How we travel as a family of five (almost) on points
Sample post — draft content
People assume traveling with three kids on credit-card points requires some kind of dark art. It doesn't. It requires a boring system, applied consistently, for years.
The short version
We put every dollar of ordinary spending — groceries, gas, insurance, the orthodontist — on a small set of cards whose points transfer to airline and hotel partners. We almost never chase sign-up bonuses we wouldn't have qualified for with spending we were already doing. And we book award flights first, then plan the trip around where the availability is.
That last part is the whole trick. If you fall in love with a destination and then go looking for award seats, you'll usually be disappointed. If you stay flexible — "somewhere warm in February" — five award seats on the same plane stops being a unicorn.
What we actually use
- One or two transferable-points cards as the daily drivers. Flexible currencies beat airline-specific miles because you can send them wherever the availability is.
- A shared spreadsheet that tracks balances, annual fees, and when each card's benefits renew. Ten minutes a month, tops.
- Calendar alerts for award-booking windows. Some programs open seats eleven months out; family-sized blocks go fast.
What we've stopped doing
We don't manufacture spending, we don't carry a balance (a single month of interest can wipe out a year of points), and we don't hold cards whose annual fee we can't justify out loud to each other.
The result isn't free travel — taxes and fees are real, and so is the time. But flights for five to Maui on points, twice a year, turns a trip that would be a splurge into one that's mostly a rounding error. For a family that runs between Seattle and a triplex in Maui, that math changed everything.