The Growth Booth

Credit Card Cocktail: The Ultimate Formula for Free Flights & Five-Star Hotels | The Growth Booth #69

Season 1 Episode 69

Did you know credit cards can get you free stays in 5-star hotels? And that’s just a start…

Welcome to the 69th episode of The Growth Booth Podcast, a show focused on supporting budding entrepreneurs and established business owners alike, towards achieving lifestyle freedom through building successful online businesses.

Learn how to do that and more on this week’s episode as Aidan is joined by Sean Agnew, an expert in globetrotting in business class without paying a single dime. Discover how credit cards can get you free flights, free hotel stays, cashback, and more!

Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business, or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you’re in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!


Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

03:06 Benefits of Credit Cards

06:29 Getting Started with Credit Cards

08:44 The Basics

11:23 Episode Sponsor

12:15 Accumulating Points

17:11 Where To Find Benefits

18:40 Business VS Personal Expenses

20:08 Tracking and Managing Cards

27:07 Recommended Cards and Programs

32:08 A Word of Caution

33:15 Outro


Links and Resources Mentioned:


About Our Host:

Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.

Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler.

 

Let's Connect!

●  Visit the website: https://thegrowthbooth.com/ 

●  Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aidanboothonline 

●  Let's connect on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aidanboothonline/ 

●  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheGrowthBooth 


Thanks for tuning in! Please don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe!


Aidan

Hey, everyone, Aidan Booth here. Welcome to episode number 69 of The Growth Booth, where today we're talking about what is quickly becoming one of my favorite topics, and that is credit card hacking. Now, if you don't know what that is, then you're in for a treat today because you're about to learn from an absolute master of credit card hacks. This is a guy that travels the world completely free. I guess the credit cards, the credit card companies probably pay for him and the banks pay for him to live it up in business class, sometimes first class, and not just airlines either. So Sean Agnew, who's been on the show a few times, and many of your listeners may be familiar with, already is here, and he is our in-house expert. So, Sean, thanks for joining us. 

 

Sean

Thanks for having me. I'm always happy to talk about this topic.

 

Aidan

How many credit cards do you have?

 

Sean

Well, now, I've pared it down a little bit since I've been in the process of relocating the business from Canada to America there. I think last year right around this time, I think I had eight on the Canadian side and four on the American. I think I had twelve total. I think I pared that down now to about six. 

 

Aidan

You can put them in a wallet still, right? 

 

Sean

Yeah, I have, like, a wallet, and then I have a whole bucket of them behind me.

 

Aidan

You wouldn't put them in a wallet if you live down in Argentina because you probably have a big wad of cash in there as well. It's a cash economy down here, and sometimes I find myself taking cards out just because of the cash down here. I'll give you an example, and this is a little bit off track, but the largest cash denomination is 1000 pesos, which is the equivalent of $2.50 American. You can imagine if you want to have $50 or something in your wallet, you got to have quite a lot of those notes in there, and it takes up a lot of room, man. 

 

So credit cards, they are the way to go. It's not just about rewards, either. I mean, there are other benefits to using credit cards that sort of came to mind. Protection, I'm not sure if you've used this benefit before, but I just had a friend who was traveling around in Argentina, and he rented a car from Alamo Car Rentals, and he returned the car, and they said to him, “Oh, you've screwed the car over. You're going to have to pay thousands of dollars to get it fixed. And he told me that he returned the car, and it was in absolute fine condition, and he paid for it with his Amex, and that was from Amex from the United States. He got on the phone with Amex, and they said, “Look, don't worry, we've got you back here.” If he had paid for that in cash, he would have sort of been screwed. I mean, I don't know how they would have got the cash out of him if he had done that, but there's a bit of protection there. Have you ever used the protection side of your cards? 

 

Sean

Yeah. So that's one of the benefits about having twelve different cards, is you're pretty much covered for just about every protection that's out there. Like, I have some cards that I have specifically because they give me, like, free Wi-Fi on an airplane. I have other cards that will give me two weeks of travel insurance if I book on that card. I have another card that obviously I will book my rental cars from because I get free car insurance. And there are numerous benefits. Some cards give you higher points on gas, some cards give you more points on your meals. It's always good to diversify as much as you can because there are a lot of benefits that you can have. 

 

Aidan

Obviously, there's the convenience factor if you're paying with a card. I mean, I think this is pretty much global. Argentina is probably the last standing economy that still operates in cash, but it's a convenience factor. There's also building credit. So, improving your credit score. I'm not sure if this is something that you've sort of consciously thought of when you've been using your cards or not. 

 

Sean

Yeah. So obviously in order to get like twelve cards, you have to have a decent amount of credit score. I don't have the credit score formula here, but I know a bunch of the way that you get a higher score is not utilizing your total value across all cards. So if you have, I don't know, $100,000….

 

Aidan

And paying it back on time. 

 

Sean

Correct. If you have $100,000 in credit cards, and you have like a $5,000 balance, you're going to have a better score than somebody who has a $70,000 balance. Right?

 

Aidan

Right.

 

Sean

Yeah. My score has been great since having all these cards. It doesn't seem to impact it at all. 

 

Aidan

I think if someone is actively trying to build up a bit of credit, cards can be a good way to do it. You show that you're a responsible consumer and so forth, and then that gets tracked by the banks and it can open up new lines of credit. I remember going back 20 years ago when I was starting my online business, I was using credit cards and stuff and from time to time the banks would actually reach out to me and say, “Hey, we can up your limit to X amount,” and I was like, “Okay,” and that was just because of the credit score being built. 

 

But the main benefit that I want to talk to you about, and god, we've spent so many hours talking about this because you really are the master here, are the points and the rewards. How did you first get interested or sort of become aware of the fact that you could use your credit cards and hack the heck out of them to get so many benefits? 

 

Sean

Well, what's interesting is that I wish I knew this or I wish somebody was giving me this talk like a decade ago, because I've spent a lot of money, multiple seven figures, on ads, ecommerce stores, whatever, and if I had have taken the time period between 2013 and 2020, there was a seven-year period where I wasn't using my credit card points at all to the best of their ability. 

 

It was after COVID when I was finally allowed to leave the country, which is a weird thing to think about, but after a year of being stuck in Canada, I was actually at an event down in Florida. One of my buddies that I hadn't seen in a couple of years was telling me, Tim, “How the hell are you traveling here and there and everywhere?” And he's like “Dude, you got to get this card. You got to get that card,” and he actually gave a quick, like, 10-20 minutes presentation to all the individuals that were in our little Mastermind there. The second I went home, I was like, man, I wasted so many years just not spending points properly. 

 

So ever since that moment in time, I guess pretty much the last two and a half years or so, once I made the switch, I haven't paid for an international flight ever. Coming down to see you in the end of May there, and I'm not.  

 

Aidan

That's not a short flight. That's not a short flight, either. 

 

Sean

Yeah, 14 hours. That's a nice little lie-flat seat. I mean, I got to pay the tax. I think the tax was, like, $104 or something. 

 

Aidan

I'll take that. Recently, Sean and I were in Las Vegas catching up with one another, and I paid $8,000 to get to Vegas. Like, what the hell? Flights have gone mental, and you probably traveled there for $100. 

 

Sean

I was telling you about it at lunch with Steve. I was like, “You got to get this card. You got to get that card paying for flights.”

 

Aidan

So you heard a presentation, and I guess you could say that the penny dropped. At that point, you've been really doubling down on this ever since. Now, for someone who's brand new to credit card hacks, what are some of the basic things that they should know to get started? You mentioned a few things a few moments ago. For example, you can have one card, which is good for getting free Wi-Fi. Another card is good for something else. Maybe you could explain a little bit about what that is and just some of the basics to get us going here. 

 

Sean

Yeah, sure. First of all, don't extend yourself if you can't. What I'm doing might not be available to the average person out there. I totally understand that. But even if you have one credit card with, like, a $5,000 limit on it, if you're using the right card, it's still much more beneficial than using whatever card you have in your pocket. A lot of cards, you might get a credit card for free, and you get nothing out of it. So you spend all this money at the end of the year. It's like, “Oh, you got 10,000 points,” and then you cash that in for a $100 check, and it's like the worst value you can possibly get. 

 

So what I would do is it really depends on your lifestyle. I am practically addicted to travel. I think it had to do with COVID and being locked down for 18 months. The second I was able to leave, I went to five out of the seven continents last year, and not having to pay for those flights, I absolutely love it. I looked for cards that are going to maximize my points for international first-class travel. We can talk about that as we go along, but maybe you're not at that point in your life, and you're like, “Hey, I don't really want to travel first class. I don't have that vacation time. It's not within my budget.” Whatever. 

 

You should still be maximizing the cards to save on, get points for groceries. There are cards that give you 5X points at the grocery store, and instead of paying with your debit card, you pull out your credit card on that $100 grocery bill. You get 500 points instead of nothing. The debit card is almost the worst thing that you can ever pay with. I understand. I want to make sure you're responsible. Don't max out your credit card bill, but the credit card actually gives you a bonus for using it. So as long as you're responsible, you can have cards that are giving you points for groceries, that are giving you points for gas, that are giving you points at the movie theater, whatever it may be. 

 

At the end of the year, you might find yourself with 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 points. And maybe it's not an international trip, but maybe you live in Florida and you want to go to Vegas, and bing, bang, boom, you get a free plane and a free four-night stay that you otherwise wouldn't have had. I think it's critical just to look at your lifestyle and look at the cards that are out there that fit that lifestyle and start using those. 

 

Aidan

How do you accumulate points then? 

 

Sean

Yeah, so for me, it's quite easy. I run a marketing and advertising business, so the two cards that I use in my business quite strictly at the beginning of the year are the Amex Business Gold and the Chase Business Preferred Card. Both of those cards, on your first $150,000 in ad spend, will give you 4X points. 

 

Aidan

Is it just ad spend, or is it any spend? 

 

Sean

So they have different categories that they'll give you 4X spend on for Amex and 3X spend for the Chase card, and it's on the first $150K you spend. So obviously, I don't expect everybody watching this podcast is going to go up there and spend $150K. But if you did, you would use your Amex card to spend the $150K, then you would switch to the Chase and you would max out the $150K there. And there are different categories, one of them being ad spend. And so, obviously, I have an advertising business. I toss the cards in the Google Ads account I have, and after $300,000 in ad spend every single year, I'm left with 1.5 million points. 

 

Aidan

That's awesome. I know that if someone's listening to this, and you've made the point a couple of times already, it doesn't matter if you don't have a huge amount of ad spend, you can still do this on a smaller scale. I bet you save $5,000 or $10,000 or get $5,000 or $10,000 worth of something in rewards just for the average Joe, if you know what you're doing here.

 

Sean

Here is an example on that, actually, if you don't mind me jumping in there. Steve was telling me about the Park Hyatt in Japan because I'm going to Tokyo this year with Jacqueline, and he was saying, “You got to stay at the Park Hyatt. It's this famous hotel in downtown Tokyo. It was in a movie,” whatever. I was like, “All right, cool, I'll check it out,” and that hotel goes for something like $1,000 a night, US dollars. Just crazy, right? But the World of Hyatt credit card that you can go get gives you a 60,000-point welcome bonus for joining. Do you know how many points per night that it costs for a room at the Park Hyatt in Tokyo? 20,000. 

 

So just by going to sign up for that card, three nights for additions to get the 60,000, usually it's like, “We'll give you 60,000 if you spend X amount over 90 days,” or whatever it is, but they're giving you three nights at a Tokyo hotel that's worth $3,000. So just those little things that anybody could do go a long way. 

 

Aidan

And that hotel, by the way, is worth the effort. I've stayed in there, stayed there for about a week, and yeah, it's something else. The views are amazing. The bedrooms have got all kinds of technology that I couldn't even figure out how to use. It is Tokyo, after all. That extends into the bathroom, where everything in the bathroom does all kinds of different things that you don't expect it to do or don't know how to control, but it's a lot of fun. The hotel is amazing. 

That's a great point. You've seen an opportunity to get a card, it's not difficult for you to get it. It's going to save you equivalent of $3,000 from the get-go just for doing nothing, basically. It sounds like you're able to pass a lot of the business expenses through these cards. You're spending the money. You have to spend the money anyway, and the points are the bonus, the reward, the icing on the cake. 

 

Sean

Yeah. One of the biggest mistakes I made, and look, I understand we're all at different levels in our business and life, but one thing I did when I started doing really well in business, 2017, 2018, I'm starting, I'm doing really well here, things are good. I have this card in Canada. I have a US-dollar Visa in Canada. All I'm doing is just taking the cash value of my points. If I have 50,000 points, that might be worth $500 in cash, which is $500 in cash. I'm not going to complain about it. But guess what? In Canada, they tax that as income on your business. 

 

So that 50,000 points is actually taxed at like 50%. That $500 becomes $250. It's like, I know now, maybe not right now, gas prices and things like that, but I know last year there were first class one way flights that were $8,000 to Barcelona that I could take for 50,000 points. Do I want the $8,000 flight, or do I want the $500 that's going to get taxed at 50%? So it's just such a huge mistake. Credit card companies, they want you to take the cash because the other things that you use it for are much more expensive for them. 

 

Aidan

Yeah, but they're losing money on you. Well, you're spending a lot of money with them, but I would say you're in that 0.1% of the population that really knows how to leverage the heck out of these cards. I think every single person listening to this can also be in that 0.1%. You don't have to have a huge spend to be able to do this. Where do you go to find out about benefits? Like, you say you're going to Tokyo, going to the Park Hyatt. How did you know that exist? Did you do a Google search? Did you ask for some AI technology or something? 

 

Sean

Well, nowadays, I could probably just go to Chat GPT and be like, “Find me the best credit card that's going to get you three nights at the Hyatt in Tokyo.” In probably 2 seconds, it's done. But nowadays, I mean, I've been doing this for three years, right? I'm a point hacker. I already know the cards I should have set up in my business. I don't usually use hotel cards too often, but I grew up in relative poverty, so I'm still a little frugal. I was like, “I don't want to spend $1000 a night on a hotel. It's got to be a better way.” 

 

So I started googling around. I know there are Hyatt credit cards, and I just sort of came across it on one of the websites I jumped across. I went to the website, I applied for the card, and I got the card. I booked three nights at the hotel. There you go. Right? So it's just a simple Google search. There's a wealth of information out there on there. The Points Guy is a good website to check out. That guy's dedicated his whole life. This guy eats, sleeps, and breathes this stuff. But yeah, there are a couple of YouTube channels out there I can't think of off the top of my head. But just simply Google, ask ChatGPT how to get a cheap first-class flight with points to wherever you want to go in the world, and see what comes up. I bet you that'll be the fastest way nowadays. 

 

Aidan

What about when you're going to the supermarket? Do you have a special card that you use there? Do you distinguish between the personal expenses, like going to the supermarket and the business expenses? 

 

Sean

Yeah. My accountant, not so much. I think my bookkeeper probably hates me a little bit. They're probably vastly underpaid for the amount of nonsense I put them through because I will mix stuff, and I know you're probably not supposed to, but receipts or receipts and whatever, yeah, my personal card gives me 5X points on gas. None of my business cards come close, so it's like, “Okay, if I want to charge gas to the business here, I'm going to use my personal card.” I want the points, right? My bookkeeper is like, “Yeah, stop doing that dude.” I'm like, “But I need the points.” He's like, “How many points did you get? You got like 300 points.” I'm like, “Hey, they add up.” 

 

But then my business card gives me really good points on meals, entertainment, groceries and stuff, so I'll often use that to go buy groceries. It can be a little mixy, but sometimes I even forget. But literally, I don't have my phone in front of me, but I have like a Google Notes where I have the cards and then what points I get for each sort of thing so that when I'm at the store, I'm like, “Oh, yeah, this is the one I got to use for the movies,” or whatever, so I can max out the points. 

 

Aidan

Well, we'll make sure that you fill-up the tank before you drive us down to the Formula One, which is actually going to be happening this week when this episode is published, because that's definitely a business expense right there. Now that kind of led me on to my next question, how do you track and manage this? Do you have Post-it notes? Do you write on the back of each card? What's your strategy there? What's your system? 

 

Sean

I mean, I used to have a Google Sheet that I would religiously fill out, and it's a little weird. As an entrepreneur, I don't like the tedious tasks, but I really love credit card points. I'll sit there hours on end just typing out these points. Then I got to a point where I was like, you know what? Amex is probably right. I'm not going to track this stuff anymore. But what I was doing the other day and what I'm going to do going forward is like, “Okay, where am I traveling this year? What's the lay of the land now?” Points have sort of gone up a little bit. Like to go to Japan, for example, I saw last year was like 150,000 points, and now it's like 225,000 points. 

 

So I was kind of like, “Okay, I'm going to go to Japan, and I might bring my girlfriend with me to that one.” I got to pay for two flights, and I'm going off to Buenos Aires now in June or whatever, and I'm going to Portugal. You try to look at that, and it's like, “Okay, I need 1.5 million points. When am I going to get that?” and just sort of make a note to myself. 

 

Aidan

But you do like a forecast, business forecast, for the points?

 

Sean

Yeah, that's exactly what that's like, right? You get the points on your Amex, and then Amex partners with all these different airlines, and it's like a 1:1 point ratio. If I want to book a flight through Air Canada, I just transfer some points from Amex over to Air Canada, or if I want to book it with Singapore, Air Emirates was the one I took last year, which was, like, a $14,000 flight. It was the A-380, the largest plane in the world. I had my own suite. When you get on a plane, sometimes you'll get a menu and they'll be like, “Okay, you can pick the chicken or the steak,” and you're like, “Okay, give me the steak.” They had a book, and it was like, do I want a filet mignon? Do I want an omelet? Like, do I want crème brûlée? Do I want Don Perignon? It was ridiculous. 

 

Aidan

It must be nice. You look across the island to the other suite, and you know the other guy paid $14,000, and you're just cruising on back to the points. 

 

Sean

It was sweet, and I think I paid, like, 140,000 points to it. So it was like $1400 cash value amounts of points for a $14,000 flight. It was just unbelievable. If you ever get a chance to be on an A380 in the first class suite, I would have never dreamt that for myself, and I didn't pay for it. A few hundred bucks in taxes or whatever. 

 

Aidan

My story with the A380 is I flew from Paris to Sydney, Australia, and I booked the flight. The Malaysian flight crashed and went down, right? No one knew where it went, whatever that flight was. And so that happened. Then I had this big trip coming up, and I was having a look around, and Malaysian had an A380, which went from Paris to Sydney, Australia. I was like, “Oh, okay, well, the other flight was pretty bad luck, but I'll try my luck, and I'll go in this A380,” because they had been known for their amazing quality and service before the plane went missing. 

 

And then I booked my flight with Malaysian, and the very next week, the Russians shot the next Malaysian jet out of the fly and I was like, “Holy crap, two Malaysian jets are down now, and I'm traveling pretty soon.” But anyway, it worked out okay, and I think I got a really good deal because of all the hassle that they had had. I wasn't in a suite there. I was just in regular business class, but even that was amazing. I mean, it was next level business class compared to pretty much any other of the big luxury airlines. I've traveled Qatar as well. That wasn't A380, but that was a long 30 hours or something of flying from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, and that was pretty good. But Malaysian was even better. There was basically like an assistant, I would almost say that was, standing by my seat the whole time, and I was like “If you want to go and rest or something, you can do that. You don't need to be sort of my on-demand assistant. I'll press the button if I need something, or I'll get out of my seat and go and do it.” But they've got pretty amazing bathrooms and stuff, those planes as well. 

 

Sean

Yeah, I had a shower in mine. They had two showers in the first class. I literally booked one. They're like, “What time would you like to book your shower, sir?” And I was like, “Shower?” I was like, I guess I'll just have one to say I had a shower. You got 30 seconds of hot water. It's a horrible shower, but you have to do it. Why not, right? 

 

Aidan

Having spoken to you about this in the past, it sounds like when you have to set up accounts, if you're using the points for the different airlines, you set up accounts with the loyalty programs of the different airlines. This is something you could get a VA to do, I guess, just to save some time. If you wanted, you could say, “Set me up in a loyalty points account with British Airways, with American, with Delta,” because then, as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, but you start accumulating all these points, and you're like, “Okay, transfer these points from my Amex to British,” and then once they're in British, you use those points to buy the British flight. Is that how it works? 

 

Sean

Yeah. So your two main programs that you're going to use for airline travel that are just the best are Amex and Chase, and they have many of their airline partners overlap. I think Amex uses Delta and Chase uses United or vice versa, something like that. Generally, when you're using those two cards, you just go to Google. A quick Google search will give you which partner airlines that both Chase and Amex partner with, and then you're going to want to go to all those airlines' websites and create free accounts. Air Canada, Virgin Air, British, Singapore Air, whatever, right? Etihad, KLM, Air France. I pretty much know them all by heart. 

 

But you go there and you create the free account. Then when you're ready to book a flight, you'll go. For example, when I was looking to go to Buenos Aires, I know that the only way to get there from Toronto is with Air Canada. I go to Air Canada's website, and I start looking at flights. I see how many points they cost. I look at different days. Do I want to connect, do I not want to connect? Whatever. Then Air Canada says, “Okay, it's going to be this amount of points.” I then go over to Amex and I send points over to Air Canada. It's like instant one to one transfer. 100,000 Amex points is 100… 

 

Aidan

It's amazing. I thought it would have been a 24-hour delay to get into the system. 

 

Sean

It's instant, and then you can book the flight. Usually, nowadays with the way the laws are in America and Canada, I don't know how it is the rest of the world, but you got like 24 hours to cancel if you want to change your mind. But yeah, pretty simple process. 

 

Aidan

That's awesome. So you've mentioned that you use Chase and Amex for travel-related things, and they obviously work well with advertising spend. Are there any particular cards or reward programs that you might recommend to the average Joe who maybe doesn't do that much ad spend? Is there anything that comes to mind there that would be worth looking at? And obviously, it's going to vary all around the world, but we do have a lot of our listeners in the USA and Canada. 

 

Sean

Yeah. Specifically in America, I know that there's a really good Amazon card that gives you 5% cashback on all your Amazon Prime purchases. I think if I'm not mistaken, it gives you free Amazon Fresh delivery, by the way, for my American listeners. As somebody who just got a place down in Miami, I'm addicted to Amazon Fresh things. The greatest thing ever. It's like they have groceries 30% cheaper than Whole Foods, and they deliver it right outside your door in like an hour. I don't know how the hell Whole Foods even exist with that kind of service. It's unbelievable. The Amazon credit card is a really good one. I just got that one recently. Like I said, it gives you cashback on all your Amazon orders, free Amazon Fresh delivery. 

 

Aidan

I think they give you, like, a couple hundred dollars as credit or something, like free money, when  you get one as well, because I see them getting advertised to me all the time. They're like, “Get the Amazon card and we'll give you $200.” It might be different for different people in different parts of the world, but I keep seeing that. 

 

Sean

Yeah. I know one bad thing as a Canadian is the same card in America that exists in Canada, like the Amex Business Gold in America gives you way more benefits, like forex points on your ad spend. You get like 100,000 points for joining this and that. The Amex Business Gold in Canada, they're like, “Yeah, you get nothing.” It's just horrible for whatever reason. 

 

But hotel cards, I don't necessarily recommend hotel cards if they're going to they have free ones, or they have ones that are like $79 a year. Unless you're loyal to a specific brand, or you're doing what I'm doing, you're just getting a card to get some free nights or whatever, that's fine. Generally speaking, they're not the best cards because you can oftentimes book your hotel through Amex if you really wanted to. I still don't think it's the best use of points, but if you wanted to, you can book your hotel through Amex, oftentimes at a better value than you can through the hotel card itself. 

 

It almost makes no sense to have those cards other than if you'd go to Marriott 40 times a year, and maybe it makes sense, but hotel cards are decent. Then get yourself a good grocery card and a gas card. Usually, they're sort of one and of the same, Amex. In Canada, we have one called the Cobalt. I don't really have one down in America yet. I haven't looked too much into it, but the one I have gives me 5X on gas and 4X on meals and things like that. Just stuff that you can get the highest amount of point value on your day-to-day life activity. 

 

Aidan

Yeah, so something I do for hotels, and it's not quite at the level of what you're doing for sure, but it's something that's really easy that you can start with, and it'll save you at least 10%. I book my hotels for the most part through hotels.com, and you can still use a credit card when you're booking through hotels.com. If you book through hotel.com, and you've got an account with them, what they do is for every ten nights, they give you one night for free. It's basically like getting a 10% discount, and the free night that you get will be the average of the value of your other ten nights. If your first ten nights were an average of $400 a night, you would have a $400 credit. 

 

For me, at least, that accumulates pretty quickly. It's not like you get one night free. It's that you get that amount of credit free. So that is $400. Depending on where I'm staying, that might be worth one and a half nights or two nights or whatever it might be. If you're going somewhere and you're staying for a few nights, you might be spending $1,000 or something, then I imagine that you could also put that kind of an expense through your credit card. It's almost like you're double-dipping. You're getting credit card points, but you're also getting hotels points, which is 10% saving. 

 

It's not just a 10% saving in that they give you a free night or the equivalent of a free night for every ten nights, but they also give you discounted prices as well. So it's almost like you're sort of triple dipping there. But again, I think what you've said is really the pinnacle of hacking for credit cards and getting points, and, yeah, it's just amazing. This is something that I'm studying closely and finally starting to work to my advantage, which, to your point, should have done it much, much sooner. Any tips or tricks that you want to leave people with? Any final warnings? Obviously, don't go crazy and spend up large on your credit card if you can't afford to do that. But any tips or tricks just to leave folks with here today? 

 

Sean

Yeah, definitely. The warning is, like, don't just go spend money just to get points. One tip is cards oftentimes will offer you crazy welcome bonuses, but they'll always have strings attached. Like, the Amex Platinum gives you 120,000 for joining, but you got to spend $30,000 over six months. Just always be aware that you're hitting those targets, and those points are usually delivered right away. My biggest tip would be start as soon as you can. This is free money out there for you. I don't know how you want to use it, but maybe it takes a few years to accumulate 100,000 points or something, that's still a free trip that you otherwise wouldn't have had. So get started soon. Don't make the mistake I'd made. I literally wasted millions and millions and millions of points on stupid, not valuable things that I wish I could have changed. 

 

Aidan

That's tens of thousands of dollars, those millions of points, maybe even into six figures. 

 

Okay, well, Sean, this has been awesome. Really appreciate you taking some time out. I know that this is something that we've discussed personally. It's also something that you've shared in some of our different online training programs and is always one of the most popular presentations. I'm sure we're going to get questions, and we can definitely follow up with that. 

 

We will include some links in with this episode, which is going to be on The Growthbooth.com. Navigate to episode number 69. You can also see us on YouTube, and you'll be able to again find us just by searching for The Growth Booth, episode number 69. Check that out. You'll be able to get the transcripts and a few links to some of the most popular cards that Sean has mentioned. 

 

I would say if you're listening to this internationally, the best thing that you can do is just do a Google search for reward cards and point cards in your country, and you're probably going to get some good information. It's not going to take you too long to find out what's available and go ahead and do it because it's just money that's free, basically, and you can tap into it and use it for anything you want, I should say. It's not really the money, it's the free access to things which would otherwise cost you a lot of money. 

 

Thanks again, Sean. Really appreciate you sharing all this with everyone here. 

 

Sean

Yeah, thanks for having me. Anytime. 

 

Aidan

That's a wrap, guys. We will see you on the next episode of The Growth Booth. Bye for now. 

 

 

People on this episode