Craig Joseph

I think the fees were around three tenths of a percent per transaction. So still not perfect, but far, far less costly than my other options.

So if you're abroad for any period of time, to me, it's all about redundancy and getting ahead of problems before they arise. So having multiple cards issued by different banks can be a benefit in case one card becomes temporarily unusable, such as due to a fraud alert, and even better if those different cards operate on independent transaction networks, for example, Visa and MasterCard.

That way you still have options if there's an issue with one of the payment networks or if a vendor only accepts one of the other for a transaction. You only want to take cards abroad that don't pass on foreign transaction fees, and even better if you take cards that earn rewards in categories where you know your spending will be concentrated, such as restaurants or grocery stores.

And since you're traveling, a card that offers consumer protections like trip delay or lost baggage insurance could also be valuable.

Yeah, I did live abroad in New Zealand through tax season in the U.S. And at that time, my taxes were pretty straightforward. And I normally would have done them myself, but I hired a CPA who was a buddy of mine to do them that year since I didn't want to make any mistakes while I was out of the country. And I set up for any correspondence from the IRS to go through him.

That way, nothing would be missed while I was abroad and not actively checking my mail.

Yeah, glad to join y'all again.

Hey, gang, glad to be back.

So in my previous life as a geologist, I wrote a proposal that was funded and sent me to work with another geologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. If I remember correctly, I had about three months to prepare for the trip, which included everything from figuring out how to rent an apartment from abroad to how to safely move a few hundred pounds of rocks around the globe.

And as it turns out, airport security in some countries consider rocks to be a weapon and don't let you carry them on a plane, especially in the quantities I had. So that's one of the many things I wish I would have known before moving abroad.

My story is a tale of I wish I knew then what I know now. So I'll preface this by saying I wasn't much of a personal finance nerd back then. I did keep my credit union checking account to pay for recurring expenses at home, like my storage unit and car payment. And my plan was also to use that debit card abroad.

Confirmed this would work with the credit union, but I'll sheepishly admit that I made two big mistakes. The first mistake was not asking about fees or understanding that I'd incur foreign transaction fees each time I used my debit card abroad. And the second was not having an account that reimbursed ATM fees.

After a couple of weeks of paying 3% in fees each time I wanted to access my money, I looked into opening a checking account in New Zealand. But even then, I was looking at significant fees for transferring money from the US to that account. So if there's any piece of advice I can give to folks moving out of the country, it's to figure out how to avoid fees when banking abroad.

I do. And this actually gets into that topic of multi-currency accounts that you just mentioned, Sarah. Due to my lack of planning, I did have to transfer money from my account at home to New Zealand. And of course, I wasn't aware of how expensive those transactions could be.

The roommate that I found in New Zealand introduced me to an app-based service called Wise, which at the time it was called TransferWise. That allowed me to open a multi-currency deposit account so I could get paid in U.S. dollars, convert the U.S.

dollars to New Zealand dollars at a mid-market exchange rate within the same account, and then spend the money with an associated debit card without having to go through the process of having to select your currency when you check out with a purchaser transaction. And that account also let me transfer money in New Zealand dollars to my roommate's deposit account to pay for rent and utilities.

It takes a little bit of time to learn the nuances of it, but still a very, very powerful tool.

It doesn't, no. And I should mention that PointEI is my favorite tool. It's the one I recommend the most often, and it's the one that I use the most often. It doesn't do the sort of nitty gritty level of detail that seats.arrow has, but it has a super easy to use interface and lets you customize results in a variety of useful ways, depending on what miles or points you're trying to use.

So one of my favorite features is that it integrates current credit card transfer bonuses into the search results as well. And that's one of my favorite ways to save on my points and miles redemptions. So SayBuilt is offering a transfer bonus to Alaska Airlines. You can actually filter the results to include only Alaska Airlines or its partner airlines that will be part of that transfer bonus.

One of the other things I love about Points.ya is that the live search tool covers an eight-day range. So you get real-time results for award availability over that period on a combination of up to two departure and two arrival airports.

You got it. Yeah. So you can search for like Monday through the following Tuesday. So if you know what your departure dates are, you can search for award travel over an eight-day period from up to two departure airports and two arrival airports. So it's super powerful. It would be great if you could search for broader periods. Say you just know you want to travel sometime in June.

It would be nice if you could search for the entire month, but we'll take what we can get, right?

Points, yeah, offers a monthly and an annual premium subscription, but you'll need to determine how frequently you use the tool, determine if it's worth that $100 annual fee. I think the last I looked, the monthly fee was like $12 a month.

So if you're only going to use it once, then maybe it's better to use the monthly fee, find what you need, and then go back to the tool later and sign up for a premium membership later whenever you want to use it again. One other downside is the inability to search for airline-specific stopover or multi-city benefits.

So this is a big deal to me, and it's one of my favorite things about award travel. Just for example, I just used Alaska Air Miles on Finnair to get a free stopover on my way to Europe. So I was flying from the US to Amsterdam. And because Finnair's hub is in Helsinki, you could actually get a free stopover there.

So I went and visited Finland for a handful of days before I continued on to Amsterdam. So Pointsea kind of struggles with that a little bit. Another example is the United Excursionist perk, which offers a free one-way flight on a multi-city award ticket.

So for these itineraries that sort of have complex routing, you'll have to search directly with the airline website or call in to confirm award availability. But overall, I think a relatively few number of users will be impacted by these limitations. And again, Pointsea is a super powerful and easy to use tool.

Yeah, so point.me has a standalone app and website. It's not really a tool that I use much. The search features are relatively limited relative to what you get with a service like PointsYah or seats.arrow. And most of all, it doesn't offer alerts.

You know, for beginners, Point.me could be good because it offers straightforward and step by step booking instructions for how to actually transfer your points and book an award flight with a specific airline after you find award availability. So if you really need some handholding to get through the process, it could be good.

That said, there are tons of resources out there already on how to transfer your points and how to make award bookings. So it's really only valuable if you want those step by step instructions in the same app you're using to search for award availability.

I love PointsPath, and I'm glad you brought it up. I think it's a great tool. You know, if I'm not sure whether to use miles or pay cash for a flight, my first step is to use Google Flights to see what options there are. And the PointsPath extension seamlessly integrates with the Google Flight search results.

So it actually shows you the cash and the points or miles cost of a specific flight right there in the same place. And it makes it really easy to determine the value of your miles and whether you should book in cash or points.

Yeah, there's another tool I use all the time. It's called Aerolopa. And I use that to find the layout of the seating chart for whatever plane that I'll be flying on.

And this helps me avoid inadvertently selecting a seat that might have limited recline or a partially obscured window or that annoying computer box with the in-flight entertainment that's under the seat in front of you that takes up foot space. I hate that.

It's a great way to see what the plane is going to look like before you get onto it, so you know exactly what you're walking into. Another tool that I use is called Great Circle Mapper, which allows you to see your flight path between two airports. I am always a window flyer. I want the window seat. I want to be able to look out and daydream as I'm looking at the ground 30,000 feet above.

I use Aerolopa to pick the window seat that I want, and then I'll log on to Great Circle Mapper, and it'll show me the flight path between two airports. Like that flight to Finland that I had mentioned earlier, I logged on to Great Circle Mapper and I saw that I was actually flying over Greenland and just north of Iceland. So basically in the Arctic Circle. And I was flying at night.

So to me, this meant that I had a chance to see the northern lights if I was on the left side of the plane. So I knew I wanted to pick a window seat on the left side of the plane so that at some point in the middle of the night, I could open my shade and hopefully see the northern lights, which unfortunately I didn't.

There are probably two more that I use pretty regularly. Award Wallet's a great tool for tracking all of your points balances in one place. It's been around forever. It's easy to use. It's especially useful as well because they'll remind you when your points may be reaching an expiration date so you can avoid losing them, which is a big deal.

And if you're renting a car, I always recommend using Auto Slash. And that's been my go-to for comparing prices and saving money on car rentals for quite some time.

It really depends on what I'm looking for. Google Flights and PointPath are my first step when I'm flying domestically or if I'm paying cash for a flight. But if I know, for example, I'm looking for an international business class flight that I'd never pay cash for, there's no reason to go through that step. So I forego Google Flights and almost always head to PointsYeah.

Then once I find availability on PointsYeah, I go directly to the individual airline website to confirm the availability is real. And then I transfer my points and book my flight. And I think that's another really, really good point that listeners should understand is that some of these award search tools will show what's known as phantom award availability.

So the award search tool thinks that there's a seat that's available that may not be available. So you always want to check with the airline before you transfer your points.

Yeah, a lot of these tools actually have hotel integration. So Points Yeah has a hotel search feature. Seats.Aero has a counterpart called Rooms.Aero that does the same thing as the flights only for hotel rooms. So there's multiple options if you're also looking for hotel award availability.

Oh, I've so many hot takes. The one for today would probably be that Bilt Rewards is the best travel currency that I personally am starting to value more than Chase Ultimate Rewards or American Express Membership Rewards.

So I was team Chase, and I still am. Don't get me wrong. I love Chase Ultimate Rewards. But for the last 10 years or so, that's been my program of choice. But they've really kind of failed to innovate. There are no new transfer partners. It's sort of the same old what you got five years ago is sort of what you get today.

Whereas BILT gives you multiple ways to earn their reward points and bonuses within their rewards program and gives you access to award partners that you don't have access to otherwise. So one primary example is Alaska Airlines. Nobody partners with Alaska Airlines. And there are some indirect ways that you can transfer miles from other programs like American Express to get Alaska miles.

But Alaska is a one-to-one partner with BILT. And I find it super, super valuable. Beyond that, they have transfer bonuses at the first of every month called Rent Day. You can get some really, really sweet deals transferring your built rewards to certain airline or other transfer partners.

Absolutely, Megan. Thanks for having me.

Hey, Megan. Thanks for having me.

Well, I got into miles and points about 15 years ago with the primary goal of saving money. I think it's safe to say that that's why we're all here, right? It's to stretch our travel dollars. The more money you save on travel, getting to your destination and the hotel once you get there, the more money you have for cool experiences once you're on the ground.

So anyway, I was a poor grad student and loved to travel and tried to stretch my point balances by booking the cheapest flights and hotels possible. And that all changed around 2015 when I used American Airline Miles to book an international business class flight for the first time. And that flight was on Japan Airlines in the U.S. to Tokyo.

And I remember sitting in the spacious business class suite looking around with this ornery grin on my face thinking I didn't have to pay for this.

And talk about imposter syndrome too, like surrounded by people that probably paid thousands of dollars for their seat. And I'm just like, do I belong here?

I compulsively track everything in all aspects of my life, but I have a spreadsheet that tracks all of my redemptions. And over those 15 years, I've saved something like $250,000 off the retail costs of travel.

That's thousands of nights on the road, hundreds and hundreds of flights. I've been all over the place, and it's kind of neat to track how far this hobby has taken me.

So back in the day, you had to spend quite a bit of time. There weren't tools out there that made the process easier. But today, the process doesn't really have to be that complicated. A lot of people have this misconception that there are all these nitty-gritty and nuanced riddled terms and conditions for

all these different airline and hotel loyalty programs that you need to know in order to book a nice vacation. But when it comes to actually redeeming your points, there are so many award search tools out there now that streamline the steps in the points redemption process that used to be super labor intensive, like finding award availability.

I remember that first business class flight I talked about going to Japan. I spent hours, probably days, combing the American Airlines website, just waiting for availability to pop up and other tools that will do that instantly for you.

So think of these tools sort of like Kayak or Google Flights for miles and points redemptions. The tools let you select what miles or credit card points you have. And once you input details like your travel dates and departure and arrival airport, they show you all the available options for using your miles.

So that long list of airlines that partner with your credit card points, these tools search all those airlines simultaneously and show you where there's availability so you don't have to search them one by one.

Definitely, there are different tools for different use cases. For the most part, these tools are best for people looking for airline partner award space or that have transferable points from their credit cards and access a wide range of airlines and hotel transfer partners through those credit cards. If you only have rewards with one loyalty program,

Say a certain airline, United Airlines, for example, you'd probably be better off using the airline website or the hotel website directly to search for that award availability. Otherwise, try out these tools and figure out where your next adventure can take you.

Well, I guess it would just be like any service, right? Worth it will depend on the value you get from the service. So if you pay $100 annually for an award search tool and it saves you more than that, even if you only use it once a year, that's a win, right? That said, many of these tools offer services with monthly rates so you can renew and cancel at will depending on your travel schedule.

But there are some limitations with those search engines. In particular, you're only going to see search results that apply directly to your credit card issuers transfer partners. So let's say Bilt and Amex both use point.me. They'll return different results because their transfer partners are different.

And if you have points with multiple credit card programs, it won't search through all of your available transfer partners. So let's say you've got a Chase credit card as well in addition to your Bilt card. When you use Bilt, you'll only see the results for transfer partners with Bilt. You won't actually see any of the other ones from Amex or Chase or any other non-partner airlines.

So of course, cost is one, but you also need to know whether the tool is going to do what you need it to do, right? So does it offer a search of the airlines that you want to use? Search speed is another. Some of these tools query from huge databases, cached databases that can take a really long time to get results. We're talking like 20 or 30 minutes for results for some of them.

But there are some tools that operate really quickly and kind of cut out that lag time. Additionally, to me, the biggest thing with these tools is alerts. So I don't want to have to go to the airline or hotel website every day and hope that I find availability. These tools allow you to set up alerts with your search criteria. So whatever your travel plans are,

They'll send you an email whenever the availability shows up. And sometimes they'll even send you emails letting you know that the availability isn't showing up just to kind of remind you that you might need to look for different options for whatever your travel plans may be.

So seat.arrow is one of my favorite tools because I can search for a very specific set of criteria. And I should start and caveat this by saying that it's probably not for beginners. For example, I use this tool to search for particular planes or particular seats that I've never flown before. So say I want to fly in a very specific seat, like we were talking about Japan Airlines earlier.

So you can filter specifically for Japan Airlines first class on a very specific plane, say their 777 that offers the first class. Or if you want to look for Singapore Suites or Etihad Apartments or Qatar Q Suites, these really aspirational business class or first class products, you can filter just for those and it's pretty valuable for that.

I also use seats.aero to filter only for flights where those seats are available and no other tool offers that so easily. In addition, seats.aero has a free and a pro version. Both offer alerts. Like we talked about, alerts are super important, but seats.aero does have this one quirky thing

where if they send you an alert and it triggers, then it removes the alert and you have to sign back up for it. So if it isn't perfect, if it isn't exactly what the travel plans you're looking for, then you have to go back into the website and set it back up again. So not totally ideal. It's not super, super user-friendly.