Frequent Flyer Miles 101

Alright, as promised, here are some free/cheap/fairly easy mile earning activities.

I am definitely not a proponent of applying for every good credit card offer out there, or of carrying balances on your card. However, life does require the spending of money and you might as well get something for it!! Pick a good mileage earning credit card, stick to it, and put every penny you spend on it. Using cash is a wasted opportunity. A few of my favorites:

American Airlines card with 75,000 bonus miles. Best sign-up bonus around right now if you are looking for a quick way to make a lot of miles. This link takes you to the application, this link has a good explanation.

British Airways Visa. 50,000 mile sign up bonus, 1.25 miles/dollar spend (every other card is 1 mile/dollar) and no foreign transaction fees. Best way to get to Asia on the fewest miles. My friends just went to SE Asia for 50,000 (see their great blogging of it here) and I just booked my parents business class to Vietnam for 100,000 each (thats a $7,000 ticket).

Continental card. Usually between 30-40,000 miles for signing up but they definitely have the best partners around that fly the most places and have the most seats available, especially if you are interested in going to Europe.

Alaska Airlines Visa. Only 25,000 miles for signing up but comes with a $99 companion ticket every single year. For only $99 you can bring someone with you on any Alaska/Horizon flight, which is an awesome deal if you fly to Hawaii or Mexico or somewhere else where flights are expensive.



Non-Credit Card Deals*

Chase Bank just got rid of an offer for 25,000 miles each for a business and personal account that you could do every single year. That got us to Morocco and First Class to Mexico City last year. They just discontinued it b/c is was Continental  miles and they are merging with United but I'm pretty sure they'll be bringing back something new in the near future. I'll keep you updated.

Citibank has a checking account you get 20,000 miles for opening. It has a $6,000 minimum balance, which is kind of a bummer and it takes about 6 mos to get all the miles, but if you have that $$ sitting around somewhere else anyway then this is a great way to earn 20,000 miles for it.

The following are all smaller mileage opportunites but either free or very cheap and every bit helps!

Sharebuilder gives around 2000 miles for opening an account on a number of different airlines. It's a free account, you can invest as little as $5 in any stock/mutual fund you want and you get miles! Put a little money in, get some miles, forget about it, and come back in six months and (hopefully) realize you made some $$ off it too! Continental, Alaska, check your airlines website for more 

If you happen to be signing up for Netflix anyway (or perhaps cancel, and re sign up?) a number of airlines offer around 2000 for signing up. American, Delta, United, try google for more.

Dining programs. Most airlines have a dining program where you just register your credit cards, and then when you eat somehwere and use those cards you automatically get somewhere between 5-10 miles for every $$ you spend. There's actually a number of restaurants on there that I go to anyway, so I just register my cards and then every once in a while find that I got 300 miles for eating out. Neat. Alaska, American, check your airline's website for more.

AA is giving 800 miles right now for trying Safeway's home delivery. Your first order is free delivery, so it saves you a trip to the grocery store, and gets you 800 miles.

If you are someone that is an Aunt/Uncle/friend of my parents/other person that has more money than most people my age: Fidelity and TD Ameritrade give up to 50,000 miles for investing with them. If you do this anyway this can be a pretty sweet deal, they are free accounts, you can transfer stocks directly so that you don't have to actually buy/sell, and there is no time restriction for how long you need to keep the $$ there. Continental, American, American, check the website of your airline for more.

There are zillions of other great deals out there. I can't list them all. If you want to really get into this a) look on the airlines website where you already have some miles accumulated, they have lots of great deals listed on there and b) check out flyertalk.com . FlyerTalk is a community of people who like to fly/travel and have strange obsessions with miles. Some of them may be certifiably insane based on the lengths they go to in order to get miles but they have so so many great ideas. Browse the MilesBuzz forum to keep up with all the latest and greatest.

Also, pick an airline or two, and stick to it. It doesn't help you at all to have 10,000 miles scattered around with each airline. Think about which pleaces you are interested in going to, browse websites to see which airlines have partners that fly which places and how many miles it takes to get each place and pick what seems right for you.

*Please read the fine print on the actual websites for all these offers. Sometimes they have weird details and I have not attempted to list every little detail of the promotion here, but I have tried these all myself and promise they work and are not too crazy.




We spent some time last week at my parents house in Olalla while they are down in Mexico. We got really lucky with some beautiful weather and a nice full moon and low tide for a beach walk. It was so bright out that the last couple pictures were taken at almost midnight and my shutter speed wasn't even all that slow.

(you can't see him very well, but this is my seal friend who kept me company while Matt was at work)

Down Under

Sorry to disappoint. That would be 'down under' as in, our basement not Australia. Someday we will make it to Australia, and it will be very cool. Lately though, we've just been working on the basement.

If you missed the previous updates and have a thing for sledgehammers, crowbars, grout, jackhammers, or other such man-ness you can check them out here, here, here, and here. Now we're putting things back together again.

Back in December my Dad and our contractor came over for the day and Matt took they day off work. They replaced this ugly old window (why is it brown???) with two new ones. Light! Let there be light!

They got bored (ha) and decided to move this support beam that used to be right in the middle of where I didn't want it to be! to somewhere out of the way. woohooo.

(this is the before)

Matt framed the bonus room that the boys tore apart last September.
 
Last week Ron & co came out and turned this electrical mess...

...into this. Thank goodness. I was tired of getting shocked.
 

Then Matt and I had a busy, busy weekend.

Looks like cotton candy no?

It's insulation. We spent countless hours cutting and stapling up the pink fluffy stuff into every wall and ceiling joist. It's actually fiberglass and not quite so friendly and fluffy. It's itchy and bad for your lungs. Glad that's over.

Sunday we got to the really exciting stuff. Sheetrock! Ok, I know, sheetrock is a nightmare. I've heard it all. I think the part of hanging it is better than mudding and sanding though, and it's pretty exciting to see a place come together and actually start to look like a room after so much work. All we got done was the ceiling in the bonus room, but its a great start and we feel like we learned a lot so the next chunk will go more quickly.

Anyone want to come help?? :)



Bonus shot: our cozy little cottage when it snowed last week

Where in the world....

Points to whoever can guess the three countries on our list for the first half of 2011!

(It doesn't count if you already know...)

Found! Cuba Video

I signed up for a checking account with Key Bank last summer and a week before our Cuba trip my freeee iPod Touch came in the mail (thanks Key!). I was still trying to figure out how to use it on this trip (it has HD video but you have to remember not to fill it up with music, because then there will not be room for video) but when I got back I forgot all about it. I finally remembered the existence of my iTouch and uploaded these. None of them turned out all that well, but somewhat interesting anyway. Cuba blogging was way back here, here, here, here and here.

Some music & dancing on Callejon de Hamel

A pano of the view from La Cabaña Fort in Havana and a quick hello from Matt & Adrienne

Some music & dancing at Tropicana

2010 In Review

I think if I never have another year like 2010 until I'm retired I will still consider myself a lucky person.

Matt & Mackenzie 2010 in review

7 countries

8 states

13 days of backpacking

47 days out of the country

195,000 frequent flyer miles used each

20,000 ft mountain + Mt Rainier.

*** If you like traveling but aren't sure how to get so much if it in, my best advice (aside from getting a job with lots of vacation and flexibility) is to stack up frequent flyer miles. If you're looking for a good place to start, the American Airlines 75,000 mile sign up bonus card that I mentioned this summer is still live. I'll try to put up some different, non-credit card offers soon because a lot of people have been asking me about them lately. If you have them and can't figure out how to use them: ask me. I like helping.

Christmas in Medford + Crater Lake

We spent a record eight days in Medord this year for Christmas...so thankful that we both have jobs that let us work from random locations when necessary. It was wonderful catching up with family and friends and getting to spend some time relaxing and outdoors. I won't bore you with details of family meals and such but here are some pictures.

Christmas eve dinner

Hi Ben. You are the cutest nephew ever.

I turned another year older. Finally.

Uncle Matt & a mischevous Ben

We took a snowshoe trip to Crater Lake. It's only 2 hours from Medford, and I had never been there! The road was closed because of snow so we ended up hiking to the lake instead of around the lake. It was snowing pretty hard, so we didn't actually see much of the lake. It was beautiful anyway though and we made some cool new friends, so it all worked out. We'll try again in the summer.

 

If you can't see the real thing, a plastic model is always good too, right?

Pretty.

Matt's dad restores sweet old cars. We spent some time at his shop visiting, checking things out, and poking around. If you need a car restored, he's the man.

We also got in some good visits with our friends whose wedding we went to in Kentucky last summer, discovered that Medford actually has a great tapas restaurant, rediscovered a passion for the original Nintendo (in the case of the boys), and just generally had a great time catching up with everybody.

*If you're wondering what's in store for the Sullivans in 2011...don't worry. We'll update you on some exciting new travel adventures very soon.


**Thanks everybody who chipped in with advice for my photo problem after the last post! Steven is the winner with the suggestion of just buying an extra 20GB of memory from Google for a measly $5/year. Yipee. The photos will continue.