How to MAXIMIZE Your Amex Points

Most people are stuck in a system designed to work harder and not smarter. We're here to expose the strategies, the loopholes and the Life hacks for 1% use. This is universal basic knowledge. Most people think they're winning when they use their Amex points for flights, gift cards, or even statement credits. But the truth is that's exactly what Amex wants you to do because it's the worst way to use your points. So let's talk about point value. Depending on how you redeem them, Amex points can be worth as little as 0.6 cents to over 10 cents per point. That means two people could have the same number of points, but one ends up flying first class and gets all this value and someone gets $100 best buy gift card. It all comes down to how you use them. Here's the play that the 1% know transfer to airline partners. Instead of redeeming your points through the Amex portal, you send them to. Airlines don't usually send them to hotel partners. It's very rare I've ever seen a good ratio there. But you send them to the airline partners like Emirates, ANA, etc. And that's where the magic happens. We're going to go through some examples to show you exactly what we mean. So we included a table here that you can get a general sense of what these point ratios can be. Now, this is not a rule of thumb. This is always a sliding scale. And these are on average I have seen airline deals as high as 10 cents per point. We just don't want to set expectations falsely for anyone. And so we took this from data from places like the points guy that say on average you should be at least getting 2 cents per point with airline partners. But we're going to show you some examples of where you can get up to 10 cents per point per value and the difference adds up fast. 200,000 points could be $1,200 or a $10,000 trip. It's not about having the points, it's knowing how to leverage them. And I've flown round trip business class to Europe for less than most people pay for economy. And the reason that I'm able to do that is because I always transfer to partners strategically. Okay, so let's run through an example. We are going our trip here in the summer and if you have not downloaded this app, I highly recommend it. We've talked about it in the past. We're not getting paid. It's called Seats Aero. I pay for the pro version. One of the things that I love about this app is that travel hacking and using your points, the best value, it's not easy. It's personally, you have to be thoughtful about how you do this. And this app makes it much, much easier. So one of the things that I really like about it, and I get this from the pro version, is, is that I can basically select all the east coast airports at one time or I can do a specific city. So I can put here, as you can see, like est, and it's going to show all the major hubs across the east coast of the United States. And I could also put that I want to go just to Dubai, for example, or I can put Abu Dhabi or Doha, which are nearby airports. And so if you have flexibility, this is super, super important because you can then see what the best, best rates are. One thing I also really like about this app is that if you have flexibility in your travel. So I selected up to 28 days of flexibility. It could be up to one day, three days, seven days, whatever you want to do. And then you can select that. I'm only interested in business class tickets or first class tickets. And so that's the example of why I think it's so valuable. We're going to click search on this and it's going to put everything that's there. We're seeing like hundreds of flights. You know, there's already seven results so far. We're gonna sort by business low to high. And essentially what you'll see here is that we found an American express flight for 70,000 points. There's another one on Alaska Airlines. It's actually a similar flight that you'll see and it's 70,000 with only $347. So sometimes this is actually an interesting tidbit. You can actually book the same flight through different airline partners or. But one partner will charge less in taxes than the other. So that's just a little hack because sometimes you have to pay the taxes. And I don't exactly know why that is the case. It's sometimes an internal policy there, but that typically will be able to save you hundreds of dollars. So this is a great example of what we can do. So we can put essentially business class low to high, maybe first class low to high. So this is a really, really interesting flight that I'm going to put out here. So as you can see here, there is a business class ticket from Boston to Doha for 70,000 points. But the first class ticket is 105,000 points, which is a great, great value. You can see that there is another. The next best one is 115,000 points. One thing to note is that there is a JFK to Abu Dhabi for 115,000 points and only $7 in taxes. Whereas the other one is 105,000 points and $600 in taxes. So even though it's 10,000 more points, if you do the math, 10,000 points is not worth $600, right? So it's something for you to look at. And that's an example. But let's see what this compares to. If we were just to use it for statement credit on your AMEX bill. And that will really show you the value that we're kind of getting for this flight. And we'll pick this flight specifically and see what they are charging on the website of American Airlines as an example. So we currently have this Boston flight that we've talked about. We looked up the value and it was $5,793. We also have another flight that we're considering. This is the JFK to Abu Dhabi route. This is also a first class ticket for 115,000 miles. Kind of high taxes on this one. But I looked up this one and I just wanted to show you this example because it was such an expensive ticket that it shows the example of how drastic some of these things can be. And so this ticket, if you were to buy it just cash for the first class, for the first in business, it was 15,000. So this is the Boston Abu Dhabi route. This is the New York Abu Dhabi route. If you booked it direct, it would be $15,108. Right. And so you probably are not going to book that flight, but someone is. Someone's probably going to pay for that flight. But this will just show you some value differences of what's possible when you book flights this way. And so this one was 115,000 points. This was actually a business rate. It was 70,000 points. And there's some taxes here as well. So you want to keep that in mind. But for the sake of the math and the example, we're not going to go through that. So if we're looking through the math here, 70,000 points. So let's look at this value here. So if you're just taking statement credit, right, if you were using these 70,000 points for just statement credit, or even in the AMEX travel portal, not the where you transfer these points, but just in the travel portal itself, you're going to get 70,000 times 0.6 cents per point. That's very small. But that says 0.6 per point 70,000. And this is statement credit, right? So SC statement credit. And so what that gives you is. That gives you $420. So you're going to save $420 on your bills if you do the statement credit. If you use the 70,000 points to get the business class ticket here, you're going to get $5,793 of value, right? Of total value. And so that is more than 10x. I mean that is like what is that exactly? Let's see that. That is 5793 divided by 420. So you are going to get 13.79x more value than essentially if you were just choosing the statement credit. And so and if you multiply that times the point per value ratio. So let's see, 5,793, 5,793 divided by 70,000 here in this example you are getting 8 cents 0.82 cents versus 06 cents, right? So this is.006 cents, right? Because less than 1 cent. And so that is a monster difference, right? Like you were getting a tremendous amore amount of value on this flight. Now if we do this one, the, the first class ticket from New York to Abu Dhabi, $15,118 which is insane. This is a one way as an example. So this isn't necessarily the best value of flight even if you're going to buy this on cash. But let's just do that math just for the sake of it. This one is yielding out 13 cents per point value, right? So you're even getting an even better ratio here of that. So this goes to show you the difference of how you use your points, right? Even if you were to take the non statement credit sometimes now they let you use your points on Amazon or you can use it for gift cards or you can use it for, you know, if you want to book a hotel through the Amex travel portal and they'll give you a little bit better ratio, they'll give you one point for $1, right? But that one point for $1 at best. This is now worth $700, right? For 1.1 dollar, that's worth $700. You're still getting a tremendous more value here. So this is an example of how you should always hoard your points for, for these types of opportunities. And if you use these apps like seats, Aero, it makes it very, very simple. Usually the hassle about these things is finding the right fare, finding the right travel place, how to do the connection on stuff and then people, most people just give up. But if you use services like this, it's super simple, super easy and you can fly to your entire family and you look like a hero, right? Which is great. And that's always great to be a hero. And this isn't just about luxury, it's about value. You're getting the same dollar for point ratio that the ultra wealthy do, but you're not paying the price. And there is nothing better than that. When you're sitting in first class, you're sitting a little bit of champagne. The guy next to you paid $15,000, you paid $0. It feels great. It feels great. Honestly, there's no better feeling in the world. So we're playing a different game here. A different game, a different points game. And now you can too. So while most people are using Amex points for cash back or gift cards and thinking they got a deal, the 1% are flying first class for free. They're staying in five star resorts. They're turning every swipe into something way more valuable. And it's not just about earning those points, it's about mastering them. If this sounds interesting to you, join our free community. You don't need to be rich to live like the 1%. You just need to learn what they do. This is universal basic knowledge.