#85 - Reader Challenge: A Honeymoon For Free??

Reader Challenge: A Honeymoon For Free??

Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa & Josh!

Soundtrack for this newsletter: Mo Money Mo Problems (Stripped Version) - The Notorious B.I.G, Mase, Diddy

Reader Challenge:

Honeymoon for Free??

After last week’s email I got a lot of great messages back from you out there, and it’s really nice to hear that these more practical tips are helpful and inspiring you to travel more.

Out of all the responses, one stuck out to me the most -

“This is great! But what if my budget was zero?

My husband and I have been putting off a honeymoon for almost a three years now, and we had always intended to spend a week at an all inclusive somewhere. Maybe it sounds cliche, but we just want to relax on the beach and read.

We thought we would do it the year after we had our wedding, but then we had some things come up with family and health and that just kept happening year after year. I feel like we kinda forgot about going.

How can we go on a honeymoon for free? is that even possible? I know that’s asking a lot but I think honestly that’s the only way we can travel right now.”

Challenge. Accepted.

Let’s try and make this couples honeymoon dreams come true.

Also, I think this will serve as a good cheat sheet for goal-oriented credit card churning.

Let’s first define Credit Card Churning - The process of opening cards for the sole purpose of earning welcome bonuses or other benefits. Usually, it involves closing cards after the bonus posts to your account and before the next annual fee is charged.

Goal Oriented Credit Card Churning is that, but with a specific goal or trip in mind to use those points on.

Lots of people just collect as many points as they can, without a real plan to spend them. This can end up in losing those points, forgetting about them entirely, or getting a whole bunch of the wrong points for the trip that you want to have.

My hope by the end of this newsletter is you’ll have a solid grasp on every step required to get an entire trip for free.  

The Free All-Inclusive Honeymoon

Where? An all inclusive resort on the beach

When? Thanksgiving-ish (End of November) - That way we only need to take 5 days of vacation from work but get 8 days away.

How long? At least 1 week

Plan of attack: 

1. Find an all-inclusive resort that has open award availability during the time we want to go, and calculate how many points it will cost for a week there

2. Match the right credit cards to sign up for to accumulate enough points to be able to book that resort for free

3. Create a plan to fulfill the minimum spend requirement of those cards so that we can actually get the points

4. Book the all-inclusive resort

5. Figure out how to get the flights for free

And we need to do all of this before November. 

Requirements:

Have to spend ~$3k per month on normal life expenses with a credit card, or do some manufactured spending (explained towards the end)

Have to have a credit score around 700+

Have to not be carrying any balance on any credit cards currently

This is gonna end up a little bit tight, but I think it’s possible if we fulfill all those requirements.

Luckily, the lovely Katie’s Travel Tricks put together a google map that has all of the all-inclusive resorts in the world that are bookable with points.

At first glance, this map is pointing to a few things quite clearly - 

1. For the amount of time we have to get these points, and the value we could get out of them, Hyatt is the best place to start (12,000 points per night vs 50,000 for Hilton or IHG).

2. This is going to be an international trip.

Sorting by least Hyatt points, to my surprise there are actually a lot of options!

Some in the Dominican Republic, some in Tenerife (yes, please!), some in Palma de Mallorca, and one in Mexico.

The Alua Atlantico in Tenerife

Pretty nice all-inclusive rooms for a decent amount of points

So after poking around at all the resorts across Mexico, Tenerife, and Palma, this one in DR looks the most interesting to me…

Nice nice nice. Triple nice.

It’s got the all-inclusive thing going for it - breakfast, lunch, dinner, unlimited drinks, room service, right on the beach - and at only 12,000 points per night. I think we’ve found a winner.

Most of the all-inclusives in Europe were available as well, but some of them only had breakfast for free, or only offered drinks with an upcharge, or were just too far away from the beach. They were all great, but the one in the DR looked the simplest (and the closest, as the reader is in the USA).

Looks like the only uninterrupted availability is from Nov 20 - Nov 28, which is right over Thanksgiving.

If we went a week either way not over the holiday, it would also be open weekend-to-weekend, but we want to take advantage of the holiday days off.

8 nights * 12000 points = 96,000 total Hyatt points needed.

We have a target.

Yes, please.

So if our goal for the all inclusive resort is 96,000 points, that means we should start with this pretty-bonkers Chase Sapphire Preferred sign up bonus: 90k points after spending $4k on your credit card (on anything) in the first 3 months. 

This is the best current offer to accumulate a bunch of Hyatt points quickly - let me explain:

You get Chase points with this, but one of the best parts about getting Chase points is that you can transfer them to all different kinds of affiliates (airlines, hotels, etc.) In this case we’ll transfer the points from Chase to Hyatt at a 1:1 ratio (meaning you’re not losing any points by transferring.)

Once you get the Chase card you’ll be able to see all the available airlines and hotels that you can transfer to, but just know that Hyatt is one of many.

With that 90k sign up bonus, and assuredly hitting a few more points along the way (the $4k we spend to get the bonus also accumulates points), we should hit that 96,000 point target with just that one card.

Sweet.

Since we here two people with (assumed) above 700 credit scores, while the first person is fulfilling the spend requirement for the Chase Sapphire Preferred, the other partner can sign up for the other credit card that will get us our flight for free.

My first thought is to take a look at google flights to find a reasonable-ish flight - as in one that’s not super long, doesn’t have ridiculous amount of layovers, and is reasonably priced. Then we’ll take a look at some of the major airlines - American Airlines, United, and Delta - to see what their flight availability is using points.

(You often have to create a free account and login with each airline to look at flights using miles.)

There’s some great award availability roundtrip to the DR, with Delta being the clear current winner. 

First up, American Airlines — 27.5K points round trip is pretty good,

but you also have to pay $126.65 in fees. Boo.

United looking a little better.

Delta - the fees are a bit more money ($122 is steep), but the difference is made up for by the incredibly low number of points you have to spend for a RT flight.

Let’s go a little deeper -it looks like JetBlue has similar priced flights, and we can get them by transferring points from CitiBank to JetBlue.

37,600 points for 2 roundtrip tickets to the DR.

Perfecto.

There’s an additional booking fee of $49.65 per leg, so we multiply that by 4 and we get $198.60 total.

If we get this Citibank card that gives us a 75,000 point bonus after we spend $4k in the first 3 months, that should cover it all, fees included.

There’s some math to show how coming right up.

Doctor of Credit is a great place to start to find all the best-and-most-recent credit card offers.

75,000 citibank points - 37,600 for two round trip flights = 37,400 left over.

You can spend any additional points to get a refund on any purchase you make, at a rate of 1 cent per point, so we’ll use those to cover the booking fees.

Booking fee = $49.65 * 4 total flights (2 per person) = $198.60 = 19860 Citi points needed to pay for that.

37,400 - 19860 = 17,540 left over.

That leaves us with another ~$175 left over that we can spend on anything else we want while we’re there - fancy extra drinks, a tour, souvenirs, whatever.

That’s it - we’ve done it. 

An entire 8 night all-inclusive honeymoon on a beach for a grand total of $0 out of pocket.

Mandatory word of caution here - only spend what you can pay off. Don’t buy things you can’t afford just to fulfill the minimum spends.

I want to go on a honeymoon now. I wonder if Lisa would be down :)

This is what we used to think a good YouTube thumbnail looked like

You might be saying at this point - ok, great!

But I don’t spend $8k every 3 months! 

That’s ok too - let me introduce you to a little trick the churning community calls -

MANUFACTURED SPENDING

Manufactured spending is a method of incurring credit card debt with the goal of satisfying the credit cards minimum spend to get the big point bonus, but without actually spending any “real” money to do so. 

The best way to explain this is with a story -

When a…friend…of…mine was leaving for their first trip around the world, they needed to get enough points for an entire round the world ticket and for a bunch of hotel stays to make that trip financially possible. It ended up all adding up to about 1,000,000 points across a bunch of different airlines, hotel programs, and other cards to make the trip happen.

There was a clear plan of which cards they were going to get and when, and what they were going to book with the points, they just had to get there.

The only problem?

The keys to the travel kingdom

Their spending was incredibly low because they was trying to save as much of what little money they were making for the trip.

And they had to spend ~$30k on the various cards to get all those points.

Big time catch-22.

Luckily, at the time (this is no longer the case) the US mint had an offer available - in a desperate attempt to get the one dollar gold coin into circulation - where you could buy $1 gold coins, 1000 at a time, with free shipping, on a credit card. 

So if my friend had a credit card that had a minimum spend of $5000 to get the big point bonus, they would… theoretically… be able to buy $5000 worth of one dollar gold coins on their credit card, receive those gold coins in the mail, and then take them to the bank and deposit them.

Then they would use that money deposited into my bank account to pay off the credit card that they had purchased them on.

This way, no money came out of their actual pocket during this entire transaction and they would fulfill the minimal spend requirements for each card.

 That is manufacturing spending.

From Frugal Flyer’s Article - a great read

That particular trick was shut down for obvious reasons, but there are still ways to do this.

Here’s three resources to get you started there:

You may not need to go to these absurd lengths like… my friend… did, and honestly, hopefully you don’t have to. 

I would imagine that this would have been a reasonable amount of work, and could have potentially led to some hilarious and very awkward interactions with the bank tellers as they brought in thousands upon thousands of gold coins, looking like they had literally robbed a pirate ship from the bottom of the ocean and brought the plunder to them to deposit.

Theoretically.

“My friend” is always up to some shenanigans

Hopefully you can just hit the $8k in 3 months by convincing your friends to let you buy their new TV for them and having them pay you back, or buying flights for their vacations on your credit cards instead of on theirs.

More importantly, this proves the point that traveling for free is not only possible, but actually pretty straightforward with a little preparation and the help of credit card points and miles.

Hope this got some ideas churning in your brain for your next big trip or honeymoon.

That’s all for this week, see you next time!

Today

Finishing up our 3 Days in Hong Kong on a Budget video

The (Near) Future

Australia and New Zealand. It’s time :)

Our Latest Videos

5 Days in Kyoto and Osaka on a Budget 🇯🇵

The much requested Kyoto and Osaka video. Come and get it :)

3 Days in Taipei on a Budget

The second of our series—3 Days in Taipei! (Ok…more like 3.75 days.) This one was a special one for us. Still dreaming of the food.

3 Days in Mexico City on a Budget

The first of our series—3 Days in Mexico City! We had a blast.

See you next week…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs 3 years ago, you’ll likely be interested in our Skillshare course on Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles.

It’s been really taking off lately, but we still have a few uses of this link left for those of you who want to see the class for free. It comes with a free month of Skillshare, which is more than enough to watch our class and any of the other great courses on there!