Amex Membership Rewards Points, what's your strategy?

[NoMoreDebt]

How long do you save up your points before you use them? For my situation I have the option to cash them out into Charles Schwab which seems like a nice way to go if not using them for airfare.

If someone wasn't traveling for roughly 2 to 3 years would you save them at the risk of them being nerfed or use them/cash them out?

[Anonymous]

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@NoMoreDebt wrote:

How long do you save up your points before you use them? For my situation I have the option to cash them out into Charles Schwab which seems like a nice way to go if not using them for airfare.

If someone wasn't traveling for roughly 2 to 3 years would you save them at the risk of them being nerfed or use them/cash them out?

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I think it depends on your goal and possibly the amount  you have and your potential earning rate without travel.    If you are set on a real aspirational travel award, cashing them out isn't going to get there, so it might (or might not!) be worth taking the risk of devaluation etc and keeping them, and hopefully adding more.

But if it's more casual, e.g. maybe I will use them for a domestic flight sometime, and then you realize that's not going to happen soon, cashing out might be more appealing.

This of course happened with Covid, when no-one knew if, let alone when, normal travel would return.   I cashed out my UR points (thanks, Pay Yourself Back!) and I'm sure others cashed in MRs via CS or maybe gift cards

[swankytiger]

Cash them out with the Schwab card and put them in VTI/VOO/SCHB/etc

[CorpCrMgr1]

I cash them in ASAP. I know people that fly and visit Europe on points.

[Shooting-For-800]

I use all of mine at Home Depot from HD gift cards.

$1 per 100 points.

Simple and easy.

[NoHardLimits]

I use my MR points for inexpensive airline revenue tickets or to top off my Delta SkyMiles account for an award redemption.  I'm not putting much spend on my MR earning cards these days, so I will likely exhaust my supply of points within the next year or so.

[FicoMike0]

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I remember a couple of European vacations on points. Two week, athens, paris, geneva.  747 first class that was nice.  I had a biz trip in la the week after. I stayed an extra day, flew back geneva to Paris to JFK to lax, long day, traveling with the sun.

These days, I mostly cash them in.

[redpat]

My perpetual running MR balance runs between 300k - 400k and use them for transfer partners.  I never worry about MR devaluation since there are so many ways to use them.  On the other hand I have seen many transfer partners have devaluation, but some transfer bonuses off-set some of those issues.  I have never gone to 0 MR points and never will, I redeem about 300k annually.

My advice is,  don't panic and plan a trip that you would like to take and if you need to accumulate some, do so.

Those who panic miss out.

[okurosetta]

How have you used points in the past? If so, what on? How would you want to use the points? If flights, do you travel domestic, international? If hotels, do you stay at high-end properties, something decent but good value, or the cheapest possible? Are you sitting on a lot of points?

The answers for which strategy would be best could go so many ways based on those answers.

I am similar to @redpat as I like to have a stash of points available for redemptions. If a good points booking comes up in your searches, you'll either have enough points or you won't. I'd rather have enough points.

There is a balance to this - I'd prefer to earn more than I burn, but not significantly more. And so long as one is earning at least or more than they burn, if they are sitting on a ton of points, cashing out may make sense. I went ham on Amex SUBs for a while, earning well over 700k MR from SUBs alone, and did cash out quite a bit of MR to Schwab at 1.1cpp. But I only did this because I had excess MR - now that I have gone through the various SUBs (basically only NLL offers for me left), I currently have 145k and would prefer to stay around 200-300k at most times, so redeeming to Schwab isn't even a thought.

[OrangeRange]

I don't see MR points as being devalued over time as the points themselves have multiple uses, and aren't what changes in value, it's the transfer partner redemption values that do.  I'm much more cautious of keeping my American Airlines miles too high and unused for example, as there could always be a sudden devaluation of them. 

I have around 310K MR points now. I usually use mine to top-off SkyMiles redemptions for flights I take domestically and to Canada. I have done a few Hilton transfers as well. Ideally, I'll always keep a reserve of about 200K points for any international flight options, and the rest will just go to domestic flights and any sporadic Hilton stays I want to do but don't want to pay for. 

If you don't have any immediate use cases, then cash out or let the stockpile continue to grow until you do.