Ultimately, even the most seemingly MS friendly of businesses can end up getting you into unwanted territory. A returned payment from Amex is often a death sentence, and there’s no amount of cat pictures that can bail you out when that happens. 

And it’s not only on the MS side of things – there’s a graveyard full of frequent flyer accounts that are now banned after assurance from your third party “friend” that there wasn’t any risk in doing things a certain way. 

Having access to this economy is a win-win, but make sure you’re looking out for yourself in all of these negotiations. 

Good luck out there in the marketplace friends, and hope your year is off to a good start.

Баяр хүргэе!

Since the beginning of the hobby, there was generally a natural progression to move from churner to shrimp to dolphin to whale using whatever was the most popular platform of the time. Whether it was back in the day on Flyertalk, /r/churning, or deep down in comment threads on Doctor of Credit, you gradually picked up the context of what things were by committing to learning about it. 

This was a tedious process, and it certainly weeded out people that didn’t want to put in the legwork of better understanding the game. But it wasn’t that serious – I remember getting downvoted to oblivion on reddit many moons ago when I asked if the annual fee on a Southwest card counted towards Companion Pass, and I’m still here.

Things have changed a lot since then – /r/churning is a ghost town compared to its heyday, and Elliott Management has ensured that Southwest went from a program with extreme usefulness to yet another bad domestic airline. 

When the AApocalypse and nutritional supplement implosions happened, there was a natural push to move things out of the publicly indexable eye and safely out of a crawler searching things like “credit card offers for my houseplants”.

Nowadays, you can find the churning and MS chatter taking place in groups across every platform you can think of – from giant Facebook groups to tiny Whatsapp and Telegram chats. 

Much like Flyertalk and /r/churning, the ratio of legitimate discussion to the same question over and over varies day to day and group by group. For example, the major award travel Facebook groups are probably not a great place for even a beginner, because there’s so much static from easily searchable questions obscuring the helpful info. 

However, there are other places that are more helpful for scaling up. Private groups spun up in two forms – small probe groups of people that already knew each other, and paid groups from prominent creators who offered more exclusive content and chats. 

Much like their predecessors, there was an expectation of Googling easily answerable questions and contributing equally to the community. Speaking to my journey, I would occasionally post a negative data point and get a politely worded answer of “how did you possibly think that would work?”

Regardless of what era of the hobby and flavor of learning platform you had, you probably made a lot of mistakes along the way. Those missteps are invaluable on your journey from shrimp to dolphin to whale. It’s much better to learn about concepts like kiting when you’re moving four figures instead of six, and it’s much better to get shutdown by a very sensitive issuer early on than an important one later. 

Perhaps most importantly of all, making the mistake of hesitating on a play or signing up for a new debit is something you can only learn in time. Even ten years in, I was kicking myself this morning for the fact that some of my loops I can only run in one player mode due to procrastination years ago. 

However, over the last few years (and especially in the era of a plump man’s logistics company) there are people who have decided to ignore the best interest of the community, opting to essentially sell the trade secrets to anyone willing to pay for a Substack subscription with zero vetting. 

It’s an extremely shortsighted choice and is directly contributing to the war on happiness, but hey, this is America, who is going to tell them no? 

For me, the biggest concern is on the beginners they’re bringing in with unrealistic promises.

The value proposition is very different compared to some of the OG private groups associated with mainstay churning/MS content and feels much more like the kind of direct response marketing you’d see in the classifieds of tabloid rag promising riches while working from home.

Pictured: Whop grifters promising things you could learn yourself for the low, low price of $697

vs.

The Ron Swanson-esque value prop for Vinh over at Miles Per Day

Putting aside the obvious fact that guaranteeing that a certain easy MS method will stay alive and contribute to that $10k goal in 2026 is asking for trouble, some random kid on Whop should not be jumping straight into full MS without learning about the basics of the hobby first. That’s how people end up buying five figures on closed-loop gift cards they have zero use for.  

I think messaging things like “earn $20k/yr in credit card points when you sign up” is so irresponsible when you aren’t ensuring that the people signing up have the foundation necessary to navigate the inevitable troubles that occur when MSing. But at the same time, that headline sells a hell of a lot better than the realistic copy that some of the legacy communities use.

Even in my own experience, I’ve had a couple of friends who I helped get deep quickly. Even with monitoring, some of them were shutdown for doing reckless things because they didn’t know they were reckless. And since I had learned not to do said thing 8 years ago, I didn’t think to mention it. 

Anyway, unlike the people who parlayed getting into a private group into essentially grifting that info elsewhere, I’ve always believed there’s more money to be made building a community of like minded people. Most of us are clear-eyed about the fact that you had some level of chance interaction to get to where you are now, outside of the oldest of heads. 

I’ll continue to do my best helping point people that are ready for it in the right direction, while also respecting that spoonfeeding isn’t doing anyone any favors, and that’s what I’d suggest to you too. 

Coming soon: EARN $5K A DAY WITH CHASING CETACEANS LOOP PLAYBOOK /s (jk) and whatever else I need to say to make this clearly tongue in cheek.

Hope your new year is off to a great start friends!

Terviseks!

Pictured: an ice cold Ožujsko in Dubrovnik, circa 2018

Editor’s note: This post is very long and somewhat personal/vulnerable (my probe group may even go so far as to call it…sensitive?) and while it relates to MS and churning plenty, it isn’t about a specific play. If you liked my post on finding purpose in travel, you’ll probably enjoy it. If you didn’t, feel free to skip, no worries, I’m fully back on topic next week! And butterboy, if you’re reading this, it’s too long, it’s not too late to turn back! 

For me, the start of a new year always means pensive reflection on the past year. Many of my favorite moments and biggest accomplishments of 2025 were directly driven by churning and MS, and it got me thinking about what the hobby means to me. 

In a way, it’s a continuation of this post. I hope you enjoy this musing to start the year. 

If I had to describe myself in black and white, I’d be a card-carrying type B personality. Nobody ever says that, of course, because talking about your personality type is for type A people. 

But nobody’s personality is that simple (and interestingly, the whole type A/B thing was funded by Big Tobacco in an attempt to divert attention from smoking being a cause of heart disease). 

Outside of my type B traits, I have two common hallmarks of type A people – the first is lifelong chronic anxiety, and the second is a need to find purpose in achieving a measurable result.

I can’t do much about the first one (although hey, therapy gave me the self-awareness to arrive at this thesis, so that’s good?), but I now recognize how important the second one is to me. 

In a lot of my adult life, I’ve struggled with listlessness as it related to having something that I was both passionate about and could measure progress and success in. When I was trying to figure out how to fix it, I thought back to being a kid and how I didn’t struggle with it, even though I did with anxiety.

It was pretty clear – I had two things I found a lot of purpose in that were easily measurable. The first was school, and the second was the sport I competed in from ages 10-18. 

I don’t know if I’d call myself smart, but I’m lucky that back then I had a somewhat eidetic memory that made things like standardized tests come naturally. But while I was acing tests, I was also doing things like tying my shoes together and proceeding to bust my ass falling down stairs, so you can decide for yourself if I’m smart. 

In the sport that I played, it was more of the opposite. I had little natural talent for it (and had a form defect that often got me disqualified, even though it made me worse), but I was extremely passionate about it and gave 100% at all times. 

I was one of those psycho kids that had College Board books listing colleges by 12, and I had a clear idea of the times I needed to achieve in my sport by memorizing what the cutoff pages looked like. 

I ended up achieving some of the things I dreamed of as a kid – I got into some prestigious schools, performed well at my sport (with diminishing returns), and declared to compete D1 in college. 

But along the way, I’d lost some of the competitive fire for the sport. My lack of natural talent caught up in the second half of high school, because everybody was working hard at that level in a way that not everybody was at 12 years old. 

It was crushing to watch people pass me while knowing I was still giving it my all (although with the gift of more mature hindsight, I was also coming of age and priorities shifted towards skipping practice every once in awhile for football games, dating, concerts etc.) 

In the end, I never competed in college, and I didn’t graduate from that prestigious school I initially attended. I ended up graduating from a mid-tier state school, and found some level of purpose in working hard for good grades in the hopes of getting a great job out of college, parlaying that into an MBA admission, and then getting some type of FAANG job afterwards.

I was lucky to find a fairly ideal job within a few months with great coworkers, many of whom I am still friends with years later. Having a job I was driven at made it easy to find purpose, but the measuring stick was a bit of an issue. Some positions can be quantified easily, but mine wasn’t one of them. 

The only real way for me to evaluate myself on working towards a goal was via salary or promotion – two things that didn’t come around often, regardless of how much time I spent at the office and the worry and anxiety I devoted to it at home. 

After a few years of that and experiencing unbridled corporate toxicity outside of my department, my views on work/life balance shifted quite a bit, and I stopped measuring myself on whether I got promoted every year. Any interest I had in getting an MBA and FAANG job fizzled out with it. However, I didn’t replace that old quantifiable goal with anything, and that was when the feeling of listlessness really exploded.

By this point in time, I was churning at a decent level. I hadn’t tried business class or been to the Maldives or anything like that, but I have some really fond memories of the first trips I took fueled by churning. My P2 and I had road tripped through Iceland and Croatia, attended Sziget in Budapest, fished the crystal clear flats of Belize and more. 

As much as I loved having the ability to take trips like that, it still wasn’t scratching my itch to quantify progress that I was making on something I was passionate about. 

Of course, there is a way to quantify travel, but I’d recommend against trying to measure success solely by country counting. While adding a new country to your list is a great feeling, focusing exclusively on it leads to racing through trips without enjoying the experience. I once met a couple on the Flixbus from Budapest to Prague that counted a 15 mins detour on the bus into Bosnia & Herzegovina as B&H being crossed off their list, no need to visit Mostar or Sarajevo anymore. They didn’t even have a ćevapi or burek!

Anyway, like many of us during the pandemic, I was bored, anxious, and depressed. I decided to dig much deeper into churning, and quickly realized my perception that living in NYC precluded me from MSing was incredibly false.

While it took a few years to get really deep, I was measuring myself on learning a little bit more each day and adding new tools, platforms and loops into my MS toolbelt. Once I was starting to earn significant cashback and more miles and points than I could hope to use in 10 years, I realized I was scratching the itch to quantify my efforts in a way that I hadn’t been able to do since I was in high school.

While you have to play within the frameworks of the bank, MS is one of the very few things in life where you have the agency to control how much you earn while also being infinitely more scalable than the average /r/beermoney activity. 

You aren’t relying on an official, admissions board, or HR department to say that you deserve this accomplishment. If you want to go out and make $5,000 today, you have the ability to (although much like school or sports, legwork is required). 

One thing I find really interesting is how people found churning, and why they stick around. We have diverse reasoning for ending up here and still being at it. 

For me, it’s not FIRE or needing a bunch of award seats for a big family. I just enjoy playing a game where the relationship between effort and reward is pretty damn close to 1:1. 

Granted, I spend about 5% of my hobby time probing things and actually running loops with the remaining 95% dedicated to bantering in Discord, but hey, I’m still a type B after all. 

Lastly, being heavy into MS made me realize that it’s possible to quantify and measure travel in a way that isn’t likely to make people not want to talk to you. Instead of counting countries, use MS as a way to cross truly crazy things off of your bucket list. It’s a personal accomplishment that has meaning to you, your friends and family will love to hear about, and isn’t something you need to compete on. 

Want to sit in the Paddock Club for a Formula 1 race? No big deal – just MS the hell out of your Amex Hilton. Want to see the total eclipse in Egypt? Any expensive arrangements you need to make aren’t bad when you aren’t paying for flights or hotels. Have an esoteric hobby that holds meetups on another continent? No problemo. 

Personally, I spent close to seven figures of AA miles on 2026 World Cup tickets so that P2 and I can go with our soccer-rabid friends and make lifelong memories. Was that an irresponsible choice given we fly oneworld way more often than other alliances and I am likely to lose my source of easy generation in 2026? Probably. But looking back fondly on something like attending a hometown World Cup is exactly why we play this game, and scratching that itch is truly addicting. 

As my P3 (my mom, lmao) likes to note, it’s exciting to see me have something that I’m so passionate about. And at least for me, it provides necessary dopamine that I wasn’t able to find in the past.

One of my resolutions this year is to streamline my time spent in the spirit of my friend mforch’s views of CPH. However, I’m sure I’ll end up spending some time in the weeds that could be better spent upskilling on something else or reading a book, but I can’t help myself. Just like some of you, I do it all for the love of the game. 

Hope you had a good start to your new year, and let’s collaborate on killing it in 2026. 

Ура!