The Global Slowmad

We have been enjoying our time in Scotland with Alex over the last ten days and have been too busy to write anything new. Fortunately, we prepared a few articles before we left home for precisely this sort of occasion. So this post is a little different. Specifically, we thought it might be useful to share a high-level recap of our points and miles activity in 2024. After all, this is one of the primary methods we are relying on to afford our global slowmad lifestyle in 2025. If folks are interested, we can cover some of the specific tools and resources mentioned below in greater detail at another time. 

Points Earned from Credit Cards*
We use credit cards for every possible expense -- insurance, home contractors, even income tax payments. We also open more new accounts than the average person. All of this is designed to generate credit card points from our household spending that can be redeemed for travel via transfer to major hotel and airline programs. 

According to our AwardWallet Transaction Analyzer (a handy tool for keeping track of your rewards balances across most bank, hotel, airline and other loyalty programs), we earned 504,959 points through regular spending charged to our credit cards. The actual tally was quite a bit higher because AwardWallet is not able to track some special, promotional earnings rates on specific cards during the year. For example, the unsung hero last year was a no-annual-fee Chase Freedom Unlimited card that earned double points in all categories for the first year, including six Chase points for every dollar spent dining out – which we did a lot of. (That's still not as good as the promotional rate for an AmEx Gold a few years ago that offered 10x on dining.) A significant portion of our regular spending was also helping us meet SUBs, meaning that it was doing double duty.

We also are quite opportunistic about finding attractive signup bonuses (SUBs). Per our TravelFreely Dashboard (a handy tool for tracking progress toward SUBs), we earned 1,730,000 points from opening 14 new credit cards in 2024. We know that sounds like a lot of credit cards. And it is. This included 7 business cards now that Stuart has joined the realm of the (occasionally) self-employed. The biggest contributors were a couple of American Express Business Platinum SUBs of 250,000 Membership Rewards points each. We timed those applications to coincide with some tuition payment deadlines to satisfy the rather large minimum spend requirements.

In total, we accumulated more than 2.2 million points from our credit cards in 2024. Assuming an average value of 1.4 cents per point (a pretty conservative valuation if redeeming points for travel in our experience), our credit card activity generated around $31,000 in potential value in 2024!

Points Earned from Shopping Portals
We earned 22,160 American Express Membership Rewards points in 2024 merely by clicking through the Rakuten browser extension when shopping online. The number is somewhat underwhelming compared to our credit card earnings, but free is free and shopping portals are just about the lowest-effort way to accumulate points if you don't mind the occasional pop-up or can remember to click through. Other useful portals include Capital One Shopping, TopCashBack and RebatesMe. We also earned 2,304 American Airlines AAdvantage miles from the AA shopping portal and a handful more from the Southwest Airlines shopping portal (back when we still cared about that program -- we're not even going to dignify the program with a link because we can no longer recommend it). We often compare earning rates on Cashbackmonitor, turn on the Savewise or CardPointers browser extension or simply wait until we see a good rate hit our inbox for a specific retailer before completing a planned purchase.

Points Earned from Dining Rewards Programs 
Similarly, we earned 1,484 miles from the Southwest Rewards dining program (avoid), 1,334 miles from the American Airlines dining program (a particularly good option since AAdvantage miles historically have been more difficult to accumulate) and 4,922 Marriott Bonvoy Reward points from the Marriott dining program (a poor value, but we signed up for the initial SUB and forgot to switch our card back to something more useful) in 2024. These are all minimal effort programs that merely require you to register your cards on the website and earn points anytime you later use that card at an affiliated restaurant.

Points Earned from Uber Transactions
We also earned a whopping 1,598 Marriott points from using Uber and Uber Eats in 2024. Honestly, we had forgotten this was even a thing until checking our Marriott earnings history to write this post, but you can link your Marriott Rewards account to your Uber account to earn some extra points. Brand partnerships like this get promoted from time to time, and it's usually pretty easy to link your programs and earn a few extra points.

Points Redeemed for Travel
We were more focused on accumulating points in 2024 than we were in redeeming (or “burning” to use the lingo of the trade) them. By contrast, we will be spending almost nine months overseas in 2025, so we are burning through a shit-ton (another technical term) of points and having a more difficult time earning them in bunches since we are not able to sign up for new cards while traveling. 

That said, we did have the opportunity to use a modest amount of our free nights and accumulated points in 2024. A few highlights (also captured in the pics below):

-- We stayed at the Fordson Hotel in Oklahoma City using a Chase Hyatt Category 1-4 free night certificate. This was the first night of a bucket list month-long road trip throughout the American Southwest with our aging pups to check out everything from the trails of Sedona and the art galleries of Santa Fe to the dog beaches of Southern California.

-- We used airline miles and redeemed three IHG free night certificates (plus a 4th night free award) to attend Alex’s college commencement ceremony in California.

-- We used airline miles and AmEx airline credits to fly to Las Vegas on three separate occasions in 2024 (for the EVO gaming convention, a comped slots tournament and the Formula One race). We stayed at the Palazzo for two nights using a $200 AmEx Platinum Hotel Collection annual credit, spent two nights at the Venetian courtesy of the casino loyalty program and used a total of five Marriott 50k free night certificates at the Las Vegas Marriott (for EVO) and at the Westin Las Vegas (including a view of the Sphere and the track for F1).

Bottom Line
The credit card rewards game is not for everyone. There are plenty of ways it can go wrong in spectacular fashion, and it takes some effort to do it well. (Check out our recent post on 12 Credit Card Rewards Rules for Beginners.) To us, the 2024 payout was worth it. And 2025 should be even better. 

* Of note, several of our credit cards also offer cash credits for spend in various categories. This includes things like airline incidental charges, free hotel nights, travel credits, CLEAR, Global Entry, Uber, Grubhub, Dell, etc. It is difficult to assign a precise value to these credits, the available discounts at specific merchants or perks like airport lounge access, hotel and airline status, free gym memberships and so forth. After all, we wouldn’t be incurring many of those expenses if we had to pay for them out of pocket. Consequently, we heavily discount these categories and only recognize a fraction of their theoretical potential value. For 2024, we estimated the true value of the recurring (non-SUB) credits at approximately $4,300, the discounts at roughly $300 and the perks at about $440. That’s $5,040 in all. In other words, even ignoring the points themselves, the free stuff that came with the cards more than offset the $4,347 in annual fees (which really is a LOT) that we paid in 2024.