Last year was a big one. My immediate family spent almost two months traveling between our 28,000-mile round-the-world summer vacation, free cruise match opportunities (and trips to set them up), and other miscellaneous travel. With my Frequent Miler travel (for things like Flying by the Seat of out Points and Million Mile Madness), I spent more than 3 months on the road in total. I expect 2025 to be another big year of travel, most of which is already booked and “paid for” (in terms of miles and points). As I took stock of where we are in terms of points and miles left on-hand after most of our 2025 travel has been booked, I decided that 2025 might be a good time for me to put some focus into that “other” aspect of our game: cash back. I don’t plan to abandon miles and points any time soon, but in 2025 I think I want to resolve to work a bit harder on the cash back side than I have in recent years.
Taking stock of where I am
After a big 2024, I decided to take stock of where I am. Without getting into the weeds with specific programs, I added up balances to figure out what we have on hand:
- 1.1 million airline-specific miles
- 1.3 million hotel points
- 500,000 transferable points
- $3700 in cash back rewards (a little over $1,000 of this is Capital One credit card cash back that could become 100,000 transferable points)
- $1800 in United TravelBank cash
- $600 in Southwest Airlines transferable credit
- $1100 in Marriott and Hilton gift cards
- $1,100+ in Capital One Shopping portal “cash back” that’s only redeemable for gift cards
Keep in mind that those are totals spread across multiple programs, so not every point and mile is as useful as it sounds in aggregate. Still, that’s a lot of points and miles and other travel-related rewards. And there are more on the way — between pending rewards (including from spend already completed, Rakuten, a welcome bonus in progress, etc), I expect to make my way back up to about 750,000 transferable points over the next month. And I should note that the above does not yet include the 1,000,000 SAS Airlines miles that I expect to earn sometime in the next month!
While my transferable points balance is still a bit lower than I’d like it to be (given a family of four and a lot of flexibility, I’d ideally like to be a little closer to a million transferable points), the bottom line is that we’ve got enough points on hand to plan some awesome trips. Even if the miles/points above were only valued at $0.01 each, the above totals out to more than $30,000 in rewards. Again, it’s not quite “all that” since, in some cases, it includes smaller, less useful balances (for a family of four) like 20,000 JetBlue TrueBlue points and 20,000 total Spirit points. And I don’t currently have enough Hyatt points to meet my immediate needs, so I do need to focus on earning some more of those (or currencies that transfer to Hyatt). Still, even if I didn’t earn another mile or point for the rest of 2025, I’d have plenty of rewards to cover the rest of our 2025 travel and still have more than enough to plan some nice trips in 2026 and 2027. My rewards balances are surely far below some others in the game, but I nonetheless feel very fortunate.
Given the fact that we have more than enough points left over to handle a few future trips, I think that 2025 should be a “cash back” heavy year for my family.
I still love miles, but cash back is a key tool in the belt
Award travel is awesome. I love getting a plane ticket or hotel that would be far out of my price range for what feels like a handful of monopoly money.
But those “free” plane tickets and hotel stays are not without some cost. Whether award taxes, airline-imposed surcharges, or the cost of things like meals and local transportation, there are plenty of expenses to cover. Thankfully, the games we play open opportunities to earn not only miles but also some cash that we can put away for a rainy day.
Having cash on hand is obviously inherently good, but I find value in playing the “cash back” side of the game to create a pool of “play” money — cash back that could be useful for buying points and miles when on sale, taking advantage of good cash hotel rates, or just to invest for the future.
Back in 2021, we cashed out around 400,000 Membership Rewards points to my wife’s Schwab account and invested that money in simple index funds, leaving it alone and simply setting the account to auto-invest the dividends. We’ve made around $1400 on that choice. The absence of those points in our Membership Rewards accounts has never been an issue — we earned enough additional points that those would have always been surplus rewards. There comes a point where you have surplus points and collecting more points is not really providing opportunities for outsized value but rather costing you the opportunity to earn cash that can be used for anything. While I don’t necessarily feel like I’m at the “enough points” threshold, I do feel like it’s always rebalancing from time to time and putting some time and energy into the opportunities our hobby creates to earn extra cash.
Bank Bonuses
On this week’s coming podcast, I mention my excitement about going for more bank bonuses in 2025. After really solid years with bank bonuses in 2020, 2021, and 2022, I’ve since slowed my pace on bank bonuses in favor of other pursuits. But in 2025, I want to get back in the game with checking/savings/brokerage account bonuses.
I’m planning to start with the US Bank business checking account bonus that’s currently offering either $400 or $900. Tim wrote about the bonus here. The $900 bonus requires a $30,000 deposit. That’s obviously a large hurdle. However, the required hold period for the bonus is low — the account requires depositing the money within 30 days of opening the account and keeping it there until the 60th day after opening the account. In other words, you really only need to hold the money at the bank for about 30 days (I’d recommend maybe 31 or 32 days minimum to be safe). That’s still obviously a tough hurdle, though the low hold period might make it easier to accomplish. I’m going to try to accomplish this by buying and immediately reselling something/things to temporarily generate the cash I need.
Let me oversimplify what I just said (which is to say that this isn’t exactly what I’ll do, but it explains the general concept).
- I’ll open the account today (January 3rd), which means that I’ll need to fund the account with $30K by February 2nd (30 days from today) and keep the $30K there until March 4th.
- I have a credit card with a monthly due date of the 18th and statement cut date of the 21st with a $0 balance right now.
- On January 22nd (the first day of my new statement period), I’ll buy $30,000 worth of stuff that I can immediately resell for $30,000 in cash (this is the oversimplification, but stick with me to understand the concept rather than question this piece).
- I’ll deposit that $30,000 in cash (from selling the products acquired in the previous step) in US Bank by February 2nd.
- On February 21st, my credit card statement will cut with a balance due of $30,000 and a due date of March 18, 2025.
- Sometime between March 4th and March 18th, I’ll pay my $30,000 credit card bill with the money in my US Bank account
- I should earn the $900 bonus by the end of April (within 30 days of the last day of the month in which you meet the bonus requirements).
The reality gets a bit more complicated since “winning” with that strategy requires being able to source $30,000 worth of stuff that can be resold without either high risk or the potential for some amount of loss or both. There isn’t a lot of margin for error. However, it isn’t impossible to do.
That of course will not be the only bank bonus I’ll look to earn this year. My wife is eligible for this PNC bonus that should be relatively easy and neither of us have done the nationwide BMO Harris bonus before (though maybe we’ll wait and see if the offer improves after the current offer expires). Even if we just did one US Bank business account bonus, two BMO Harris bonuses (one each), and the bigger PNC bonus, that would be $2,000 in bank bonus cash with relatively low effort. We’ll keep a close eye on Doctor of Credit’s Best Bank Account Bonuses page and look to take advantage of as many opportunities as we can.
Resale opportunities
The previous section mentioned reselling $30,000 worth of stuff. That can be a lot harder than it sounds. However, it can also be somewhat easier than it seems. Tim has written about buying groups. We also sometimes see opportunities to resell relatively simple products like gift cards for a small profit margin. With the right cash back strategies, including shopping portals and credit cards that yield a good earning rate, it is possible to turn even small margins into nice little wins.
I used to do a lot of product resale. The downsides are many, with the biggest being the time commitment. I don’t have the time to go back to the type of product resale that requires a high time commitment, but I am somewhat interested in low-hanging fruit — perhaps things like buying groups will be a fit or perhaps my wife and I will source some other opportunities, but we’d like to put a little hustle back into mini side hustles.
Going after credit card cash back
My wife and I previously kept IRA investments with Bank of America for their Preferred Rewards Platinum Honors status, which includes a 75% bonus on credit card earnings on some of Bank of America’s proprietary cards like the Premium Rewards card and Unlimited Cash Rewards card. My wife and I moved our retirement funds to Merrill Edge years ago in order to earn 2.625% cash back on those cards given the Platinum Honors status (and I wrote about doing that at the time).
Last year, we moved those funds to Robinhood for their generous 3% IRA match, which yielded us around $6,000 in bonuses (with the requirement to keep that money in our Robinhood IRAs for 5 years). However, we haven’t yet lost our Bank of America Platinum Honors status. Our Bank of America cards are our current “everywhere else” favorites given the earn rate. That’s particularly true for online purchases, where the Bank of America cards are often our best bet.
I also have the US Bank Altitude Reserve card. This card earns 3x on mobile wallet purchases, so I tend to use Google Pay for most in-person purchases. That’s because the rewards on this card can be used at a value of 1.5c per point toward travel booked through the US Bank portal or through Real-time mobile rewards, making the effective earn rate 4.5% back for Google Pay / Apple Pay purchases. While Apple users tend to report earning 3x on many online purchases when using Apple Pay, I haven’t had success with Google Pay for online purchases.
The card that I don’t have but really want is the US Bank Smartly card. The Smartly Visa earns 2% cash back as a base rate, but if you keep just $5,000 on deposit with US Bank, you’ll earn 2.5% back everywhere. That’s a much lower threshold than Bank of America in order to earn nearly as much cash back. However, the real draw here is if you can move $100K in a combination of cash or investments since that threshold will earn 4% back everywhere with the Smartly Visa. That’s a fantastic rate of return that we discussed on a recent Card Talk. I’m not yet willing to burn a 5/24 slot by applying outright (I’d really like to try to go after a second household Southwest Companion pass, so I’m trying to hold out to fall under 5/24 this year), but I do want the Smartly card. I have a long-held US Bank Altitude Go card (which was converted from the Radisson card a few years ago and originally from a Club Carlson card years before that). Last month, I called and tried to product change to the Smartly Visa but was told that it isn’t possible. I’ll try opening the Smartly savings account along with the new business account and I’ll see if that gets me anywhere on a product change. Maybe it’s just a matter of HUCA (hang up, call again)? I’m hopeful that we can get that card changed over.
In the meantime, I’ll be on the prowl for cards offering good cash back bonuses, with a particular focus on business cards. There are quite a few business cards on the market offering cash back bonuses of $500-$750 with spending requirements in the $5K-$7.5K range.
If I can get my hands on the Smartly card, I could see that become our go-to card for any situations where we can’t pay with Google Pay for 3x on the Altitude Reserve.
What about miles and points? Will I abandon them entirely?
Don’t worry — this still Frequent Miler. There’s no risk of me trying to go full Cash Back King any time soon. I’ll always get excited about miles and points and I’m sure that I’ll collect a bunch of those this year, also.
But I’m curious as to how much extra cash the hobby can generate in a two-player household with moderate effort. That last part is important: I’m hoping to generate this extra cash back with an amount of effort that others could conceivably match rather than turning it into a full-time job of its own.
In 2021, my wife and I earned more than $6,000 in bank and brokerage bonuses. Can we make $10,000 between those types of bonuses, a manageable amount of product resale, and a couple of cash back credit card bonuses? Can that number climb even higher? I look forward to some challenge.
But I’ll reiterate that I’m not giving up on miles and points. I’ll still be going after airline miles and hotel points when opportunity knocks. However, I’m going to try to focus more closely on the opportunity cost of chasing those things and to only choose miles and points when the price is right this year. Cash isn’t necessarily king for me, but by the end of the year, I hope to be able to report a king’s ransom in cash back earned with strategies you can recreate to suit your own needs.
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Nick, building on what you and your wife did a few years ago with AMEX points – pursuing transferrable points cards (or bank account bonuses) with the intent of cashing those points out is also a perfectly valid strategy. Wells Fargo, Citi, and Chase make this trivial as you can directly redeem for bank account deposits or statement credits at 1cpp. AMEX requires a business checking account or the Schwab Platinum but the latter still lets you redeem at 1.1cpp up to a million points per year ($11,000). Capital One is probably most annoying as the miles earning cards need to be redeemed for travel charges for statement credits.
Is this as a good value as transferring to partners for award redemptions? Not by any stretch. But there is a point where excess miles sitting in transferrable accounts are just opportunity cost of returns you could be making elsewhere (5% this past year if in a basic savings account – 20%+ if you start talking money that could have been invested in stocks, since 2024 was above average for returns). That adds up quickly as those results compound over multiple years if those points don’t get used up. Where the “excess” miles cutoff is at will vary – it might be only be a few hundred thousand for someone who travels once a year or only flies domestic economy, while it can easily be millions for someone else with a large family who’s goal is to travel often and in luxury. I’m reminded of an article I read from Trip of a Lifestyle – they opened dozens of cards and simply cashed out the majority of the points from them. That’s a different target market in that their goal was financial independence and not traveling in luxury, but it’s a good thing to reconsider periodically how points and miles are serving you.
Nick! I am in the same position, well kind of. Currently have a health balance of AMEX, Cap 1, Chase, American, Delta, Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, oh my! In looking at redeeming, we are about to have our first child, so with the realization that we may not travel too heavily internationally, im looking at more cash back spending strategies! If you have any articles about how to maximize cash back would love to learn from you guys. thanks for all the FM team does! Hoping everyone earns their SAS bonus!
Also having first child. Congrats!
Just had first child a week ago. Also figuring out how to change strategy in the year ahead. Congrats!
congrats!!!
If you want to break even or better AND get paid fast, buying groups probably aren’t your friend
I’ll be interested in how your “experiment” goes throughout the year. While many things are bookable with miles and points, many things, like experiences, boutique bed and breakfasts, and Disney, are not, so I think writing more about the trade offs could be worthwhile.
Nick, I love your post, but I would guess that most of us are not disciplined enough to take the cash back we earned in dribs and drabs and invest it. Instead, we’ll take advantage of great redemption offers which enable us to travel well at a price we can afford. Champagne taste, beer budget has been my mantra for decades although it’s way harder to get a bargain today than it was pre-pandemic.
Hilton gift card site is down, says it could be 8 weeks until replenished. Ugh!
I ordered a $50 Hilton gift card using my AmEx Biz Plat on 1/1 and received an email on 1/3 saying it shipped
Yes, this was before I tried to order. You probably got your order in before they ran out
Nick, this is just one tiny data point, but the Smartly Card has been a complete bust for me. While I got approved for the card right away, the credit limit I got was rather small (I applied for six cards total in 2024, the credit limits I received with the other cards were between 30K and 50K, my Smartly card is a whopping 11K, additionally, the card has declined pretty much every charge I have tried to make, it declines anything over $250 (even though the card is fully paid off, so I have my entire 11K limit available), it has declined my car insurance company (a major national company), my property taxes, in other words, merchant accounts that are massive and should not be suspicious at all. I am one of the suckers who immediately moved 100K over to get the 4%, I have spent about 8 hours on the phone with the absolute worst customer service providers I have ever dealt with (wait, that’s not fair, the worst except citi of course 🙂 ) and all in all, I have spent about 10K over the past month of the 40K goal I had when I applied for the card… Great opportunity or total scam?
I was thinking of jumping on the Smartly Card but would be interested if others have had similar experiences. I already have Citi cards and find dealing with them to be a complete nightmare, so I don’t need another Citi in my life.
Don’t forget that the cash back on the Scwab amex cc is tax-free!
Nick is a beast! But TBH, that sounds like a lot of work (and potential risk) for $900 ? unless it’s a one shot deal for a product that he’s easily sold at cost or better many times in the past. Do tell!
I am glad Nick wrote this post, was thinking that it made sense to focus on cash bonuses as well. Already have 3 trips planned in 2025, which will consume 80%+ of my PTO, and likely have enough points for 2026 and 2027. Earning bonuses that can be put towards non-airfare / lodging expenses makes more sense than hoarding more points. Of course, I’ll probably still jump on the low-hanging fruits, like 70k of valuable points after a single purchase, but the main focus is going to be cash.
If I have an existing US Bank Business Checking account but have a new LLC that needs a checking account, can I open a second US Bank account and get the bonus bc it’s a entirely new business/EIN? Or would that not count since I’m already a ‘business customer’? Also couldn’t find in the fine print whether I would need to close and wait 90 days or a whole year before being eligible again. Anyone have experience with this? Thanks!
Update to this I just read somewhere that the bonus is ‘once per business’ so technically then, I should be able to get it for a new business even as an existing customer. Will report back!
I was able to product change to a USB Smartly card from a USB Cash Rewards card easily and in time to pay my January tax estimate for a cash back net of 2.25pc. I will use Pay1040 to pay tax at 1.75pc fee.
I have gotten several cash bonuses 500-750 WITH 0% interest for 12-18 months too. I had a big purchase so I left my cash in the bank earning around 5% and used the 12-18 mo 0% interest cc and collected the 500-750 bonus. Best to do this with business cc – Amex Blue Business + USB Triple cash at the moment. Of course, make large payments each month to avoid any chance of owing interest at the end of the free period and watch the due dates.
I’ve jumped onto that exact combo. The 0% APR arbitrage would have made me nervous when first starting this game but it is real and you just have to make sure you can move things around to pay it off in a timely manner if need be. $10K floated for a year across the BBP and Triple Cash cards is another $400+ earned in interest at today’s rates, a whole extra bank bonus or SUB without opening any additional accounts.
The 0% APR boosts the effective return on the current Triple Cash bonus to around $1K for $6K spend – that’s as good as a 60K – 80K point SUB on another card if you value those points at 1.25 – 1.5cpp.
I’m always inspired by your posts. Great article that many of us will tag and come back to.
I was able to product change from the Go to Smartly