Credit and Loyalty Cards | The Miracle of Points Multiplication

With a little ingenuity and discipline, it is possible to work small miracles with your credit cards and loyalty cards. Our columnist followed the lessons of a points professional.

Oddly enough, the trick to maximizing your credit and loyalty card earnings is to be… unfaithful. But as with love, multiple relationships take time and some strategic planning.

The difference when it comes to rewards programs is that no one will ever end up unhappy and angry about the points they accumulate.

Instead, these cards can allow couples and families to travel for free or almost free, take a weekend getaway, get gas tanks or grocery shopping without spending a single dollar.

But points don’t fall from the sky. You have to organize yourself to get the most rewards, which is not always easy with the proliferation of programs and their constantly changing offers.

To help the most motivated, Milesopedia, a Montreal Wikipedia dedicated to credit and rewards cards, offers a private mentoring service. Intrigued, I signed up for a session, thinking I would receive general tips about each of my cards. I was wrong.

Expert Aline Nguyen instead develops personalized strategies to achieve a specific goal, such as going to Disney with the kids for a week or taking a honeymoon in Bali and sleeping in a specific overwater hotel. Only with points. By taking into account both the person’s spending habits, the strengths of each card and current promotions, the coach develop a strategy by determining precisely which types of points are most beneficial and the best way to obtain them as quickly as possible.

Both the accumulation and use of rewards are optimized.

The driver who buys a lot of gas, does his grocery shopping at Metro and wants to go to Paris to stay in an Airbnb will not have the same game plan at all as the manager who travels for work, often buys on Amazon and wants to take his girlfriend to an all-inclusive resort in Mexico.

The project can be quite simple. A woman once used Milesopedia to save money on a flight she thought was too expensive. She had to go to Switzerland at the last minute for a family emergency and the plane ticket was selling for $2,600. Thanks to a one-time offer from Aeroplan, it was much cheaper for her to buy points. For $1,500, the woman got enough to go to Switzerland. For $2,500 in points, she could have even flown business class, recalls Aline Nguyen.

Since I didn’t have a specific project in mind, I asked the expert to explain her best strategies, her most profitable moves, her way of managing all of this without wasting hours of her life.

In itself, my question proves that the proliferation of credit and loyalty cards has made accumulating points quite complicated, thank you. The good news is that no one is forced to play the game. But those who want to can earn a lot of money if they do it intelligently.

Basically, you should never spend more to earn points. That would be counterproductive. Then, you must absolutely repay the balance in full on all your credit cards every month. Otherwise, the interest paid will be more expensive than the points collected.

From the moment we are able to have this discipline, we keep ourselves informed of promotions and take advantage of those that suit us.

Aline Nguyen told me a story about earning Air Miles for strawberries. On St. John’s Day, June 24, Air Miles was paying 24 times the miles on all purchases, and another offer gave you 5 miles for every box of strawberries purchased. “The strawberries were on special at $2.50 a box. I bought four. For $10 worth of strawberries, I got almost 500 miles, which is $50.”

Another strategy: “quadruple hits.” Here’s a real-life example. The Scène+ program offered 1,000 points on the purchase of $100 worth of IGA gift cards. Using an Amex Cobalt credit card that gives 5 times the points on groceries, M^me Nguyen purchased a $100 Simons gift card. She then went to the Aeroplan portal (but it could have been Air Miles) to shop at Simons.

Points were therefore obtained on his Scène+, Amex, Aéroplan and Simons cards.

While home runs like this aren’t always possible, double whammies can become a reflex. Just take advantage of the multiplier effect of the Aeroplan and Air Miles portals. A strategy that is still little-known and underused. “It’s just one more click that earns us something. So why not? People forget, it’s not automatic. It’s like flossing,” the mentor explains to me philosophically.

Buying gift cards is another strategy to get into your habits. Many credit cards offer five times the points at supermarkets. So before you go to the SAQ or make purchases in a store or even on Airbnb, plan to buy a gift card while you do your grocery shopping. You will save 5%. It’s better than nothing, if you don’t forget to use your gift cards.

If you’re a low spender and don’t travel, you may feel like cards don’t do anything for you. But choosing the right one might surprise you. “We see people spending only $15,000 a year to get $5,000 worth of points,” says M.^me Nguyen.

Households of four spend an average of $16,000 per year on food ($77 per person, per week). Add to that $4,000 in spending on activities and clothing, and you could save $840 per year by getting a credit card that gives you 5% cash back on groceries and 1% on everything else.

The most lucrative strategy, according to Milesopedia, is to take advantage of credit card welcome offers. Be careful to read all the terms and conditions carefully, as a certain minimum purchase amount must be charged to the account to unlock the bonus. To avoid abuse, some issuers limit the number of bonuses a person can get. For beginners, Milesopedia recommends starting with one or two credit cards, then space out applications by at least six to nine months.

“Then,” Milesopedia adds, “once you become more comfortable with credit card management, you can increase the number of credit card applications and bring them closer together over time.”

Aline Nguyen has about fifteen credit cards. She opens and closes accounts regularly, but keeps some cards for a very long time, which pleases the credit agencies. It has nothing to do with financial problems, it’s her way of accumulating a maximum of points and discounts by paying for each type of purchase with the card that pays the most. She assures me that her credit rating doesn’t suffer, except sometimes in the first few months after opening a new account. By paying off her balances in full and on the nail, she sees her rating go up quickly.

This is certainly not a strategy that I would recommend to everyone, as it requires discipline, knowledge and time. But this extreme use of programs has the merit of demonstrating to those who do not like to enrich the banks that it is possible to use credit absolutely without fees, and even to derive financial benefits from it.