Episode 152

This week, Texas Family Law Insiders takes a lighter turn. Holly Draper steps away from the courtroom to talk about a hobby she shares with Colorado attorney Candace Werth, whom she met through the Lawyer on the Beach retreat: points hacking.

Candace has practiced law for 34 years, including 24 years as a prosecutor handling cases from murder to elder abuse, before moving into probate, estate planning, and elder law. Along the way, she and her husband added vacation rentals and a car wash to their business interests and discovered that owning businesses is the key to playing the points game at a high level. Whether you practice family law, run a firm, or simply love to travel, this episode is for you.

Candace and Holly explain the two halves of the game: learning how to earn points and learning how to spend them. They walk through the difference between transferable points and cash back, why sign-up bonuses matter far more than everyday spending, and why the annual fees that scare most people away are often offset by card credits.

They also take on the biggest fear new players have: that opening cards will wreck their credit. Candace has 26 active cards and a credit score above 800, and Holly has qualified for several mortgages since she started. Both are emphatic about one rule: pay every balance in full every month, or don’t play.

The conversation then gets into the fun part, with stories of business class flights to Istanbul, Sicily, Greece, South Africa, and Tahiti for little more than taxes and fees. They explain booking one airline’s “metal” with another airline’s points, repositioning to a bigger hub to catch a better award seat, free stopovers in cities like Dubai, and the shopping portals that quietly add hundreds of thousands of points. They also share the mistakes to avoid, from low-value portal redemptions to speculative transfers and points that expire before you can use them.

Finally, Holly brings it back to law practice. Business credit cards can put the points game into hyperdrive, and lawyers have more qualifying expenses than they may realize: court filing fees, advanced client expenses, bar dues, CLE conferences, and even courthouse parking. Holly explains how giving staff authorized-user cards keeps those points with the firm, and Candace shares how solos, young lawyers with a side hustle, and sole proprietors can still qualify for business cards. As Candace puts it, put those expenses on the card, pay it off, and your clients are sending you on these trips.

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

• What points hacking really is
• Transferable points vs. cash back
• Don’t fear the annual fee
• The credit score myth
• The non-negotiable rule
• Points for lawyers
• Timing new cards to big expenses
• The two-player game
• Booking on partner “metal”.
• Repositioning and stopovers
• Common mistakes to avoid
• Shopping portals
• Where to learn

Mentioned in this episode:

• Points Hacking
• Travel Hacking
• Credit Card Points
• Transferable Points
• Sign-Up Bonus
• Minimum Spend
• Transfer Partners
• Transfer Bonus
• Repositioning
• Stop-Over Flights
• Shopping Portals
• Business Credit Cards
• Expenses
• Authorized User Cards
• Where to Learn

Useful Links

• 10X Travel Free Course: https://10xtravel.com/free-tools/
• Points Yeah Travel Site: https://www.pointsyeah.com/landing
• Recommended Shopping Portal: https://www.rakuten.com/
• Holly’s Points Hacking Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/18TTus81GK/

Transcript

Episode 152 | Candace Werth: Playing the Points Game

​Candace Werth: Once he flew his first business flight going JFK to Milan on the Emirates A380, that was enough for him. He was like, “Okay, this works. We haven’t gone broke. Our credit isn’t in the dumpster, so let’s play.” So he is now fully on board with the points game.

Narrator: You’re listening to the Texas Family Law Insiders Podcast, your source for the latest news and trends in family law in the state of Texas.

Now, here’s your host, attorney Holly Draper

Holly Draper: Welcome back everyone to the Texas Family Law Insiders podcast. Today, I’m joined by Candice Werth, who is an attorney from Colorado, who I actually connected with through the Lawyer on the Beach retreat. And we discovered that we had a really interesting hobby in common, and I thought it’d be really fun to have her come on here and talk a little bit about it and give everyone a break from the serious legal topics that we often discuss on this podcast.

So thank you so much for joining me today, and why don’t you start and just tell everybody a little bit about yourself.

Candace Werth: Great. Thank you, and hi, everybody. I’m Candus Worth. I sometimes go by Candy. I have been an attorney for 34 years. I spent 24 years in prosecution, which is just really grueling, doing everything from murder to elder abuse, death penalty cases.

And about 10 years ago, I stopped and did a complete career change and moved into probate, estate planning, and elder law. And during that time period, we got into some outside businesses with some vacation rental business and a, bought a car wash. So we’ve really diversified our interests a little bit.

And then through the process of owning businesses, I realized how great it would be to get into points hacking, and so that has almost become a second job because it’s so much fun. It’s more fun than work.

Holly Draper: Yes. And so points hacking is what we’re actually going to be talking about today. And I got into points hacking, I would say March of 2024 is when I first discovered points hacking, real points hacking.

I’d had an American Airlines card since I was probably 20, and oh, I never really got any value out of that. And I’d had a, just a pretty generic points Capital One card, but I never knew about transferable points or how to really maximize them, so I never used those points for anything. They were just really sitting there.

And one day, somehow it got into my Instagram algorithm and I was like, “Wait a minute. We like- We’re traveling a lot, and that business class seat looks a whole lot better than the economy seat that I flew into Australia for 16 hours. So maybe I should go down this rabbit hole and see what it’s about.”

And I will say for us, points hacking has really changed our lives because it has made travels that much more enjoyable, that much more accessible. We’ve traveled all around the world, generally business class for very cheap, just the cost of taxes and fees and points. And you might be asking yourselves, listeners, “What does this have to do with family law or law in general or being a lawyer?”

And I think this episode can appeal to all lawyers. It could appeal to people that aren’t lawyers, too, and especially to those that are business owners, whether you own your law firm or you’re thinking about owning a law firm someday or you own some other type of business. I know, Candy, you mentioned you all have a lot of business interests.

We do as well. We own a bunch of real estate and have it in various property management-type businesses. We own a college planning business. And the more businesses you own, the better you can play this game. So let’s start with the basics, and I know a lot of people it- Because I’ve been so consumed with this world for the last couple years, I forget that people don’t know the basics.

So why don’t you tell us in plain English what points hacking is and why people might want to get on board with that?

Candace Werth: Points hacking, it can be called several different names, travel hacking, points hacking, or the points game. And what it really is, it’s learning how to leverage your credit card points.

It’s how to earn a lot of points strategically, and even more so, how to spend them strategically. And I was like you, Holly. I, in the beginning, I would get a credit card, earn points, and I might get one flight out of it, and I was pretty excited about that. Or I would use points to get an upgrade somewhere, and I didn’t realize the whole program out there.

And it’s hard to find and hard to learn because you can’t get an in. You just get a credit card, you earn points. I got into The Points Guy, and I– reading a, a post on Facebook on The Points Guy website, I learned about another program that teaches you really how to do it and how to just take it to the next level.

And it really comes through maximizing sign-up point- bonuses. And so you take out a business card or a credit card, any credit card, but you need to be strategic about it. And don’t just think, “I fly United, so I’m going to take a United card.” Because certain points only can be spent in certain atmospheres.

So you have United, you can only use your United points on United. But if you have American Express, you earn membership rewards points. You can spend those on all sorts of different transfer partners, whether it’s different airlines or hotels, or you get a Chase card and you earn that sign-up bonus and you can use it at their transfer partners.

So it really comes down to learning how to earn a lot of points and earn them quickly, and how to strategically spend them. So there’s two main components to the travel game.

Holly Draper: Yeah, and so you mentioned transferable points. That is the biggest thing that I didn’t understand before I really started to play this game, even though I had a Capital One Venture card, and so I had transferable points, but I didn’t know what I could do with those points.

All I thought I could do was do the travel eraser, where I’m getting one cent per point to cover the flight I just bought with my credit card. But with transferable points, you can transfer them. Right now I’m trying to stock up on Capital One points because they can trans- that’s the one that can transfer to Turkish Airlines, and we eventually want to be able to go to Turkey.

But I am not flying economy overnight ever again. So I need to bank my Capital One points and get ready for that. But other ones, Chase, I would say most of the experts tend to think Chase is the gold standard and what you should start with for points. And every– It’s not every Chase card. You have to find the cards of any of these programs that are transferable points.

You do not want cash back. You want points that can be transferred.

Chase might have a Southwest card, but for transferable points, you want the Chase Sapphire Preferred or the Chase Sapphire Reserve or Chase Ink, which is a business type card.

My personal favorite is Amex, largely because they have massive signup bonuses. Especially with Business Platinum, 300,000 bonus points for a Business Platinum Amex. And we’ll get a little bit more into why I love Amex later. Transferable points is the number one, and constantly getting the signup bonuses is point number two.

And slowly accumulating points without getting new cards is never going to let you play this game really You have anything to add on that?

Candace Werth: Sure. The other thing is people cannot be afraid of annual fees, and that is one of the first things that people put the brakes on about getting into this game. And they think, “I don’t want the Chase Sapphire Reserve.

That annual fee is, $700,” or the Amex Platinum. “So I just want to play it with maybe a gold card or a green card.” But this kind of comes into that theory of nothing ventured, nothing gained, and you really have to learn how to leverage the bonuses with the cards to get the greatest benefit from them.

And just what Holly was saying, that the Amex sometimes offers 300,000 points and Chase will offer 150,000 or 200,000. It’s the card with the big annual fee, but that’s okay. The Chase Sapphire Reserve, you get automatically 300 back on travel, so that annual fee just dropped $300. Or you use their hotel benefits and the other card benefits, and it drops that annual fee down so you recoup that amount.

Same with Amex. They have restaurant credits. They have hotel credits. And so you have to not be afraid of that annual fee because so many people turn away right from the beginning. And getting back to your Capital One focus now because of Turkish Airlines, we just flew Turkish on the longest flight out of Denver to Istanbul direct on business class in Turkish where you have the little pods, so you have your own little space and they have a chef on board.

And we did it through United. We transferred points to United and booked United, but on Turkish metal. So this is getting a little tricky for those who aren’t in the points game yet, but with the transfer partners, you don’t want to just think book Turkish to go to Istanbul. You look at who Turkish is partners with, and they’re in the Star Alliance and so is United.

So we were able to pay 80,000 points and fly business class on Turkish Airlines direct Denver to Istanbul, and then we connected and went to Athens.

Holly Draper: That’s an absolute steal. If that flight, round trip business class, let’s say $10,000. Probably costs more than that, but just for easy math, let’s say $10,000. You would take $10,000 divided by…

it’d be, 80,000 points would be one way, I’m assuming. So 160,000-

Candace Werth: Yes

Holly Draper: … points. So let’s say 10,000 divided by 160,000. Is 6.25 cents per point. Now, if you were just using that point, those points through the travel portal, through the Capital One portal or the Chase portal, and just buying it there, you would get one cent per point.

So by doing that specific redemption, you got more than six times the value by transferring the points compared to what you would have gotten through using the portal.

Candace Werth: We just did the same thing on going to Sicily and Greece, and we did it through United. And on this one- Yeah … what we did was we flew Denver to Newark to Naples, and then we did a small flight on EasyJet to get to Sicily.

We spent a week in Sicily, then flew to Santorini, then Mykonos. Coming home from Mykonos, the one-way flight was a $12,000 flight if you paid cash for it. We flew Mykonos to Vienna on Austria Airlines, Vienna to Munich on Austria Airlines, and then we thr- flew Lufthansa on their A380, which is the biggest plane in the sky.

It’s a double-decker, and it flew direct from Munich to Denver. It- to pay cash for that was $12,000, and we did it on 80,000 United points and $11.50 in taxes.

Holly Draper: Wow. So that’s really double the redemption. That’s probably more like 10 or 12 cents per-

Candace Werth: It was 12 cents per point-

Holly Draper: Yeah …

Candace Werth: that you’re making.

Holly Draper: Yes. And that is an exceptional redemption. I don’t want anybody to think that you can always get that, because you absolutely cannot. And I would say I’ve probably never gotten that good of a redemption because with kids and school schedules and whatnot, I’m more limited in when I can travel. So I will usually have, “This is when I’m traveling. This is where I’m going, and now I need to find a way to get there on points.” My options are more limited then, but I have always been able to find a points option.

My general rule of thumb, I want to see at least two cents per point before I will ever consider wasting points or spending points on that. Typically, for international business class, I’ve gotten more like three to six points per mile or points per dollar. I forget what the right

Candace Werth: cents per point.

Holly Draper: Yes, cents per point. So what… If somebody is new to this game, what would you recommend they do first to get started?

Candace Werth: I think the first thing you need to do is learn how to earn, and that’s what I focused on in the beginning.

I started in 2022, and that’s when I took the, the free course that I think you’re going to get into later with a group that is just bent on travel hacking and how to help each other and get the best value, but learning to earn and not being afraid to take out credit cards. And the annual fee is the first thing that holds people back.

The second thing is everybody thinks, “If I take out another credit card, it’s going to affect my credit.” So I just did a little research into my own situation, and right now I have 26 active credit cards, and my credit, it did take a hit. I’m down to 813. But that’s because we just moved and took out a new mortgage.

But, yeah, ei- an, a credit score over 800 with that many credit cards. So people are just panicked that they’re going to kill their credit if they do this, but really, as long as you keep your oldest credit card active, that helps anchor your credit score so it doesn’t fluctuate much. But you have to learn to earn.

And so we started thinking about what can we put on credit cards that we wouldn’t normally put on credit cards, and we started with personal cards, and we were paying everything off every month, and that’s the secret is you cannot run a credit card balance or you lose all the benefit from playing the points game.

But we just treat it like a debit card. We spend everything for the month and then pay it off. And then once we started looking into business cards, and there’s usually bigger sign-up bonuses, bigger rewards, sometimes because you have bigger expenses. But when you’re running businesses, you have so many business expenses, and if you can run those through credit card, and for lawyers, you are paying court filing fees.

You are paying advancing client expenses. Those are free points for you. So rather than paying with a check or an automatic transfer, you put all of that on the business credit card. You pay that off, and your clients are sending you on these trips.

Holly Draper: Yes. And another tip, first going back to what you said about the credit score, that was a hangup that I had as well.

I thought it would negatively impact my credit score, and we are to invest in real estate, and I was worried that it might impact my ability to get mortgages for our investment properties. Neither of those things has happened. My credit score actually has gotten higher as I’ve been playing this game, and I have probably qualified for six different mortgages in the two years that I have been playing this game.

That’s a common fear or misconception that people should just put to the side- … because it’s not true. But yes, absolutely, you gotta pay them off every month. If you’re not going to do that, if you can’t be responsible playing the game, don’t play the game. A next tip would be if we have a big spend coming up, I always want to get a new card that has a sign-up bonus.

We renovated in our master bathroom, and so we were buying a lot of the supplies. It was going to be 10 or $15,000 worth of supplies. I would never just pick a card out of my wallet that I’ve had for years and put it on there, and that $10,000 gets me 10,000 points. I’m going to apply for a new card in time to have it so that I can put that $10,000 on that new card, and all of a sudden it’s worth 100,000 points or it’s worth 150,000 points instead of just 10,000.

So I know we’ve talked about the transferable points cards, Chase, Capital One, Amex, Citi. There are people out there who are very loyal to brands, and they want their branded cards. I have multiple American Airlines cards because I live in an AA hub, and really I have it because I get free bags. How do you feel about branded cards?

Candace Werth: I love them, but it’s a balance. So if I’m traveling internationally, I’m not looking at Southwest for anything other than to relocate to a big hub to get out of the country.

But I have both United and Southwest, and I’ve recently taken on, I believe it’s Alaska Airlines, even though I’ve never flown them, but they are partners in a different alliance that I am not privy to, so that’s going to get me into Asia. And they have international spend five points per dollar, and since I have a business out of the country, a vacation rental in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, every dollar I spend that I can put on a credit card for that property, I earn five miles on Alaska, which then are transferable to their partners.

So that’s a strategy that I use. But we’ve got into playing the Southwest game, and it’s a balance. I really do like my transferable currencies the best, but we’ve learned Southwest because it’s– we’re in a hub for them, and we fly it to Mexico all the time. So I have the highest status with Southwest, which is A-List Preferred.

And the trick that we do is we pay cash for my flights because they’re all business write-offs, because I’m going down to work on the property in Mexico. So probably my first six flights I pay cash for, and then what we do is we rather than buy what used to be the Want to Get Away, or maybe it’s still the Want to Get Away, maybe now it’s called Choice.

We pay the Choice extra, which used to be Business Preferred, because you earn the most points that way. And so with this, I usually hit the companion pass status by about April, and by June I have A-List Preferred. Then I stop paying cash for my points, and I use all of my points to either pay for my flights or my kids’ flights or family members or staff, and you earn so many points because you jump into a 200% earning with Southwest.

You pay with a credit card, A-List Preferred doubles what your prior earn was. And it is just insane to me how many points I earn with Southwest. And I was looking at this morning. I am currently sitting on 360,000 Southwest points. My husband flies free. We just pay the taxes for his. I’ve already paid for seven round-trip tickets with points for family members or office staff to go to Mexico, and I– we still have 400,000 between the two of us.

And so it’s a crazy side hustle that we do with Southwest, and it works for us because we do so many Southwest flights. And then we went to Tahiti in March- We use Southwest to relocate or reposition to LA, and then we could fly out of LAX to Tahiti. So for that flight, it was $5 in taxes for me, $5 in taxes for my husband.

So it’s good to play along with the transferable currency game, but it depends on where you’re at. If you’re not in a Southwest hub, it makes no sense to play Southwest. If you’re not in a United hub, it makes no sense to play United. In Denver, we have very few American Airlines flights, so I don’t mess with American Airlines.

But United, I do with them because you get a discount and they have such great transfer partners. So it’s learning the system. And to start out, I always say learn one system. Get into one ecosphere. So if you fly Southwest a lot with your family because you have the companion pass, you can learn Southwest or learn Chase, learn Amex, and then spread out.

But find out what fits your needs and work that way first

Holly Draper: And one- once you start playing the game, you’re going for these sign-up bonuses. You have to pay attention what… by when do you have to hit that spend, and make sure that you hit it by the deadline or you just wasted a card, wasted probably however much money you spent trying to get an extra sign-up bonus, and now it’s gone.

You don’t… You can’t get that. One of the keys to playing this game, if it is available to you, is they call it two-player game. Player one, player two, P1, P2. You’ll see, if you go in these various groups, you’ll see P1 and P2 referenced. That’s what they’re talking about. So I’m P1, my husband is P2. And you don’t…

You can use your points together. You want, the more both of you can play the game, the more points you can collectively gather. You can’t always combine them, like Amex, you can’t combine your points, I don’t think. But with Chase you can. And even if you can’t combine your points, if we’re going somewhere and I have this many points in Amex and my husband has that many points, we may use one of them to buy it or we might both buy our own, depending on how many points we have and what we’re trying to do.

Amis- I know from talking to you in the past, you also have a P1, P2 game going on in your house.

Candace Werth: Yes. And, you hear a phrase sometimes, the reluctant P2. Usually there is one partner or spouse who is all in the points game ready to go, and you have somebody who’s putting the brakes on, and that was my P2.

He just was jaded with credit cards. He liked to pay cash for things or pay on his debit card. He had that fear of them. So when I got him to get a business card, and this is back when we used to play the Chase Ink game. Chase used to offer, I think it was 40,000 points as a referral bonus. So he had one Chase Ink card, and I would go into his Chase Ink and refer me with the different businesses to different cards.

So he ended up with over 240,000 points just by referring cards to me, and I would take them out under a different business. And you can take out each card for each business, and you can do sometimes more than one for a business. So I have multiple business Platinum cards. I have two of them for my law office and one of them for our property rental business, and I think he ended up with two of them for the car wash because once he flew his first business flight going JFK to Milan on the Emirates A380, that was enough for him.

He was like, “Okay, this works. We haven’t gone broke. Our credit isn’t in the dumpster, so let’s play.” So he is now fully on board with the points game.

Holly Draper: So how long did it take you to figure out the game when you decided to start playing it?

Candace Werth: I started October of ’22, and that’s when I just focused on earning. So it’s like focus on what I can get a handle of. And so I just earn points with doing the sign-up bonuses. And I was probably… I wasn’t crazy. Some people will take out a credit card every month. I would accomplish a sign-up bonus, and then I would, if we had a big spend, I’d take out another.

And our first trip we took was March of ’24, and that was a really hard trip that I had some help getting it booked because it was a little tricky, and it’s a lot of research and different travel groups. But I think I started figuring it out that first year. But mine was more focused on learn how to earn, and then once you’re sitting there with a million points, you’re like, “Okay, now where are we going?”

So then it’s opens up a whole new world of where are we going and how do we get there. And I think that’s a lot of people’s weakness is learning how to strategically spend them and how to start searches and how to search. If you want to… I wanted to go to Tahiti. I wanted to go to Bora Bora. Let’s go have some fun.

There’s not a lot of airlines that go there, so you start looking at who flies there, and you can go into Google Flights and see what airlines are in a particular city or country or location. And then you start looking, who are their transfer partners, and what points do I have that can transfer to a transfer partner?

So the way we ended up getting to Tahiti was transferring Amex points to Qantas Airlines and trans- booking on Qantas on Air Tahiti Nui, and then the way we came back, I think we used Chase points transferring to Air France and came back on Air France

Holly Draper: Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t realize you can book flights on a certain metal through a different airline.

Alaska’s a great way to do that, because Alaska and American are in the same alliance, and so I’ve been able to book some American Airlines points through Alaska. We just booked, we’re going to go to Europe next summer, and premium economy home from London, 35,000 points on Alaska.

I will not fly premium economy overnight, but I will fly premium economy on a daytime flight.

So going east to west, I will fly premium economy now. But how- finding the deals definitely takes some practice. I, for my first couple of big redemptions, my first one was going to South Africa because I knew this is really far away, and the thought of spending 25 hours in coach next to a teenage girl who likes to complain, made me not necessarily want to go on that trip.

So my mission was I want to get to South Africa and back on points, business class. And because I didn’t know what I was doing yet, I… You- There are services out there that you can pay to handle this for you, and the one I use, which we’ll talk more about this company in general, was 10x Travel, and I know you hinted about the free course and where a lot of people learn to point hack, and for me, and I think for you, that was the free course at 10xtravel.com.

It costs nothing. It’s very detailed. It tells you how to do all the things. It really teaches you how to play this game, and they do have a service that can help you find redemptions based on you give them, “I have these cards with these, this amount of points. This is how much my P2 has,” and they l- search for and send you options.

I’ve done that a couple of times when I thought I couldn’t figure it out myself. Now, I don’t know that I need that anymore, because I’ve learned how to search for things and learned about partner alliances and things like that And I also am a huge fan of a website called PointsYeah. I don’t know if you use PointsYeah, but that is my go-to if I want to know, can I get a good points deal to go to Rome next summer?

I will go there, I will plug in the dates, and it’ll tell me how I can filter it by business or premium economy or whatever. It’ll tell me how many points, it’ll tell me which transferable currency can transfer there, and it’ll walk me through the steps of how to get my points there and buy this ticket.

I have never… I’ve heard there, there can be phantom results there, and you don’t ever want to just completely rely on that, but always start there. And then I go where it tells me to go, and I look to make sure the flight actually exists, and I’ve- nothing I’ve ever done has hit a brick wall when I did that.

Narrator: This episode of the Texas Family Law Insiders Podcast is sponsored by the Draper Law Firm, providing family law appellate representation for non-parent custody cases, jurisdiction issues, property division, standing, conservatorship, possession and access, termination, parental rights, and grandparent access.

For more information, visit draperfirm.com or call 469-715-6801.

Holly Draper: How do you find your deals?

Candace Werth: I started with the 10X Booking Service, and they’re the ones who found me the way to go through Qantas to get to Tahiti, and I thought that was awesome. I never… And they tell you in the beginning, open up a frequent flyer account with every airline because that way you have your account, it’s established, so when you need to transfer there, you can transfer and there’s not a delay or a lag.

Of course, I never opened up a Qantas account, so when I get the thing from, the email from 10X that says, “Transfer your points to Qantas, book on Qantas,” I’m like, “Oh no, now I have to open a Qantas account.” So I used them for that the first time. Then the second time when I was headed back to Tahiti, I knew that Qantas was a, an easy way to do it, and sure enough, I found that same flight, same price, business class, 56,000 points.

And then 10X has a little bonus that if you find great award availability and you tell them about it, if you’re the first one to report it to them, they’ll give you 100 bucks. So they sent me, $100 through PayPal because I was the first one who found that. And so then they have that they use for their members of the 10X Plus community.

But once I learned how to do the flights and how to… I don’t use points yet. I haven’t done that yet, but I’ve learned how to do the searches, and every time I use the booking service, I learn more about the searches. And that tricky one that we did, getting into Italy and out from Mykonos, that was done by the 10X Booking Service.

They found it. And the three things that really help is you need to have some flexibility, whether it’s the dates you’re going, the location you’re flying into, and I think the other was which airline that you want to use. And so as long as you’re flexible on a couple of those, the, the opportunities are amazing.

But if somebody’s very rigid, “I need to fly in on this day, out on this day, it needs to be United, and I will only fly into Paris,” then it’s going to be a lot harder to find award availability. And one of the tricks that they’ve talked about that seems to work is if you get to Europe, it’s really cheap to get around Europe.

So for us, we wanted to go to Sicily, but it made sense to fly Newark on United Polaris business class to Naples, and then it was just a short hop flight the next day to get down to Sicily to, we ended up going to Taormina. So flew into Catania, and you’ll love this. This was as Mount Etna is erupting. Oh.

So we have hot lava pictures. They’re not as good as yours in Hawaii- … but we have some hot lava going down the mountainside.

Holly Draper: Yeah. You mentioned about having flexibility in dates and airlines and things like that. I often don’t have a lot of flexibility. Sometimes we’re like, we want to go take a particular cruise, and we’re going with friends, and we are going to this location for these dates.

And where we can get our flexibility is repositioning. And, we’ve used that word a couple of times already, but what that means is, so I am in DFW. That is my preferred airport to fly out of, but I have had to reposition many times to LAX. we’re going to Japan next, in March, so we are repositioning to LAX.

So I used actually I was able to get points through Delta to get me DFW to LAX, and then Singapore Airlines LAX to Tokyo. We repositioned to San Francisco to go to Singapore. We repositioned to Miami to go to Santiago. And yes, it’s not as great as flying direct, but for me to have the long flight be lay fat, flat business class, it is-

Candace Werth: Comfortable

Holly Draper: 100% worth that two or three-hour repositioning flight to get to where I need to be to catch my good points redemption flights.

Candace Werth: Absolutely. And you mentioned something that’s a fun diversion in this program. You mentioned the metal, and I loved when I learned that word because it’s… The travel hackers, they have a, a little language of their own, and metal means what airline you’re flying.

So I may book through United, but I- the metal was Austria Airlines or the metal was Lufthansa. And you start to realize if you’ve only flown domestically or domestic airlines out of the country, United, Polaris, or Delta, there are so many other airlines out there, and they have really gone over the top with the metal.

And so the one that I had seen about someone had post was the Emirates A380, and the A380 has a bar on the plane and a shower for their first class passengers. They have champagne, Dom Perignon in first class, and Veuve in, in business. And so my goal was to fly that plane. So I knew I could take that one from JFK to Milan, so on one of our trips we repositioned just so we could get on that metal, and we wanted to fly that plane.

And so it’s really fun once you start looking into some of these different airlines. And you can go into Google Emirates business class or Emirates first class and hit images and see these pictures. So just when you were going to South America and you’re like, “I want business class,” what can you find?

And then you go online and look to see is this business class really good or is it just going to be average? Is it lay flat? What’s the A380 or what’s the different planes, what do they look like? And one of the tricks that I think we’re in different places at right now is you’re still doing a lot of flights with the kids, and my kids are older, and one of them sometimes comes along.

But for us, it, we have so much more flexibility just looking for two award seats, where when you are looking for four, it’s a lot harder. And so you have to be a little more intense and dedicated to find the great deals when you’re looking at the more seats you’re looking for.

Holly Draper: Yeah, when we went to South Africa, we had me, my husband, and our two kids, and we couldn’t get four seats going there together.

So me and my daughter repositioned to Chicago, my husband and our son repositioned to Boston, and then we both- we were all on KLM, so we took KLM to Amsterdam, and then we connected up. We were on the same flight from Amsterdam to Cape Town. But having- that’s another way that you can be flexible when your dates aren’t necessarily flexible.

We did fly home all together on Emirates because I, too, really wanted to experience Emirates. Sadly, it was not the A380, but it was still an amazing experience. And one thing, Emirates, we’ve done this with Emirates. There are other airlines that do it. Turkish does it. Iceland Air does it. I think Air France does it.

There are airlines that will give you a stopover for free in their home air- airport location. So for us, we were flying Emirates back from Johannesburg to Dallas. That’s going to give you a layover in Dubai. So I just went into the little chat on the Emirates website and I said, “I like this flight for how many points business class from Johannesburg to DFW, but I want to stay in Dubai for two days.

Can we make that happen?” And all through the chat, they were able to get it booked for me on- with the same number of points, but us spending 48 hours in Dubai and getting to experience a whole other place.

Candace Werth: Oh, that is awesome. I’ve not done the stopovers yet, so that’s a whole nother

Holly Draper: world. Some of them, like Iceland Air, their stopover, you can stay up to seven days in Iceland.

Some of them, I think Dubai, Emirates is one of them, they will actually put you up in a hotel. I didn’t know that, so we paid for a hotel. I believe that Turkish Airlines might do that, too. So definitely if you just Google or Claude, ask Claude about airline stopover programs and how to book them, that can be a really good option to get some more travel.

Candace Werth: And with Turkish, if you have a layover in Istanbul, a long layover, they will actually take you out of the airport and give you a tour through the city for free if you are flying Turkish Air. And their lounge, we haven’t even mentioned airport lounges. That’s a whole nother world. The Turkish airport lounge in Istanbul is out of this world.

It is insane. It’s, you walk in and there’s a grand piano, and it’s huge, and all sorts of different types of food and drink, and it was amazing. But yeah, you start-

Holly Draper: Same with the Emirates lounge in Dubai. That- that’s definitely the best one I’ve been in.

Let’s talk for a few minutes about some of the common mistakes that people make in the points hacking game.

I would say mistake number one would be redeeming points for cash back or through the portal instead of transferring to travel partners. Now, yes, sometimes doing it through the portal, there can be a reason that it’s a good deal, but more often than not, you are way better off transferring to a transfer partner, and you could be leaving a ton of money on the table in not doing that.

Candace Werth: You know an example of that?

Holly Draper: Yeah.

Candace Werth: Is I have a cousin who wanted to take his granddaughter to Disney, and he has not played the points game, but he’s had a, a very large structural steel business that he’s used Amex for years. He has over two million points. He wanted to take the family to Disney, and he’s looking at just purchasing it through the travel portal, and it was going to be two million in points to take his family, which is a flight from Denver to Orlando and a hotel.

So that’s the perfect example. You look at what you can do with points and 12 cents per point with on a flight, and it just made sense for them not to use points, and they ended up paying cash for their trip. But he was going to try to use his points, but when you don’t know how to spend them, you’re not doing anything other than just cashing them in

Holly Draper: Yeah, and I think being smart about how you do use those points, whether it’s the tra- the portal or whether it’s just a redemption through transferring.

Not every redemption is a good redemption, and sometime your definition of good is going to vary from person to person, and sometimes traveling for free or super, super cheap for just the taxes is that’s all that matters, and people don’t care how many points. I want to get a good deal. One, one place where people will get good deals that we haven’t really mentioned yet is Hyatt by transferring through Chase.

When we go to Japan in March, we’re flying business class Singapore Airlines, which is generally considered one of the best airlines in the world, and then all of the places we’re staying were hotels booked through points. And I’ve typically not done that. I’ve wanted to save them for my international business, but Hyatt redemptions are usually excellent.

Three cents, maybe, value instead of one. I got a good Marriott redemption because there was a transfer bonus. And we haven’t mentioned transfer bonuses at all either, where every month all these cards, Chase will have a 30% transfer bonus to Flying Blue, or when I did it, it was either a 70% or 100% transfer bonus to Marriott.

Marriott’s not usually a good redemption, but all of a sudden when it was a massive multiplier transfer bonus, it was. So you want to look at all those little pieces.

Another mistake people make is speculative transferring. They see there’s a transfer bonus from Chase to Flying Blue, and they think, “I really want to go to Paris, and so I’m going to speculatively transfer points there so I have it to go to France.” And I was tempted to do that because last summer we flew to Europe and we flew Air France and got a great deal.

There was a transfer bonus to Flying Blue. I knew that next summer we were going to go. I thought, “Okay, we’ll get a comparable deal.” But I went and looked, and they were more than double the amount of points of what we had spent a year ago. And if I had s- transferred speculatively, all those points would’ve been stuck in Flying Blue.

You can’t move them out once you move them in, and then I really would’ve been in a bind.

Candace Werth: And each program has different rules, so they could expire. And you see online a lot of people talking about, “I transferred. I wanted to close this credit card out, so I transferred to Flying Blue, and then they expired in a year.”

And so you don’t want to get hit with your points expiring. You worked too hard for these points. So if you keep them in Amex and you keep an Amex card open, then your Amex points aren’t going to expire. But, like, when I’ve transferred to Qantas, you have to transfer in an even thousand amount, so I had 600 points, which really is nothing, but they ended up expiring because I didn’t use them in time.

So that’s where if you do a speculative transfer, that can be really dangerous because you may transfer into a program that they’re going to expire before you’re ready to use them

Holly Draper: Another mistake people make where they’re leaving a ton of points on the table is not making all of their purchases through shopping portals.

I love Rakuten. I mentioned at the beginning that Amex was my favorite currency, so to speak, and that is in large part because of Rakuten. And I have a Chrome plugin. It alerts me anytime any site that I’m going to is a part of Rakuten. I click to activate it, and I get points automatically by shopping there.

And it is a massive amount of points. One of the… And it’s everything. I always get my groceries through Shipt. Right now, Shipt is at a 10X. So every time I get groceries, I’m getting 10X points back from Rakuten, plus whatever points I spent with whatever card I used, didn’t have to be an Amex. So I’m getting massive more points for that.

Whenever we travel, we typically book activities through Viator. Viator has, sometimes huge multipliers, like 22X, 25X. And we’ll travel with friends, and I’m like, “I will buy all of our activities, and you all pay me back.” because we want to be together, somebody needs to buy them as one unit. And so I’ll get 100,000 extra points because I booked our group’s activities for our cruise through Viator when it was a 25X multiplier.

. I was going to book that stuff anyway. It’s not costing me any extra. I think I’ve accumulated about Two or 300,000 lifetime points through Rakuten, and it is buying stuff I already buy. I’m not buying extra just because I can get, “Oh, Rakuten has a big multiplier today at Nike.” No, I’m just buying stuff I buy, and it happens automatically because of the portal.

And there are other ones. There’s Capital One portal. There’s, I know American Airlines, if you’re really big into that, has a portal that a lot of people like. Do you have a portal that you use?

Candace Werth: I use Rakuten. I used to use Southwest, but Rakuten, it’s awesome that they can transfer. You can get cash back, but we’ve all learned that then you have cash to spend, and you can make more spending points. So I looked at mine, and I b- made over 170,000 points on Rakuten. So that’s awesome. But when I was first getting into the points game and doing a lot with Southwest, I wanted that companion pass, and there’s some tricks to getting the companion pass. But at the time, I just started using their shopping portal, and that 10X here and 5X there, you earn so many points, and with Southwest, they go towards companion pass, that it really made sense to be able to hit that companion pass.

And with Southwest, their companion pass is somebody can fly free with me every single time I fly. So other airlines, you may… companion pass may be one ticket, but with Southwest, it’s every time. But now, I just mainly focus on Rakuten because that’s gets me that transferable currency. I love Amex, and it’s one of those great ways to be able to pump up your point balance.

Holly Draper: And I will put in the show notes links for some of these things that we have referenced. So if anybody’s listening to this and they’re like, “Hey, where do I find this?” We’ll put this in the show notes so you can find them.

But now, let’s circle back since this is a law firm podcast and circle it back to the business cards. Business credit cards are the number one way that you can Put your points game into hyperdrive. Not that long ago, I had this lawyer that, I’m not going to call her out by name, but she will know because she listens to this podcast that I’m talking about her. She said, she’s owned her own firm for years. As long as I’ve known her, she has owned her own firm, so it’s probably been since 2020, 2021. And she said, “I don’t have a business credit card. What do you recommend?” And I just was floored. And I know there are people that are averse to getting credit cards, and if you don’t know this game and what it can do for you, it may never have occurred to you that you’re just leaving so much on the table by not having a business credit card.

So I immediately, I was like, “I’m going to send you a referral link. Go get this one. This is where you’re going to start, and then once you hit that bonus, come back and talk to me.” But business cards often have bigger sign-up bonuses. We own law firms, obviously, so anybody that owns a law firm, those… For me, the law firm spending is significant, and so I get a massive amount of points, and it is all legitimate law firm business expenses.

But then we also have other businesses that don’t really have expenses, so we will put personal things to hit sign-up bonuses for these other business cards that we get- … as a way to play the game. Do you do the same?

Candace Werth: Oh, absolutely. In my law firm, it’s just me as the only attorney, so I’m not having as great of expenses with my law firm.

But let me tell you, that beach house in Mexico, you put two new bathrooms in, put in a new pool deck. We put all of that on the business cards. And then we, personal expenses, my flights are write-offs. We’re taking people out there. We put all of that on the business cards, and you earn an insane amount of points that way.

Holly Draper: And you don’t have to have employees. You can be a solo and still get a business card and maximize the points that you get.

Candace Werth: Absolutely.

Holly Draper: But if you do have employees… this was a mistake I made early on. My employees bought some office supplies, or they had to pay for parking or whatever. They would pay for it on their own card, and they would send me a reimbursement request, and I would reimburse them through their paycheck or through PayPal or whatever. Now all my employees have authorized user cards on one of my Chase Inks. And the-

Candace Werth: Perfect …

Holly Draper: the balance or the credit limit is really large. I can have everybody on the team having the same authorized user being off the same card. And so now when they pay for parking at the courthouse, or they pay for $300 for bar dues, or they pay $700 to go to a CLE conference, I am getting the points for that . Since I’m paying for it anyway, I should be the one that’s, that can get the points.

Candace Werth: Absolutely. And you talked about earlier that any time you have a big expense, you take out a new card. And sometimes people aren’t thinking enough in advance about doing that. But Amex, when you take out an Amex card, if you get the instant approval on your business card, even on personal cards, you can get a digital card number where you can start spending immediately.

And one of the things that we have done is we sold a business. We sold a car wash, and that came with a lot of capital gains taxes, and we had met with our advisors ahead of time. We did not want to do an exchange and start a different business. We just wanted to pull the cash out and invest it. So we had a very large tax bill for three years in a row, and I would take out new Amex Platinum cards every time we had a big tax bill and put it on there, and you’re getting that card instantly.

And, there are fees when you put taxes on. The IRS isn’t going to just eat the credit card fee, but it was like 1.86%, but then I’m earning 300,000 points. So we ended up putting, this is crazy, we paid more in taxes than I paid for my first house and my second house. But that made an insane amount of points.

We’re still sitting on over two million points with American Express, and we’ve been on two international trips other than Mexico every year for the last four years.

Holly Draper: And so I know a lot of our listeners might be young lawyers that don’t own their own firm at this point, and you don’t have to own your own firm to have a business and have a business card.

It could be your side hustle. Do you make buttons that you sell? You can get cards. People get business cards by having what I would say are not the most legitimate of businesses. But-

Candace Werth: Poshmark

Holly Draper: do your research. But there are probably ways if, even if you don’t think you own a business, there are probably ways that you can get in this game as a business owner and play it

Candace Werth: And even if you don’t do it as a business, there’s still great sign-up bonuses on personal cards. And the biggest thing is you have to look at what the sign-up bonus is and what the minimum spend is.

Because if you’re going to get that 300,000 on Amex, you’re probably going to have to spend 20,000 within six months. If you don’t have 20,000 in expenses, that’s not the right card for you. But when you stop and think with your business, do we spend that much? Are we going to hit it? And we just bought a new house, and it has a well and a leach field, and we learned early on we’re going to need to put in a new leach field, and the sellers gave us money for that.

Awesome. I’m taking out a new card. I’m going to have that 20,000 paid off with one project that somebody else paid for. But you have to pay attention to all of those things. But yeah, if you’re a, an attorney that doesn’t have a lot of business expenses, but you do have some sort of a side hustle, or you’re doing some contract work on the side, you can be the sole proprietor of your business.

The business is just your name, so I could be Candus Worth is the business name, and take out a business card. Even if you don’t have an EIN, you just use your Social Security number on the application

Holly Draper: So, we’re just about out of time, but where can our listeners go if they want to find out more about you?

Candace Werth: About me? You could go to werthlawllc.com. That’s my office webpage. Or I’m on Facebook, and because I was a prosecutor and a lot of people that didn’t like me would look for me, I’ve got my security settings wired down, so you actually have to search the exact name. It’s Candace Black Werth, and you can find me that way.

And I post a ton about my travels just because a lot of people would post travel pictures, and I loved seeing their vacations because it gave me ideas about where to go. So I now have got into really detailed travel notes just so others see what we’re seeing. So yeah, I’m happy to friend people. If anybody’s going to Cabo San Lucas, we’ve been going down for over 20 years.

I’m happy to give restaurant advice, hotel advice, whatever you need.

Holly Draper: And I love that you, because we’re Facebook friends, and I love that you often post about your redemptions when you travel and how you made this particular trip happen using points. And I try to do that too because people are like, “Oh man, you’re just flying all over the world in business class.” Yeah, I’m not paying to do that. I am doing it the smart way and want you too can fly all over the world in business class if you know what you’re doing.

Candace Werth: Exactly. And you don’t want to seem pretentious. Yeah, I’m not paying 12 grand for this flight, so that’s why I post the redemption just because, hey, this is the points game.

Since I figured out the points game, it’s opened up the world to us. The amount of times we’ve been to Italy, to Greece, to Bora Bora, and we’ve used the hotel credits in Bora Bora, and we’ve teamed it up with Costco Travel. There’s so many different options out there, but it makes the world accessible.

Holly Draper: Yeah, and if anybody has questions and stuff about points hacking, I actually started a Facebook group where I send people to ask those questions so that when I answer them, others can get the benefit and can see it. because for a while I was getting a lot of the same questions. The group is called Miles and Points Hacking Friends, I think, so I’ll drop a link to that as well in our show notes so that anybody who listens and wants to learn more, pop in that group and I know I’m happy to share anytime.

Candace Werth: And I would say they should also go to 10xtravel.com because I tried to get into this game and it was so hard. Once you do it with 10X, it just lays it out and it is so easy, and it’s free. And you

Holly Draper: And they do have a group on Facebook. Is it 10X Travel Insiders? Is that what it’s called?

Candace Werth: I think so, yeah.

Holly Draper: But a word of warning; do not comment or post in that group without doing the free course first. They will come after you. And it is obvious when people ask these new questions that they did not do the course before they started asking questions. But it has been a wealth of information being in that group.

I’ve learned so much, and if it weren’t for that group, I definitely would not be where I’m at today as far as traveling the world for free or cheap on points.

Candace Werth: Same. Same.

Holly Draper: Thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed it. If you enjoyed this episode, go leave us a review and subscribe to enjoy future episodes

Narrator: The Texas Family Law Insider’s Podcast is sponsored by the Draper Law Firm. We help people navigate divorce and child custody cases and handle family law and appellate matters.

For more information, visit our website at www.draperfirm.com.