Fly for Free on Airline Credit Cards

I’d like to provide a quick overview of a method I’ve used to accumulate a ton of bonus airline miles. For most of my financial life, I’ve used Citi’s Platinum Dividend Select, a cash-back rewards card. However, I recently stumbled upon this great post at Chris Guillebeau’s Art of Nonconformity blog. Here’s the punchline: Bonus miles earned by opening frequent flier airline credit cards. On to the facts…

Objective: Quickly accumulate airline miles to get free airfare.

What I Did:

• Opened Delta Gold AMEX card, received 30,000 bonus miles after spending $1,000 with the card. Annual fee waived for first year.
• Opened Citi Premier Pass Elite card (Expedia), received 20,000 bonus miles after spending $600 with the card. Annual fee of $75 charged.
• Opened Chase British Airways card, expecting to receive 100,000 miles after spending $2,000. Annual fee of $95 charged.

Total Credit Access: $30,000
Total Bonus Miles: 150,000

Coach class round-trips to Europe are about 50,000 miles, so that’s THREE FREE ROUND-TRIPS TO EUROPE!

My credit score dipped from 830 to 760 and is now slowly creeping back up. The average age of my accounts has decreased, but my credit utilization rate is now much lower as well, which will give me a better score as my accounts age. A few weeks of free score monitoring is available from FICO.

The British Airways 100k bonus is a fantastic offer. Next on my list is Citi’s American Airlines card which comes with 25k miles. If you own a small business, you can sometimes open two of each card and double your mileage bonus; that’s one card for you and one for your business. I don’t recommend the Citi Premier Pass Elite card; the rewards are cashed in via Expedia, and there seem to be a number of restrictions on what you can earn miles on, a lower miles-to-cash-value redemption rate, and fewer redemption options.

If you don’t regularly have enough expenses to reach these spending requirements, you can search the web for other spending strategies.

John Gerzema: The Post-Crisis Dunce

When I first discovered TED, it offered a variety of truly great, inspiring talks. Lately, some major duds are showing up on the website. A video of John Gerzema, an executive of ad firm Young & Rubicam, appeared on the TED website in October. His talk is titled The Post-Crisis Consumer, and he argues that the “consumer” is proactive, not reactive, particularly in this time of crisis.

Let me give you his two lines that offended me the most.

“The consumer drove us headlong into the crisis that we face today.”

“This is a tremendous opportunity for the consumer, who drove us into this recession, to lead us right back out.”

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“Innovation is the Greatest Ponzi Scheme of All Time”

This is a rough sketch of an idea given to me by Sander van der Leeuw’s talk titled “The Archaeology of Innovation” which he recently gave at the The Long Now Foundation seminar series about long-term thinking. Surely need to develop this idea further.

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Auto Update - U.S. SAAR October, November 2009

11/4/2009 — An update from Autodata Corp. — In October, 838,052 cars and light trucks were sold in the U.S., for a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 10.46 million units. Over the past decade, the auto industry enjoyed annual sales of about 17 million units, but times have changed. General Motors is now making business decisions with the assumption that 10 million units will be the new “normal” annual rate for a while.

12/6/2009 — An update from Autodata Corp. — November numbers are now available. The SAAR for November 2009 was 10.93 million vehicles.

Domestic Auto Industry Overview 2009

I put together a graphic overview including the latest news. God help us.

Legacy costs, and declining revenue due to foreign competition and the recession of 2008-2009 led to substantial losses for the Big Three, and forced GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy. To raise cash, the companies gave up ownership to unions and governments, and sold or cancelled nameplates. The federal Cash for Clunkers program stimulated sales in July and August by cannibalizing September’s demand, which sank to less than half the 17 million rate the industry had enjoyed for the past decade.

Low Car Diet: Part 2 - Day to Day

ZipCar is proving to be quite awesome. We are constantly bombarded with useless new products and services, but here is one that actually adds value to my life. Imagine that.

This past two weeks, I’ve used:

• a Prius to get groceries and dinner
• a Civic to check out an apartment in SF
• a 328i to check out an apartment in SF and visit Golden Gate Park
• a Nissan Versa to get groceries and go up to Mount Diablo to check for some of this week’s meteor shower action
• a Honda Odyssey to move from Berkeley to a new apartment in SF
• a Mini to get back over to Oakland for a Saturday homebrew BBQ

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Low Car Diet: Part 1 - Muir Beach

I signed up to participate in ZipCar’s latest promotion, The Low-Car Diet. It’s a 30-day challenge to give up your personal car and get around using any other form of transit, including, of course, the car sharing program offered by ZipCar. To begin my journey, I first drove my own car from San Francisco to Detroit, parked it, and promptly flew back west. Here’s my baby, the car that I gave up. It’s a 2001 Saab Viggen.

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Awkward Rules: Navigating complex, irregular, or unfamiliar urban environments

I sent this over to the friendly folks at www.awkwardrules.net for consideration.

Example—You head underground to take a Manhattan subway from midtown to the lower west side. Upon exiting the train at the desired stop, assuming you’ve made it that far, you now have the task of spatially re-orientating yourself and choosing the proper course to your destination, all while minimizing time spent deliberating and avoiding damaging blows to the illusion that you know where you are and what you’re doing.

Figure 01 - Overview (notice cracked-out follow-walker)

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Letters to the President: Process Improvement

In response to the recent NYTimes piece about the process by which the White House sorts through thousands of letters addressed to Obama, I was thinking about the process that they use.

This is the CURRENT PROCESS:

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Guy Kawasaki + Wordle: Let’s Get Specific

What has Guy blogged about in the past two weeks? (April 14 - April 27)

Wordle grabs his last five posts from his RSS feed, and with some help from Excel, we can create some more tailored views of His Wordliness. Guy, I tried following you on Twitter but your stream is so voluminous that I couldn’t see my other dear friends!

Proper Nouns

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