Why I manufacture cash

I was chatting with a blog subscriber the other day who expressed surprise when I told him I was manufacturing spend on a 2% cash back card, rather than a mile- or point-earning credit card.

That exchange made me think I should present my argument for why travel hackers as a general rule either should manufacture cash back, or at least should be willing to manufacture cash back. The simple reason is that doing so keeps you honest.

Bonused spend is capped or limited

There are cards that are straightforwardly superior to cashback-earning credit cards, or may be under certain circumstances. For example, if you have access to grocery store manufactured spend, a US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards card (2x), Hilton HHonors Surpass American Express (6x), Amex EveryDay Preferred (4.5x), or American Express Premier Rewards Gold (2x) card are either clearly or convincingly worth more than manufacturing spend on a simple 2% cash back card.

But manufacturing spend at grocery stores faces all sorts of obstacles, from daily limits on purchases to annual caps on bonused spend. Whether the limits you face are imposed by the stores you visit, the cards you carry, or the inconvenience of visiting bonused retailers, they leave you with a simple choice: restrict your manufactured spend to bonused retailers, or manufacture unbonused spend as well?

Unbonused spend should present hard choices between rewards currencies

I loosely consider the 3 most lucrative travel rewards-earning credit cards for unbonused spend to be:

• Chase Freedom Unlimited. 1.5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent, flexible if transferred to Chase Sapphire Preferred, Ink Plus, or Sapphire Reserve.
• Amex EveryDay Preferred. 1.5 flexible Membership Rewards points per dollar spent.
• Starwood Preferred Guest American Express. 1 Starpoint (1.25 airline miles) per dollar spent.

You would need to get 1.33 cents per Ultimate Rewards or Membership Rewards point in value, or 2 cents per Starpoint (1.6 cents per mile when transferred in 20,000-Starpoint increments), to break even compared to a 2% cashback-earning credit card.

Those thresholds are, on the one hand, trivially easy to meet. Getting 1.33 cents per Hyatt Gold Passport point or United Mileage Plus mile is considered a poor redemption of those currencies since it's so easy to get so much more value from them. Even 1.6 cents per transferred Starpoint is relatively easy to achieve on long-haul flights, especially in premium cabins.

On the other hand, those thresholds are only easy to meet when the points are redeemed for travel. When you earn rewards currencies other than cash because of their possible future value, then fail to redeem them, you are ultimately paying a premium for an inferior product.

Consider two travel hackers, each of whom manufactures $10,000 in unbonused spend each month for a year. The first uses a Chase Freedom Unlimited and earns 15,000 Ultimate Rewards points. The second uses a 2% cash back card, and earns $200 in cash back. Both pay the same purchase and liquidation fees. At the end of the year (in the 13th month), the first travel hacker will have 180,000 Ultimate Rewards points, and the second will have $2,400 in cash.

To make up the $600 in cash value, the first could redeem all 180,000 Ultimate Rewards points for 1.33 cents each — an easy lift, as described above.

But what if the first travel hacker redeems just 120,000 of their Ultimate Rewards points for travel, leaving them with a 60,000-point balance? Now she needs to get 1.5 cents per Ultimate Rewards point — still not too difficult, on long-haul United award redemptions or at mid-tier Hyatt properties. After all, Hotel Hustle pegs the median Hyatt Gold Passport point value at 1.862 cents.

Finally, consider if the first travel hacker redeems just 60,000 of their 180,000 Ultimate Rewards point haul for the year. They still have $1,200 in cash value, but that means they'll need to get 2 cents per Ultimate Rewards point to break even with the 2%-cashback travel hacker. Now we've found ourselves, rather than being safely below the median Hyatt point value, 7.5% above it. Rather than merely looking for a decent United redemption, we need an excellent one. All to break even with the person who's been taking their rewards to the bank in the form of cash each and every month!

This has nothing to with devaluations

When I point out the folly of hoarding miles and points, people often think I'm talking about the risk of devaluations. But as I wrote in the linked post, 

"For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth whenever an airline or hotel devalues its miles, that process is relatively gradual and relatively predictable.

After all these years, despite everything that's happened in the airline loyalty industry, the 25,000 domestic saver award ticket still exists."

If there is never another devaluation of any loyalty program under the sun; if every loyalty program opened up every seat, in every cabin, on every flight, for award redemptions, unredeemed points will still be worth nothing, while cashback earned can still be put to work paying for the expense of your choice, from groceries to retirement savings.

Conclusion

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. But it's as good a place as any to start!

When deciding between a cashback-earning credit card or putting the same unbonused spend on a travel rewards-earning credit card, take a look at your existing balances and your account history. Do you redeem the points you earn? Are you consistently getting the value you need to break even compared to a 2% or higher cashback card, taking into account the orphaned points you don't redeem?

If so, terrific — keep doing what you're doing. If not, then it's time to ask further questions about your manufactured spend strategy.

And those questions are how cashback credit cards keep travel hackers honest.

Finding the value in the Chase Sapphire Reserve

Now that everyone's had a chance to calm down about the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, let's take a look at the card's features and see what, if any, value it might have to a travel hacker.

Keep in mind that since the Sapphire Reserve has a $450 annual fee, you don't need to get $450 in value to make the card worth getting. You need to get $450 in value to break even.

Ultimate Rewards flexibility

When you have a Chase Sapphire Preferred, Ink Plus, or Sapphire Reserve, you can transfer your Ultimate Rewards points to Chase's travel partners.

I won't relitigate the question of who qualifies for a Chase Ink Plus credit card. But suffice it to say, some readers cannot or feel they cannot be approved for Chase Ink Plus cards, in which case their only option if they want to make their Ultimate Rewards points flexible has been to carry a Sapphire Preferred, with its $95 annual fee.

If carrying a Sapphire Reserve allows you to downgrade your Sapphire Preferred to a Freedom or Freedom Unlimited, that brings your Sapphire Reserve's annual fee down by $95, plus the value of any additional points you earn with whichever of the the two, far superior, credit cards you change your Sapphire Preferred to.

Note that this is not true if you have access to an Ink Plus, since its accelerated earning rates at gas stations and office supply stores makes it worth carrying whether or not you have a Sapphire Reserve.

100,000 Ultimate Rewards-point signup bonus

After spending $4,000 on purchases within 3 months, you'll earn 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points, worth $1,000 in cash. Since the annual fee of $450 isn't waived the first year, this is the equivalent of a $550 signup bonus, less the difference in value between the cashback you'd otherwise earn on the same $4,000 in spend. Assuming you have a 2% cashback card you'd otherwise manufacture spend on, the total value of the signup bonus drops to $510 in cash.

Is a $510 signup bonus worth pursuing? Maybe! But I walked into a Citi bank branch today and picked up a brochure for a $400 cash bonus for opening a new Citibank Checking account. Doctor of Credit has a list of a few thousand dollars in bank account signup bonuses. The Chase Sapphire Reserve signup bonus is a bit higher than those signup bonuses, but a bit harder to get — you have to be approved, after all!

In short, if you chase signup bonuses, the 100,000 Ultimate Rewards-point signup bonus is probably all you need to know about this credit card. If you don't, you'll need to find the card's value elsewhere.

Increased value of Ultimate Rewards travel reservations

With a Sapphire Preferred or Ink Plus credit card, there are exactly two reasons you would redeem Ultimate Rewards points to book travel through the Ultimate Rewards booking engine:

• you are booking paid air travel on an airline or a stay at a hotel without award availability;
• or, although there is award availability, transferring Ultimate Rewards points to one of Chase's transfer partners would yield less than 1.25 cents per point in value.

The two situations have different implications, and need to be treated differently.

If you regularly use Ultimate Rewards points to book travel when there is no award availability with Chase's travel partners, then the move from a 1.25 to 1.5 cent-per-point redemption means saving Ultimate Rewards points: every $1,000 in paid reservations you make costs 13,333 fewer Ultimate Rewards points (66,667 instead of 80,000). If you currently book $3,375 in paid Ultimate Rewards reservations per year, the Sapphire Reserve will pay for its annual fee in the cash value of those savings.

In the second case, you are moving the threshold for points transfers compared to paid bookings. With a Sapphire Preferred or Ink Plus card, at all redemption values above 1.25 cents per point, accounting for taxes and fees, you'll get more value transferring Ultimate Rewards points to a travel partner than booking through the Ultimate Rewards portal. For example, a simple domestic United one-way costing 12,500 Mileage Plus miles and $5.60 in fees is a better value than redeeming Ultimate Rewards points for the same flight at any price higher than $161.85. At 1.5 cents per point, that breakeven point moves to $193.10. This is a very small change in the breakeven point!

The fact that taxes and fees are levied on both paid airline reservations and award flights means that the breakeven point increases by less than the 20% increase in the value of Ultimate Rewards points redeemed for paid travel.

Thus the difference between the first and second situations becomes clear: if you already find value redeeming your Ultimate Rewards points for paid travel, the Sapphire Reserve generates genuine savings compared to what you're currently paying. However, the increase in breakeven point is not significant enough to change the value calculation for Ink Plus and Sapphire Preferred cardholders who already get more than 1.5 cents per point in value from their United Mileage Plus and Hyatt Gold Passport points transfers.

Southwest Airlines presents a slightly different case, recently discussed by Trevor at Tagging Miles.

$300 annual travel credit

I'm the only blogger who says this, which either means I'm wrong or that I need to keep saying it more loudly and convincingly: statement credits are worth much less than cash.

How much less? Well, we've already established that with the Sapphire Reserve, $300 in travel booked through the Ultimate Rewards booking engine costs just $200 in Ultimate Rewards points.

If that is true, then how can it be the case that a $300 annual travel credit is worth $300, rather than $200?

There are lots of ways to get $300 in travel out of the $300 annual travel credit:

• Buy $300 Alaska Airlines tickets and refund them to your travel bank.
• Buy $300 in Southwest Airlines tickets and redeposit their value to your account.
• Buy $300 in gift cards from a travel provider that sells its own gift cards (Marriott properties all sell Marriott gift cards, for example).
• Pay $300 for travel.

The card is too new to know whether this would work, but you could theoretically even book an Alaska Airlines ticket more than 61 days out, or a fully refundable airline ticket, or a refundable, prepaid hotel reservation, wait for the credit to hit your account, then refund the reservation. I consider that an excruciatingly bad idea, but that's up to you.

The point is, $300 in travel is not worth $300 in cash to a travel hacker, but credit card annual fees have to be paid for in cash!

Conclusion

There are a lot of places a travel hacker can look for value with the Sapphire Reserve, but the card's benefits are not additive in the way affiliate bloggers suggest: 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points are not worth $1,500, a $300 travel credit is not worth $300, and the increased value of Ultimate Rewards points through the Chase booking portal is only valuable to the exact extent you redeem Ultimate Rewards points through the Chase booking portal.

This doesn't mean the Sapphire Reserve is a bad card or that you shouldn't get it.

This does mean you should look at your own pattern of earning and redemption, then think for yourself before jumping on the latest credit card affiliate bandwagon.

3 ways I would use the Ritz-Carlton credit card

There's a simple reason why I am so skeptical of signup bonuses and recurring annual benefits. I receive e-mails and comments every day from readers who say the same thing: "I signed up for this credit card before I found your site, and now I have no way to use these points/certificates/companion tickets." If you don't get those e-mails and comments, there's no reason for you to realize just how widespread the problem of orphaned and expiring loyalty benefits is. You may even think you're the only one who has trouble redeeming Membership Rewards points (you're not).

I don't have anything against signup bonuses. But if you chase signup bonuses, rather than focus on how to pay as little as possible for the trips you want to take, you're unlikely to get the most value from your travel hacking budget, whether that budget is in the form of time or money.

Last week I applied that skepticism to the new Chase Ritz-Carlton Rewards credit card. But just because I don't chase signup bonuses doesn't mean signup bonuses are worthless or bad! On the contrary, the right signup bonus at the right time can help you achieve your travel goals at the right price.

With that in mind, here are 3 ways I would use the new Ritz-Carlton credit card signup bonus of 3 free nights at a Tier 1-4 Ritz-Carlton property after spending $5,000 within 3 months.

A 3-night vacation

Sometimes you just want to go away for a long weekend. Nothing wrong with that! Without flying halfway around the world, you could spend 3 nights at Lake Tahoe, in downtown Boston (where hotels, even on points, are shockingly expensive), or in Puerto Rico. Slightly farther afield, there's a Tier 2 Ritz-Carlton in Santiago, Chile.

Those aren't all properties where you'll get outsize value from your redemption, simply because there are other, cheaper properties nearby. But you'll still save the money or points you'd otherwise pay, and you'll get to stay in a class of property you might not otherwise be able to afford.

A leg or side trip during a vacation

If you're planning on a multi-week trip like the one I took to Europe this summer, it would be easy to book one of your stops at a Ritz-Carlton property. The Ritz-Carltons in Budapest and Geneva both look lovely and are centrally located.

Likewise, if you are planning a long stay in a single location, you might want to make a side trip to see more of an area. While planning a trip to Kauai, you might decide to take a side trip to stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Kapalua, or while visiting Tokyo you might plan a few nights in Okinawa or Osaka as well.

Extending a stay

There are a few ways you could use the Ritz-Carlton signup bonus to extend a stay.

First, if you are relentlessly focused on maximizing the value of your points, there are certain inevitable obstacles to doing so. For example, Hilton HHonors points are most valuable when redeemed for 5-night stays, since the fifth night is free. If you want to stay more than 5 nights, but less than 10, that benefit is correspondingly less valuable.

But if you are staying in an area with both Hilton and Ritz-Carlton properties, you can use Ritz-Carlton free night certificates to extend your stay. For example, you might redeem 320,000 HHonors points for 5 nights at Hilton's Grand Wailea, then head around Maui for another 3 nights at the The Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua, maximizing the value of your HHonors points and enjoying an 8-night Hawaiian vacation.

Second, you could extend a stay at a Ritz-Carlton property. For example, for 350,000 Marriott Rewards points you could book 7 nights at the Tier 3 Ritz-Carlton Vienna (plus 55,000 United MileagePlus miles or 50,000 miles in other loyalty programs), then redeem your Ritz-Carlton free night certificates to extend your stay to 10 nights. Note that if you're transferring Ultimate Rewards points to Marriott Rewards, this is only a marginal play since the Park Hyatt Vienna costs just 25,000 Gold Passport points per night.

Third, you might try to achieve something similar to my experience with Hyatt Gold Passport suite upgrade awards. Since the Ritz-Carlton credit card comes with 3 "Club Level" upgrades annually on paid stays, you could book one paid night, apply a Club Level upgrade, and see if you're allowed to keep the same Club Level room on subsequent nights paid for with your free night certificates. There's no guarantee that would work every time, but it's virtually certain to work at some properties, some of the time.

Conclusion

The right time to sign up for a new credit card is when you already have a redemption in mind, and your research indicates that a new card's signup bonus or earning and redemption structure make it the cheapest, easiest, or fastest way to achieve that redemption.

The wrong time to sign up for a new credit card is when bloggers are salivating over temporarily raised payouts on their affiliate links.

Final status report on my personal finance application cycle

Last June I wrote about my personal finance application cycle, in which I applied for a Chase Slate and Citi Double Cash credit card in order to run up high balances and use the resulting negative-interest-rate loans to finance other projects. Since my 0% APR introductory periods are coming to an end, I thought readers might enjoy a final update.

Did it work?

My strategy worked perfectly, as it had to.

Fees and interest rates, unlike other terms and conditions of credit card agreements, are heavily regulated and cannot be changed by the banks to retroactively apply to existing balances (as long as you stay current on payments). In fact, even if my Chase and Citi accounts had been closed for some reason, I still would have been entitled to continue making only the minimum payments on the two cards until the introductory interest rate period elapsed.

I had no trouble moving my existing Chase credit lines to my new Slate card, as I explained in the original post, and was able to transfer $15,000 in balances to the card at the promotional 0% APR. I also didn't have any problem manufacturing my $5,200 credit limit on the Citi Double Cash, maximizing the amount of cash I was able to borrow at a negative interest rate.

What happened to my credit score?

When reading about this tactic, many of my readers grow agitated about the horrific damage that must have been wreaked on my credit score by nearly maxing out two credit cards on an ongoing basis.

In the 12 months of FICO score history Barclaycard provides, my score has bounced around between 677 and 729. In the last 6 months, Citi has me between 667 and 683. And in the last 12 months American Express has my FICO score between 670 and 720.

But I don't care about my FICO score, and the "damage" didn't keep me from being approved for a new Chase Hyatt credit card.

As should be obvious, everyone's situation is different: if you have just a few cards, or a short credit history, then high utilization on one or more cards might do significant damage to your credit score, potentially keeping you from getting approved for the credit cards you want.

If you have a lot of cards, and a long credit history, it's more likely to have only a nominal effect on your score, as it did on mine.

What did I do with the money?

Not much! I funded my Consumers Credit Union Free Rewards Checking account with $10,000, and used the rest of my newfound cash flow to increase the speed and convenience with which I manufactured spend on my other credit cards. Even if you diligently pay off each of your credit cards with the same spend manufactured with that card, there are still inevitable delays connected with depositing funds and making payments. Having a substantial amount of cash on hand smooths out those inconvenient delays and increases my overall return.

What's next?

This month I paid off the balance on my Citi Double Cash, and have already started using the card to manufacture unbonused spend. It's a somewhat inconvenient product since you have to pay off your balance in full before your statement closes in order to earn a full 2% cash back on your spend each month. Still, 2% is a perfectly reasonable return on unbonused manufactured spend, so the card still has its uses to me.

After I pay off my Chase Slate balance at the end of the month, I'll call to request a product change to the Chase Freedom Unlimited, which earns 1.5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent everywhere, and that card will enter my rotation as a go-to card for unbonused manufactured spend.

Once that's complete, I'll wait a few weeks until I'm safely out from under the shadow of Chase's 5/24 guideline for new account approvals, and apply for another Chase Slate. I'll move available credit from my new Chase Freedom Unlimited account, and start this process over again.

Should you do this?

I don't give advice. I don't know your situation, and have no idea whether a 15-month, negative-interest-rate loan is right for you. But there are a few reasons you might consider it.

First, there are purchases that you might be considering paying for over time, like a car, which will cost less in total if you accelerate your payments using a negative-interest-rate loan.

Second, holding borrowed cash in a high-interest checking account, as I did, can serve as an "emergency fund" to protect you from job loss, emergency medical bills, or losses in the stock market. Even if, like me, you don't find the idea of an emergency fund particularly interesting from a personal finance perspective, you'll still earn more in a high-interest checking account than you will in a fixed-income mutual fund, a subject I've written about elsewhere.

Third, if you're a reseller or the owner of a business that needs access to capital in order to grow, you might consider financing expansion with a negative-interest-rate loan, especially if you work with vendors who only accept cash or give a discount on cash transactions.

I moved. What did I miss?

Well, faithful readers, I'm back. For the past week I've been packing all my earthly possessions and transporting them 904 miles eastward. They're now, mostly, unpacked, and life should be very slowly returning to normal. Here's what I've learned in the past week.

Pay people to load and unload trucks for you

Packing your possessions into boxes for transport is a long, hard, chore, with a correspondingly high payoff. You can discover long-lost mementos, dispose of mountains of clutter, and get the opportunity to thank your old clothes and books for their service before disposing of them.

Loading and unloading trucks is an utterly thankless task that has no redeeming value. Pay someone else to do it for you. Don't try to help. Just watch.

There are only 81 Ritz-Carlton properties where you can use their new free night bonus

The new Chase Ritz-Carlton Rewards credit card has a signup bonus of 3 nights at any "participating" Tier 1 to Tier 4 Ritz-Carlton property after spending $5,000 in the first 3 months.

According to my brute force calculations (Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4), that leaves you with 81 properties in the world where you can use your 3 free night certificates.

Maybe you're planning to visit one of the 81 locations where you can use your free night certificates anyway. That makes the credit card a no-brainer, with a signup bonus worth thousands of dollars.

But if you aren't already planning to visit a Ritz-Carlton property, why would you be interested in a credit card that forces you to plan a whole vacation around it?

Travel is too cheap to chase signup bonuses that make you play by the loyalty industry's rules.

Chase Sapphire Reserve seems fine

Now that the details of the Chase Sapphire Reserve have been more-or-less-or-more officially confirmed, I can say with absolute conviction that it seems fine.

The 3 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent on travel and dining seems fine.

The $300 in annual statement credits seems fine.

The ability to get 1.5 cents per Ultimate Rewards point when redeeming them for travel through the Ultimate Rewards portal seems fine.

I personally don't chase signup bonuses. But I know a lot of people do! They'll no doubt enjoy the 100,000-point signup bonus after spending $4,000 within 3 months. That seems fine too.

I apply for cards that either help me earn more points or help me leverage the points I already have. The Chase Sapphire Reserve does neither, so I won't be getting it.

Conclusion

I'm sure I'll have more to say about all this (well, probably not about moving trucks) as time goes on and the affiliates continue harping on these cards' supposed benefits. But since I've been out of touch for over a week, I thought I'd get started by sharing my 10,000-foot view of these latest fads in the credit card marketing blogosphere.

Thinking about Hyatt Diamond requalification

I took advantage of the Hyatt Diamond status match late last year and have been enjoying my suite upgrades, free breakfast, lounge access, and check-in amenities for over half a year now. With just under 5 months left to requalify, I've been giving some thought to whether and how to do so.

Whether to requalify

I have a high baseline level of skepticism that elite status benefits are worth paying anything for.

For example, I manufacture elite status on Delta with a Business Platinum American Express card, but I also earn 1.4 SkyMiles per dollar spent when I meet the $25,000 and $50,000 annual spend thresholds. Since SkyMiles are the airline currency I use most frequently and to greatest effect, I manufacture spend on the card with the SkyMiles in mind, and appreciate the bonus Medallion Qualifying Miles merely as an ancillary benefit.

Requalifying for Hyatt Diamond status has a related logic: since Hyatt Gold Passport points are some of the most useful points, thanks to how easy they are to earn through Ultimate Rewards transfers, qualifying for Diamond status means getting more value from points I'll redeem anyway. I'm not going to try to quantify that additional value — I'm pointing out the difference between elite status in programs you already use aggressively and elite status in programs you use infrequently or never, like the periodic elite status challenges you see offered by airlines.

How to requalify

Hyatt Diamond status requires 25 paid or Points + Cash stays, or 50 paid or Points + Cash nights during the calendar year. There are three important things to consider when deciding on a path to requalification: the Chase Hyatt credit card; requalifying on stays; and requalifying on nights.

Chase Hyatt Credit Card elite-qualifying stays and nights

The Chase Hyatt credit card gives 2 elite-qualifying stays and 5 elite-qualifying nights after spending $20,000, and 3 additional elite-qualifying stays and 5 additional elite-qualifying nights after spending a total of $40,000 during the calendar year. If you spend $40,000 on the card, and value Hyatt Gold Passport points at the 1 cent each you can buy them for with a transfer from Ultimate Rewards, you'll pay $400 in foregone cash back for 5 stays and 10 nights, compared to a 2% cashback card.

Whether that's cheap or expensive depends both on your alternatives and on whether you decide to requalify on stays or nights.

Requalifying on stays

Qualifying with elite-qualifying stays is the option that gets the most attention from travel hackers for three reasons.

First, it's much cheaper to mattress run for additional stays than additional nights. If you are requalifying on stays and get 80% of the way to Diamond status (20 stays), you only need to book 5 more one-night stays. If you are requalifying on nights and get 80% of the way to Diamond status (40 nights), you need to book twice as many more nights, at double the cost.

Second, requalifying on stays allows you to mix and match your booking options. Since Hyatt guarantees standard room award availability, you can book just one night of each stay with cash or Points + Cash, and the remaining nights using only points. This is, in fact, the strategy I've been following this year.

Finally, requalifying on stays allows you to rapidly earn stay credits on longer trips by moving between multiple Hyatt properties in the same city. For example, the Andaz 5th Avenue is just 2 street blocks from the Grand Hyatt New York. It would get old fast, but if you travel alone or have understanding travel companions, on a 5-night stay in New York City you could earn 5 stay credits alternating between the two hotels each night.

As indicated above, if you choose to requalify on stays, then the Chase Hyatt credit card will earn you 5 stays for $400, or $80 each. Is that cheap or expensive? In general, it is cheaper than mattress running with Points + Cash stays unless you have access to Category 1 properties. Those Category 1 Hyatt properties cost 2,500 Hyatt Gold Passport points and $50 per night, plus taxes. If you're able to mattress run at one of the 12 Category 1 Hyatt Regency properties in the Americas (there are many more in the Asia/Pacific region), you'll be able to select a 1,000-point Diamond amenity and earn 325 Hyatt Gold Passport points per stay, bringing your total cost down to $61.75, plus taxes, cheaper than the $80 you'd pay manufacturing spend with the Chase Hyatt credit card.

Using the same logic, even a Category 2 Hyatt Regency Points + Cash stay would cost $81.42, plus taxes (the proof of this is left as an exercise for the reader).

Requalifying on nights

While the case for requalifying for Diamond status on stays is strong, it's not airtight.

Looking at my own stay history this year, I have 7 elite-qualifying stays and 15 elite-qualifying nights. But I have also redeemed 7 free nights. If I had booked those nights as elite-qualifying Points + Cash nights, I'd be at 22 total nights, or 44% of the way to Diamond status, whereas by trying to requalify on stays, I'm only 28% of the way there.

Of course, I had reasons for booking those nights as free awards: 4 of them were redemptions of Chase Hyatt credit card certificates, for example, which can't be booked as elite-qualifying nights!

There are three key questions when deciding whether to requalify on stays or nights: the average length of your stay, the availability of Points + Cash award availability, and the category of property you typically stay in.

If your average length of stay is less than 2 nights, you're strictly better off requalifying on stays, because twice as many nights than stays are required to requalify. This is true even if you have more than 25 stays or more than 50 nights! That's because the more easily you can qualify, the more flexibility you have in selecting between free nights, Points + Cash, and paid stays, and flexibility in this game is worth a lot.

If your average length of stay is 2 nights or longer, then you have to consider the category of property you typically stay in and the availability of Points + Cash award availability. Two extreme examples illustrate this point: if you stay exclusively at Category 7 properties, each night you book with Points + Cash instead of just points costs $150 in extra Hyatt Gold Passport points — that's an expensive elite-qualifying night! If you stay exclusively at Category 1 properties, each night you book with Points + Cash costs just $25 per elite-qualifying night, plus taxes. However, if the properties you stay at don't regularly make Points + Cash awards available, you're out of luck: back to requalifying on stays.

Manufacturing spend on the Chase Hyatt credit card, at $40 in foregone cash back per night, is far superior to mattress running for nights, which even with Points + Cash awards starts at $61.75, as shown above. However, if you already stay 50 nights per year at Hyatt properties, the Chase Hyatt credit card elite-qualifying nights are inferior to simply swapping your award nights for Points + Cash nights, which only requires a "top-up" of $15-25 in Hyatt Gold Passport points (until you get to Category 7 properties).

Conclusion

I already have 2 additional elite-qualifying stays booked, with another 2 planned. Together with the Chase Hyatt credit card elite-qualifying stays, those trips will get me to 16 of the required 25 stays. To mattress run for the 9 remaining elite-qualifying stays at a Category 1 Hyatt Regency property would cost $555.75, plus taxes, which is out of the question.

On the other hand, I haven't planned my fall and winter travel yet, so it's still possible that enough real trips will come along to either get me over the finish line naturally, or get me close enough to mattress run for the final few stays.

Some bonus categories I never think about

I belong to the noisy-but-unpopular school that believes everyday spending should properly be a rounding error in the typical travel hacker's overall miles and points strategy. That's because more miles can be earned in an afternoon of light manufactured spending than will be earned in a month or year of trying to earn as many points as possible on actual purchases.

The flip side of that is a blind spot when it comes to the bonused categories of spend on cards that I already carry, either for purposes of manufactured spend or recurring annual bonuses. In the interests of keeping my blind spots few and far between, I decided to take a closer look at a few of those categories.

Hotels

With increasingly limited access to gas station manufactured spend, you may find that you're not able to manufacture $50,000 in spend in a Chase Ink Plus's double point category of "gas stations and hotel accommodations when purchased directly with the hotel."

Since Ultimate Rewards points are worth 1.25 cents each when redeemed for paid airfare, or more when transferred to Hyatt Gold Passport, Southwest Rapid Rewards, and (usually) United MileagePlus, you're strictly better off paying for your hotel stays with a Chase Ink Plus than with the 2% cash back card you use for your other everyday purchases. One possible exception is if you are having trouble finding eligible expenses to redeem your Barclaycard Arrival Plus, Capital One Venture, or BankAmericard Travel Rewards miles against, although you can always consider refundable reservations in that case.

I'm fond of paying the revenue component of my Hyatt stays with Hyatt gift cards purchased at a discount using cashback rewards, but if you pay for Hyatt stays directly, the 3 Hyatt Gold Passport points earned per dollar with the Chase Hyatt credit card are superior to the 2 Ultimate Rewards points earned by both the Chase Ink Plus and Chase Sapphire Preferred — assuming you plan to transfer your Ultimate Rewards points to Hyatt Gold Passport at any point in the future.

The math is somewhat less favorable when paying for Hilton stays with the American Express Hilton HHonors Surpass card, which earns 12 HHonors points per dollar spent at Hilton properties. According to the Wandering Aramean visualization tool, 12 HHonors points are worth a median 5.376 cents, while 2 Ultimate Rewards points, transferred to Hyatt Gold Passport, are worth a median 3.724 cents. That's an edge, but it's an edge that's highly dependent on your actual redemption pattern.

Finally, the Chase Marriott Rewards Premier credit card is by and large not worth holding for either its recurring benefit (one free category 1-5 night each account anniversary) nor for manufactured spending (one elite night credit for each $3,000 spent). But if you do have it for one reason, the other, or both, you are still unlikely to get more value from the 5 Marriott Rewards points earned per dollar spent at Marriott properties than you would from 2 Ultimate Rewards points earned on the same spend — unless, of course, you are already planning to transfer Ultimate Rewards points to Marriott for some reason, like booking a 7-night Hotel + Air package.

Restaurants

As I've written before, most of the time one or more rotating cashback bonus card is offering 5% cash back at restaurants, so the idea of needing a particular card "dedicated" to restaurant spend is misleading: you should use your most lucrative card, which will, at least 6 months of this year, be a Discover it or Chase Freedom card. But that leaves the other half of the year, which makes it a legitimate question whether there are better cards than a straight 2% cashback card for use at restaurants.

Using the same median Hilton HHonors point value as above, the 6 HHonors points earned per dollar with the Hilton HHonors Surpass American Express at restaurants slightly edges out a 2% cash back card, earning the equivalent 2.688 cents per dollar spent, while the Chase Hyatt credit card earns 2 Hyatt Gold Passport points per dollar spent, or a median 3.724 cents per dollar.

This matters because the Chase Sapphire Preferred, often promoted by affiliate bloggers for its high affiliate payout and earning rate on travel and dining, earns 2 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar. In other words, for just $75, rather than $95, you can earn 2 Hyatt Gold Passport points at restaurants with a card that also offers a free night at Category 1-4 Hyatt properties worldwide. That's a fact that's helpful to keep in mind the next time someone tells you the Chase Sapphire Preferred is the best card to carry for restaurant spend.

Airline tickets

Finally, I very rarely find myself booking air travel directly through an airline (preferring to use miles, Ultimate Rewards points, or Flexpoints earned with a US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards card), but if you do book air travel directly, or need to pay the taxes and fees attached to award tickets, you can do better than a 2% cashback card with cards you may already carry.

If you periodically sign up for a "spare" US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards card, for example during the current Olympics promotion, you can use that extra card to pay for airfare, earning 2 Flexpoints per dollar spent, and transfer the resulting bonus Flexpoints to your primary account for future redemptions.

If you use an American Express Premier Rewards Gold card to manufacture grocery store spend on an ongoing basis, you may as well use it to pay for airfare, earning 3 Membership Rewards points for your airline tickets as well, which can be transferred to potentially lucrative travel partners like Delta SkyMiles. The same goes for a Citi Prestige card you may carry to raise the value of your existing Citi ThankYou points.

And the Chase Hyatt credit card earns 2 Hyatt Gold Passport points per dollar spent on airfare, giving it an edge over a straight 2% cashback card, depending as always on your actual planned redemptions.

Conclusion

I don't think it's useful, let alone necessary, for a travel hacker to stress over every possible bonus point at every possible merchant. But for the kind of purchases that you know you make frequently, it's at least worth considering finding additional value by keeping in mind the bonus categories offered by cards that you already use to manufacture spend, or hold for their recurring annual benefits.

As I indicated above, I don't usually pay for airline tickets or hotel stays with credit cards. But digging into my existing cards' bonus categories, I realized I could replicate the majority of the Chase Sapphire Preferred's "travel and dining" bonus categories with cards I already had: the Chase Ink Plus and Chase Hyatt credit cards. Between the two, they cover hotels, airlines, restaurants, and rental cars.

Obviously that leaves out things like cruises, travel agency bookings, local transportation, and so on. But they do include the bulk of reimbursable business travel, so if you do spend a large amount in those categories each year, you may find yourself coming out ahead by examining the bonus categories on your existing card card portfolio.

I don't buy points, but maybe you should!

Every major loyalty program sells their points for cash, normally at a fixed rate through the industry-sponsored site Points.com.

For example, you can buy up to 60,000 Delta SkyMiles per calendar year for 3.76 cents each, up to 75,000 United MileagePlus miles for 3.76 cents each, up to 150,000 American AAdvantage miles for 3.19 cents each, and up to 60,000 Alaska Mileage Plan miles for 2.96 cents each.

Hotel programs likewise sell their points currencies for cash, with IHG Rewards Club selling up to 60,000 points for 1.15 cents each, Hilton HHonors selling 80,000 points for one cent each, Marriott Rewards selling up to 50,000 points for 1.25 cents each, Starwood Preferred Guest selling up to 30,000 points for 3.5 cents each, and Hyatt Gold Passport selling up to 55,000 points for 2.4 cents each.

Purchased points are too expensive for me

I don't personally buy miles or points because it's a more expensive way of acquiring miles and points than the other methods I have available.

United MileagePlus miles and Hyatt Gold Passport points cost just 1 cent each when purchased with Ultimate Rewards points transferred from a Chase Ink Plus account.

I happen to have a Citi AAdvantage Platinum Select MasterCard, so if I ever needed to stock up on AAdvantage miles, I can do so for 2.105 cents each — the cash back I'd earn manufacturing the same unbonused spend on my Barclaycard Arrival+ MasterCard.

And of course I earn 6 HHonors points per dollar spent with my American Express Hilton HHonors Surpass card at grocery stores, so even compared to an "optimal" redemption rate of 2 cents per US Bank Flexpoint, I'm already buying HHonors points at a mere 0.67 cents each, 33% less than the 1 cent per point Hilton wants to charge.

Purchased points may make sense for you

As the examples above make clear, the decision whether to purchase miles and points or manufacture them rightly depends upon your next best alternative: your opportunity cost.

If you're currently manufacturing the bulk of your otherwise-unbonused spend on a 5% cash back card like the Wells Fargo Rewards Visa during the introductory promotional period, then manufacturing spend on a one-mile-per-dollar card costs not 2.105 cents per mile, but 5 cents per mile, 57% more than, for example, American is willing to sell them!

Likewise, if you have $100,000 on deposit with Bank of America, you might be earning 2.625% cash back with a BankAmericard Travel Rewards card. That may make purchasing Hyatt Gold Passport points at 2.4 cents each worthwhile, compared to manufacturing spend on a Chase Hyatt credit card.

Purchase small numbers of points for high-value, upcoming redemptions

While you usually see affiliate bloggers advocate buying large numbers of points speculatively when loyalty programs offer the highest bonuses on purchased points (bringing down the cost per point), I have exactly the opposite view.

If you find yourself with an upcoming, high-value redemption, and don't have the time to manufacture the required points, then go ahead and buy them. Paying "too much" per point, if it drastically brings down your total out-of-pocket cost, makes perfect sense: the goal isn't to pay as little as possible per point, it's to spend as little money as possible on the trips you actually want to take!

But the money you spend speculatively buying miles for redemptions you don't actually have planned could almost invariably be better spent building a credit card and manufacturing spend strategy that generates the trips you want to take at far lower out-of-pocket expense.

"Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits" is a beautiful, not-very-useful book

This is a review of "Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits" by Philip A. Fisher. You can find all my previous book reviews here. If you're interested in buying a copy, I hope you'll consider using my Amazon Associates referral link.

In my May review of the "Masters in Business" podcast I mentioned that the host asks his guests for book recommendations, and one extremely common recommendation is "Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits," by Philip A. Fisher. In it, the legendary fund manager describes his investment philosophy and, in great depth, his strategy for selecting stocks he believes will dramatically increase in price over a period of many years.

"Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits" is a book about late-1950's America

It is rare to come across a book that is so strongly rooted in a particular time and place. When reading "Pride and Prejudice" you notice some quirks of English law (like perpetual entails) but you basically get the idea that it's a story about a bunch of young people growing up and getting married.

"Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits" is not like that. Here's Fisher writing about labor unions:

"In this day of widespread unionization, those companies that still have no union or a company union probably also have well above average labor and personnel relations. If they did not, the unions would have organized them long ago. The investor can feel rather sure, for example, that Motorola, located in highly unionized Chicago, and Texas Instruments, Inc., in increasingly unionized Dallas, have convinced at least an important part of their work force of the company's genuine desire and ability to threat its employees well. Lack of affiliation with an international union can only be explained by successful personnel policies in instances of this sort."

That is an almost-unrecognizable vision of the American labor movement, but it's listed as one of the most important considerations when deciding whether to invest in a company!

Needless to say, an investor today should not base their decisions on 1958's union environment, which we now know was almost literally the peak of union membership as a percentage of the American workforce.

This is also a book about America as a manufacturing powerhouse. Fisher describes with wonder the almost-miraculous invention of titanium and exciting new uses for aluminum. Even DDT gets a nod as an exciting new insecticide, guaranteed to increase American agricultural production for many years to come (it's now illegal).

Importantly, Fisher is describing a world where the only investment choices for working Americans are actively-managed mutual funds and stock brokers. Because of that, the book can be read in two ways: if you're an active manager of a mutual fund, it's advice on how to do your job. If you're in investor, it's advice on how to select an active fund manager: pick one who agrees with Philip A. Fisher!

"Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits" provides no useful information about picking stocks

If you picked up a book like Michael Covel's "Trend Following," and read it cover to cover, you could start trading stocks using the strategies in that book.

You'd lose a lot of money, perhaps slowly at first, and then all at once, but the book does give you instructions on how to trade according to Covel's theories.

"Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits" isn't really like that. Fisher's strategy requires you to gather information about companies that is not publicly available. I don't mean "insider" information, but simply information that is not knowable without spending a lot of time hunting down employees, customers, vendors, and competitors and communicating with them at length. It's a strategy that could only be followed by a wealthy, well-connected mutual fund manager with a lot of money to invest.

The problem, of course, is that identifying the disciple of Philip A. Fisher (the author died in 2004) who truly and correctly follows his investment principles is impossible in advance. The successful fundamental fund manager will naturally say that he "correctly" applied Fisher's strategy, while his unsuccessful competitors "incorrectly" applied it, and give you all sorts of reasons why. Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe past performance is any indicator of future results.

Fisher has some interesting insights about dividends

Fisher makes two interesting arguments in his discussion of whether dividend-paying stocks are better or worse investments than companies that retain most or all of their profit for further investment.

The first is a straightforward mathematical insight that's frequently glossed over: the dividend yield that should matter to you is the yield on the price you purchased a stock at, not its current price. If a company pays the same 2% of its share price in dividends, but its share price quadruples over 15 years, the lucky owner over that time period will be earning an 8% yield on the price she paid for it, despite the stock never paying a "high" dividend at any point in the entire period.

The second point has to do with transaction costs. The high historical stock market yields you frequently see quoted in investing propaganda require the reinvestment of all dividends paid. If you, quite rightly, plan to reinvest all your dividends, you have three problems: first, until very recently, fixed commissions on stock purchases meant it was as expensive to make small purchases as large ones. If you immediately reinvest dividends, purchase commissions eat up a higher percentage of your capital. If you wait to invest a large amount, you suffer from having more time out of the market, losing some of the benefits of compounding.

The second problem is that it can be cumbersome to reinvest dividends because of the need to buy integer values of stocks.

And third, you also have to find a stock to invest in! It may be your current stocks have already gone up too much in value to be good candidates for further investment, which means you have to find something new to buy. That friction imposes another transaction cost. Retained earnings reinvested in a quality business, on the other hand, eliminate all those transaction costs by (hopefully) increasing further the value of your existing shares.

Basically, Fisher is not a big fan of dividends.

Conclusion: read this book for nostalgia, not for advice

This may sound like I'm being harsh on the author: after all, what period was he supposed to write about if not the period he was living in?

On the contrary, I actually found "Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits" to be a beautifully written description of the world our Baby Boomer leaders grew up in. When Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again, this is the America he has in mind: heavily unionized, highly-paid, a manufacturing powerhouse, with exciting research developments that would only years later prove to be toxic to humans and the environment. Men work in labs and factories, women purchase previously-unheard-of consumer goods, and during periods of economic recession the government runs a deficit of "25 to 30 billion dollars."

It sounds like a lovely place to visit, but I'm not sure I'd like to live there, and I definitely wouldn't recommend investing as if you did live there today!

Travel hacking without spend

While I write a lot about strategies for using manufactured spend to get pay for travel at deep discounts, I know that many of my readers find manufacturing spend to be distasteful, time-consuming, or impossible (I know because you never hesitate to tell me in the comments section).

So at a reader's suggestion, I want to share some thoughts on travel hacking without manufacturing spend, and indeed without the requirement to spend any money on credit cards at all (besides annual membership fees).

Annual benefits

There is a not-unreasonable intuition that in the absence of manufactured spend, which properly focuses on high earning rates, bonus categories, and valuable points, annual recurring benefits of credit cards would become more important in developing a travel hacking strategy.

For airlines, those benefits include things like American Express Delta Platinum and Reserve companion tickets, the Chase Southwest Airlines 3,000 (Plus) or 6,000 (Premier) annual bonus points, the Bank of America Alaska Airlines annual $99 companion ticket and, for those grandfathered in, the 10,000 bonus anniversary miles offered by the Barclaycard American Airlines Aviator card.

Many hotel co-branded credit cards offer anniversary nights: the Chase IHG credit card gives a free night worldwide, Chase's Hyatt credit card gives a Category 1-4 night annually, and US Bank's Club Carlson credit cards give 40,000 (Premier Rewards and Business Rewards) or 25,000 (Rewards) bonus Gold Points on each account anniversary.

If our intuition that recurring benefits are more valuable without manufactured spend is true, then one credit card strategy might be to carry:

• both a personal and small business version of both the Platinum and Reserve cards ($1290 in annual fees);
• a Chase Southwest Premier card ($99 annual fee);
• a Chase IHG credit card ($49 annual fee);
• a Chase Hyatt credit card ($75 annual fee);
• and one or more US Bank Club Carlson Premier Rewards and Business Rewards credit cards ($75 and $60 annual fee, respectively). Note that US Bank doesn't impose a hard cap on the number of its products you're allowed to have.

For $1,648 in annual fees per year, you could thus buy 4 domestic companion tickets on Delta (subject to fare bucket constraints), 6,000 Southwest Rapid Rewards points (worth perhaps $100), a free night at any IHG Rewards property, a free night at a Category 1-4 Hyatt property, and 80,000 Club Carlson Gold Points (good for at least one free night at any Club Carlson property).

I'm deliberately leaving out the Citi Hilton Reserve free weekend night benefit and the Club Carlson free domestic night benefit, since they each require $10,000 in annual spend.

Without price compression, free nights are an expensive trap

In a world with plentiful manufactured spend, travelers experience a phenomenon I've dubbed "price compression:" nights and flights that have large differences in retail price have much smaller or nonexistent out-of-pocket differences in cost to the travel hacker.

For example, a free Category 4 Hyatt night from the Hyatt credit card can be combined with Hyatt Gold Passport points transferred from a Chase Ink Plus, where you've manufactured cheap Ultimate Rewards points.

Without manufactured spend, and the price compression it produces, you'll be paying the retail price of your stays out of pocket, less any rebates earned by booking through shopping portals and online travel agencies. Unless you typically spend only a single night in each city you visit, travel solo, or have a very understanding travel companion, this can become very expensive very quickly.

To see why, take a stylized example of a city with a Category 4 Hyatt that costs $125 per night and a nearby Holiday Inn that costs $100 per night. On a four-night stay, you'll pay $375 out of pocket for the Hyatt, and $400 out of pocket for the Holiday Inn: a savings of $25.

So far, so good. But remember you paid a $75 annual fee for your Hyatt credit card! If you only compared the value of your night to your annual fee, you'd mistakenly believe you saved $50. By taking into account how the "free" night benefit affects your behavior, you'll realize the truth: the Hyatt credit card in fact cost you $50.

Of course if you are a solo traveler or have an understanding travel companion, moving hotels in the middle of your stay may not be a big deal. If you have a lot of one-night stays, you may also save real money. But that's an individual assessment you should take seriously before paying hundreds, let alone thousands, of dollars in annual fees.

You'll find a similar principle applies to the airline credit cards: if Delta flights are consistently more expensive, or less convenient, than competitor flights you may find yourself over-paying just to take advantage of your companion ticket. Southwest Rapid Rewards points, likewise, are only valuable if you're able to earn enough of them to redeem them for the flights you want.

None of which is to say these are bad credit cards or bad benefits. They just need to approached critically if you're to have any hope of using them to save money on travel.

Everyday spend

My standard response when asked which credit card people should use for their actual purchases is that actual purchases should represent a rounding error in your miles and points balances. Without manufactured spend, of course, that rounding error may turn into the bulk of your balances!

In my view, there are only a few credit cards that have any measurable advantage over paying for your purchases with cash.

• Discover it Miles. If you can sign up for a Discover it Miles card that doubles your cash back after your first year, you'll earn 3% cash back on all purchases and pay no annual fee or foreign transaction fees. You can boost your earning even more by redeeming your cash back for certain gift cards — you can currently redeem $90 in cash back for $100 in Hyatt gift cards, turning a Discover it Miles card into a 3.33% cash back card. Canceling and applying for a new card each year may let you continue on an ongoing basis.
• BankAmericard Travel Rewards. If you have $100,000 on deposit with Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, or MerrillEdge, you'll earn 2.625% cash back on all purchases, and pay no annual fee or foreign transaction fee.
• American Express Amex EveryDay Preferred. If you make 30 purchases per month, this card earns 1.5 Membership Rewards points per dollar spent everywhere, 3 points at gas stations and 4.5 points at grocery stores. Because of its $95 annual fee, you should only consider this card if you spend a lot of money each year. If you do, you might find the ability to transfer points to Delta, Air Canada, British Airways, or American Express's other partners more valuable than cash back.

Travel hacks that don't require spend

Of course, credit cards are just one tiny corner of the travel hacking universe. It's just a corner that's become unusually prominent because there's so much money to be made selling credit cards to the unwitting.

So here's a brief list of other travel hacking techniques, no credit card required:

• Mistake fares and attack fares. Among the original travel hacks are simply waiting for an airline to slip up and forget to add a zero to an airfare, or to "attack" a rival's hub by cutting fares far below normal. By following Twitter accounts like @TheFlightDeal and @EscapeATX, and bookmarking sites like Flyertalk's mileage run forum, you can handily see whenever those hard workers find a new error fare or attack fare. Julian the Devil's Advocate wrote up a terrific guide to getting text alerts for a particular city or airline that interests you.
• Stacking portal and online travel agency rewards. In the bleak world without manufactured spend, you've got to make every dollar count. By clicking through shopping portals to online travel agencies before making hotel reservations, you can earn portal rewards plus the rewards offered by whichever travel agency you select.
• Best rate guarantees. I've written before that I find best rate guarantees to typically be a waste of time, and I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to make booking decisions around best rate guarantees. But once you've identified a hotel and rate, it's common sense to check if there's a lower rate elsewhere that's eligible for a best rate guarantee claim.
• Hidden city ticketing. It's not for everyone, and it won't work for every itinerary, but it's possible to save a lot of money searching for flights using Skiplagged, a service that takes care of the hard work of finding cheaper "hidden city" tickets. Note that you usually will not be able to check bags when flying domestically on such tickets.
• Corporate rates and other discounts. There are a number of lists circulating of corporate rate codes, which can bring down the cost of chain hotel stays significantly. Likewise, if you find out there's a convention, conference, or athletic event in a city being held during your visit, you may be able to piggyback on their lower negotiated rates.
• Aggressively book and rebook. Autoslash makes it easy to monitor rental car rates so you can rebook your car if and when the price goes down. By booking cancellable hotel reservations early on, periodically checking for price changes lets you lock in any price declines while being protected from any price increases.

None of those techniques will save you as much as manufacturing spend will, which is why I write a lot about the benefits of manufacturing spend. But the universe of travel hacking, like the universe itself, is vast and growing, so it pays to keep an open mind and to keep exploring!