I’m a sucker for an inspiring story about using points for something truly crazy, especially when there’s an OG MSer involved. This one is from my friend Joe (you may know him as Colin). Enjoy!

This is the first installment of a three-part story about how I am putting together a small destination wedding in Scotland for summer 2027. This isn’t an MS wisdom or hints post. It’s just me sharing the roller coaster that is earning, then spending, millions of points on a wedding.

Growing up, it was a running joke that my father was a bit of a cheapskate. He got it from his dad, who was even more of a cheapskate. I always knew my dad was a little obsessed with credit cards, but as a kid, I just lumped it in with him being cheap. He died unexpectedly shortly before I graduated from college, and afterward my mother started sharing some of his games with me.

It turns out my dad was an MSer throughout my entire childhood. He was an active member of FatWallet, had an affinity for buckets of dollar coins from the Mint, and his pride and joy was cycling the grandfathered Priceline Rewards Visa (feat. William Shatner, iykyk). I have distinct memories of playing with and collecting some of the dollar coins he would bring home. When he died, I had no clue about this hobby & had never signed up for a credit card.

Fast-forward to now and I am fully immersed in the hobby, along with being an aspiring award-booking nerd. I have always viewed churning, at least in part, as a way to honor my dad’s legacy. Combine that with P2 and me wanting to do something a little nontraditional for our wedding and this is what you get: welcome to my not-so-big (but complex) Scottish churner wedding.

Brought to You by Kate Spade

In January, I was in Greece after booking a spontaneous LH F 747-8 trip (RIP LH partner F 😢). On our second morning there, I woke up and saw all the chatter about the British Airways shopping portal offering 250x at Kate Spade. I immediately handed my phone to P2 and told her to go crazy.

Apparently “crazy” for P2 is about $1,000. I decided that wasn’t enough, so I went back in and ordered roughly 25 purses for another $4,000. Like everyone else, I spent the rest of January waiting to see whether BA would actually honor it.

A short time later, I proposed to P2 on the rooftop of the Park Hyatt Kyoto. Very stereotypical churner of me, I know. The very next morning, I found out that BA was going to honor the 250x. Unfortunately, only one of my orders tracked. The smaller of the two, of course. I eventually had to threaten to take BA and Collinson to arbitration to get them to pay out the rest. They ultimately paid everything, leaving me with just under 1.6 million Avios and a lot of Kate Spade purses.

One piece of advice in hindsight: if you ever participate in one of these “too good to be true” shopping portal rates, start a screen recording before beginning the checkout process. I luckily had just enough screenshots to prove my case with BA, but life would have been much easier if I had a recording.

The Wedding Plan

P2 and I had tentatively discussed doing something a little nontraditional for our wedding even before the engagement. We want it to be memorable and fun for everyone involved, but still relatively low-key. Destination weddings can be controversial because of the time and expense required of the guests, so if we are asking everyone to travel internationally, we want to cover their flights, ideally in business class.

Of all the places P2 and I have been fortunate enough to visit through the proceeds of this hobby, Scotland is probably our favorite. The people are extremely friendly, the hotels and B&Bs have consistently been great, the food is surprisingly excellent (I avoid the brain ones), good whisky is available everywhere, and the scenery is out of this world. After a lot of searching, we found a perfect venue in the middle of nowhere in the far north.

The goal:

Book 11 people in round-trip business class to Scotland from all over the USA.

Resources Available

• 14 AA systemwide upgrades
• 1.6 million Avios
• A few million points in several other currencies to cover gaps and positioning flights

Ideally, everyone will fly into Inverness (INV), which is unfortunately only served by a handful of airlines. We also want to minimize positioning flights and layovers while keeping YQ/YR below $1,000 per person round trip. We are encouraging all our guests to tack on their own Europe trip before or after the wedding so fortunately not every person needs to fly to/from the UK on their transatlantic leg.

The Rough Playbook

These are some of the tips and strategies I expect to use:

• Flights originating in Inverness are exempt from UK Air Passenger Duty. BA recently reduced the benefit of this when booking with Avios by normalizing its taxes and fees.
• BA now generally normalizes Avios redemption taxes and fees based on the distance band: $499 for trips under 4,000 miles and $599 for trips between 4,000 and 6,000 miles.
• CX and JL have generous award charts that may be useful for outbound travel on BA (if the flights are released to partners…)
• For the return, I’ll target tickets that originate in INV & have the TATL leg operated by AA (no BA surcharges woo). These should avoid UK APD entirely as long as the London connection is under 24 hours.
• BA releases four business-class award seats on every flight at schedule open. The call center can access them at midnight London time, with the seats generally appearing online about an hour later.
• BA can sometimes be generous about releasing those seats to partners at schedule open.
• AA is unfortunately quite stingy with releasing TATL SWU availability near schedule open except for a few routes. I expect to be rebooking lots of flights as the dates approach to switch to systemwides.
• I’ll probably avoid Virgin metal unless the availability is too compelling to ignore.

None of these strategies are novel on their own. The fun part will be combining them across 11 passengers while keeping the routings, fees, and positioning reasonably manageable all on specific dates.

Coming in Part 2

In a few months I’ll share a small status update. I’ll cover what I end up booking, which programs and currencies I use, how much cash I spend, and where the systemwide upgrades come into play.

For now, the venue is booked, my points are ready to burn, & I eagerly wait for the calendar to open. Until then, I will be :pray_pepe: to the BA & AA revenue management overlords.

-Joe

/s, in case it isn’t obvious

I try to avoid ranting all that much on the blog because there’s enough hot takes out there already. While rants perform better than therapyposting about how great MS is, there’s zero monetization on CC, so it makes no real difference to me. 

I’m free to talk about how listening to a Trampled by Turtles song makes me a better churner. I’m not ESPN laying off actual journalists to give people like Pat McAfee and Stephen A. Smith an even bigger platform to yell even louder from.

But I was pretty taken aback by an email that I received today and it got me thinking about the direction of this hobby as an “industry” and how we’re not safe from enshittification anywhere we turn. 

The email in question is from Going, which many of you may remember as the rebranded name of the former Scott’s Cheap Flights. 

I was a huge fan of SCF back in the day. I booked my pre-churning international trips thanks to the alerts. I talked to Scott on reddit. Hell, I applied for a flight searcher job there in 2018 (in reviewing my application doc just now, I’m not surprised I didn’t get the job since I sent a 3 layover itinerary to get to Tanzania). 

And I get it – most businesses that are adjacent to travel or finance in 2026 are going to gradually morph into an affiliate business. There’s way more money to be made in talking about credit cards than there is cheap cash fares. 

But I take umbrage at this slimy used car salesman style of MySpace bulletins “fwd this or ur cursed for 30 years” and LinkedInLunatics-esque typing. like. this. all over an extra 10 or 20k URs in an attempt to squeeze some final referral money out of the promo period. At least the readers that take advantage of it will get one extra night at the Hyatt Place in Lubbock over those that apply on July 31. 

I know we’re all desensitized to opening new cards, but to the average person on the mailing list, that’s another hard pull, another credit line, another sky-high interest rate. It’s not the kind of thing that should be done on an impulse unless you know what you’re doing. 

Direct response copywriting is among the best advertising out there when done correctly. But if you’re going to try and skip the marketing funnel (i.e. ‘Why the Chase Sapphire Preferred is the best low annual fee travel card” for awareness or “The Chase Sapphire Preferred vs. the Citi Strata Premier” for consideration), it better not be phrased that you will “lose 100k points” as a result of not opening the email. 

And I don’t have an inherent problem with affiliate links. It turns out that maintaining a community is a lot of work, and I’m ok with creators earning referral income in return for their work. But that’s for original content that is helpful, not manufactured urgency. 

Anyway, I’m sure the referral money is flowing as a result of the email so I’m the idiot here, but it still feels weird to see referral farming being done so shamelessly by a brand that I used to really trust for travel. Apparently you don’t even need to be purchased by Red Ventures to sell out these days. To me, this is such a human hobby centered on human interests of travel and financial independence and the commoditization of it is really lame. 

So if you need to apply for a new card today, ask a friend for a referral link. Don’t have a churning friend? Go to a meetup. Buy someone a drink. Chat about what works for you and discover something new. All of that is going to get you way farther than shilling for the banks, and you don’t even have to lose your editorial freedom to do it. 

Juejue!

Pictured: some future affiliate bloggers discuss Fortnite the CSP

One commonly discussed quirk (if you can call it that) of getting deeper and deeper into MS is that your perception of what is a lot of money changes. When you’re moving many multiples of your actual paycheck around every day, it starts to feel like it’s barely real at all. 

Us millennials in the “I only make big purchases on my laptop” meme are now moving amounts that previously qualified for that treatment across whatever fintech or crypto app we still have deposit limit left on that day.

But the whole point (at least in these discussed loops) is that you aren’t actually buying anything – just taking your nibble of the arbitrage pie before it ends up right back where it started again a couple of days later. 

Most people don’t get that desensitization to moving money around like that unless they have a job involving making payments to vendors (and they probably aren’t the owner, otherwise they’re likely acutely aware of the outflow being a purchase vs. a transfer). 

This post is one of those “just as much a reminder to myself as it is entertainment for you” sort of posts, because it’s coming out of a situation I find myself in. 

I’ve alluded to the fact that I’m lucky to have a job with good work/life balance, but my P2 has the opposite. I was working through my loop tracker yesterday and felt that same (whether this is good or bad is beyond me) numbness that I feel towards the never ending inflows and outflows of every business day as a MSer. 

Why is my P2 spending so much time and energy stressing about something that can be replaced by any cat clicking and clacking away on a phone(s)? 

As much as I wish it was that simple, it really isn’t. And there’s a few reasons why. 

The first is that, as much as I hate to admit it, a W2 job can provide some things that MS can’t. Benefits, predictability, a hair more security than MS. I know that the job market is brutal right now, but layoffs are generally something that companies try to avoid. However, culling unprofitable customers is a unanimous win for a bank or fintech.

The second is that earning solid MS profit in this current environment isn’t exactly super easy. The loops only take a few seconds to run, but it takes a serious dedication to following the signal to find them. It’s kind of an embodiment of that old trope: “you don’t pay me for the five minutes I spent to do it, you pay me for the ten years I spent learning how to do it in five minutes”. 

Is it true that a good set of loops can potentially alleviate the stress of an overbearing corporate job? Absolutely. But is it really as simple as just knowing what card to use where? That might have worked in 2024 when somebody would just sell it to you on Whop. But to accomplish that in July 2026 means you have a good network, a good eye for arbitrage, or, ideally, both. 

And there’s one big distinction between getting laid off and losing a play that feels like getting laid off. With both a dead play or layoff, you walk away with no future earnings (unless you get severance). But while you walk away with knowledge to apply to your next step in both scenarios, it’s much easier to apply relevant experience to a new job than it is to recreate a dead play’s exact combination of risk tolerance, limits, cadence, and scale somewhere else.

It’s definitely true that MS and networking are more fun than heading down to the ‘ol business factory. But I’d caution against calculating your hourly earnings as your weekly profit vs. the seconds it takes to run a loop, because it’s discounting the many hours of time spent to know how to run the loop in the first place (as well as the opportunity cost of just getting better at your job). 

If I’m being honest, I’d probably have a much better title at my W2 if I wasn’t as into churning as I am, and that’s what I try to remember when I get irritated that MS is much more efficient at making numbers go up and to the right. 

I’m not trying to advocate for having a W2 if you don’t feel like you need to (I wish I didn’t), just to try and stay grounded when assessing MS profits vs. work paychecks. Avoiding that feeling of numbness towards transaction value is hard. And it’s also important to weigh the fact that it’s 2026, and even your rock-solid loops could be gone tomorrow. 

Fingers crossed that no churners lose any big plays this week.

Ошкӧм!

A special thanks to good friend and frequent guest poster smugdog for today’s post. It’s an interesting thought exercise for whales, minnows, and everyone in between – and a fresh perspective on the never-ending debate about sharing vs. gatekeeping.

The K Shaped Churn: Why the Whales Are Diving Deeper and the Minnows Are Drying Up

You might remember me from my last post about why turning an interested friend into a churning buddy often becomes more work than expected.

Lately, I have been thinking about the other side. Maybe new people are not difficult to teach. Maybe this hobby has become difficult to learn.

In economics, a K shaped recovery describes one group rising while another falls. That increasingly feels like modern churning. Established players are moving into private networks, while newer hobbyists face a wall of information that still does not contain the answers they need.

The Easy Ramp Up Is Disappearing

For a while, certain apps and low friction manufactured spend methods made the hobby accessible. A newer player could generate volume from home, learn the mechanics, and make mistakes without risking a frozen bank account or thousands of dollars in float.

As those opportunities disappear, the beginner friendly middle is vanishing too.

What remains is often traditional MS, with store visits, inconsistent cashiers, and uncertain liquidation. The alternative is complicated fintech and resale plays requiring capital, specialized knowledge, and a high tolerance for shutdowns.

Neither is a welcoming place to start.

The Upper Arm of the K

The established heavy hitters are adapting.

They push larger volumes through flexible products, payment portals, resale networks, and low margin opportunities. They have capital, trusted buyers, years of data, and enough experience to tell an inconvenience from a disaster.

When one path closes, they usually have another.

The Lower Arm of the K

Then there is everyone else.

It is easy to dismiss newer players as lazy, but many are doing what communities tell them to do. They pay for memberships, search chat logs, read old posts, and reconstruct methods from scattered hints.

Then they ask a question and receive the hobby’s favorite response:

“Do your own research.”

“Search. 🥄”

Sometimes that is fair. Nobody wants to explain basic bank rules every day.

But that response can imply the necessary information is public when it often is not.

Much of the hobby’s content is outdated, incomplete, deliberately vague, or written for people who already understand the context. A veteran reads three cryptic messages and identifies the product, risk, and likely exit.

A newer player learns only that someone, somewhere, is making money.

That is not a learning curve. It is an archaeological dig.

The Gatekeeping Catch 22

The obvious answer is that experienced players should share more.

Unfortunately, public sharing often kills fragile opportunities. Profitable plays can survive quietly for months, then collapse within days of a detailed guide spreading widely.

Veterans learned that public instructions create volume, volume attracts attention, and attention ends the play.

So valuable information moves into small groups built on trust. From the inside, that is rational. From the outside, it feels impossible.

There is also little incentive to share in many large communities. A genuinely useful discovery might earn a few stars, some internet hugs, and a brief roar of approval before disappearing into the chat history.

Newer players are told to contribute value before gaining access to valuable information. But without useful information, it is hard to learn enough to contribute.

You need trust to get information, but you need information to prove you can be trusted.

A Better Middle Ground

The answer is not to publish every sensitive play step by step.

Communities can teach durable skills without exposing fragile methods. We can explain transaction coding, float, shutdown risk, recordkeeping, counterparty risk, and cautious testing. We can show what a useful data point looks like and keep beginner resources current.

Smaller groups may also have more room to reward useful contributions instead of simply rewarding whoever makes the most noise. That model is not perfect, but giving contributors a share of the value they create is a better incentive than asking them to do the research for free and survive on applause.

Most importantly, we can be honest.

Sometimes the answer is not, “Research harder.”

Sometimes it is, “The information is intentionally private because sharing it would probably kill the opportunity.”

That may disappoint someone, but it is kinder than making them believe they failed to find a guide that never existed.

Where do we go from here?

The hobby is not dead, but it is becoming more unequal.

The whales have capital, experience, trusted networks, and backup plans. The minnows are caught between public noise and a private world where useful details are withheld.

Nobody is entitled to another person’s research or hard earned play. But a healthy hobby still needs an on ramp.

The best communities may be the ones that protect fragile information, reward the people who uncover it, and still leave enough tracks for the next pride to follow.

We do not have to hand every newcomer the keys to the boat. We can at least teach them how to swim, explain where the currents are dangerous, and stop pretending that “do your own research” is always a complete set of directions.

-smugdog

It’s been awhile since we had cause for a good ‘ol fashioned Friday rant, but yesterday, the Mint gave us plenty to talk about. Since you’re reading this post, you’re likely aware that the U.S. Mint released three special edition coins shaped like the Liberty Bell yesterday. A 1oz silver at $750, a half-ounce gold at $10,050, and a 1oz gold at $19,600. 

The Mint has been a vector in the MS world for virtually as long as MS has been around – the old heads can speak to the legendary $1 coin method (likely one of the few times that NPR wrote an article about MS).

While that method is dead and gone (and would never last in this era of blogs and social media), the Mint remains a useful lever for MSers via these limited releases. There’s generally some level of premium being paid by buying groups, plus the ability to quickly meet SUBs, EC bonuses, or both. 

Mint releases are always a little tricky because most of us aren’t coin collectors and we don’t know the market all that well. Buying groups can work with actual coin dealers to gauge end user demand, but it’s always subject to change once the release actually occurs. 

There’s been plenty of drama over the years when things didn’t shake out as expected, and that even extends to MS via Olivia Rodrigo as this excellent 404 Media article covers (outside of them calling us nerds, of course). Just don’t ask PFS what happened with Travis Scott.

Mint deals are even trickier now, because MSers aren’t the only arbitrageurs interested in an easy profit. The cook groups, sneaker botters and pack openers are on to the hustle now, and it being shared on DoC ensures that an even wider swathe of the hobby is keeping a tab on the release. 

To come back to yesterday’s release, the release sizes were extremely small – 2,026 of each coin to commemorate the semiquincentennial. Demand was expected to be extremely high (especially for the relatively affordable silver variant) even though the retail prices were many multiples over spot, leading some to theorize that the Mint was baking the resale premium into the price. 

As it got closer to release, pretty much all of the usual suspects posted listings that guaranteed some solid profit, and we were all queued up with our add to cart scripts ready to go. As expected, silver sold out virtually instantly, congrats to those of you who hit. The gold variants didn’t immediately sell – if I remember correctly, the 1oz one lasted 20 minutes or so. 

The orderbooks for silver reflected the heavy demand that everyone expected, and those that hit (especially the cook group folks who scored a big haul, no I’m not jealous at all) had an extremely profitable day.

The orderbooks for gold looked very different – the ask side filled up with MSers who were only looking to flip the coin, but the bid side (which had extremely low liquidity to begin with) dropped like a stone.

It became evident fairly quickly that the end user demand for the gold variants was a miniscule fraction of what everyone expected, and the downstream impact was swift. Buying groups had their buyers pull out, so they had to ask their sellers to pull out, so a lot of us spent a lot of time listening to the awful Mint hold music. I hope everyone was kind to the poor CSRs who were also affected – shout out to Amber for making cancellation painless. 

The fallout from this is a pretty big loss of trust across a lot of players. I’d imagine a lot of bridges were burned between coin buyers and buying groups, and I know firsthand that some bridges were burned between buying groups and MSers. 

All I can say is that this could have been so much worse – while the Mint bungled the whole thing by selling at an insane price point, they at least offered a painless way out. 

Depending on which group you chose to lock with, you were either compensated quite well for your time on the phone or compensated quite not well, but to me the major benefit from yesterday’s debacle is some good lessons to keep in mind for the next release:

• Buying precious metals is not a form of risk-free MS – these are volatile assets and the true end user demand isn’t crystallized until you’ve already put money down
• You have a lot of options in who to partner with for arbitrage, and difficult days like this make it easier to choose which one is right for you
• On the flip side, while both the buyers and the Mint are businesses, the folks you had to talk to yesterday are people too. Whether it was a flustered CSR or someone staring down the barrel of losing their business overnight, basic human decency shouldn’t go out the window
• The Mint makes it easy by allowing returns, but similar vendors don’t offer this. If this happens to you and things go pear shaped, don’t panic. This has happened before, and there is a simple way out if needed.

The funny thing is that I originally planned for this post to be a quick hit about how much fun the buildup is to release time and finding out if you scored or not. That levity went out the window ten minutes post-release, the second that the (only?) buyer on the market knocked the 1oz below cost. At least I could keep the post image.

One of my very first posts was about what MSers can learn from gamblers. I think it’s time for the next edition of that series – what MSers can learn from cook groups, because they were the true winners yesterday.

It isn’t all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows in MS, and yesterday was a very good example of that. We can all take a deep breath and relax heading into the weekend knowing we came out relatively unscathed. 

Most of us took a L this time, but there’s another release next week – until next time.

Саламлӑ сӑмахсем!

Pictured: the one 1oz buyer each time they lowered the bid and sent the ask plummeting