CC Award Update

We got the award.

In an earlier post, I expressed some reservations about these big awards and the minimum spend required to achieve them. I still feel that, and my wife still feels that. We did drastically reduce our planned expenses. We don't like feeling incentivized to make big purchases.

But I still wanted the award for reasons I'll explain later, so I found a method of manufactured spending to make it work. There aren't many available to us Americans abroad, but there are some, and I took advantage.

The manufactured spend did cost something as a percentage of the spend, so it wasn't free. Basically, it's a cost for the accumulation of these points. I think it's better than buying a bunch of expensive stuff totaling $4000.

Why do it at all though? The basic calculation in my head was something like this: we are going to travel to the United States again at some point in the next two years, so therefore it's worth spending a little, to save much more later. The return is pretty good in this case (around $70 spent to save between $600-$1000 later). Even if I later eat the annual fee, the return is decent.

The reality is that we're going to visit family in the US at some point. It's important to both of us, and despite any savings goals we have, it's not worth sacrificing relationships or missing seeing child relatives grow up. Next summer we'll suffice with FaceTime, but the next year we'll almost certainly be heading back.

Or we'll help relatives who aren't as financially well off come visit us. It is much cheaper for us to pay to fly someone here, than for both of us to fly to the US and find accommodation and transportation.

Will we do this again? Maybe. I'm looking at other card award possibilities, but the trouble with manufactured spending is that it's kind of skirting the rules. I prefer to draw as little attention to myself as possible regarding my American financial accounts, and manufactured spending can open me up to closer inspection. I might do this with another similar card and then focus on things like hotel cards that provide free nights automatically. Since hotel costs were a high proportion of our last visit, cutting down on that would be worthwhile.

Or maybe I won't. I could just continue to add points to this card that I have and otherwise use normal German payment methods to get by. Germany doesn't have the same glut of strategies that the US has, but it has a few, and those might be enough to both satisfy the points accumulating itch and to keep things simple.