Thinking about price compression

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Travel hacking means never paying full price, whether it's for flights, hotels, rental cars, or any of the other travel expenses we develop techniques to minimize, evade or completely avoid. One interesting consequence of this is what I would like to call "price compression." There are two ways this phenomenon manifests:

  • More expensive itineraries don't cost more miles or points. The classic example here would be an economy itinerary that costs $150 and a first class itinerary that costs $350: both would cost 20,000 US Bank Flexpoints, so the passenger wouldn't incur any additional cost by taking the more expensive, higher-earning flight. Another fairly common situation is with American Airlines award availability: there will be only expensive AAnytime availability for economy seats, but SAAver availability for first class seats. The difference in miles, and the cost of manufacturing those miles, is often trivial.
  • The price ratio between expensive and cheap itineraries is the same, but scaled drastically downwards. For example, someone redeeming Chase Ultimate Rewards points earned with an Ink Cash, Bold, or Plus card at gas stations might pay roughly 1 cent for 2.5 cents in airfare. A $500 flight still costs twice as many Ultimate Rewards points as a $250 flight, but the numbers are scaled down, to $200 versus $100 in total out-of-pocket expenses. An even more extreme example would be Citi ThankYou points earned (starting April 19, 2015) with a ThankYou Premier card at 3 points per dollar spent at gas stations, then redeemed for 1.6 cents each on American Airlines or US Airways flights (with a ThankYou Premier card).

Think about out-of-pocket costs earlier, not later

Once you've earned miles or points, a common impulse among travel hackers is to assign value to them corresponding to their redemption value, rather than their acquisition cost. This was the theory motivating Frequent Miler's Reasonable Redemption Values, for example: the value of a mile or point is the value of the award that currency is typically redeemed for.

Only later, after booking an award redemption, do you hear people say "I paid $87.50 for a $5,000 BusinessElite ticket to Europe" (using Delta SkyMiles as an example).

What I would like to suggest is that price compression makes it worth considering your total out-of-pocket expenses earlier, rather than later, in the redemption process. It still makes sense to base your earning decisions on the imputed redemption values of your miles and points, but when it comes time to redeem them, it makes sense to look at your out-of-pocket expenses as well.

Price compression at work: paid tickets on American and Delta

Perhaps it's unsurprising why I've been giving this topic some thought lately: the recent massacre of Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan earning on Delta-operated flights.

On the one hand, the new Mileage Plan earning rates have made me more willing to book flights on American Airlines, since even slightly more expensive flights earn two to four times more Mileage Plan miles. On the other hand, it has made me more diligent about checking first class fares on the Delta flights I would, all else being equal, prefer to take.

An upcoming trip to Boston illustrates this point nicely (my earning as an Alaska Airlines MVP Gold 75k is in parentheses):

  • A Delta flight in the "V" economy fare bucket costs $386, and will earn 1,222 (2749) Mileage Plan miles;
  • An American flight in economy costs $540, and will earn 2,734 (6151) Mileage Plan miles;
  • The cheapest Delta first class flight costs $697, and will earn 3,055 (6873) Mileage Plan miles.

That's a fairly significant range of prices. But what about the "compressed" prices of those flights — the out-of-pocket cost of the spend manufactured in order to purchase those fares?

If you're manufacturing Ultimate Rewards points with a Chase Ink Plus at 0.49 cents each, and redeeming them at 1.25 cents each, the three flights cost:

  • Delta "V" economy: $151
  • American economy: $211
  • Delta first: $273

Here you can see the ratio between prices is the same, but the prices are compressed so there's a much smaller difference in the passenger's actual out-of-pocket expenses for the three flights.

Likewise, the three prices fall into three different US Bank Flexperks Travel redemption bands. If you're manufacturing Flexpoints at gas stations for 0.49 cents each (or grocery stores for 0.69 cents each), the three flights will cost:

  • Delta "V" economy: $98 ($138)
  • American economy: $147 ($207)
  • Delta first: $196 (276)

Knowing your out-of-pocket costs promotes clear thinking

I'm not arguing that it's worth paying $98 for 4,124 Mileage Plan miles. At 2.4 cents each, that's fairly expensive from the perspective of manufactured spend. But of course you're not just earning redeemable miles; you're also earning elite-qualifying miles, helping you qualify or re-qualify for elite status.

If the status in question is Alaska Airlines MVP Gold 75k, then you'll receive an additional 50,000 bonus Mileage Plan miles when you qualify. That doesn't mean booking the most expensive flights available is always a good idea, but those bonus miles do mitigate some increased out-of-pocket expenses, once those out-of-pocket costs have been transformed by the miracle of manufactured spend.

You'd also be flying in first class. Whatever you think about free booze, checked bags, early boarding, and so on, they're not worth nothing.

Are you redeeming your miles and points fast enough?

I relentlessly advocate earning miles and points with specific redemptions in mind. But I understand perfectly well that that's not always easy to do. Your upcoming travel schedule may not be knowable in advance. Award space you were counting on may not materialize, leaving you with an unexpectedly large balance. And of course you may simply have access to more manufactured spend than you can reasonably plan redemptions around.

That being the case, taking a look at your out-of-pocket expenses may help you realize you can afford to travel more and travel better than you thought. Instead of comparing each redemption against some ideal redemption you read about online, try comparing redemptions against the price you paid for those miles and points. When it's a matter of a hundred dollars to fly across the country or world in a premium cabin, your economy cabin may be a false economy after all.

Two weird redemptions I just made

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I try to be as transparent as possible about my own mile and point redemptions because I'm absolutely atypical compared to most travel hackers: I don't have a family so I'm shopping for a maximum of 2 seats; I generally don't mind flying coach (as long as I get an aisle seat, preferably in an exit row); and I take 2-4 vacations per month, visiting friends and family all over the country, which means I need to stretch my miles and points as far as possible.

That colors my manufactured spend strategy, and makes my experience more or less irrelevant for some readers (you can't redeem SkyMiles for first class seats, so all my Delta posts are useless for those interested in flying in international first class cabins).

In that spirit, here are a couple weird redemptions I made on Saturday.

Ultimate Rewards points for a cheap American flight

Besides my Chase Freedom cards, these days I'm earning Ultimate Rewards points with a Chase Ink Plus card at 0.67 (office supply stores) and 0.49 (gas stations) cents each, and I have a lot of them. Those points can be redeemed for 1 cent each in cash, transferred to Hyatt, United, and Southwest for quite valuable redemptions, or redeemed for 1.25 cents each for paid airfare.

For an upcoming trip to Reno, I was looking at a $199.60 one-way flight on American Airlines (I had already booked the return with Flexpoints). I've long found these piddling airfares to be some of the most annoying to game: they're too cheap for 20,000 Flexpoint redemptions, but also too cheap to redeem a valuable mileage currency like Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles for. I could pay with my Barclaycard Arrival+ card, but I have plenty of travel purchases waiting for redemptions and don't need an additional one.

So instead, I redeemed 15,968 Ultimate Rewards points for the ticket. Those points cost me (on average) 0.58 cents each, or about $92 all together. In other words, I got a 54% discount on a paid ticket. That's nothing to aspire to, but there's a good reason why I did it: I don't need the points for any upcoming transfers and they're only worth 1 cent each when redeemed for cash.

PayPal Extras MasterCard points for an even cheaper flight

Here's one that readers might actually find useful, if they've been following my PayPal adventures for the last few months. A PayPal Extras MasterCard is permanently linked to the PayPal account through which you applied for it. But when that PayPal account is closed (or "permanently limited" in their jargon), the Extras MasterCard continues to work and, importantly, continues to earn points.

Ordinarily, Extras MasterCard points are worth 0.83 cents each in cash: you can redeem 6,000 points for $50 deposited instantly into the linked PayPal account. With all my PayPal accounts permanently limited, that wasn't going to work for me, so I started exploring the other points redemptions available.

It turns out that for the month of February, virtually all redemptions have been cut in price, in some cases dramatically. For almost all gift card and travel redemptions, Extras MasterCard points are worth 1 cent each in February.

Two of those redemptions are for "flight discounts" of $100 or $300:

In late April I'm returning to Lexington, Kentucky, to visit an old friend and bet on some horses. I was able to easily book my outbound flight with 12,500 Delta SkyMiles, but there was no award availability for my return. There was, however, a perfect American Airlines itinerary that cost just $174.60. Whenever practical, my preference this year is going to be to book paid American flights in order to credit them to Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan.

So I redeemed 10,000 Extras MasterCard points for a $100 discount on the flight. When redeeming Extras MasterCard points for a travel discount, you're taken to an extremely primitive travel portal run by a 3rd party provider. Fortunately, that means you don't need to pay for your flight with your Extras MasterCard. That's unlike, for example, a partial Ultimate Rewards redemption, which requires you to use a Chase credit card for any remaining amount after applying Ultimate Rewards points.

I used my Arrival+ MasterCard, and the charge appears in my pending transactions as "American Airlines," so I'm confident I'll be able to redeem Arrival+ miles against the remainder.

Personal finance digression: my beef with Future Advisor

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This isn't a personal finance blog, or a financial independence blog, or an early retirement blog. But I understand there's a lot of overlap in interest between those subjects and travel hacking, so every once in a while I let myself vent about the personal finance industry (see: "Pound Foolish" is a pretty good book").

I was complaining on Twitter about Future Advisor the other day and got into a back-and-forth with their social media team. I want to expand on my point and explain why Future Advisor does not and cannot do what they claim to do: "actively monitor and manage our clients' IRA, Roth, and taxable accounts from a household-wide, long-term perspective."

How Future Advisor works

When you create a Future Advisor account, you're asked for just three pieces of information: your current age, your target retirement age, and your risk tolerance ("Conservative," "Moderate," or "Aggressive"). Based on that information, Future Advisor creates a "Target Portfolio" and a recommended asset allocation. Here's their recommended asset allocation for me:

Next, Future Advisor asks for your current "financial profile." You can either manually input your current investments, or enter your login information and Future Advisor will download the details of your investments automatically. Here's my current financial profile:

Once you've completed those two steps, Future Advisor gives you an "Action Plan," telling you what to do with your current assets in order to bring your plan in line with the asset allocation they recommended based on your age, target retirement date, and risk tolerance. Here's the action plan for my Vanguard Roth IRA account:

Future Advisor does not consider interest earned on cash savings

Note in the current asset allocation picture I showed above, Future Advisor only allows you to add "cash you would like to invest."

The cash I have in my Mango savings account is not "cash I would like to invest," however. It is cash I already have invested — in a 5.28% (after $36 in annual fees) APR savings account! There's no way to tell that to Future Advisor. On the contrary, if I input the value of my Mango savings account, I'm told to move it all into investments that mirror the original target asset allocation Future Advisor proposed:

The explanation for this recommendation leaves me (almost) speechless:

Future Advisor is projecting an average growth of 5% in my cash — cash I'm holding in a savings account that already earns more than that!

This means Future Advisor cannot do what it claims to do

While looking at your target asset allocation, you can see an explanation of each proposed investment. Here's the important part for my point:

The "green" portion of my recommended asset allocation (15% of the total in the first picture) is intended to "reduce overall risk" and "offer growth in bear markets." If I have $5,000 invested in an FDIC-insured savings account with a high, fixed interest rate, and the goal is to reduce overall risk and offer growth in bear markets, logically I shouldn't invest any money in "Investment Grade Bonds," "Inflation Protected Bonds," or "International Bonds" until the total size of my portfolio is over $33,333 (15% of which would be the $5,000 balance in my high-yield savings account).

By ignoring the interest rate on my cash savings, Future Advisor gives inappropriate advice given its own stated investment objectives when designing a target portfolio.

What I'm saying (and what I'm not saying)

Let me be perfectly clear before this becomes a discussion of ideal asset allocations: I am not saying that the target asset allocation designed by Future Advisor is a "bad" asset allocation.

I'm also not saying that my current asset allocation is a "good" asset allocation. Indeed, the same criticism of Future Advisor could be applied to the target retirement date mutual fund my Roth IRA is invested in: since that target retirement date fund also has a bond component (10.1%), I would logically be better served by replicating the stock holdings of the target retirement date fund, while using my high-yield savings account to replicate the bond component with higher yield and lower risk.

I'm not going to do that, but it's a legitimate suggestion.

What I am saying is that Future Advisor, which claims to provide exactly that kind of advice, is incapable of providing it since it doesn't ask what the current yield is on your FDIC-insured savings accounts. Without having that information, it provides bad advice by its own standard of optimizing your holdings across all "IRA, Roth, and taxable accounts from a household-wide, long-term perspective."

In fairness, Future Advisor's social media team doesn't even dispute this.

The only remaining question, then, is why they are still in business?

Weekend blog housekeeping

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Here are a few updates I thought I'd share with my readers.

New blog subscription provider

If you were signed up for a PayPal subscription back in December, before the account I was using to handle subscriptions was closed by PayPal, you should have already received multiple communications from me about resubscribing through my new subscription provider, Moon Clerk.

If you weren't a PayPal subscriber, you may still have noticed that the PayPal subscription box in the right-hand sidebar has been replaced with a Moon Clerk subscription box.

If you enjoy getting news, analysis, and laughs from this site, I hope you'll consider signing up for a blog subscription. It's by far my largest source of income from this site.

As my small way of saying thanks, blog subscribers receive my occasional subscribers-only newsletters and access to the complete archive of past newsletters.

In case you're concerned about the security of your data, I looked into this, and Moon Clerk is an API for Stripe.com, a very reputable payments provider. Arguably more reputable than PayPal, for instance (see: account closures). You can read more about their security protocols here.

Thoughts on Google AdSense

A few months back, I got around to signing up for Google AdSense, and added a little AdSense box in the right-hand sidebar. Personally, I use AdBlock, so I never see the thing, but if you visit my website without AdBlock you might see something like this:

I don't know what a Simplify Commerce by MasterCard is, but if they want to throw a few shekels my way, who am I to complain?

After signing up for an account, I went through and blocked the "Credit Cards" ad category, since Google ads invariably offer the very worst signup bonuses, and I didn't want there to be any suggestion that I recommended the cards being served by Google:

Unfortunately, that had almost no effect on the credit card ads being served. So then I manually blocked each credit card URL as I came across it in my "Ad review center:"

 

That seems to have mostly staunched the flow of credit card ads (though let me know if you see any and I'll try to figure out what's going on).

In any case, I periodically check in on my Google AdSense account to make sure it's still chugging along. Here are my earnings from last month, for instance:

I guess no one had anything to do but visit my site on Christmas day!

What I didn't realize until I started digging into my ad "revenue" (I haven't actually received a payment yet) is that I'm not just paid when people click on my ads. Apparently I also earn a few tenths of a cent whenever anyone visits my site:

That may sound obvious, but I'm having a hard time describing the effect this realization had on me. After all, I basically don't promote my site at all. I have a Twitter account where I joke around with other travel hackers, but that's about it. But it turns out, every time a reader decides to visit my site, instead of reading my posts on Feedly or receiving them by e-mail, I earn as much as half a cent!

I don't know what I'm going to do with this information yet. Should I post more often? Start more fights with other bloggers?

In any case, the least I can do is encourage my readers to visit the site! Read the comments; there's often a ton of information there I didn't know or forgot to mention in the body of my posts. Leave a comment of your own!

The site's really an incredible resource, and I learn more from my readers every day than I could ever possibly hope to share. So stop on by! I think you'll like it.

My 2014 in miles and points

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It's still January, and that means the blogger's code entitles me to write a 2014 retrospective on the miles and points I earned and redeemed in 2014. Last year I wrote an in-depth 2013 end-of-year accounting that included detailed information about all the fees I incurred manufacturing spend. My manufactured spending has sprawled a bit too much to make that practical this year, but I'll still give the total figure for everything I classified as "fees and charges" in my Mint account in 2014.

Here are my best estimates and calculations of all the miles and points I earned and redeemed in 2014:

There are a few obvious discrepancies in this chart.

  • My Barclaycard Arrival+ miles don't quite square up, I assume because the 10% rebate is screwing with my calculations in some way; I may be double-counting some miles incorrectly, for example. I'm only 10,000 miles off, though, which is actually a pretty small margin of error, all things considered..
  • The other discrepancies are mostly related to points transfers; for example I currently have (many) more Hyatt points than I earned since I transferred some points from Ultimate Rewards that I didn't ultimately redeem.

Regarding the fees I incurred in 2014, I should note this includes things like my monthly $3 Mango prepaid card fee and $12 Suntrust checking account fee. In other words, they aren't all directly connected to manufactured spending.

Why do I travel hack?

You don't typically read about me redeeming my miles for first class flights or my hotel points for 5-star resorts. That's not because I have any objection to comfort (and I have a lot fewer objections after my 11-hour flight from Rome in economy!), rather it's because I'm traveling more or less constantly, and want to stretch my miles as far as possible.

I love being able to take a trip to Portland just to see Star Trek in the Park, to Boston to see my best friend perform in a standup showcase, or to Lexington for a long weekend of pony racing and breweries with friends, paying a fraction of retail by redeeming miles or points I've acquired cheaply.

I redeemed a bit over 240,000 Skymiles, for example, in 2014, and I redeemed them exclusively on domestic roundtrips. Instead of 2 roundtrips in Business Elite, I took a bunch of vacations to visit friends and family all over the country.

I don't think that decision is "superior" in any way to the Business Elite alternative, but it's the strategy that works for me, for now.

Thoughts on 2015

At the beginning of 2014 I was still somewhat attached to the circus of chasing high signup bonuses. Today, I'm focused on cards that provide valuable recurring benefits and those that are worth manufacturing spend on. I'd rather have 5,000 miles I made a deliberate calculation to earn, knowing I'll redeem them, than 50,000 "opportunistic" miles I have no idea what to do with.

For example, today I have over 60,000 miles in what will become the combined American Airlines AAdvantage program, and no plans or really even interest in redeeming them, a result of last year's January application cycle.

With that in mind, here are some of the cards I plan on picking up at some point in 2015:

  • Citi Double Cash. Negative 2% interest rate on a 15-month loan? Yes please!
  • Starwood Preferred Guest American Express. I'm tired of asking my (working stiff) brother to book my Starwood reservations for me.
  • Chase IHG Rewards Club Select MasterCard. I'll use the signup bonus (and 20,000 current points) to turn my 2 "Into the Nights" award nights into a longer vacation.
  • US Bank Club Carlson Premier Rewards Visa. I already have the small business version of this card, which has a lower annual fee of $60, but I'm interested in finding out whether a second card account, linked to a second Club Carlson account, will let me redeem more than one consecutive "last night free." Even if that isn't possible, I value the 40,000 annual anniversary points at substantially more than the $75 annual fee, and will happily keep the card until that benefit is ended (or Club Carlson undergoes a massive devaluation!).

Besides those, I plan on applying for and taking advantage of the high promotional cash back earning rates that continue to be offered by a few regional and national banks.

Because cash is the one thing I'm always willing to acquire opportunistically!

Quick hit: Orbitz $100 off $100+ promo is back (2 nights required)

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Via Miles To Memories, run, don't walk over to Orbitz.com and start booking pairs of nights for $100 off using promo code "VISACHECKOUT" and paying through, you guessed it, Visa Checkout.

Your total stay cost must exceed $100 before the discount is applied, your stay must be two or more nights, and not all properties are eligible. According to Miles To Memories, the code is good for travel between December 10 and June 30, 2015.

If you don't have an Orbitz Rewards account yet, feel free to sign up using my referral link. If you do, we'll each earn $25 in Orbucks. And don't forget to click through a shopping portal for additional cash back: TopCashBack is currently paying 7% on Orbitz reservations, although only 2% on reservations made with a coupon code.

Update: selling Marriott gift cards to Cardpool

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Last month I wrote about a nice opportunity to score Marriott stays on the cheap or make a quick buck buying Marriott gift cards for 25% off and then reselling them at 92% of their face value.

First the good news: as expected, Marriott gift card purchases of $200 or more made at Marriott properties (not their multitude of other brands) counted towards the American Express Sync offer, and I received $50 statement credits on all my cards within a day or two.

However, you may remember that my plan was to resell those gift cards, since I so rarely pay for hotel stays that it would take me years to spend $800 at Marriott properties. Consequently, last week I went to sell a single Marriott gift card to Cardpool, and immediately ran into a problem: when submitting a card's details, Cardpool requires a 15-digit gift card number. But the cards I bought have 20-digit gift card number, plus 4-digit PIN's! Fearing the worst, I wrote to Cardpool asking if they only purchased 15-digit gift cards, and whether there was a workaround.

There was. This afternoon, Cardpool wrote me back, explaining:

"Simple [sic] enter the 15 digits for the gift card number and input the remaining number + the PIN number as PIN number or CID."

So there you have it: if you're reselling a 20-digit Marriott gift card to Card Pool, enter the first 15 exposed digits as the card number, and the remaining digits plus the PIN in the second required field.

Oh, and if you're reselling to Cardpool, be sure to click through TopCashBack in order to earn an additional 4% of the card's face value in cash back.

Reflections on a long weekend of deals

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I hope all my American readers had safe and meaningful Thanksgiving holidays, and all my other readers didn't miss me too much this weekend!

I feel pretty good about the deals I participated in this weekend, but I definitely got frustrated at various points and learned some valuable lessons, lessons I hopefully won't forget over the next 12 months! Here are three.

Plan ahead for Small Business Saturday

Going into Saturday, I had 2 American Express-issued credit cards, each with one authorized user, 2 eligible prepaid cards, each with one sub-account, and one third-party American Express card (the Fidelity Investment Rewards American Express) for a total of 9 eligible cards, or 27 transactions eligible for a $10 rebate.

I managed to make all 27 transactions, but it wasn't easy and it wasn't fun, mainly because my family insisted on coming along with me, then immediately becoming impatient as I did what I needed to do to maximize my value from the promotion.

I had a few problems repeat themselves over the course of the day:

  • Cashiers could not understand what I wanted to do. The most frustrating example of this was a cute chocolate shop which I visited Friday afternoon to go through my plan: buy a ton of chocolate, then pay $10 at a time with a bunch of American Express cards. The same cashier, perhaps the owner, was working on Saturday, and I asked for about $50 in assorted truffles, caramels, powders, and bars. When I went to pay, I reminded her I needed to pay $10 at a time and she responded, "Oh, we can't do that." I ended up salvaging the situation by having her ring up each item separately, but couldn't help silently wondering: "do a lot of your customers come in a day in advance and spend 10 minutes explaining their shopping plans to you?"
  • Technical limitations. Another merchant couldn't split transactions between credit cards. He was apologetic, but it still meant I couldn't buy anything very expensive from him.
  • Problems with gift cards. Small merchants in my hometown don't seem to sell a lot of gift cards, and the cashiers may not have much experience ringing them up (setting aside problems with split tenders!). At one merchant, the cashier slipped up and handed me an unactivated gift card. Since this wasn't my first rodeo, I was sure to check the gift card's serial number against the receipt he gave me; they didn't match, and he was able to find the activated one in the pile by his register.

Ultimately, I found that bars and restaurants were more patient, experienced, and friendly than any of the actual shops I went to. I feel somewhat ambivalent about this, since I would have done more shopping for actual Christmas gifts if the retail cashiers helping me had the same friendly attitude as the bars, restaurants, and breweries where I simply bought gift cards.

Maintain a demand schedule

The only Cyber Monday deal I participated in was the Orbitz offer of $100 off any hotel reservation of $100 or more. I have two trips planned for the next few months and was able to save $100 on each of 4 nights, canceling the much more expensive stays I had already booked.

I would have booked more nights under the promotion, but for two issues: first, most of my nights are already booked on points. While I considered canceling more of my existing reservations in order to rebook the nights through Orbitz, I already have the monthly points income I need. Canceling some reservations in order to book cheap paid stays would just increase my balance of orphaned points; I'd rather enjoy my Diamond elite status with Hilton and my last-night-free premium redemption with Club Carlson and keep those balances nice and low.

Second, the travel I have planned for later next year isn't close enough to finalized to be able to book hotel stays around it. And that brings me to the concept of a demand schedule, an idea I learned about from Sam at Milenomics, but have implemented only sloppily. The basic idea is to know, in advance, all the trips you are expecting to take for the next year, with as much information as possible about each trip. Once you have a demand schedule, whenever a deal comes along, whether it's free hotel nights anywhere in the world, first class mistake fares, or buggy airline redemptions, you know the cities, nights, and flights to search for first.

I was only able to book 4 nights through the Cyber Monday Orbitz deal, but it's not as if I'll only be traveling 4 nights next year. On the contrary, I'll take dozens of trips, and if I had already planned them out more carefully, I'd have booked all my hotel nights for pennies on the dollar this morning.

Be active on Twitter

Fortunately, this is a lesson I learned early and well. Throughout the day on Saturday and Monday I was reading updates from Twitter users and travel hackers all over the country reporting their own experiences, information I could immediately put into action. In fact, I only learned about the Orbitz promotion mentioned above through Twitter on Sunday night. If I'd missed it, I'd feel like a colossal mark.

Back in June I shared a list of Twitter feeds I think are worth following. Here are a few more:

  • @PointsWithACrew. Posts a lot of clickbait, but ignore that; he also shares some good deals, and is a decent writer.
  • @travelwithgrant. Active on Twitter and in the community, and passes along good deals.
  • @milestomemories. Where I found out about today's Orbitz offer, and many others.
  • @Drofcredit. Encyclopedic approach to bank deals, and very helpful on Twitter.

All those guys write blogs too, but I find it tough to read very many blogs, or even scan their headlines, anymore. For me, Twitter is the perfect medium: it gives you access to longer pieces if a headline grabs your attention (which is why clickbait is a cardinal sin) while also letting you interact with the authors if you have specific followup questions.

If you're interested in my own Twitter musings, you can of course follow me @FreequentFlyr.

Pro tip: finding information on this site

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My goal when starting this blog was to write the kind of blog I would want to read, and part of that project has been the fact that I almost never repeat the same information twice. If I were an affiliate blogger I might find excuses to repeat the same tired cliches, but since my only goal is to write the best blog I can possibly write, I'm content with explaining just once why Club Carlson points are so valuable.

One drawback to this approach is that new readers may not realize that their questions have already been answered here on the blog, so they end up asking the same questions or making mistakes that could be avoided if they knew better.

This is surely especially common for readers who subscribe to the blog's RSS feed or have each new post e-mailed to them, rather than reading them on my actual website. Those readers may miss two powerful tools to find additional information about topics that interest them: the search field and tags.

"My blog has a search function"

I feel like I say this at least once a week on Twitter to readers who don't immediately understand something that I'm trying to sum up in 140 characters. If you have a question about a topic like freezing your IDA and ARS credit reports, you can pop over to the search field found at the top of the sidebar on every page, and type in "IDA." The first hit will tell you step-by-step how to freeze your IDA and ARS credit reports before applying for US Bank credit cards.

Almost every post is tagged

Sometime the search field won't get you the precise information you're looking for. At times like that, you can also search for "tags." If you're reading a post about a topic that's interesting, you can click on one of the tags at the bottom of that post to find more about the same topics. If you already know what topic you're looking for, for example all posts about Club Carlson, you can also do a command/ctrl-F search for the bank, card, or product you're interested in, and click the entry in the seemingly-endless list of tags found at the bottom of the sidebar on each page:

I have no idea by what principle these tags are ordered, but the important thing is they're easily searched for and found.

Most, but not all, of my posts are more-or-less meticulously tagged, so if you can't find information using one method, you might have more success trying the other.

Conclusion

It sometimes seems that some of my readers think I have some incredible secrets I'm saving for myself, while in truth virtually everything I know is here on the blog. I simply don't have any interest in rehashing techniques that I've already covered and that have changed little in the intervening months or years. Learning about those techniques is as simple as exploring the multiple tools (in addition to Google!) I've provided for your convenience.