What are you spending on annual fees? | Ask Us Anything Ep79 | 9-3-25
Frequent Miler on the Air
Frequent Miler
4.9 • 640 Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2025
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What are you spending on annual fees? What's the holy grail of first-class suites? We answered these and many other questions on the Ask Us Anything hosted live on YouTube on September 3rd, 2025.
(00:37) - As banks tighten up on credit card approvals, I’m sure many have received a denial for “lack of recent installment loan information.” Has anybody taken out a loan to improve their odds? To me, it makes sense to take out a loan where interest is <$50 if it means getting approved for even 1 more card per year with a large bonus. Would love to hear thoughts/experiences.
(04:28) - Recently canceled a stay at Calala Island inside the cancellation window and sadly had 225,000 Hilton Honors points taken away. Have any of you ever forgotten to cancel an award in time and had to pay the price?
(08:49) - There are good and bad business class products, sometimes even within the same carrier(depending on plane/route). How do you quickly filter out the bad options when doing award searches and alerts?
(12:24) - How many airports do you have, Nick?
(15:54) - If the Chase Ink Business Premier® train shuts down, what would be the team's strategy to earn more Chase points?
(16:48) - Greg- is that the complete Delft house collection behind you, or is there more??
(19:46) - Am I using award tools wrong? I set alerts and sometimes get emails for them, but the awards always seem to be gone by the time I check them an hour or two later. Not sure what to do differently
(21:44) - What are your 5/24 strategies? Do you always stay under? If/when you do go over, how much do you go over, and do you bunch the applications or do you spread them out?
(26:51) - Which credit travel portals or travel booking portals have you confirmed that will still earn you your hotel points?
(30:27) - After listening to the last Coffee Break, you can freely transfer Chase UR points between spouses after setting it up. Correct?
(31:58) - How do we ask questions?
(32:31) - What’s going on with Citi and suddenly freezing already approved Strata Elite accounts?
(33:08) - Hi guys! Are there times when you buy points?
(34:29) - There are a lot of reports of Chase telling people that the sign-up bonus on the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card or Chase Sapphire Reserve® Card is now once per lifetime. Did you hear anything on this?
(35:34) - Have Greg / Nick changed their evaluations of Alaska Atmos vs AA miles after the removal announcement of Singapore and LATAM awards?
(39:00) - Y'all have all flown some epic flights to Asia… what’s your all-time favorite way to get to Asia? Looking to book a trip to hit Tokyo/Shanghai/Hong Kong
(40:30) - What exactly does a CSR Authorized User get besides their own Priority Pass access?
(41:58) - Any tips for improving approval odds with Citi? Recently denied for the AA personal card. I do have a Costco card that I have not been using, but other than that, no Citi cards. Thanks!
(43:05) - What is your holy grail of a first-class suite? Emrites? Etihad? JAL?
(47:04) - Nick, I’m curious if you continued on with casino status matching in Atlantic City? I still have Bally's Superstar and am now eligible to rematch at Hard Rock/Ocean. Curious if you’ve done so yet
(49:40) - What are you spending on annual fees? I love the game and do the same, but I’m curious what your fees are looking like. Thanks!
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Music Credit – “swappin’ back n’ forth” by up @ night
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a Voyescape podcast. |
| 0:03.9 | You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. |
| 0:12.2 | Welcome to Ask Us Anything, where the Frequent Myler team answers your questions live. |
| 0:19.4 | All right. |
| 0:20.5 | Welcome to Frequent Myler's Ask Us anything live on YouTube. If you want to get |
| 0:24.8 | stuff like this in your email inbox, you can go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe, join our email |
| 0:29.4 | list and get all of our posts in your email inbox each week. Join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook |
| 0:33.7 | group to ask questions anytime you'd like and get answers from lots of different folks. |
| 0:38.4 | But right now, we're going to get to some of the questions that you have been sending us already |
| 0:43.0 | and those that you send us here are live. So I think Stevens probably got the first one |
| 0:46.4 | queued up for us, right? Yes. So one of the comments on the Ask Us Anything post asked, |
| 0:51.8 | as banks tighten up on credit card approvals, I'm sure many have received |
| 0:56.0 | a denial for lack of recent installment loan information. Has anybody taken out a loan to improve |
| 1:02.2 | their odds? To me, it makes sense to take out a loan where interest is less than $50 if it means |
| 1:07.5 | getting approved for even one more card per year with a large bonus. We'd love to hear thoughts and experiences. |
| 1:12.9 | So guys, have any of you ever taken out a loan to improve your credit card, approve? |
| 1:19.9 | I have not, and I don't remember ever seeing that as a reason I was denied for a credit card either. |
| 1:25.6 | Let me ask you another follow-up question, |
| 1:28.3 | Greg. How many things, how many ways have you adjusted your behavior based on the reason that you |
| 1:33.7 | got for a denial? How many times have you adjusted your behavior? Zero. Why don't you for the, |
| 1:39.5 | I don't know, a hundredth time, explain why. Ignore the letter, folks. Ignore the letter that they give you that says you were denied for A or B or C, for the most part, you can ignore. Now there are some cases where, like, for instance, we know there's a 524 rule with Chase. And so if they tell you've had too many new accounts in the last 24 months for a Chase card, we know you're likely not going to get approved for that card. However, |
| 2:02.0 | when it's like too many inquiries or you need more installment loans or things that are very |
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