At the beginning of the year, a good friend told me all about how she started credit card travel hacking and paid almost $0 for her family of 4 to fly to Mexico and stay 5 nights at an all-inclusive resort.

Great, I thought. What is the catch? Obviously, the catch is that you’re signing up for a million credit cards and something bad is bound to happen. Your credit score will plummet! You will forget about a card and be hit with major interest! It’s playing with fire! 

But my friend is the kind of person who is a) good with investments, and b) always in the right place at the right time. So I decided to look into it through the website she recommended and a few Instagram accounts she follows.

Y’all. I’m here to say, it is a real thing and I am so glad I looked into it. The process can be tricky and isn’t for everyone, but those fears I had did not end up being true. 

So far we have saved $1,220 on flights to Boston, MA for our family of 5 this summer. I still have to buy our return tickets, but it looks like we will have enough points to cover most, if not all, of those flights as well. That means, with the current price of tickets for our return flight, we will save close to $2,400.

How did I do it? Sit back and I will teach you.

Step One – Getting Our First Cards

Like many other consumers, we had one credit card we used for most purchases, the Capital One Venture Card that we signed up for about 10 years ago. It had a great sign-up bonus at the time, and we took full advantage of it. It has a pretty generous point redemption system and we cashed out our points every year for around $800 worth of free travel. I thought we were doing pretty well, and I wasn’t wrong. But after I learned about travel hacking and the enormous bonuses people earned year after year I knew we could be hacking it better.

When my friend first told me about travel hacking there was an amazing sign-up bonus from Chase Southwest Rapid Rewards. If you spent $4,000 in the first 3 months you received 30,000 bonus points AND a companion pass good for around one year. 

One of the tricks of travel hacking is utilizing your spouse or partner. On our Capital One Venture card, one of us is the cardholder and the other is the authorized user. If you want to get a bigger bonus DON’T register your spouse as an authorized user. Instead, they can get their own card and an additional sign-up bonus. If we both signed up for the Chase Southwest Rapid Rewards Card we would end up with 60,000 Southwest points and 2 companion passes. 

Step Two – Hitting Our Bonuses

I signed up for the card and started working toward the bonus. However, the bonus incentive with the companion pass was about to expire so we had to choose whether to sign Brian up or wait. We signed him up a few weeks after I got my card, in part because we were going on a ski vacation and knew we’d hit my bonus early.

If you’re keeping track that means we had to spend $8,000 in about 3 ½ months. That is a bit more than we normally spend (our normal credit card bill is closer to $2,000 per month). With the ski vacation we knew meant we’d maybe get there, but I was all kinds of STRESSED about hitting that bonus.

I do NOT recommend trying to hit multiple bonuses at the same time. We ended up meeting the bonus because of a few big purchases we didn’t see coming including paying for our son’s medical bills after he broke his leg. But I did end up purchasing some things (like kid’s birthday gifts) a month or so early because I was trying to hit the bonus. All in all, I didn’t spend more than I normally would in a year, but if I am consistently stressed about meeting a bonus and buying more than usual to get there that will end up costing us more than we save.

Also, another hot tip is to always refer your partner to their next card. Most cards have a referral link that gives the cardholder extra points when someone uses it and is approved for the card. I originally thought we would have 60,000 points and 2 companion passes, but we ended up with 80,000 points and 2 companion passes all because I referred Brian to his card!

Step Three – Using Our Points

Now comes the fun part – traveling! We’re planning a trip to Boston and NYC this summer, and we have been saving for a while to do it. But why use our own money when we can use points?! Also, WOW it is really expensive to travel with kids. 

I bought our tickets to Boston on Southwest and they were $244, or 16,970 points, each (without the taxes, which you cannot pay for with points). Because we had two companion passes we only had to pay for three tickets, which ended up being 50,910 points and around $30 for the required taxes.

Instead of paying $1,220 for 5 tickets we only paid $30! 

I haven’t bought our return flights yet as we are still trying to figure out exactly which day to return (can’t vacation last forever??). Because of some points we already had with Southwest from previous flights, plus points we’ve earned since getting our cards, we still have over 50,000 points left. Depending on the price of our return flights we may have to pay a bit out of pocket, but when I last checked prices we do have enough points and would end up saving around $2,400 in total.

Want To Get Started?

This just scratches the surface of what is possible with travel hacking, and I’m already working toward my next card bonus with plans to travel over Christmas break. Before I started I thought, “If I can just save a thousand dollars on our trip this summer it will be worthwhile.” Little did I know just how worthwhile this hack would be. Or how expensive flights are these days, geez.

Be warned though, travel hacking isn’t for everyone! There are several tips, tricks, resources, and warnings you need to know before you get started. 

I’ll write a post about those and link it here when it’s done. But, if you want to get started with travel hacking let me know! I’ll send you what I know, and of course a referral link for your first card.

*Please know, I am not a finance expert, investment advisor, or legal professional and this post is not intended to be financial advice. I’m simply sharing my story. Please do not rely on the information in this post for your personal financial decisions.*