148. Your Year in Points Review: How to Audit, Learn, and Plan Smarter
Point Me To First Class
Devon Gimbel MD
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 29 December 2025
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Have you ever taken a step back and actually evaluated what your points did for you over an entire year?
In this episode, I'm inviting you to do your own Year in Points Review—a way to look at how you earned points, how you used them, and whether your approach to earning and redeeming rewards helped you reach your travel goals.
I walk through why a year-end points review is worth doing, including how it helps you evaluate what you did well, what you could do better, and how having clear data makes it easier to decide what to keep doing, what to stop doing, and what to focus on moving forward.
I also share my personal process for reviewing both sides of the equation: points earning and points redeeming. From looking at different points ecosystems to understanding how points were earned and used, this episode walks through how to pull the details of the year into a clearer big picture.
If you want to better understand how your points worked for you this year, this episode will show you how to get started.
Get full show notes and transcript: https://pointmetofirstclass.com/year-in-points-review-2025
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Point Me to First Class, the only show for employed professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners who are looking to optimize their higher than average expenses to travel the world. |
| 0:10.7 | I'm your host, Devin Gimble, and I believe that your expenses are your greatest untapped asset, if you know how to leverage them. |
| 0:17.8 | Ready to dive into the world of credit card points and miles so you can travel more, travel better, and travel often. Let's get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome |
| 0:31.3 | back to the podcast. As another calendar year comes to a close, I have a tradition of looking back |
| 0:37.2 | at the year and taking stock of my year and points, including how many points I earned, how many points I used to book travel, and what monetary value I got from my points during that time. |
| 0:47.5 | And I wonder, do you do the same thing? I hope you do because it can be very enlightening, useful, and sometimes even a bit surprising |
| 0:54.8 | to take a look back at an entire year of points earning and redeeming. |
| 0:58.9 | In fact, if you're a longtime listener of the podcast, you'll remember that in January of |
| 1:03.7 | 23 and January of 2024, I sat down with good friends of mine, Kelly, the Points in Milestock, |
| 1:10.0 | and Dr. Sujatha Morali, |
| 1:11.2 | respectively, and we did a recap of our entire points earning and points redeeming for the prior |
| 1:16.4 | calendar year. And I'm going to continue that tradition on the podcast next week when I bring |
| 1:21.3 | back the points earning and redeeming year in review series, this time with my good friend |
| 1:25.8 | and guest, Dr. Andrea Mayberry. We're going to do a deep |
| 1:28.5 | dive into exactly how many points we earned in 2025, how we earned them, and what we use them for. |
| 1:35.2 | But before we kick off the new year with our look back to 2025, I wanted to invite you all to do |
| 1:40.5 | your own points year in review. For the rest of today's episode, I want to talk about |
| 1:45.3 | why to consider doing a points year in review for yourself and explain what to do to put together |
| 1:50.1 | your own year in points review. So let's start with the why. Here are three reasons that I think |
| 1:56.1 | doing a year end points review is worthwhile. Number one, it helps you evaluate. Most of us are living |
| 2:02.4 | very busy lives and even those of us who consider ourselves irrationally enthusiastic about |
| 2:06.8 | points probably aren't spending that much time on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis |
... |
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