My wife and I are “hybrid digital nomads”. We fly around the US staying in hotels (mostly Hiltons) from mid March through the end of September. The other half of the year we own a unit in a “Condotel” in Florida that gets rented out like a hotel when we aren’t there to cover the cost. We also don’t have cars and depend on Ubers and the occasional rental car for ground transportation.
We will be in at least 13 cities this year. Some vacations. Some “nomadding” and some a little of both.
I also travel for business 7-8x a year (cloud consulting at $BigTech)
All that to say, credit card rewards and loyalty points makes traveling, staying on budget and being able to enjoy more expensive places possible.
For our major categories, we get the following “returns” from credit card points/loyalty points (miles, hotels, transferable credit card points)
- Hilton hotels - 20-25%
- Hyatt Hotels - 20%
- Delta/American Airlines - 14%
- Groceries/Dining Out - 5.5%
- Uber - 4.2%
- everything else 2.4%
Then there is also the concept of “churning” where you sign up for cards just for sign up bonuses. Those can be worth between $600-$1200 per card.
Ask me anything…
What is the carbon footprint of that lifestyle?
Would any plane not fly if I weren’t on it?
I think the thinking of the prior poster here is
1) it's not just you, it's your partner too. So that's two seats x # flights/yr.
2) with the extra seat miles you are occupying, airlines can sustain their existing routes/itineraries or expand them if they're at capacity.
At a larger scope it can be viewed as: will the airline fly more flights with its existing fleet? Will the airline buy more aircraft to fly more flights? If yes to either, then your argument breaks down.
What are the chances that our scheduling a flight that was already scheduled to fly 6-9 months prior caused the airline to add another route?
You know, if there are enough people like you then you can generate a lot of additional demand for flights, and an airline will actually add flights to their schedule to accommodate that. The law of supply and demand still works here.
Having said that: fuck carbon footprint!
Yes, I’m sure there are lots of people like me who are willing to throw away everything they own that won’t fit in three suitcases and travel around the US for half the year.
"I am a beautiful and unique snowflake, there aren't really any people like me" is a wrong answer here :) We are not talking about people exactly like you, we're talking about people taking a lot of unnecessary trips just for fun. Some will do that constantly, like you, some will try this for a month or two. Still those travels add up.
Again, I'll take having fun over saving the planet every time, let's just stop pretending that your travels add no carbon emissions.
Do my personally taking a plane that was already flying “add to the carbon emissions” of the plane was going to fly anyway?
Or should I also start a collective action to keep others from flying to reduce the number of flights overall? My refusing to ever fly is not going to stop one plane from flying.
What do you think would be the chances of a flight taking off empty, day after day, without the airline cancelling it?
I fly for both business and leisure myself, but arguing that "the plane will take off with or without me on it" is beyond ridiculous.
Unless you have your own private plane, the airplane would just as much take off without you as Google would still be running servers whether you used it or not.
Are you alone going to make a difference by not flying? Like that neocon anti-environmental Obama said “we aren’t going to save the planet by throwing a bottle in the recycling bin”
Is it really that hard to understand?
The airplane takes off if, on average, the sum of dollars that all ticketed passengers are willing to pay for the benefit of being on it is larger than the operational and capital cost of the airline for operating that one flight.
Your contribution (in a purely causal sense, regardless of what moral statement you might read into it) to all of this is very indirect and diluted, but that does not make it zero.
How much could you reduce your carbon footprint if you didn’t use HN? Google?
Silly questions aren’t they?
Note that you're the one bringing the "carbon footprint" concept into this conversation, not me.
> How much could you reduce your carbon footprint if you didn’t use HN? Google?
Again, I don't really subscribe to the idea of carbon footprints, but for the sake of the argument: Insignificantly little, compared to the emissions caused by the flights I take.
> Silly questions aren’t they?
Absolutely.
The first reply to this sub thread asked me about my “carbon footprint”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34494390
From just a brief Google search, 500,000 people are in the air at any given time.
When my wife an I fly we are
0.0004% of all of the people in the air. Is that percentage “significant”?
Yes, but I‘m not the same person that mentioned your carbon footprint.
My point is, carbon footprint or not, that buying flight tickets and airplanes flying are in a causal relationship, which you seem to be denying, which in turn I find absurd.
You are responsible (again, no moral judgement or carbon footprint shaming implied; again, I fly too, and not too infrequently) for the consequences your actions, and dilution of responsibility seems like an extremely immature way of dealing with that.
Buying a flight ticket isn‘t the same thing as chartering a private jet, but it‘s also not the same thing as riding a bike around the block in terms of energy and resource expenditure. What we do about all of these things is a question completely secondary to the discussion at hand.
And if you didn’t ride a bike and walked everywhere you would save the resources required to make the bike.
Are you not also “diluting” the responsibility by not taking into account all of the energy you use by being on your computer? By being on the internet?
At what point does it become silly? Or do you set the bar right above “the things I don’t do”?
> Are you not also “diluting” the responsibility by not taking into account all of the energy you use by being on your computer? By being on the internet?
No, I am accepting the responsibility for all of these actions (at least insofar as I am aware of their consequences) – which are not nearly in the same ballpark as flying in terms of energy expenditure, but again, you're the one counting/comparing, not me.
> Or do you set the bar right above “the things I don’t do”?
Like what, taking airplanes? You seem to be intentionally ignoring the fact that I have repeatedly stated that I do. I just don't engage in ridiculous logical acrobatics in trying to rationalize away the consequences of doing so.
Yes, most certainly.
You are part of the aggregate like it or not and this is aggregated demand that gets this plane flying.
You are free to do what you want but you can’t deny your impact. Given your post you probably have by yourself the carbon footprint of two to three families.
So how many people do you assume in the US are throwing away everything they own to fly as much as we do?
And you’re also assuming airplanes are flying at 100% capacity. I can tell you out of the 12 flights I was on between business and personal the last two months of last year [1] none of them were at capacity.
[1] ATL -> SFO -> LAX —> CHS -> CLT -> BNA -> CLT -> RDU -> CLT -> ATL -> SAV -> MCO
How do you manage to get 20-25% on Hilton hotels? True, I never accomplished anything more than Silver membership, but I also read the analysis that one Hilton point is worth like 0.6 cent. It takes a while to accumulate even 100.000 points, and then that's worth maybe 1 free night.
I don’t redeem HH points for any less than .7 cpp. You get a free night when you pay all of your nights with points.
But as far as collecting points. Each time I stay at a Hilton, per dollar, I get:
- 10 base points
- 10 points for being Diamond (automatic with the Amex Hilton Aspire)
- 14 points on the Aspire card.
That’s 34 points minimum or around 24%.
But Hilton ran a 3x special the third quarter of last year followed by two 2x specials for 54x and 44x. At 54x that’s almost 38% back.
I don’t use more than 70K points per night or 280K points for 5 nights (fifth night free).
Our “housing budget” is $3500/month. We spend that on our own place during the winter and hotels the rest of the year and the income pays for our mortgage at our “winter home”. I’m also traveling for reimbursed work trips. That means at times, I’m collecting points for two hotels at once if my wife doesn’t come with me.
Thanks for the details :)
Seems like Amex Hilton Aspire card is the key here, just not sure how to get one, not living in the US, and having no credit history there. I assume they require some exorbitant income level as well?
Anyway, seems like just getting Diamond status gives you quite a bonus. I'm in this weird situation where I plan to go to US for the next 3-6 months, and I am actually considering living in Hiltons the whole time :)
In the US, income has little to do with getting credit cards.
The only time that banks really care about your income or your income to debt ratio, is buying a house.
> Then there is also the concept of “churning” where you sign up for cards just for sign up bonuses. Those can be worth between $600-$1200 per card.
This doesn't work for long, IME. The banks quickly get wise to you, and won't give you any more bonus cards, at least for a while.
There is an entire crowd source science around how to churn and different companies have different policies.
For instance signing up for business cards using your SSN as the EIN doesn’t show up on your credit report.
Once you have one card from Amex, they don’t do a credit pull for additional cards. Between personal and business, Amex has six Delta cards and four versions of the Platinum.
That means you can apply for as many Amex business cards as you want with no effect on your credit.
Chase has a hard 5/24 rule where you can’t have opened more than 5 cards with any issuer within 24 months. But that doesn’t include business cards.
You also have to space credit card applications out. It also helps that I have a long credit history. I opened my first card in 1996.
> Chase has a hard 5/24 rule where you can’t have opened more than 5 cards with any issuer within 24 months. But that doesn’t include business cards.
I've never been able to get a Chase card.
> You also have to space credit card applications out. It also helps that I have a long credit history. I opened my first card in 1996.
I think I applied for too many at once. Also I take advantage of those 0% introductory APRs and run a balance (only paying the monthly minimum for the duration, and paying the remainder as one lump sum before it expires), which adversely affects my score.
Banks seem to be OK giving cards to known churners. It should be trivial to figure out. My theory is it's either because the marketing department is happy to show off the success of their campaign, or that the banks are leveraging the high credit scores of churners to reduce the risk on-paper of customers with lower credit scores.
There are various rules that the companies use.
Sone companies like Amex have a “once per lifetime rule” and others make you wait four years and others don’t give you sign up bonuses for the same “family” of cards.
Marriott for instance has restrictions between Chase and Amex cobranded cards.
Banks still occasionally shutdown customers who follow the rules but are grossly unprofitable.
My point is, I think the banks actually want churners for the reasons I mentioned.
Banks have methods to try to limit churning some are explicit like Amex “once per lifetime rule” where you can only get a sign up bonus for a particular card once.
And they have what is colloquially known as “pop up jail” where when you try to sign up for a new card, they will allow you but pop up a warning saying you won’t get the bonus if you apply for the card. It’s based on your previous behavior with them.
But even while the algorithm for how they choose it is secret, it’s been reverse engineered for the most part via crowd sourcing.
Most credit cards also will deny you if you have opened too many recent cards no matter what your credit is. For instance I just got denied the CapitalOne SavorOne card that had 10% cash back for Uber and I have an 800+ Fico.
I love the idea but it seems like you’d have to be quite a minimalist when it comes to personal belongings. Do you keep stuff in storage when you’re not occupying the condo?
We threw away everything we owned that wouldn’t fit in three suitcases - two checked bags and one carry on.
Of course, I also have a large bookbag with my laptop a second portable display, my iPad and often a client laptop since we aren’t allowed to install a customer’s VPN on our work computers.
It’s a very freeing experience