Comment by hnthrow289570 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnthrow289570 | Hacker News Reader

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>Redditors are frequently sophisticated with their spreadsheets; many of them could clearly earn three orders of magnitude more from the financial industry if they stopped thinking that the right way to monetize spreadsheet skill was in gaming credit card signup bonuses.

It's a pretty decent outlet for having something complicated to work on. Another would be EVE Online with the added bonus that it's also an actual game. My guess is most of those people are just trying to min-max what the companies allow them, rather than trying to find an exploit in the system that prints money per spreadsheet CPU cycle.

I am suspicious that anyone can get a job in finance with only churning (or EVE) spreadsheet skills. I have rarely found "well if you can do that hobbyist but seemingly proximal activity, you can walk into a decent-paying job" to be true in tech and I suspect it's true for finance too.

Maybe the finance bros just need a leetcode-for-spreadsheets website to run their technical interviews to open the floodgates though.

I am pretty deep into the credit card hobby and most of the people in it are high-earning professionals already. The last meetup I went to consisted of half of software engineers.

So we already have jobs that pay well for optimizing things.

It’s hardly a difficult skill. I have a spreadsheet with the date , credit limit, money needed to spend to get the reward and a date to cancel the card. Wall Street better get ready for me

So are you essentially constantly swapping cards that you use once you cap out their bonus sign up amount, so to speak?

If so, doesn't that cause the issue where your points are all scattered across various different credit companies?

How does one get deeper into the credit card hobby? I optimize for cash back on gas and groceries but not much else.

/r/churning is a good place to start. Lots of people doing cash back churning too, so even if you don’t want plane tickets, there is plenty for you.

/r/churning is notoriously unfriendly to newbies. They have absolute no tolerance for basic questions whose answer can be found via search. If anyone is reading this recommendation, just be a lurker there.

When I first applied for my CSR card many years ago, I was rejected by the web app. But a perusal of /r/churning led me to some powerful phone numbers where human customer service reps can override such rejections.

How much do you estimate you make off of it? It feels like the intersection of marginals gains and a high level of attention you need to pay to sniff out good deals, not hurt your credit score, remember how to balance charges across cards. I feel like it would need to be a fair amount to be worth the "time".

It is hard to say and we often debate how to value things in the churning community.

I take 3-4 transcontinental business class trips a year and heavily exploit the sweet spots of airline programs. The cash equivalent price (booked well in advance, so not just last-minute flights) of my travel is probably $30,000 a year. I just Australia on points, with lots of little stopovers in a few other countries.

Whether you value it as much as $30K is debated, as some people say you should value it at what you would otherwise have been willing to pay for the experience. You also have to factor in that award availability is limited, so it is nowhere near the same as picking dates and going. Your points and availability heavily shape where you go and when, which is fine for a curious about everything person like me, but messier for those with specific needs.

I have a colleague who does the same thing, but is lucky to get $4000 a year from a similar pile of points as he wants to use them all for his family to Hawaii for Christmas and he is just flying economy. The variably in value is tremendous.

Plenty of cards can also be churned for straight up cash. There are people pulling 5-8K in cash off of them a year.

The other advantage is that is all after tax. You don't pay tax on any of this.

> attention you need to pay to sniff out good deals

That is why you join a community like /r/churning. There are also lots of Facebook groups as well. Crowdsource the work!

> not hurt your credit score

Depends on whether you need it. Also, I found that my credit score became pretty stable after I got some 15 cards. New applications change it by 10-20 points now.

> remember how to balance charges across cards.

I personally got the hang of this rather quickly, as you just have 3-4 at any given time (the rest are "sock drawered" until it is time to cancel) and pull out the appropriate one. Some put post-it notes on what each card is good for.

As for the billing, companies send digital reminders now.

When I was really into it, between $5-10k a year depending on effort, which was largely not taxable. I figured I was making around $30 an hour post-tax, which was less than my day job paid, even after accounting for tax.

These days I understand it is probably harder to hit those numbers. When I was doing it in earnest (2014-2016, roughly), it was already regarded as "late" in the sense that issuers had started to take notice and crack down. I'd read people reminisce about the "golden days" (pre-GFC, I guess) when you could get a card with something like a 5%-for-6-months signup perk and just absolutely go to town, we're talking literal millions in manufactured spend.

Like others said, it's more of a hobby than a side hustle.

At the end of the day, it's mostly a hobby and you either find keeping track of everything and making effective use of rewards worth it or not. Personally, I have a few cards for targeted use but mostly I just take 2% cash back on a free card and figure that's close enough.

I was also intrigued by that quote and find it rather dubious. Coincidentally today, I and 5 other family members are boarding business class international flights worth ~$60k cash, paid for with signup bonus points. This doesn’t even include the other tens of $thousands of redemptions we’re doing on both this trip and the rest of the year. This is also just side hustle/hobby-that-pays-for-itself “money,” in addition to the (not) “three orders of magnitude” faang income.

This was otherwise an interesting article.

I find it hard to believe you're getting almost 6 figures of value out of signup bonus points and other card reward redemptions in a year.

A lot of that depends on how you value the flights (a lot of the benefit comes from being able to do international business class one way with points very easily, but those tickets being very expensive in cash), but it is pretty straightforward if you both optimize the earning, optimize the spend, and optimize the points programs.

To give you an example, a business class ticket from Seattle to Taipei with EVA (a very nice airline) is about $8000 round trip or $6000 one way. You can book it for 75,000 Aeroplan points one way. That is 1-2 credit card signups.

But Aeroplan also lets you have a stopover in the middle of a trip and lets you string together up to 6 flights and only pay based on the distance.

So you could do Seattle, do a layover in Taipei, have a stopover in Manila, stay a day in Singapore, and then land in Darwin Australia for 92,500. Which is closer to 2 credit cards, but still easily achievable in a month or two. But the value of that trip when I did something similar was closer to $12,000. Prices out at around $9000 for my test dates for the flights I did.

Now, you need to take many trips a year to do that as a single individual (which I am), but the referral streams for credit card signups are also very powerful, so get a Player 2 as it is called, and you can easily get 20-30% more on your signup bonuses and each person can also do the bonus.

And that is just business class. Once you start getting into First Class redemptions (hard to do, but the serious people manage it), the value can easily be the equivalent of a 12K for a simple round trip, yet alone stacking First Class products as many programs let you do.

Some of the pricing is also probably last minute. Points costs fall last minute, but cash prices rise. That boosts your cost per point, or CPP as we call it.

Those $60k flights are almost certainly list/last minute pricing.

It’s even mentioned in the article that the airlines love flight miles because they can play with the redemptions to sell unused capacity for what the customer sees as real money. It also encourages loyalty.

Not last minute, booked a year out when they were ~$10k+ per ticket.

The point is not “nobody on Reddit can ever make out well financially by chasing points, etc.” it’s “people who do this are sophisticated enough at trading that they could make even more money in the financial markets”. (We can debate whether that’s as fun as getting great plane tickets with points.)

IMO there’s a large overlap in the venn diagram of Redditors who are good at churning and Redditors who spreadsheet their way to retirement. For example, the podcast I linked to in another comment is from a guy who is FIRE’d.

It’s totally doable. I got my wife into this when we met in 2001. We vacationed 6 weeks a year through these various schemes.

If you have a source of business expenses, it’s easy. With regular consumer spend it’s more challenging but doable.

We empathized time at destination. If you’re going for value, you target airline and other upgrades. Our focus being time, we usually targeted hotel redemptions. There used to be a path to “launder” AMEX points and convert to a multiple of Hilton points through airline programs.

It's very possible when you play in 2 player mode and maximize your "pennies per point" redemptions. We're doing the $60k in flights to Japan, hotels for the extended family for 2 weeks (another several $thousand), and then multiple weekend trips throughout the year for a suite in an all-inclusive resort that goes for ~$2.5k per night (roughly another $20k total).

How?

Everything I know, I learned from /r/churning. Although it can be pretty intimidating as a newbie; I was a lurker for a ~year before I was comfortable enough to start hitting SUBs.

If you're specifically interested in Japan flights, I recommend checking out this podcast: https://thedailychurnpodcast.com/ep-58-how-to-book-ana-japan...

As far as general advice, many people acquire Chase UR points predominantly for Hyatt and acquire Amex MR predominantly for flights. If you're in 2 player mode then you earn points a lot faster because you can refer each other.

It's not trivial to do. You have to save rewards points, learn transfer partners (and their booking sites), and be willing to book ~330 days in advance for certain flights.

The value of points is sort of hard to determine.

I'm guessing (but could be wrong) that you would not actually have paid $60K for business class seats for your family had you not had points that would cover. (I have gotten really good deals using points for something I'd have paid for anyway--but it's been rare.)

Only sometimes. Depends how you use them.

If you have some specific flight that you pay for regularly, e.g. to visit family, then replacing that flight's average cost with points gives a concrete number on point value.

If you are using points to fly first class on a trip you would not be taking at all but for the point redemption, then the value gets a lot more muddled.

Absolutely. If you use points for something you'd pay cash for otherwise, they're typically worth something like 1 to 2 cents per point. But a lot of people (and I've done this myself with upgrades now and then) treat them as more of less "free" money. Presumably the upgrade or whatever has some incremental value but we wouldn't have paid for it out of pocket.

Is $60K cash split between these 6 people? Then it is not that impressive.

If you want higher ROI on spreadsheet hobby start using it for your own financial/retirement planning. Playing with numbers in that field can change outcomes by hundreds of thousands dollars.

Don't worry, I'm doing that too. Mega backdoor, etc.

Microsoft Excel World Championship 2023 - Finals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDGdPE_C9u8

I think churning is just a hobby for bored divorced guys and used as a proxy for developing any real (non-financialized) interests. Normal cash back for most cards is good enough for most people, and you aren't going to get big point kickbacks unless you already have a lot of money to spend.

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