Simply Well Spent

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Travel

Our Top 5 Adventures with Credit Card Points

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And just like that, Thanksgiving is over and the Christmas season is more than well underway. It really felt like it snuck up on me this year… but I guess I feel like that a little bit each year. The changing of the seasons really shouldn’t be able to fly under the radar so – after all, Sarah does start into her Christmas music phase as soon as Canadian Thanksgiving is over (and that’s in early October).

Also, if you felt like this year snuck up, just prepare yourself for next year. In 2019, Thanksgiving will fall on November 28th… aka, today. That’s going to make for some kind of short holiday season. You might have to join with Sarah in starting the Christmas music around Canadian Thanksgiving!

In honor of our cherished American tradition of Thanksgiving (and because of the craziness of travel/holidays/family, lez be honest), we took the last couple weeks off from posting. Sometimes when our travel schedule hits peak crazy around the holiday’s – and (as Sarah likes to remind me) our blog post schedule isn’t as, ahem, planned out as we’d like it to be – we just have to give each other some grace. Because a week or two off isn’t going to kill us. Or you 🙂

For now, onto this week’s post… Some of our favorite uses of points!

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The Best Deal in Travel Pt. 2: The Southwest Companion Pass

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Last week I intro’d the Southwest Companion Pass and how we’ve used it to score some major savings on travel in the first 4 years of our marriage. If you missed it, Companion Pass status on Southwest allows you to designate someone as your companion to fly with you for free wherever you go. Yeah, that’s not a typo!

To earn CP status, it takes 110,000 points to be earned in a calendar year. Points are most typically earned by flying… and that is a lot of flying, which means a lot of money, so how is it so attainable?

Well, surprise surprise, this is where credit cards come in. Southwest has 4 branded credit cards, and the sign-up bonus on these cards range from 40,000 to 60,000 depending on the current offer.

How’s this work?

Sign-up bonuses are triggered after an established “minimum spend” has been hit on a card. Most verbiage sounds something like this: “Spend 1,000 in the first 90 days of having the card and you’ll get an extra 40,000 points”. Now the key thing about this sign-up bonus is that it counts towards the 110,000 points needed to get the Companion Pass!

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The Best Deal in Travel

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Writing a post with the headline “The best deal in travel” has to be click-bait, right? That’s definitely what I would have thought years ago when I first heard about the Southwest Companion Pass – this can’t be real! But it was, it is and man is it amazing.

Wait a minute, back up

Southwest is easily the airline we use the most. Several times a year are guaranteed trips to Maryland to see my family and to Canada (flying into Buffalo) to see Sarah’s family. Southwest makes this easy with their flexible points, free checked bags, and no change fees.

And with Southwest’s expansion into the Caribbean and Mexico, the airline keeps getting more attractive. Adding to that the fact that Southwest is starting to fly to Hawaii soon and are looking at Canada, the airline is clearly focused on growth.

But back to the Companion Pass, would you believe me if I told you that ever since we got married, Sarah has flown for free with me wherever I go with Southwest? Or that we haven’t paid for a single flight on Southwest in the last 5 years? It kinda sounds too good to be true, but it’s not!

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Our Top 3 Travel Credit Cards

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So, last week I went over how great credit cards are at making travel accessible – check it out here – and today I’m going to run down my favorite travel credit cards. These are by no means the only cards out there, and they aren’t even the only travel cards I have. The combination of rewards, minimum spend and annual fee make these some of my favorites. Let’s do this thing!

Best Airline Card

If you are flying domestically, chances are that Southwest can get you where you need to go. And that’s not to say they always have the best prices – sometimes that award goes to the ultra-low airlines like Frontier or Spirit. But out of all of the airlines that I know of, Southwest has by far the best reward program. There are no blackout dates, which means every flight and every destination is points-eligible.

Southwest has a couple different credit cards, but their Plus card and Priority card are relatively similar. Currently, the sign-up bonus is for 40,000 points after spending $1,000 in the first 3 months. There is an annual fee of $69, but that is basically offset by the anniversary bonus of 3,000 points. For some perspective, 5,000 points are worth a little under $100. AKA 40,000 points are almost $800 in value!

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Credit Cards: The Gateway to Free Travel

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Credit cards mean different things to different people, and most of it has to do with your experience. For some, credit cards represent high-interest rates and a gateway to mountains of debt. For others, credit cards are some mysterious and forbidden last-resort option. And for some people, like me, credit cards are a gateway to free travel.

Surely it can’t be as simple as that, though, right? I mean, can you have the best of those three options without falling into any of the other options along the way? It is actually pretty easy to manage, and it all comes down to educating yourself on how they work and making a game-plan for your usage of them.

The Basics

Credit cards are relatively straightforward. You use them to pay for bills and expenses and instead of the money being pulled directly from your account, it gets stacked up against your “credit limit”. Aka the amount that the bank decided it could trust you to pay back when you applied for the card. Then, after a month of using it, the bank will ask for a minimum payment that goes towards your entire balance. Ideally, you pay off the entire balance so you do not have to deal with interest (which is usually pretty high for credit cards).

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Friday Five Episode 8

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Man oh man, where has the summer gone!? All of a sudden we are past Labor Day and fall is just about staring us in the face. No complaints from me – I’m pretty partial to fall weather – but did August just disappear for anyone else?!

We took a couple weeks off this summer… a bit of an impromptu “summer break” if you will. August was pretty hectic with family time and vacation time, so we decided to just chill for a couple weeks. But now, we are back on track and, as always, looking at different ways we can save money and stretch our miles to the limit! So we are going to slide back into the flow of things with a Friday Five – because lots is going on!

Chick-fil-a App

The CFA app is pretty swell and they just revamped their app to (hopefully) bring more food rewards to their raving fans. In honor of this revamp, they are offering free 8 count nuggets through September 29th – all you have to do is download their app and create an account! If you already have the app, just open it up and the nugs should show up under your rewards.

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Our Favorite Coffee Shops in DC

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Is it slightly hilarious and ironic that I’m writing a post about coffee shops and I don’t even like it!? Ian’s the coffee drinker, whereas I’ll take a cup of tea over those blehhh tasting brewed beans any day (alright, alright that’s a little harsh and very much a personal opinion but ya get it!). So yeah, probably a little hilarious. BUT even though I don’t drink coffee I’m still a sucker for visiting “coffee” shops, ordering my tea (or hot chocolate if I’m feeling particularly indulgent!), and enjoying the space.

And now enter DC, one of our favorite cities that we get to visit several times a year on work trips. On those trips, Ian’s spending his days in the office, and I am usually spending my days hopping around the city finding a place to call my own little office for a couple hours – which usually ends up being coffee shops. I can’t offer a take on the coffee itself, but from reviews and the number of people at all these places, I can tell you they are all doing something right! So here it is – a list of my favorites coffee shops in Washington, DC  (in no particular order):

Slipstream

Plenty of table space, clean, bright, and modern atmosphere, and it’s not just for your coffee needs – this place also has cocktails, and provisions on their menu. Plus, there are two locations: one on 14th Street NW, and one in Navy Yard….

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Getting the Most out of Your Accommodations

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One of the biggest costs of any trip is the accommodation. Sure, airfare can be cheap or even free, but it is harder to find good deals on hotels and Airbnb’s. A couple nights of hotels or Airbnb’s, plus the assorted cleaning fees and taxes and whatnot can really add up.

One of the best things you can do to fight against the accommodation money-suck is to consolidate your rewards programs. And what I mean by that is to pick a major hotel chain and stick with it when you are looking at multiple bookings that cost the same. This way, you will be able to funnel any rewards points into one stack instead of randomly having a couple thousand points here and there.

Hotel points are funny because it seems like across the board almost they cost more in points than airfare. On Southwest, a $100 flight will run me around 5,000 points, but a hotel room at a mid-level chain can easily start at 20,000 points. Because of that, these hotel credit cards with huge sign-up bonuses don’t go as far compared to airline cards with smaller sign-up bonuses….

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Barclay’s Arrival Card and Airbnb (or Disney)

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We have been taking a little bit of a break from our “Summer of Renovations” the past week and a half with Sarah’s parents in town. However, any chill time that we got in over the evenings was well-earned because they helped paint all of our doors and trim to go along with some deep cleaning! It was again just a joy to put time and energy (…and to watch them put their time and energy 😉 ) into some of the little things around the house.

For example, the doors in our house all seemed to be a different shade of beige with mismatched yellow doorknobs and yellow-rusty hinges (not rustIC, rustY). And with painting the doors, it seemed like the perfect time to bring all of this random hardware onto the same page with a nice simple black. So next time you stop by, check out our matte black doorknobs (that all match) and our sweet $.99 matte black hinges (thanks eBay)….

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