Don’t try this at home
Sorry for the clickbait SEO title there. After the US Airways / American Aadvantage points were combined last week and a 270K award cancellation a couple of weeks ago, I logged onto my AA account and realized I am now a stone’s throw away from a million American Airline miles. FIRST OFF, DO NOT DO THIS! Right now, AA miles are probably the most valuable airline miles, but they are going to devalue soon (if not this year, then next year after the integration with US Airways is complete). Once that happens, my miles will be worth 25-50% less than they are now. It’s like how my United miles are collecting dust these days. Therefore, you should ‘earn and burn’ instead of letting your miles add up. Last year, I was close to hitting a million United miles too, but redeemed nearly 240K for 2 business flights to Asia. That’s when I gave up on trying to hit the million miles mark until this happened
How did I get so many?
First off, let me tell you that I can’t remember the last time I’ve paid for an AA flight. I actually have an AA gift card that is over 5 years old now. Ignore the 155,522 Million Miler balance in the picture. That was when AA was counting spend and credit card miles towards Million Miler status, which they have smartly stopped doing years ago. So here’s how I’ve gained over 1.1 million AA miles:
- 50K – Recent Barclays US Air card
- 40K – 2012 Barclays US Air card
- 500K – Five Citi AA Exec cards in 2014 (and btw, Citi paid me $1,000 to do this)
- 50K – 10K spend each on those five AA cards to get the 100K bonus per card
- 50K – Citi Business AA in 2014
- 50K – Citi Platinum AA in 2012
- 50K – Citi Select AA in 2012
- 50K – Citi Platinum AA in 2010
That sums up to 840,000 points right there purely on credit card signups. The other 313K points came from manufactured spend and portal points. I know 10K came from last year’s dining promotion. I can’t remember the rest.
How am I going to get the last 60K miles to hit the million?
I could apply for another Citi AA card, but what’s the fun in that? Instead, I just bought $4,000 of stuff on Backcountry.com yesterday to resell. Oh yeah, the AA portal was paying out 15X, so that’s 60K right there. And of course I’ll be making a profit on those $4,000 of merchandise, and so the miles will be purely profit.
Do I plan on celebrating when I hit a million miles?
Nope. Well, I do have a bottle of Moet champagne in the fridge that I need to drink up…
How do I plan to use these up?
I was saving these miles to fly first class anywhere in the world, but the list of places I want to go are slowly diminishing, and I have no travel plans in 2016. I have been a cheapskate in that I would only use the miles when I got astronomical value for them (like when flying international first class). However, because I have so many miles now, I may just start redeeming them for domestic coach class instead of paying cash. I know I’ll get a terrible value (probably around 1.5c per mile,) but better to use them than let them collect dust.