Gen Z Guide to FI

Hello internet friends! Today, I am going to be talking about travel hacking through credit card churning. It is an extremely popular technique in the FIRE community that lets you travel the world for FREE. No, this is not a scam. It does require a good amount of strategy and planning.

For starters, I only advise you use this method if you have a relatively high credit score, you aren’t making any big purchases dependent on your credit e.g buying a house or getting a car loan and if you practice healthy habits with credit card spending. Healthy habits here mean you are paying off your credit card on time and in full to avoid debt and high interest rates on your credit cards.

For this first post on travel hacking, I will be using my upcoming trip to Canada in 2023 as a case study. In 2021, I opened up a Chase Sapphire Preferred card while they were having a 100,000 mile promo. So basically, a wide range of travel credit cards offer promos of 50,000 miles – 100,000 miles if you spend $2000 – $3000 within 3 – 6 months. Back to the Chase card, so they offered 100k miles if I spent $3000 within 90 days. Through the Chase in app travel portal (called Ultimate Rewards), 100k miles = $1,250 worth of travel. The card has an annual fee of $95 so net profit of $1,155. So amazing deal all around! One of the best I have ever encountered but this was also my first card experience lol.

Anyway in 2021, I opened the around when I was moving and had a lot of moving expenses. I put the moving expenses (which came out to about $1000) on the card. Then, I also transferred all my recurring expenses (utilities, WiFi, Netflix, car insurance etc) to the card. Also, I used the card for my daily purchases – groceries, gas etc. By like 60 days, I was well over the $3000 spend required for the bonus just living within my budget and strategically opening the card when I had big upcoming purchases.

Alright fast forward to December 2022, and I still had about 50,000 points left from that card. I had used the other bonus points for short weekend trips to San Diego before I decided to become an xoxo gossip girl blogger. Anyway, this is the roundtrip cost of my upcoming trip from San Jose, California to Toronto, Canada in April 2023. A whopping $0.

NICE!! Now that I have peaked your interest, I will recommend some other blogs or podcasts to listen to while you go down this rabbit hole of free travel. I opened up 2 new credit cards in December – Chase SouthWest airline card & Amex Delta airline card. I will be sharing my experiences with those cards as well as the trips that I end up planning with them in 2023. More updates on Canada 2023 are coming as well.

Listen to ChooseFI podcast episode 9 or visit Choose FI travel page for more rabbit hole research.

xoxo genfirebaby