Ritz-Carlton: Worth the buzz or no?

I just wanted to take a quick moment to write about a new(ish) card that just came out. The card itself isn't new, but the rewards are completely different. I'm talkin about the new Ritz-Carlton Visa Infinite card from Chase.

London/Paris Trip Report

I wanted to do a quick write-up of our $37,000 London/Paris trip that cost us ~$100. Many people were interested to see the breakdown of actual costs and points needed to take a similar trip. Here we go!

So, how much did I ACTUALLY spend?

One of the interesting things about accumulating hotel/airline points for travel is that when it comes to for vacation, you don't actually have to pay anything. All your costs of obtaining these miles are front loaded, meaning you paid for that hotel/airplane ticket months ago via annual credit card fees, gift card fees, money orders, or square fees. Today I wanted to give you a quick overview of how I calculate the costs of my points so I can get a good idea of how much to budget when I go on vacation.

The first thing I do is set up a spreadsheet that adds up all the miscellaneous fees I rack up over the course of the year. These include the following:

1. Gift card activation fees (that $5.95 added on to the $500 gift card purchased at the grocery store)
2. Annual credit card fees
3. Money order fees (this is the main way of liquidating those gift cards now that Bluebird has bitten the dust)
4. Square Fees (Instead of purchasing gift cards and trying to liquidate them, the easy way out is to "pay yourself" via Square. This is rather expensive at 2.75%, but can be handy if you just need to finish out the minimum spend on a certain card)

Next I categorize each card into what type of points I get with it. For example, I have 4 cards that give Hilton points, 2 that give Starwood Preferred points, 4 that give me Aadvantage miles, and so on. 

Then I split out each fee by the associated card to get a breakdown of how many fees go to each category. I then divide the fees by the total number of points I have for each category, and viola! I get my cost per point, which lets me know when booking that hotel how much I am actually saving. See the table below for my actual numbers from the past year.

As you can see, this hobby has cost me quite a bit! Without careful tracking, these fees can become easily lost. Luckily I do some other activities that more than make up for those fees (Selling gift cards/iPhones on eBay, opening checking accounts for bonuses, etc)

So what now? Why go through the process of tracking all these fees if you don't do anything with that information? What I do is set up another tab on my spreadsheet that tracks every time I redeem a point for something. I'll break it up into separate vacations as well so I can know what to budget for each vacation. The table below shows how much our most recent trip to Hawaii (See my wife's lovely blog on the details) and our upcoming Paris trip cost vs what we saved.

This breakdown allows me to know how much I actually paid for all those points that I redeemed in Hawaii (and will redeem later on this year for Paris). As you can see, the actual value gained is tremendous. Is paying $32,000 for a 10 day vacation in Paris over the top? Most definitely! (at least for my tax bracket) Would I actually pay that much by flying first class and staying in fancy hotels if I were paying for it? Not in a million years. But when I only have to pay for 3% of the actual cost I'd call that a pretty sweet deal.

Award Trip to Paris - Breakdown

So I have mentioned to my friends/family about our upcoming trip to Paris before, but I wanted to do a detailed breakdown of our trip to give my readers an idea of what is possible via the PointsPursuit. I did this recently for our trip to Hawaii as well, feel free to give that a read of a tropical vacation is more up your alley. Also, I try to do these not in boasting, but rather to demonstrate that great vacations are realistically in reach for many people that never realized it!

Best Credit Card Signup Value

Ever wondered what card has the best signup offer? It's hard to know, especially with all the different point types. The following list, while not all inclusive, has most of the popular cards along with relevant information (annual fees, past offers, min spend requirements, etc). Hopefully this will help you to make a decision on which cards to target in your points earning strategy.

Analysis of Chase British Airways 100k Miles Promotion

                Today (9/17/2015) Chase re-launched a promotion they do every year or so on their British Airways card. Normally this card earns 50,000 Avios after $2k spend and the first year's $95 fee is waived. However, right now they are offering 50k/75k/100k Avios if you spend $2k/$10k/$20k. The $95 is NOT waived for the first year. Let’s take a look and see if this deal is worth it.

Mile Valuations

                As you know, there are tons of airlines and hotel chains, each with its own loyalty program. Additionally there are many flexible rewards programs out there (think Chase, American Express, Citi, etc). How do you value each of these points programs? 80,000 points sounds like a lot, but if they are denominated in Hilton Hhonor points, are they actually worth more than 30,000 Starpoints?