News to me too! Looks like I got it a couple months before they killed it off. New cards are always coming out at least 
You should be good to begin the Chase Gauntlet yourself too, not having any new cards issued in over 2 years. Good luck!
Welcome to the forum! I’ve always been intimidated by the system of points and miles, and it never seemed worth it based on purchases. It seems to really be about the bonuses if I’m understanding it correctly. It makes me more comfortable knowing that you didn’t change any of your normal spending to accomplish this! Thanks for sharing.
Welcome aboard - it’s always good to have new members 
I’m glad your system works for you; that kind of maneuvering and accounting would drive me insane. Also, we only have one credit card with an intentionally low limit, and no collected “points/miles”.
Yes. Many folks make sport out of what they call manufactured spending, and run up points that way, but again to me that is not fun. This makes it easy. But you’re limited to new cards you can open whereas those folks keep some and keep playing with them. They also tend to travel or redeem for much higher valued travel than I’m interested in.
I was always that way too. No debt, be frugal, save a lot of my money, etc. Then I got a couple hundred dollars worth of a bonus years ago, thought it was cool, looked into other cards I could do that with, and found there’s a whole world out there that blew my ideas away. The accounting part of this is pretty easy when you just stick to signup bonuses. Open a card, keep a spreadsheet or calendar reminder for when it’s time to renew/downgrade/avoid fee, or just keep it open otherwise if there is no fee. Set up auto-pay in full for monthly statements and it literally needs nothing else until you redeem. Even then I’ve kept it pretty simple for my Disney trip. My other plans for later involve a bit more travel hack tricks, but that’s another story.
2 Likes
I love the points and miles hobby. Mostly, I use my established cards to earn points through my normal spending habits, without churning through bonuses. I would only share this word of caution: Chase has been shutting down accounts with ‘suspicious activity’, like opening a bunch of cards at once or manufactured spending. I fished through and found TPG’s word of caution.
I stay away from all of that. The only concern could be the # of Chase cards I have, some of which are 10 years old. Other than that, I don’t do any of the stuff they mention here. I pay full-time daycare so $3000 in 3 months is a snap. I’m not running up questionable charges.
1 Like
I’ve been doing this for a while and have gone on some great trips, though nothing crazy… hubs and I both have sapphire reserves but with the fee increase we will prob cancel his end of year. For this trip, we used points to pay for a couple of the flights, rental car, universal fix. We will also use the lyft benefits quite a bit and probably doordash as well while we are there. Plus the $300 credit. We easily get our value out of it annually and dont travel that often because we have a young toddler.
I have done the most basic of basic collecting of points and have been pleased with the results. The one credit card we use for almost everything has, over 10+ years (I just don’t remember how old it is) = 12 free domestic plane tickets and one free hotel stay of 2 nights in a decent hotel. We also collect Marriott points and have maybe had about 5 free nights, scattered throughout the past 8 yrs, one night here and one there. If you let them build up you can get more free nights but we don’t travel enough to make that happen. Overall I’ve been very happy especially with the plane tickets, although we’ve watched the deal with that CC get worse and worse through the years. Still better than paying full prices for our family of 5 every time we want to fly.