How Many Points Does The Points Guy Have?

have you ever wondered how many points the points guy has you know that feeling when you're in your closet filled with clothes but you have nothing to wear well I get that all the time especially when I'm planning for insane trips like the one I'm about to take all of you on [Music] so one of my 2019 resolutions is to visit countries I've never visited before but most importantly to share it with all of you because I don't travel just to fly in first-class although you know being six foot seven that is nice and all but anyway I want to show you the actual travel stories the people I meet and I've met some amazing people around the world especially through social media the foods that I eat the crazy parties that I go to oh yeah not only you're gonna get to see cool destinations but how to get there that's really the beauty of the points guy it's how you can use your free flyer miles and credit card points to do unbelievable things it may be cool destinations it may be how I booked to get to a destination and the tips you can use to get the best first-class or you know even economy class products but even inside my world how I pack my method to avoid wrinkles 99.9% of the time because I'm too lazy to iron what I'd never travel without I think I'm getting a little ahead of myself so let me tell you how I became the points cutting so where do I begin my points education actually started in the mid 90s and we had this thing called dial-up internet and my dad was a healthcare consultant and got a job working from home and he had never typed on a computer before cuz he always had a secretary so I started charging him to book his flights $10 a reservation he thought I was doing all this crazy work on the side to do it meanwhile I was on Travelocity I was one of their first members just plugging in the details and it was a nice little business one day we realized he had all these frequent flyer miles and so I figured out how to use them to take our family to the Cayman Islands so we were able to go to the Caribbean for cheaper than what most people who grew up in the Philly suburbs I'm from Doyle's town cheaper than what most people paid to go to the Jersey Shore so that was really when I was like these points and miles are amazing and then fast-forward to 2007 I've got a job in Wall Street at Morgan Stanley doing camp recruiting and all of a sudden I was traveling for work a ton so I was accruing hundreds of thousands of points and traveling in first-class you know I flew with British Airways first-class with Madonna one weekend and my co-workers were like how the heck are you doing this so I started teaching everyone around me about points and in 2010 I started the points guide which it was not a blog it was just a static forum where you could put in how many points you had it would email me and I would charge you 50 bucks if I could help you and so I was running this mini little mileage booking travel agency that slowly started to spread and then a friend said hey Brian you should probably blog people naturally Google searching will come to your site so it'll be a great free way to advertise so I started blogging about six months in it started to take off in 2011 the bank's approached me to become an affiliate you know first month I made $5,000 by just simply blogging about the same stuff I was blogging about anyway and the next month in New York Times wrote an article about the points guy my business went through the roof I quit my job that day but I left that career to pursue my passion which is truly helping people travel better save money and see the world and it was wild it just continued to double every month and readership in size and I would listen to what if my readers wanted to hear and your every year we've doubled in size and today we're at about 60 full-time employees we've got six in the UK we're about to launch in London and now we've got every team of writers doing 30 blog posts a day covering the top news stories we've got some of the top names and travel journalism and we're just getting started enough about me let's get on the road but first I want to stop in to the office and I'm gonna give you a quick little sneak peek into my points balances and how I earn so many and then let's see where we can go but I'm pretty sure we can go almost anywhere when you see how many points I have this is a very vulnerable moment people always ask how many points I have and I say that's a very personal question I say that because I don't really know half the time because we earn so many and redeem so many at the company what I will tell you is there are eight credit cards that we use for most of our business expense each of those has bonus spends anywhere from one to ten points we're earning four points per dollar spent on average in these main categories the biggest one online internet spending so we do a lot of paid Facebook Instagram Twitter Google spend sometimes over a million dollars a month that's our big bread-and-butter the AMEX business goal gives 4x chase inc preferred gives 3 X so we're maximizing a lot of that in addition to that we book a lot of airfare which we use Amex platinum 5x on all airfare and one because that business centaurian we also get two cents per point one redeeming for flights right now we have 1.3 million Amex but the kicker here is pending points one point eight million because we spent a ton on pave advertising last month which then in turn grows our business so I can drive brand awareness grow our business and earn a ton of points all of our employee travel is booked on my venture card which earns 10x on hotels com+ we also earn one free night for every 10 through hotels.com programs so we have tons of capital won points which now transfer to Airlines but we really use venture points to pay for helicopters private jets and any of those in-between travel expenses and then chase in 2018 I mean I spent five hundred thousand on travel and food and drink entertaining that right there was one point five million chase points the other ones we use freedom unlimited for one point five points on everything the goal is to never earn one point per dollar you're losing if you're earning one point on a purchase whether it's your business expense or personal expense in a line credit cards that can give you these juicy juicy category bonuses you know it's great to get a sign up bonus but that's a one-time event the way you sustain points is by maximizing every single dollar that you spend and that's what we do here at TVG in 2018 we earned 18 million three or forty two thousand seven hundred five points we also use 17 point five million of so the key is never point toward I'm all about practicing what I preach so we've got millions to burn let's go burn some [Music]

Channel: Brian Kelly

Views: 112,976

Keywords: The Point Guy, points balance, American Express, american express points value, TPG, Brian Kelly, Chase Sapphire reserve benefits, chase sapphire reserve review, chase sapphire preferred, best travel credit card, sapphire reserve, chase ultimate rewards, chase sapphire, is the chase sapphire reserve worth it, chase sapphire reserve card, travel credit cards, chase sapphire reserve, travel tips, points, travel vlogger, best travel credit cards, aviation, points guy, thepointsguy

Id: bFuXDUreCM0

Length: 7min 4sec (424 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2019