The Two Things Every Newcomer Needs to Do Before Earning Points and Miles

Maybe you just noticed, for the first time, that the credit card in your wallet has been earning you "points" for years, and you have absolutely no idea what that means or what they're worth.

By David Yates Posted in Learn on 05/20/2026 10 min read

There’s a moment almost everyone experiences when they first stumble into the world of points and miles. Maybe a friend mentioned they flew business class to Tokyo for almost nothing. Maybe you saw someone post about a week in the Maldives paid entirely with credit card rewards.

Whatever brought you here, you felt that electric combination of excitement and confusion. The sense that there’s an entire world operating just beneath the surface of ordinary life, and that other people are living in it while you’ve been paying full price for everything.

So you start to dig in. And almost immediately, you hit a wall. At least, I did.

My Two Rules for New Projects

Before I tell you anything about points, miles, or credit cards, I want to share two rules that I believe apply at the start of any worthwhile new pursuit, whether it’s investing, woodworking, wine, or the subject of this post.

Rule One: You don’t know what you don’t know. So you have to figure out what that is

This sounds simple, almost obvious. But it’s actually the hardest problem a beginner faces, and most people never consciously address it. When you don’t know something, you don’t even know you don’t know it. Once you realize you don’t know it, you can look it up. That’s easy. But when you don’t even know that a concept exists… when you’ve never heard of it, never encountered it, can’t conceive of it… You can’t search for it. You can’t ask about it. You can’t recognize it when someone mentions it. It is, for all practical purposes, invisible to you.

The unknown unknowns. The things you don’t know you don’t know.

In the points and miles world, these are everywhere. You don’t know that there’s a rule that might lock you out of the most valuable credit cards for two full years if you open cards in the wrong order. You don’t know that the “free flights” you keep hearing about aren’t actually free, that there are fees and surcharges that can turn a “free” business class seat into a $600 bill if you use the wrong program. You don’t know that the points you’ve been accumulating on your airline’s co-branded card are almost certainly worth less than the points you could be earning on a different card. You don’t know that some of your points are about to expire, and that you may be about to lose years of earnings.

You don’t know any of this, and you don’t know that you don’t know it. And that’s the problem. It can be as overwhelming as your first time buying rugs in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar.

Rule Two: To figure out what you don’t know, you have to learn the language

Here’s the thing about any specialized field: the people inside it have developed a language for it. Not to be exclusionary. Not to make it harder for newcomers to join. But because precision matters, and shorthand is efficient, and a community that’s solved a problem needs a fast way to talk about the solution.

In the points-and-miles world, the language is dense, fast, and completely opaque from the outside. A typical conversation between experienced hobbyists might look like this:

“I’m at 4/24, so I’m going to grab the CSP for the SUB before gardening for six months and then going LOL/24 on Amex and Citi. P2 just got the ABP with NLL, so we’re sitting on about 600K MR between us. Thinking of burning it on CX or SQ First before the next devaluation.”

To an outsider, that is word salad. To someone who knows the language, it’s a perfectly clear strategic statement that communicates a full picture of where that person stands, what their plan is, and why.

Learning the language doesn’t just help you communicate. It does something far more important: it makes the unknown unknowns visible. Every new term you learn is a concept that previously didn’t exist for you. The moment you learn what “5/24” means, you don’t just know a rule; you suddenly understand an entire strategic reality you were previously blind to. The moment you learn what a “transfer partner” is, a whole category of points value that you didn’t know existed suddenly opens up. The moment you learn what “devaluation” means, you understand the risk of hoarding points… A risk you didn’t even know you were taking.

Language is the map. And you can’t navigate terrain you can’t see.

Applying My Two Rules to Points and Miles

So let’s get specific. Here’s what the two rules look like in practice for someone just entering the points-and-miles arena.

Step One: Accept That You Are Almost Certainly Doing It Wrong Right Now

Not because you’re careless or unintelligent. But because the default, which is the path of least resistance, is almost always suboptimal in this world.

The average American has a credit card that earns airline miles or hotel points on a single carrier’s program. Those miles earn at 1 mile per dollar (1X) on most purchases. They have no idea what those miles are worth, and the airline has every incentive to keep it that way. The average American has never heard of a “transfer partner,” doesn’t know that flexible bank points can be worth twice as much as airline miles, and has probably let points expire at least once.

None of that is their fault. It’s the result of not knowing what they don’t know.

The first step is simply to acknowledge that reality and to become curious about what you’re missing rather than defensive about what you’ve been doing.

I used to use my AAdvantage miles for magazine subscriptions! And I transferred Marriott points to Frontier! Wow.

Step Two: Learn the Language Before You Do Anything Else

Before you apply for a single new card. Before you transfer a single point. Before you book a single award flight. Learn the vocabulary.

This is not a detour. This is the work, as they say. Because every term you learn illuminates a concept, and every concept you grasp expands the territory you can see and navigate.

Start with the fundamentals:

SUB (Sign-Up Bonus) – The welcome bonus a credit card offers new cardholders after meeting a minimum spend. This is the engine of the hobby. Most of the “free flights” you’ve heard about were funded by sign-up bonuses, not years of organic spending.

MSR (Minimum Spend Requirement) – The amount you must spend within a set window (usually 90 days) to earn the SUB. Understanding this changes how you think about timing a new card application.

Transferable Points – The single most important concept for a newcomer to grasp. Some credit cards earn points in flexible “currencies” – Chase Ultimate Rewards, American Express Membership Rewards, Citi ThankYou Points, Capital One miles, Bilt Rewards, that can be transferred to dozens of airline and hotel programs. These points are almost always worth more than the points earned on a co-branded airline card, because you’re not locked into a single program.

Transfer Partner – The airline or hotel loyalty program to which you can send your flexible bank points, usually at a 1:1 ratio. The ability to move points to the right partner at the right time turns a pile of abstract numbers into a business-class seat.

CPP (Cents Per Point) – The measure of how much value you’re getting from a redemption. A point that is worth 2 cents of value is worth twice as much as one that is worth 1 cent. This is how you evaluate whether a “deal” is actually a deal.

5/24 – Chase’s application rule: if you have opened 5 or more credit cards from any issuer in the past 24 months, Chase will automatically deny most of its card applications. This single rule has more strategic implications than almost anything else in the hobby. Knowing about it before you start opening cards could save you from locking yourself out of the most valuable cards for years.

Devaluation – When a loyalty program raises award prices, removes partners, or reduces benefits. Points are not a savings account – they are a depreciating asset. Programs devalue without warning. Understanding this changes your relationship with hoarding.

Stacking – Earning rewards from multiple sources on the same purchase: a shopping portal paying out bonus points, your credit card earning at a category multiplier, and a card-linked offer providing additional cash back, all simultaneously, all on the same transaction. This is the difference between getting 1% back on a purchase and getting 15% back on the same purchase.

The Burn – Actually redeeming your points. The earn-and-burn philosophy holds that points sitting in an account are points waiting to be devalued. The goal is not to accumulate the largest balance; it’s to convert points into experiences at the highest possible value before the program changes the rules.

What Happens When You Learn the Language

Something shifts.

The threads you couldn’t follow start to make sense. The deals you scrolled past without understanding start to look like opportunities. The cards you dismissed as too complicated reveal themselves as carefully designed tools. The hobby, which from the outside looked like an impenetrable club for obsessive spreadsheet people, turns out to be a learnable, navigable world with real, tangible rewards at the end.

More importantly, the unknown unknowns start to shrink. Not to zero, there’s always more to learn, and the landscape is always changing. But you move from the paralysis of not knowing where to even begin, to the clarity of knowing what questions to ask and where to find the answers.

That’s the transformation that happens when you learn the language. Not an expert, not yet. But orientation. The ability to look at a map and recognize that you are, at last, somewhere on it.

One More Thing

The community that has built up around this hobby is remarkably generous with its knowledge, but to benefit from that generosity, you need to participate in the conversation. And to participate in the conversation, you need to know the language.

So start there. Learn the words. Let the words teach you the concepts. Let the concepts show you what you didn’t know you didn’t know.

And then, once you can see the terrain, start exploring it.

The flights are better than you imagine. The hotels are nicer than you think you deserve. And almost none of it has to cost what you’ve been paying.

And just like that, you now know some things you didn’t know, and you’re already learning the language!