How I Travel For Free Year-Around ($30,000 a Year+)

Hello, so what this is on the screen and I'll reload the page here is my American Express account. And thus far, it's about April right now in 2025. So four months into the year, I've earned about a quarter million points. And those aren't just points on a screen, that translates into actual money and cash. And that does a lot for me. What it does is right here, I get nearly all of my flights free or 90 plus percent off. I get free hotel stays when I want to. And on most of the money that I spend on a day-to-day basis, you know, personally and for business, I get anywhere between 8 and 20 percent in cash back. And the reason I'm making this video is because I talk a lot about personal finance on this channel and these ideals, right, these ideas, models, frameworks. But not much of that is as applied as I would like it to be as kind of material. And so something like what I want to talk about in the next few minutes, which is how I get these points, how to maximize your credit card rewards and how that translates into real serious cash for you is a very applied form of a lot of what we talk about on this channel in relation to investing, you know, personal finance and really just going about decision making in a way that gets you the most of what you want, in this case, traveling money and really just not doing a lot of the things that waste what you already have. I'm going to get into this again. It'll just take a few minutes. I want to keep this straight to the point. I want to give credit first off to Lucas. Lucas, if you're watching this, you're the OG, you're the king here. I'm not an expert in this stuff. I just follow a set of kind of basic principles that have done really well for me. And I got those from Lucas. So kudos to him. So with that said, I want to get into first how exactly I do what I do. So again, just how I get all of these things, free flights, free hotel stays and an extremely high cash back on nearly all spend. But first, I want to make one other note about personal finance as it relates to traveling, since that's what we're talking about in this video. And that's what I'm doing now. I'm currently in Thailand, in Phuket. And that starts with how browsing the Internet without protection is like posting a private message on your public story. Anyone can see your memes or your browser history, but also more serious personal and financial information. And that is basically right here, what happens when you go online without a VPN and a VPN. I'll write that right here or a virtual private network is an app that hides your IP address and encrypts your Internet connection through a secure tunnel. And like I said, I'm recording this video abroad from my home in Phuket, Thailand. And so this is very relevant to me right now. And so I want to take a moment to explain why private Internet access is my VPN of choice. And you can see that I have it connected and turned on right here right now. So first, it's great because it protects you from hackers when you're on public Wi-Fi. So whether you're at a coffee shop, an airport, or even at home, PIA shields your IP address, your photos, your personal information, your messages, etc. from prying eyes. And second, it lets you access region restricted content from anywhere in the world. I'm sure all of us at some point have been browsing on Netflix when we're traveling and we see some kind of show that just was available in our home country and isn't available now. So with servers in 91 countries and all 50 states, PIA lets you watch shows that aren't available in your region. And this is a big one to save on flights and games and to bypass regional blackouts for sport events. In my case, I'm watching a show called I Will Find You on Netflix right now, not available in Thailand, is available in the US. So when I turn this on, this is currently a New York server, then I can go and watch that show. And finally, what really sets PIA apart is that you can attach unlimited devices to one subscription. That means your entire household so your phones, tablets, computers, gaming consoles, etc. all stays protected. And here's the best part viewers of this channel get 83% off that's an exclusive discount and that brings the price to $2.03 per month plus four months free. So use my link piavpn.com forward slash john law that is piavpn.com forward slash john law or this QR code on the screen to get started with a 30 day money back guarantee and that deal that I just spoke to. And again, it's really just a set of principles that I follow that are relatively simple. The first is I get one to two new credit cards and their intro bonuses per year. That's not a credit card a month. You can do that. But you know, you don't have to. And really just I look for what's going to give me the best bonuses. It doesn't really matter how much I have to spend if that's $1,000 5,000 10,000 20,000 is really just how many points I'm going to get per dollar that I spend. So right now for Amex, for example, I have just the business gold card card American Express gold card and the Delta miles card. The big intro bonuses there are the the Amex gold and then the business gold as well. Like that's I think 275,000 points right there. And those are big bonuses these credit cards companies give you just to sign up for their card. Amex have them, you know, Chase has them, a lot of different card companies, credit card companies have them, although Chase and Amex are kind of the big two players there. So that right there is a lot of points. And that's great. And that's part of the first half of this kind of maximization equation that we're doing, which is the inflow part. And the inflow part is, well, how do I get the most amount of points? What's even more important, in my opinion, is the outflow is how do I spend those? How do I maximize my yield and what I get for spending my points? Because it's really easy to not do that well. But the inflow matters as well. Just how do you get the points? And the intro bonuses are a large part of that. That's step number one. Step number two, in terms of my my kind of playbook here is I match spend with cards that reward that spend. For example, say you spend all your money, like a high percent of your money on restaurants. How do you spell restaurants? If this is you, then that's going to look very different in terms of the credit cards you should get and the intro bonuses you should claim to someone where most of your income goes to, let's say, a business, right? To paying people to add spend, just whatever that may look like. So these two people should have different cards. And I'll give you an example with the Amex cards I have pulled up here, right? You can see right right here with global restaurants and U.S. supermarkets, these are 4x point categories. And what that means is by default, you get 4x the standard rewards, so kind of four points per dollar at restaurants and supermarkets for this card. Now, for this business school card right here, I get 4x points at what, in my case, is a really critical category, that being, you know, business and specifically ad spend. So in my case, a lot of my income goes into ad spend, whether that's for this YouTube channel, whether it's for products or just, you know, business generally. Also, a lot of what we talk about on this YouTube channel. And so if most of, say, my income personally goes toward restaurants and ad spend, then I want to just maximize the inflow, the amount of points I get on those two categories. And so what I'm doing is I'm matching these categories. So what I spend my money on, two cards that maximize those, the spend in those categories. So for restaurants, right, I get Amex gold is a 4x. Let me bring this closer to the screen, make this a little bit bigger. And then for ad spend, business gold is also 4x. Now the kind of standard, like the cash value you can get for points in the case Amex is one cent per point, right? So by default, 4x points is kind of 4% cash back. So then how do you get to 8% up to 20%? Well, that comes down to now outflow as opposed to inflow. So these first two, these just basic how I do it. I take the amount of money that I'm spending, whatever categories those may be. In my case, a lot of food, a lot of ads, a lot of business spend. And then I match those up with cards that get good points. And then in addition to that, I get the intro bonuses on, you know, a card, best case, highest volume case once every few months, but really just as low as, you know, one or two cards a year. And then I match that up with these one to two new cards and their intro bonuses per year. So by default, I'm getting a few hundred thousand points for new cards and then I'm getting 4x on my spend. So then I have these two points here. The first is just don't waste points. And what that comes down to as well, how do, how kind of the point systems work and how do you actually make them work for you? There's different ways you can spend points. For example, what you'll see with most credit cards is that you can apply points to pay down your balance. It turns out that's a really, really bad way. That's a total waste of your points. You're going to get basically one, one cent per point, like in the case of say Amex, if you do that. So I'm getting my 4% cash back. But if I was buying, say a business class international flight, I could get four or five cents per point. I think I froze there, but I suppose you heard me four to five cents per point. So that's one end of the spectrum, right? Four or five, six cents per point. But if I was flying an international business class flight, which we'll get into more reasonable examples, but we're getting, you know, four to five cents. And remember that is going to be multiplied by the Forex points. Well, now you're getting, you know, your 20 cents kind of back per dollar that you spend or your 20% cash back. And that's great, right? That does not happen often versus the kind of mainstay of, at least in my case, my travel, which is just economy flights. A lot of international flights, domestic as well, but economy. By default, if you take your points and you go and book a bunch of flights and you do it with some measure of intelligence, like just, you don't book like the 20% of flights that are a really, really bad deal. You're going to get somewhere in the range of two to four, let's average that to three X points. So now I'm getting, well, my Forex times my three X, I'm getting basically 12% cash back on spent. And so that is again, part of the outflow. How do I make these, let's say 500,000 points per year? How do I really get the most out of them in terms of transferring them into actual cash? Because again, if I just wanted to apply that to, uh, you know, my balance to pay it down, well, I just have my 4%. I spend it on flights. I get 12% and I'm going to have to pay the balance down and buy the flights either way. So just by spending it intelligently, well, you can get the 12%. Again, this is just in my case, I'll generalize this in a second as well. In addition to just wasting points as a whole and general spending categories, also within those spending categories, you want to maximize the value of your points. Um, one tool that also give full credit to Lucas here. That's great for this is amx.points.me. These guys basically aggregate specifically American express rewards. They're similar tools for, you know, chase and whatnot, uh, and other brands. So do what you will. Uh, this is just an example in line with the Amex account that, uh, I showed you earlier. So in this case, you know, I can search here. I can go, I live in Boston. Let's say Boston, uh, to London. We'll go all airports and let's say the 25th of July. This is going to look at all the different rewards programs and the transfer capabilities and someone is going to aggregate all that. And it's going to show me all the flights that I can with all the different airlines with my points because American express points are not stuck in Amex. You can transfer them to all kinds of travel partners. And this ties into hotels as well. So I can look here and I can say, okay, here's a $22,000, excuse me, not $22,000, 22,000 point flight that gets me from Boston to London. Normally that would be a, you know, four or five, $600 flight, whatever that may be. I have to pay 30 bucks as well. And that's just one search. If I was hardcore looking for flights and I have a few months to book in advance, well, I'm going to look at every day so I can sort by day here over a week long period that I'm going to, uh, take advantage of any, um, you know, point transfer bonuses that are going on. So sometimes airlines will partner with the credit card provider to give you 10, 20 plus percent kind of boost or even a hundred percent boost, whatever that may be on your points. Um, and also I'm going to take certain routes depending upon the points. Uh, for example, let's say I want to, let's go back here. Let's say I want to go from Boston to Bangkok, which I happen to be in a few weeks. There's a lot of, uh, ways I could take this. I could route through Tokyo. I could route through Seattle. I could route through Hawaii. It, it goes on, the list goes on. So what I would do in this case, and this is what I actually did is I would look at every different route. Um, a tool I like for that, that I'll show you as well. It's called flight connections.com because what this does is it shows you every single tool. So I'll go Bangkok as well. And now I can see all the different routes or the different stops, um, in terms of me getting from Boston to my destination. Then I can go look at every single one of those routes in points dots me, and I can find out which route is going to maximize the value of my points. So that way you're again, kind of layering the approaches and the optimization here to ultimately just get the most bang for your buck. Excuse me. And that as a whole, as a result is how I get tons of free flights, really, really good cash back on spend that translates into those flights. And I travel a lot. So I like to spend this on flights. If you want to spend them on hotels, you can do the same. Typically you get less cash back. Um, they're just not as good rewards with hotels. You can do that too. If you want to just get gift cards by, you know, an iPhone with, with points, you can do so as well. I personally travel a lot. So that's why I spend a lot of points on traveling generally though. Um, that is how I do it again. What I want to cover in the next few minutes here briefly is how you can do that too, or just, I want to generalize some of these principles. I have a big advantage, which is I'm going to spend a lot of money on a business and that money, whether or not the business is profitable, has this derivative benefit of I can crack reward bonuses. So I can spend the 15 grand that I need to get a hundred thousand points on a new card. And I can put a lot of money through those cards to then generate points that may or may not be you. If that is you awesome. And the first thing that I say here is if you have any business, any money making endeavor whatsoever, formal or informal, that is cashflow neutral or positive. So you spend a dollar, you get at least a dollar out, use that and run that through credit cards. Because if you can crack intro bonuses with that, right, if you can just run that through cards, you're going to get the four X points. You're going to get the three X, two X, five X, whatever the number is. And you're going to get just, okay, I spend 10 grand, I get a hundred thousand points. And that again, really, really counts when you're thinking about travel and all these spending categories. And if you don't, that's fine. You're going to spend some money for your daily life. You have to buy food, you have to buy rents and for rent, actually quick point there. I think there's a card called built that lets you get credit card or it lets you spend your rent and I quote unquote, buy your rent with a credit card. Be careful with that because that is, you know, your rent, but that is a great way to get some point bonuses on your rent spend. Uh, but generally if you do any travel, right, again, if you just buy food, anything at all that you spend, just run it through cards and whatever intro bonuses you can get, whatever points you can get again, going back to, well, where do you spend your money? Just line the card up to your spending categories. That's the card you want to get the one, the best matches your spending categories. And then depending on if say there are multiple cards with the same kind of rewards there, go for the one with the point bonus that you can reasonably spend too. For example, if you spend, let's say a thousand dollars a month and there's a certain card, let's say Mike chase that offers 30,000 points. If you spend, um, $5,000 in six months and you again, spend a thousand dollars a month, go for that one, spend your, you know, five grand over five months, get those 30,000 points, right? These points will materialize at the very least. You don't need a million, you don't need a hundred thousand. Even you just need enough to say, if you want to go on vacation, go on vacation, or just do nice things for yourself. Again, you can do what you want with these books. There's a common misconception that if you get say one, two plus new cards a year, it's going to ruin your credit score. It's not, that's a total line. Uh, just pay your, your credit cards back. Obviously I don't even need to say that. I've made eight hours of videos on this channel about that. Um, you don't want to ever miss a payment. You don't want to have a big balance on these cards. And it is really easy to like these cards make they, they, they make you want to keep a balance on the card with things like pay over time, but don't just pay it back every month. It's how you roll. The credit score will be great. Um, yes, there is a slight hit every time you open a new card because a, what's called a hard credit check is pulled, but it's take say a four point hit to your credit score, which goes back up after a few months in return for say 50,000, a hundred thousand, 200,000 points, which is thousands of dollars of free travel, right? Very obvious cost benefit equation there. And what I'm not saying here is get a card a month. I'm saying get one, two, maybe three, maybe four cards per year. Um, maybe other people, you know, do it their way with a card a month that that's not my approach at all. Um, and again, really just spend smart, look for deals. And this ties back as well to what do you spend on? And if you can connect, uh, the points that you have your credit points with what you spend on, then that's kind of the domain or the niche in which you want to look for deals. So the workflow I just went through, the approach is, you know, flight connections.com, amx.point.me. And then I'm figuring out how to best use my points for travel. You could do that for a number of other categories as well with different tools that are out there. Again, I said, uh, keep this quick. Uh, I would appreciate if you could subscribe. We are aiming for a million subscribers this year. That is the whole little system right there for hacking in a sense. I'll use the clickbait word here, your credit card, uh, points and generally just the amount of money that you spend in your life. I hope you found this helpful. Leave a comment if you did, and I'll see you in the next one. Cheers. So thanks again to private internet access for sponsoring this video. And again, make sure to check out this link, this QR code right here for that 83% off and four months free with a money back guarantee.