New Year, New You, new opportunities: as we kick off the first week of 2025 at Frequent Miler, we posted our predictions for the year, looked back at some of the highlights of 2024, and we’re preparing for an Ask Us Anything where all five of the Frequent Miler team members will be under one roof. All that and more in this Frequent Miler Week in Review.
This week on the Frequent Miler blog…
Welcome to 2025. Here’s what’s going to happen in miles, points, and credit cards this year
Every year, the Frequent Miler team throws out some predictions about what we expect will happen in the world of points, miles, and credit cards. Will all of these things happen? Will any of them happen? Our crystal ball is as good as yours (or maybe that’s not even true?), but it’s fun to look ahead and make some educated guesses about what’s to come.
Scoring the Frequent Miler team’s 2024 predictions
If you’re curious about our track record with those predictions…..well, remember that the world’s best baseball players only get a hit around 3 out of 10 times. By that metric, we’re major leaguers despite being beleaguered by incorrect predictions.
MaxFHR: An awesome way to help use your $200 Fine Hotels & Resorts credits
I was personally glad that we republished this post right before the end of the year as I had a new Platinum card that I was looking to triple dip with a December 2024 use of credits, January-December 2025 use, and then early 2026 use before I decide whether to keep or cancel. As such, I found MaxFHR to be incredibly useful for finding a couple of FHR properties that could work for my needs. As I’ve done in the past, I made several prepaid bookings under the theory that when I cancel the ones I don’t need, I’ll still keep the credit so long as I keep one of “last year’s” bookings.
2024 Deal of the Year (and reader’s choice vote)
Speaking of last year, in this post we look back at the Deal of the Year candidates for 2024 and take reader feedback for the reader’s choice award. Interestingly, the FM team each had different picks, but the ones we each picked were still the most popular choices among the community.
Cashing in on 2025 opportunities
Looking forward to 2025, I’d like to put some personal focus on cash back opportunities — whether those be from checking/savings/brokerage bonuses, new credit card bonuses, or perhaps even “cashing out” points in the right scenarios. In large part, I’m curious about what I can do here in order to help others who want to focus more on that side of the game come out even further ahead than they may have thought they could.
How to pay taxes via credit card, 2025 edition (updated)
One way to come out ahead — sort of — has long been paying taxes by credit card. Given the relatively low fees and the fact that some cards outpace those fees (particularly if you’re working on a new card welcome bonus), taxes have been a popular way to pick up easy spend. Unfortunately, we’ve had a wild ride over the first few days of January regarding tax payments. On January 1st, we lost one of the three payment processors. Another temporarily reduced its processing fee to just 1.75%, only to increase it to 2.89% a few days later. Some readers have reported still getting the 1.75% rate with certain credit cards. As a reminder, the other current payment processor is charging 1.85% and we haven’t seen an increase hit that site yet.
My favorite New Year’s Eve travel experience (that I can’t in good conscience recommend)
I loved reading this post from Carrie about a New Year’s Eve memory. I imagine that many of us have one of those old holiday memories from a different time in our lives that we wouldn’t necessarily repeat but won’t soon forget.
When are points better than cash & vice versa? | Coffee Break Ep39 | 12-31-24 | Podcast
If you read my “cash back” post above with interest, you’ll probably also want to listen to this week’s Coffee Break, where Greg and I discuss the trade offs we make when choosing to earn points vs cash back and how to make those choices.
Ask Us Anything Live: Sunday January 12 at 9pm ET
Did you wonder what happened to our monthly Ask Us Anything this month? Normally held live on Youtube on the first Wednesday of every month, we switched things up this month. That first Wednesday was a holiday (New Year’s Day), so that didn’t seem ideal. Much more ideal is the fact that the five of us will be meeting in person next weekend and as such we’ve decided to do Ask Us Anything Live with all of us in the same room. Come out Sunday night next weekend to chat miles & points and ask us your burning questions about credit cards, loyalty programs, and more.
That’s it for this week at Frequent Miler. Keep an eye on this week’s last chance deals to grab those before they’re gone.
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