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Comment by kpw94 | Hacker News Reader

> Total Cost: $5592.66

For 10 months. Even if true story, only make sense if you can find rent $559 cheaper in LA (and don't value your time & the environment of course). It was extra special for the OP as he'd live rent free in LA.

> Typically, the door-to-door commute time between my home in LA and my classroom in Berkeley is 4-5hrs EACH WAY

Waking up at 3:30am and wasting 9h every day doesn't seem worth the $ savings. I feel a part time on-campus job or something would be less draining, more rewarding, and financially same...

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If you check out the OP's FlyerTalk thread, they were already doing LAX-MIA-LAX mileage runs before attending Cal.

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trip-reports/2093205-epic-co...

Yep. I would routinely fly weekend trips from the Midwest to Jakarta on my weekends in college just to get AA miles. The views of FT posters should be taken with a massive grain of salt - we’re not normal.

> routinely fly weekend trips from the Midwest to Jakarta on my weekends in college ,,just to get AA mile,,

I'm sorry, can you clarify? Is there some secret cheap flights from the midwest to Jakarta or were you spending a grand+ every weekend?

At this time (late 2000s, early 2010s) you could purchase open jaw fares (say ORD-NRT-CGK/CGK-NRT-STL) and between the open jaw/double open jaw and sometimes a fuel dump, get an economy ticket for less than $400. I would generate typically 40k-50k+ miles at a time, meaning I was getting essentially a free economy round trip between US and Europe for every flight.

So basically I was pocketing a minimum of a few hundred bucks in profit per flight and visiting quite a few SE Asian locations, even if it was 8/10/14 hours at a time. I’d work on the flights and I saved up enough miles to have visited over 100 countries by the time I finished university at 23.

EDIT: This is still possible to do but much more difficult now that most US carriers only give mileage based earnings for their partner flights. The golden days of this arbitrage are long gone.

> and visiting quite a few SE Asian locations, even if it was 8/10/14 hours

Visiting the airport.

Nope. If you’re doing this regularly you get to know the hacks to get through customs/security/etc quickly. I would always knock off at least two of the following on every trip: museums, restaurants, parks, architectural sites.

Plus I had enough miles and a flexible enough schedule that if I did miss a flight, I’d just book a reward flight home a few days later and make a proper trip out of it.

They were living rent free. So they'd have had to find a room for $559 near Cal. That was hard in 2005.

Otoh, they have missed out on the chance to build connections with their classmates, which is one of the main benefits of even a year at a good school.

Whatever part time job you have on campus, it sure isn't going to make you enough to rent anything close to a good location. You'd still have to commute quite far, just now you also have to work.

Also they used a lot of miles. So real $ cost would be higher.

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