How I Earned 900K Credit Card Points in 2024 Worth $11,000

In 2024 I earned around 900K credit card points, worth around $11,000 by completing 9 sign-up-bonuses across 5 credit card issuers.

Chasing sign-up-bonuses will always be the easiest way to earn lots of credit card points in the shortest possible time.

To give you one example, say you want to accumulate 175K British/Qatar Avios to book round-trip USA/Asia flights in the famous QSuites. There are two ways you can gather these points:

Through credit card spending: assume on average you earn 3X MR points per $1 spent. To earn 175K Avios, you must spend around $58,000. That’s a lot of money!

Through sign-up-bonuses: assume you sign up for 2 credit cards, one with a 75K bonus (Capital One Venture X) and one with a 100K bonus (American Express Gold). Combined, you spend $10,000 across 7 months to earn 175K Avios.

Instead of spending $58,000, spending $10,000 towards sign-up-bonuses earns you the same 175,000 Avios. That’s ~83% less expenses!

Through that example, I hope you understand the power of sign-up-bonuses. This is why I chased sign-up-bonuses instead of focusing on multipliers last year.

In this blog post, I will go over all my sign-up-bonuses (SUBs), give you the points total, and finally use TPG’s points valuation to approximate the dollar amount.

Earning 890K Credit Cards Points Through 9 SUBs

Here’s a list of all the sign-up-bonuses I completed in 2024, broken down by card issuer.

Chase

Chase Freedom Flex (Part 1) - 20K Ultimate Rewards (UR) points

Chase Freedom Flex (Part 2) - 5X on grocery first year, earning 6.6K UR points

Chase Sapphire Preferred - 75K UR points

Chase IHG Premier - 140K IHG One Rewards points

American Express

AMEX Marriott Business - 5 Free Nights, total 250K Marriott Bonvoy points

AMEX Hilton Surpass (Part 1) - 130K Hilton Honors points

AMEX Hilton Surpass (Part 2) - 90K (1 free night valued at 90K) Hilton Honors points

AMEX Business Gold - 175K Membership Rewards points

Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo Attune - 10K Wells Fargo Rewards points

Citi

Citi Strata Premier - 75K Citi Thankyou points

Summing them up, that’s 891K credit card points.

Now, let’s look at the associated $$$ value.

Earning $10,862 Through 9 SUBs in 2024

How much value one can get from 891K credit card points depend on their redemption strategies. It can be anywhere from $6,000 to over $20,000.

For a reasonable valuation, I will use TPG’s points valuation chart.

If you are interested to know how much value I got from some of these points, check out my 2024 redemptions blog post that I recently wrote.

That said, let’s look at a realistic value that you could get.

101.6K UR points = 2.05 * 101.6K = $2,082

140K IHG points = 0.5 * 140K = $700

250K Marriott points = 0.7 * 250K = $1,750

220K Hilton points = 0.6 * 220K = $1,320

175K MR points = 2 * 175K = $3,500

10K Wells Fargo points = 1.6 * 10K = $160

75K Citi ThankYou points = 1.8 * 75K = $1,350

Summing up, that’s an astounding $10,862.

Closing Thoughts

If I were to earn these 900K points through my regular spending, I would have had to spend around $300,000 (assuming I get 3 points per dollar).

So, in 2024 I earned 900K credit card points worth around $11,000 in travel value by completing 9 sign-up-bonuses across American Express, Chase, Wells Fargo and Citi.