AYF/GF 156 | Credit Card Travel Hacks

 

There are three major credit card benefits: cashback, air miles, and points. What if you were to discover neat credit card travel hacks? Merrill Chandler’s guest in this episode is Owen Beiny, the Founder of The Points Partner. Owen’s objective is to help anyone in America fly for free using points and miles. The first step to achieving that goal is to teach you how to be effective in using your credit card points. There’s no point collecting credit card points if you don’t know how to use them! If you want to know how to travel the world for free just by using your credit card points, you’ll want to listen to this episode. Tune in!

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

When Fundability™ Meets Travel Hacks

An Interview With The Points Partner

In this episode, I’m going to blow your mind. We’re going to be talking to The Points Partner. We talk all the time about how to optimize your profile for business funding. How about optimizing your quality of life by using the points and having the right cards that are part of your optimization plan? We’re going to do a deep dive into how to use your points for maximum effect. I will see you on the inside.

I have got a treat for us. In the Brooklyn studio, we have Owen Beiny, who is The Points Partner. For a long time, we’ve talked about the difference between being a savvy borrower versus being a business borrower. Some people have no idea and they want nothing to do with ever being an entrepreneur in their lifetime. For those folks, we want to make sure that you are savvy borrowers, that every credit card, credit instrument and everything you do creates the most additions to your quality of life. That is why Owen is here. Welcome, Owen. I’m glad to have you.

How are you doing?

I’m doing spectacular. I can’t possibly describe you better than you can describe yourself. Will you tell us who you are and how you ended up being The Points Partner?

My name is Owen. I’m known as The Points Partner. What I do is help individuals maximize their credit card benefits. I help people get as many credit card points and air miles as mathematically possible for their lifestyle. I then teach people how to use the said points efficiently. In other words, I put people on beds and on planes for free. That is what I do for a living. I also have the number one independent website in the country, that country being America, for credit card applications and approvals.

Thank you so much. I’m going to be pointing at this man. I’m emphasizing the point that this man is the premier. I can’t say one and only. Tell us about your media junket that’s going to be going on here.

It’s going to be a crazy few weeks for me. I’ve spent many years flying around the world for free using points and miles. I started The Points Partner a few years ago and I’ve seen clients privately one-on-one helping them do the same. What I realized was and this wasn’t until 2020, that I wasn’t achieving my aim and objective. My aim and objective are to help anyone in America fly for free using points and miles, but in reality, I was helping wealthy people because they’re the only ones who could afford to come and use my time.

There are three major credit card benefits: cashback, air miles, and points. Click To Tweet

I’ve spent time building my master class, which is going to be 67 short videos in layman’s terms that anyone can watch on my website and be able to do the same. I had back-to-back media on Good Morning America, ABC, Get Fundable Podcast and the like, letting people know that they can fly for free. Go to my website and watch the videos.

This is what I love about the podcast marketplace, master classes and master courses because we’re building our own library similarly because I cannot present to enough people live. You do not have the time to talk to everybody about the benefits that come with using the right card, the right time and how to maximize those points.

When we talk about the benefits of credit cards, what most people don’t realize is there are three major benefits. The first is cashback, the second is air miles and the third is credit card points. They are not created equal. One percent cashback is not the same as one air mile and one credit card point. In reality, 1% cashback of $1 is $0.01. One air mile can be worth slightly less than that or depending on the airline, it could be worth considerably more than that.

One credit card point, as a generalization, is worth twice what 1% cashback is, but all of that is on the way in. When you come to use those points, redeem or burn them, there is another opportunity where you can make them worth more. One credit card point to me is worth $0.07. When you start looking at it mathematically like that, it’s all about the points.

A personal story, this timing was crazy. I’m sitting there with Sky, my producer and executive assistant. We have a Southwest Business Card. For all the business borrowers, we’re going to talk about the difference between being a savvy consumer and a business borrower because the rules are a little bit different, even though there are miles and points for both sides.

I’ve got a Southwest Card. It’s up to a $77,000 limit because I put everything in the business on this card. I had 480,000 plus points and we booked the entire fall and winter’s junkets and the hotels and I still have 418,000 points left. I’m sitting here going, “We’re flying for free. I’m staying in a hotel that was done on my Southwest points.” It’s crazy talk. This is amazing.

Unbelievably, on an average year, I do $120,000 worth of travel and I don’t pay a penny. It’s that simple. If you can understand how it works mathematically and how to use your points efficiently, it costs nothing. It’s interesting you were mentioning the difference between business and personal wealth. The beauty is with all of these credit card companies, whether you’re on a personal credit card, charge card or business credit card, all the points can be collated together. In fact, in most cases, with the major banks, they automatically pool all of those points together for you. In the other banks, by the click of one button, you can move your business points into your personal account. If you have the right premium credit cards, there are even bonuses for doing that.

Are you saying you can make your points over on the business more valuable overall in personal?

Absolutely.

AYF/GF 156 | Credit Card Travel Hacks

Credit Card Travel Hacks: The objective is to help anyone in America fly for free using points and miles.

 

Can you explore that a little bit for our readers?

At this juncture, I’m under compliance, which means I can’t mention any credit card companies or specific products, but what I will say is one of the major credit card player banks in the world that begins with a C and rhymes with face has personal products that are known as the Sapphire range. They are personal credit cards. If you have business credit cards that might be known as Ink products, you can with the click of one button, move your Ink points into the Sapphire product, and you’ll get a 25% or 50% value increase depending on which one of those products you’ve got. One of my favorite tricks with my clients on the business side is to get the sign-up bonuses on those business credit cards. As soon as you get them, move them across to Sapphire, and you’ve instantly increased the amount of points or value.

Guys, are you learning from what he is saying? These are not just legitimizing the use of your points, but they’re augmenting, increasing and maybe even a 50% addition if you make these transfers correctly. All of this you’re saying is, in the master class or the things that you teach, I can be able to go in there and say, “I need to figure out how to do this better.”

Let me break it down for you. It starts like this. You have to be able to be fundable. That’s how you and I know each other because you’re an integral part of my process. You’ve got to have a good personal credit score and then you can then leverage that into the business side when it’s appropriate. The next step is looking at your existing spend. Print out your last month’s credit card statement, be it for personal, business or both and look at where you spend your money.

When you swipe a credit card, it doesn’t say Joe’s Kebab House. It says restaurant. They have what’s called credit card categories. The biggest categories are food and drink, gas, marketing, travel and office supplies. They are what’s known as the bonus categories. Anything outside of that is known as non-bonus categories. All you need to do is look at your statement from last month and say, “I’m spending 30% of my money on food and drink. I need a credit card that’s good for food and drink that gives me bonuses in those categories.”

I’m going to give you an example for the readers of some of the best credit cards out there for the obvious lifestyle day-to-day stuff. Before I do that, I want to explain that’s the incoming side. I like to call it the sexy side because everyone wants to talk about how many points they got as a sign-up bonus and how thick their credit card is when they shuffle them. Everyone does but nobody wants to talk about the other side, which is the redemption, the using or burning of those points.

As a mathematical equation, only 30% is the incoming side and 70% is the outgoing side. There’s no point collecting lots of points if you don’t know how to use them. Step one, good credit score. Step two, get the right credit cards, get the sign-up bonuses, use the right card at the right place at the right time and get lots of points. Step three, know how to transfer your points out of the credit card companies and into airlines and hotel groups at the appropriate time when there are bonuses and know how to book sale price business-class tickets. That’s where the real value is.

I’ll give you an example. Most of the time, I live in Los Angeles, although now I’m in Brooklyn. From Los Angeles, let’s say I want to go to Paris for the weekend on a business class trip. Round trip, that will cost me about $7,000. I do not expect you to pay for that, Merrill. I’m not going to pay for it either. If you were to do it as pay with points within the travel portal of any credit card company, they would charge you 100 times the cost of said travel in points. A $7,000 ticket will be 700,000 points. It’s nuts.

There's no point collecting credit card points if you don't know how to use them. Click To Tweet

If, in the best-case scenario, I transfer those points out into an airline and book a sale price, business-class round trip, six-foot lie-flat bed to Paris and back, it can be done for 106,000 points. The idea here is if we know that we can get seven times the value on the way out, and right now, your credit card is giving you one point for every dollar you spend somewhere. There are credit cards out there that give you four times that. If you can get four times on the way in and seven times on the way out, that’s eleven times the amount of free travel that you were getting previously to this conversation. That, my friend, is what I do for a living.

That’s leveraging. I’m going to ignore our audience now completely. This is now just you and me because I want to know all of this. I piggyback on my curiosity because I’ve got points. I don’t know how to use them. I go to face Sapphire and look at their offerings. I burned almost everything by going into Cabo last December 2020 for Christmas. I didn’t know Jack.

I get it all the time. People email, DM, WhatsApp and back-channel me and say, “You would be so proud of me. I booked a trip to Japan on points.” I’m like, “Yeah, but how many points?” They’re like, “800,000 points.” I’m like, “I just did it for 45,000. I think you’ve still got some work to do. Go watch my master class.” Let’s make sure we’re bringing value to all your readers. Let me tell you about a couple of credit cards that are out there that are staggeringly great deals.

The first one is I won’t say the name of the company, but I will say you can get it in Gold or Rose Gold. It’s the only credit card on your website that is available in Rose Gold. It has a $250 annual fee. Don’t let that throw you off. If you write down everything I’m about to say, that card will end up costing you $10 a year. It has a 60,000-point sign-up bonus for spending $4,000 within six months. Let’s run the math. That’s an average of $750 a month, which anyone who is alive in America is probably spending on their credit card every month.

That stays within our Get Fundable Model of slow usage, so you don’t charge up to $4,000 the first time and throw yourself at the risk department. A little bit of that time grows with every month in those purchases until you hit the $4,000. This message is brought to you by GetFundable.com. Keep going.

You’ve now bagged yourself 60,000 points. Those points are the most transferable and the highest value of all the points in the ecosystem. When the card arrives, I want you to phone the number on the back of the card and ask to speak to card services. Once you get an agent on the phone, I want you to ask them to enroll you in the dining program, “Please enroll me in the dining program.” They’re going to read you a paragraph, “You’re not signing up or paying for anything. You’re just agreeing to terms and conditions.”

Once you’ve done that, you’re going to get $10 back every single month when you spend $10 or more in any of the six following places, Grubhub, Seamless, The Cheesecake Factory, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Shake Shack and Boxed, the delivery company. In other words, order one meal a month from Grubhub, you’re getting back $120 a year. It gets better. The card also comes with the same exact deal with Uber and Uber Eats, but you don’t need to enroll. Put your Gold or Rose Gold card in your Uber and Uber Eats app and you’re getting back another $120 a year. Between those two rebates, you’re getting $240 back a year. Thus, the card is costing you $10 a year.

For $10, you’ve already bagged yourself 60,000 points. None of that is the reason that I want you to get the card. The reason I want you to get the card is it comes with a staggering four times points on all of your food and drink. That is the number one place that people spend money, food and drink. There are a couple of exclusions, Target and Walmart, but outside of that, it doesn’t make a difference whether it’s a grocery store, supermarket, cafe, coffee house, bar, restaurant, food delivery or delicatessen. It makes no difference. You’re getting four times the points.

AYF/GF 156 | Credit Card Travel Hacks

Credit Card Travel Hacks: Learn how to be effective in using your credit card points.

 

The average person in America spends $1,000 a month on all of those food and drink categories. That means you’re getting 4,000 points a month. Let’s pretend you have another $1,000 of other spend, bills and bits and bobs. You’re now getting 5,000 points a month. At the end of year one, you’ll have about 60,000 points. Plus, you’ll have the 60,000 points you’ve got as a sign-up bonus. If you put those two together, you have about 120,000 points.

Even if you were blindfolded, drunk and hung upside down on one of the travel websites, you would get $1,200 worth of free travel for that. If you learn how to use your points correctly or watch my master class, you will see that is enough for a round trip business class, six-foot lie-flat bed from anywhere in America to anywhere in Asia or Europe and back again, which is worth $7,000. If I had a mic, I would drop it. I just have a pen, so I’m going to drop my pen instead.

At Get Fundable, in our universe, we talk about looking behind the curtain, “What are the insider secrets?” If you binged my episodes, you know all about insider secrets. It’s, “What’s going on behind the curtain?” We’ve talked about how to optimize your personal profile or business profile. I met you in Clubhouse. There are no accidents there.

This is the first time where we’re, “How do we optimize the actual points we’re using from the credit cards that are part of your optimization plan?” We’re telling you to get credit cards and this is the best time for Owen to announce this. If you go to GetFundableCreditCards.com, watch it. Graded by personal and business, you will see the tier of the cards, value contribution and everything we learned in the bootcamp.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about or you haven’t been to the bootcamp yet, then this is a double reason because what Owen is telling you is that we have got to leverage the very cards that are going to make us fundable and amazing business borrowers. We can now fly to France. I had a dream about being in Paris, France. Now, all of a sudden, you’re saying I can now take the trip. That is crazy talk. That is amazing. I now can go deeper inside of not just being fundable for external business borrowing, but now, improve the quality of our life.

I play a game called Next-Door Neighbors. The best part about what I do is not the fact that I don’t pay for travel or I fly on beds on planes. It’s to gain neighbors. When you’re on a plane and you have a bed, you reach over to the person who is your neighbor and say, “How much did you pay for this ticket?” They always say like, “$7,000 or $8,000.” That’s the fun part and the bit I love. They’re like, “What about you?” I’m like, “Nothing.”

Tell us about that if there are differences between personal and business points or otherwise. Is there any?

The short answer is no. All points within each bank, credit card company or institution are created equal. However, when you come to use those points, there are some benefits on some of the premium cards. If you have both personal and business credit cards within the same institution, you’re always going to want to move your points into the premium account and specifically with a bank beginning with a C that rhymes with face.

To know where we're going tomorrow, we have to know where we’re coming from. Click To Tweet

All your points are held separately in the different accounts, but you can click one button and move them all into that Sapphire account and then they’ll be of more value to you. All the other major credit card companies will pool your points together. It makes no difference. Whether you’re spending on personal or business, your points are yours and they’re held in one place.

It’s almost related to you as personal. Your Social Security account information holds all the points.

These banks are not foolish. They know that your business spend is taxable and has to do with your business, but you want the benefit personally and they arrange that for you. Your points have nothing to do with your credit card or spend.

I love that the point spend can be personal. I used all my points for Southwest to not pay charges on my business, which I can expense. I should be doing that over on my personal side ala Paris, France.

Where it gets even more interesting from a taxable perspective is if you’re doing a pay with points within your credit card company, technically, they charge your credit card and put it straight back on in exchange for taking your points. Theoretically, you could print that out and that could be taxed or a write-off for you. You still have a write-off and you haven’t even paid a penny for it.

Any other wows? I’m looking to make sure I’ve got everything that I need. How do people get ahold of you? How does my tribe start optimizing not just their fundability™ with me but the quality of their lives with you?

Go to my website, ThePointsPartner.com. I finished my master class. It has taken me a long time. I’m very proud of it. There are 67 or 68 short bite-sized videos where I explain in layman’s terms, step-by-step what to do in order not only to gain points but more importantly, how to use them. I go into immense detail, “Which transfer partners? When to sign up? What prices to look for? How to book a ticket? How to choose your seat on a plane?” I go through the entire process A to Z. For the first time ever, it’s not just available to wealthy people. It’s available to everyone and there are different-sized packages depending on your skillset. It’s nice and simple.

What about those people who want you to audit and hold their hands?

If people want me to do a white-glove service, if they still want to see me for a 1.5 or 2-hour consultation and for me to walk them through it, I’ll do that, but it’s not cheap. I charge $1,500 to do that and that’s not widely available to middle America. What it is, is $100 or $200, where they can watch it all themselves online and do it all. If they still need me, they can book time with me to ask a few questions.

AYF/GF 156 | Credit Card Travel Hacks

Credit Card Travel Hacks: If you have both personal and business credit cards within the same institution, always move your points into the premium account.

 

If they do the master class, they have eternal access to it, right?

Yes, absolutely.

It’s not timed or going to time out.

The aim and objective are that you can go on my website, and for $100 or $200, you can get access forever to watch me telling you what to do and when to do it. You can always refer back to it when you’re booking a ticket or choosing a credit card. It’s all there for you.

You started this, but I wanted to clean this up a little bit. The difference between miles and rebates is the points. I had points on my Southwest, but it’s an airline, which you would think would be in miles. Am I overthinking it?

I’m going to quote some extracts from the master class. I want you all to imagine we are lying on a beach. I take a handful of sand and drop it on the floor. As I drop that sand on the floor, because of gravity, that sand will land in a pyramid. This is what I call the Points Partner’s Pyramid of Points. At the top of the pyramid are all the credit card companies and their points. At the bottom of the pyramid, lined up next to each other, are 170 airlines and hotel groups and their air miles or point systems.

The reason I offer it to you as a pyramid is points can only go down the pyramid. They can’t go up the pyramid. If you have air miles with an airline or hotel group at the bottom, you can only use them where they are. If you have United Air miles, Delta, American, JetBlue or Southwest, you can only use them on their website. If you have credit card points, they transfer to all of the airlines and hotel groups. You can search the bottom for the best deal and then move the points.

Now, you connected the dots for me because that’s what I wanted to know because I’m sitting over here with Southwest. I nailed it on my trips, but if I use other cards, then I can use it anywhere. Sometimes, I have to take Delta instead of Southwest.

AYF/GF 156 | Credit Card Travel Hacks

 

Let’s do an example. We’ll use the example of me going to Paris. I’m not going to pay $7,000. I go and have a look at a bunch of different airlines. You don’t have to check all 170. By looking at 6 or 7, they are members of the alliances and they cover everything. In the best-case scenario, let’s say on Air France, I find a sale price, round trip business-class ticket for about 106,000 air miles plus taxes. That’s perfect. I will then go back up to the top of the pyramid to one of the major credit card companies, move those points into my Air France account and book it as a mileage ticket.

Where people go wrong is that they start at the bottom. They start by saying, “I’ve got Delta Air miles.” If you go on Delta, it’s 720,000 points. They’re like, “I don’t have enough,” and then they end up paying for the ticket. If you understand the rules of the game, you might have a chance of winning it. At the moment until you watch my master class and understand the rules, you’re trying to win a game that you don’t know the rules of. You’re never going to win.

Does this sound familiar, tribe? I preach the gospel of, “If you don’t know the rules, you can never win the game.” Once again, it’s so aligned. Connecting with our tribe, how did you trip and fall into this space? I get the passion behind it because you’re revealing the magic. What was it that kept you here?

In order to know where we’re going, we have to know where we’ve come from. I spent many years flying around the world for business and my company only put me on a couch. It was painful having to sleep upright from London to Asia, Asia to America, so on and so forth. I started getting into air miles and understanding, “Is there any way I can upgrade myself?” What started off as a necessity for a bed on a plane while I was working became a passion, which became a hobby. A hobby became an obsession and an obsession then became my business. Now, I’m The Points Partner.

What’s interesting is that it got to a point where I was spending so much of my time helping friends and family, either choosing credit cards or booking them flights, that there was no time left in the day for me to do my job. That’s when I went, “There’s something here.” Credit card companies and airlines do a terrible job of communicating this information to the average consumer. I fill that space in between.

I’m not a matchmaker for people in credit cards and airlines. I don’t work for any bank, credit card company, institution, airline or hotel group. I have deals with them all so you can get them all on your website or mine, but I don’t work for them. My job is to mathematically explain why you would want this credit card over this credit card and how you would move points here instead of there.

AYF/GF 156 | Credit Card Travel Hacks

 

Tribe, does that sound familiar again where a third party because banks and lenders suck at telling you how to perform good borrower behaviors, there’s a space for us to be able to come in and know? My passion is similar to yours. It’s connecting the dots that they’re either too unwitting, lazy or it’s not important enough or they’re making enough money without borrowers knowing how to do it. This is why Owen is on our show is because it’s about revealing the rules of the game and how to use these insider secrets to maximize your quality of life, just like we’re maxing our fundability™. Any final words to wrap up the bomb you dropped on the Get Fundable universe?

To simplify it, look at where you’re spending your money for you or your business and get the right credit cards on Merrill’s GetFundableCreditCards.com. Take my master class, learn how to use those points efficiently and effectively and then we can put you on beds on planes for free.

Thank you so much. Apparently, I now have a Points Partner who is capable of instructing you on how to optimize your quality of life and spend the money on the actual credit instruments that are going to be able to leverage business lines of credit, business loans and all of the commercial lending that we are after. Now, you get to travel and stay the night for free on the very road to us building our businesses. Have a great day.

Important Links:

About Owen Beiny

AYF/GF 156 | Credit Card Travel HacksAfter 20 years of flying around the globe for FREE, The Points Partner Owen Beiny now teaches others how to do it also using the power of credit card points and air miles.