November 2025
Greg shares how credit card points are his most powerful tool for funding travel, amplifying everyday spending, and freeing up cash for bigger financial goals. If you want to know how he saved over $24,000 on a trip to Europe using points, don’t miss this episode.
Tune in if you're interested in…
* The smartest ways to earn, redeem, and not waste credit card points
* Which cards offer real value * Strategies business owners can use to supercharge point accumulation
* Real examples of turning everyday spending into luxury travel
* How to align point-earning with your financial goals and values
Watch previous episodes here:
Redefining Work/Life Balance Presence is Key | Morton Wealth
How Your Money History Impacts Your Decisions | Morton Wealth
Good morning everyone. And if you were here for the last panel, welcome back again. And I just have to say, that was pretty amazing. I am already dreaming of my next vacation. Ideally, somewhere with turquoise waters, zero Wi-Fi, maybe kids not asking you for snacks every five seconds. But before we all, you know, start booking our next trip, I think let's maybe start talking about how to pay for our trips in a smarter way.
So today we're here to really, talk about credit card points, because there's a fun fact half of all travelers choose their destination based on where their credit card points can take them. So that's kind of sad. And I am here with an expert. But if we let our credit card points be our travel agent, and I know they don't really expect a tip, that's not really going to lead us to the best vacation.
So today we're going to dive into the world of credit card points, how to earn them, how to use them, and and how not to leave them on the table like that last sad piece of toast at brunch. I'm Patrice Benning, wealth advisor and partner here at Morton, and I'm joined by actually a dear friend of mine, Greg Eisenman.
And he is truly the expert of credit card points. Greg, would you like to really introduce yourself and maybe even tell us how you became the master of the credit card points game?
Well, I would love to use my favorite subject to talk about. So my name is Greg Eisenman. First of all, thank you for for having me here today and for everybody here that's attending.
I actually work for Gallagher. I'm an insurance broker, and by day, I help, employers design, benefit packages to attract and retain employees. But it's really, if I'm honest, credit card points are my true passion. And I talk about it all the time to anybody who will listen. My wife gets a little bit annoyed about that, but, she's really the reason I got into it.
So, I like to travel. I've traveled all over the world. I'm also kind of cheap. I don't like to pay for things. And we were getting married. We were starting our wedding planning, looking at everything that was going to cost. We were paying for most of it ourselves, and we were looking at planning our honeymoon. And I quickly realized we had very different ideas of what our honeymoon was going to look like.
She wanted to stay at the Four Seasons. I grew up staying at the Days Inn, so a Marriott to me is like a palace. And I started realizing that I couldn't afford this kind of vacation that she wanted to go on. And that's when I started taking this deep dive into the internet, and learning how to earn credit card points, which started with paying for our wedding on all of these credit cards.
Well, first of all, I, you know, Shari and I think a line on how we like to find things, but the financial planner in me align with your values and how we can be smarter about that.
Yeah. The goal really is to maximize your life using these points and save your money for other things. That's really why I got into it and why I want to travel, a lot. But when you're trying to save for college, you know, save for a house, save for retirement, you got to pick and choose sometimes what you spend. These credit card points can really make your life easier in that way.
So maybe this is actually a good time. I would like to poll the audience to find out who picks their travel destination based on their credit card points. So raise your hand. All right, so based on that, I feel that I think we probably know how to use credit card points, but I don't think we know how to maximize them. So where do we fall short. You know, is it maybe the cards that we use. Is it our redemption timing? I mean, what's the best way to do that?
Well, it could be all of the above. So. So first of all, everybody's really big on brand loyalty. I don't care about brand loyalty. That's kind of number one, because when you are beholden to one carrier, airline carrier, one hotel brand, if you're earning points on those credit cards, your points are stuck with them.
If you're earning points with Delta and you want to go somewhere and there's no Delta flight available, or there's no delta for flight available for points, you're stuck. So I encourage everybody, first and foremost to be a free agent. I personally prefer Chase and American Express cards, which also Citibank cards. Capital one cards. Personally, I think the Chase and the American Express ones have, the most earning potential and the most value when you go to redeem them.
That's that's earning a number. Number two, part of that is when you have the cards, you don't need a million cards, you only need a few. And you just have to make sure you're using the right card for the right purchases to maximize your points. Sometimes you've got to get creative. People don't realize. I literally charge everything that I do taxes, tuition.
The only things I have not figured out how to charge are my mortgage and my car payments. If I could, I would, but I haven't figured that just yet. And then when you go to use them, most people make the mistake of using them in the Chase or American Express travel portal. That's actually the worst value you can get for your points.
Each one of those carriers and or credit card companies. Same with, Capital One. Same with, Citibank. Have travel partners. What you want to do is find the best deal with a particular hotel or airline that you want to travel on, and then transfer from Chase or American Express. But again, you can then if there's no Delta flight and there's United Flight, you can transfer to United instead. Your points aren't stuck with this one particular, airline or hotel chain.
And when we were prepping for this session, I think I was really, you know, kind of shocked me of the amount of things that I thought I was doing. Well, as far as maximizing points and just simple things like my, auto premiums were automatically debited from my checking account, and I realized that I could actually put all of my credit card.
Yes. I had I got a call from somebody the other day and he called me, said, do you really pay tuition on your credit card? And I said, absolutely. He's like, Because I'm about to do it, and I'm nervous about it. I said, well, what's the other option? You're going to write a check. You're gonna put on your debit card. He said, yes. I'm like, okay, then you charge it, and then three days later you pay it off. You really have nothing lost, but you just got God knows how many points. And I want to ask how much is tuition was. But he got those points. And that's really the, the idea is that if you're going to I'm not telling anybody here to go on a credit card debt.
But if you're going to spend money anyway, you might as well get something out of it. And it's not that hard to strategize. And one of the slides in here we can talk about is, you know, actually, I'll slide forward because I think it's helpful and I'll come back is, you know, according to the IRS right here, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Right. People spend in Los Angeles, I'd argue it's higher about 3% of their income on restaurants. And then they spend, forget the get the number here a certain amount of money per, per family on groceries. And if you're using a debit card or using a bank card that gets no point, you're literally getting nothing for it.
And if you're using the right cards in this example here. Well, tips jump forward for a family of four if you have a household income of 400,000. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you're spending $12,000 at restaurants, $15,000 on groceries. If you use a debit card, you get nothing. If you use, a card that's getting one times points like the Amex Platinum, which we'll talk about, which everybody has. And I'm not a huge fan of, you get about 27,000 points, but if you use the right chase or Amex cards, you can earn between 60 or 120,000 points, which is enough for two hotel nights at a Park Hyatt. It's enough for for me. I got four flights to Europe for 120,000 points. There's there's so much more you can do that.
And this is money you're already spending has nothing to do with going into debt or trying to like, you know, spend more money than you need. This is the money you're already spending. Just getting it in the right place.
Well, it's interesting because as an advisor and financial planner, I often talk to clients about aligning their spending with their values and long term goals. But what makes me really happy is when we plan for that fun bucket and we'll say, all right, let's, let's dream. Let's say every year we're going to spend 15 or $20,000 and you're going to do something really fun. You're going to go take your family on a nice trip, or you're going to go with your friends or whatever that looks like.
Yeah, but I feel that maximizing credit card points adds a layer of creativity into financial planning and even thinking. Actually, even business owners. Raise your hand if you're a business owner in this room. Oh yeah, we have a few. Oh yeah. But I actually, when we were talking about this, I almost started considering maybe doing a side hustle, hiring my two teenage boys as employees, getting them credit cards, but that's probably not okay.
So you can do that on a personal level. My son has a credit card.
Well, yeah, they're signers online, but not signers, but authorized users. So yeah, I can talk about a little about the layers and just the opportunities that business owners have when it comes to that.
Yeah, there's there's huge opportunities because you're paying for a million things. And you can actually if you are the business owner, you can keep those points on a personal basis and you can co-mingle your personal and business points. So number one, if you have employees, you can give them company cards. And the points come back to the company. They're your points. And then you can co-mingle them with your personal points.
And then depending upon where you spend money in your business, you want to have the right card. And there is a slide in here, on business cards right here. Now, business cards are a little bit trickier. One thing to talk about with the business cards, they have really high sign up bonuses. Like right now American Express Platinum is offering like 200,000 points on a sign up bonus.
That's enough for a pretty nice trip. But you want to look at where you can maximize based on that particular card, and you want to get the card that best fits your business, that fits your business. Like, for example, if you're in construction, Amex Platinum is the only way to maximize. If you are doing online advertising, you want to look at the ink business preferred or the Chase Sapphire Reserve business because that's where you're going to get the most points.
You got to look at where you spend your money, how you spend your money, and then just get the right cards to maximize that. That's step one.
So kind of you led me into this. Let's kind of address the elephant in the room. Premium cards. Yep. You know, the ones that have eye watering fees and they, you know, weigh like a dime bill.
You know, are they actually worth it or are we just paying for airport snacks and, you know, metal.
So most of them, I would argue, are worth it. I'm probably an outlier in that, I don't think. And I would venture to guess you don't need to raise your hand that 80% of the people in this room have an American Express Platinum card. I don't think it's worth anything, because now there's that's a conversation of what I would call points versus perks. I look for credit cards to earn the most points that I can used for free travel, which is my goal. American Express Platinum is focused on perks, so like Aura Ring, Lululemon credits.
I think we have a slide on that.
Oh, I do actually, yes. All right. So if we go here you can see the annual fees at the top. But this is a grid that I actually made for my mother. She wanted to get in on this whole points thing that I was doing, and she couldn't remember what to use. So I made this grid for her.
And basically anything that's highlighted in blue is where you're going to get the most value. She doesn't have all these cards, but this is really just like an overview of basically which card you should use based on what you're charging. And what you'll notice is that the Amex Platinum has the least amount of things in blue, because unless you're booking travel inside the American Express portal, you only get essentially one point for most things, and that's not a very good deal.
Even on the Freedom Unlimited card, which is a free card, you get one and a half points for anything that doesn't fit in the bonus category. That's actually the card I use the most. But when I when I get back to the original question of on the Sapphire Reserve, it has a similar fee, but when you charge $300 in travel, they immediately credit you back 300 bucks.
And there's very easily redeemable perks that within like a month or two, you can earn all your money back. The American Express platinum their their piece mailing it back and having vendors giving you money back, but you're not really earning any points. So for me, it's not worth it. I'm a big proponent of the Amex Gold, which is four times points on restaurants and groceries, and it's a huge, hugely valuable card.
Some people have both. I just don't think it's really worth the $900 a year you're paying for the card. If you're looking for the points, if the perks are what you want or you don't like to travel, then it might be a good fit for you.
I wish I had met you 15 years ago.
So let's assume that I won the, you know, the lottery of points. And I do have a million points. Yeah, such wishful thinking on my part here. Is there a redemption strategy? What? How do I go about that? Really?
Well, so number one is you got to start early. You got to plan early, you know, redemptions, point redemptions are basically there's a number of, seats available essentially right on the plane or at a hotel. And those disappear. The earlier you start, the better chance you have of getting the hotel you want, or the flight that you want or the airline that you want, whatever it might be. So start planning early. I usually start if it's a big trip, 6 to 12 months in advance.
Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about the trip.
Yeah. You took this this year.
So this is an example that I like to give you. And I know overall. So my family and I went to Europe for like two plus weeks. And this is really where it comes in. Because if you think about it again this is a trip that's about two and a half weeks. The only thing that I couldn't put, or pay for was points. As we went to the south of France and there just was not a hotel available. So we got an Airbnb. I did get points for that, but I didn't use points. But if you look at this year, if I had paid cash, the cash equivalent was close to about 24,000 points. I only used 540,000 points. And it cost me about $800 in fees.
And so when you're using points, if you look in the column in the blue on the far right, the goal is to get a minimum of $0.02 for every point that you use. If you're getting less than $0.02 per point, it's really not a good use of your points. And that's all I was saying in the Chase. In Amex portals, you're only getting $0.01 per point.
So it's a bad use of points because you're you're losing. When I give this presentation to different places, I call it winning the points game, and it is a game, and I'm a competitive person, and I want to beat the credit card companies. And this is how you beat the credit card companies. And so if you look, we got $0.05 per point on our flights, six and a half cents in London, $0.03 roughly in Amsterdam.
And I got the minimum $0.02 in Paris. But I was I was okay with that. And overall it's about four and a half cents. If I had taken that in cash back, it only would have been $5,400 and I got almost $24,000 of value. And when you look at that $24,000, each person can use that money differently.
You can take it and invest in your business. You can take it and put it towards your down payment on a house. For me, what I usually like to do is, is take a trip I never would take in a million years because as I mentioned, I'm kind of a cheap person. So we went to Hawaii for a week on a family vacation.
The whole thing was free flights and hotels. We did a luau. We went on a jungle off roading tour, went scuba diving. I rented a sailboat in the south of France. I chartered a boat. Things I never would have been able to do if I had paid $25,000 for. For both of those trips. Really? So that's how I use it.
You can use it any way you want. But as you know, Patrice was talking about using as an investment strategy. That's $24,000 that I didn't spend that I can now put to work in a million different ways. It's really up to you how you want to do that. There are ways to do this. This I this was in June.
I booked all of this in November. And honestly, I was a little late on that one because it took us a while to make a decision.
The other part that I think both of us, because we both have kids and we're both kind of subject to vacation schedules. So using points, it's a little bit more restricted because we can only go on vacation.
This is a big time summer time, but some folks may have a little bit more flexibility, so maybe you can talk about that as well when it comes to redemption strategies.
Yeah, absolutely. And so if you do have kids you do have to start early for this reason, right? I can only travel during spring, summer and winter break. That's that's kind of limited unless I'm going to go summer with my wife perhaps, or we're going to pull our kids out of school, which we don't do very much. We can only travel when everyone else is traveling. The prices are the highest. The redemption value is the highest. It's the hardest time to find a good deal.
If you don't have kids or you're traveling without kids, or your kids are out of the house. If a humongous advantage because you can travel during shoulder season or off season, and that's when you can fly first class, you see these deals sometimes online or people advertise. I flew to Japan first class for 50,000 points. That's because they want in October, when everybody else is stuck at home with their kids, and there's nobody taking that business class flight to Japan so they can do it.
Or you can go to Australia in October before every the busy season in November and December. And they're still amazing. Whether it's it's a huge advantage that you have because, again, you're not beholden to any particular schedule and you have that flexibility, which kind of leads into another point of you do have to be a little bit flexible.
Sometimes you can't leave on the exact day that you want. And that's why I say start early. Plan your life around the trip. Don't plan your trip. Don't wait till the end and then plan your trip and try to cram it in. And whatever five days you have, that's when you end up wasting points. Because if you are flexible, sometimes leaving two days earlier can save you.
I actually had a friend. He went to Paris with his wife. They wanted to leave on a particular date, go to seven days. And I said, did you realize you're about to spend a million and a half points on first class seats? If you leave two days earlier and stay one day longer, so you stay for eight days instead of seven, it's only 500,000 points.
And he's like, well, how do you know that? I'm like, there's a calendar on the Air France website. It just shows. It's literally a million points less if you leave two days earlier. And so you just have to be sometimes a little bit flexible. I'm personally fine with flying economy. I don't ever. But not everybody is. I'm 6'2.
If I can do it, you can do it. But, you know, I just want to get to the destination. I personally don't really care. I had to go on a boat or a bus if that's what got me there. I want to be, you know, wherever I'm trying to get.
I like how you work. There's another part of points that I feel I am maybe a little, I don't know, I'm not really paying attention to it. So it's the amplifying part of it where I think is when my credit card says if I this particular month, if I spend, if I go to particular places and it's like three times the amount that I can get right, and I'm like, I don't know, is it worth it?
Do I activate, do I do like, how do I how do I work that?
Well, so that I would say is worth it. You also get emails from your credit card companies saying, you know, redeem for Apple gift cards or do this. Don't ever do that. That's like the worst use possible of your points. But if they say in this, they don't do this as much anymore. Chase, you used to say all the time in July you can go to Best Buy it. You can get eight times points. I'm like, well, what if I don't need anything at Best Buy? So actually what I used to do is I'd go to Best Buy and I would look for things that I need anyway. So I actually went to Best Buy once and it was like eight times, points up to $1,000, and I bought $1,000 worth of Uber and Lyft and Chevron gift cards because I knew I was going to use those. But that way I got my at times points. So there are creative ways that you can do it just by buying the things that you're already using. The Freedom Flex, which was up there, that's a that's a no fee card that has, different quarterly bonus categories. Usually once a year is Amazon and there's a $5,000 max.
I just immediately buy a $1,500 Amazon gift card, get my five times points, and then I know we're going to blow through that. And probably 3 or 4 months.
All right, then I know that. I mean, we've all we all have credit cards here. So it's not like we have to start from the beginning. But if we were to kind of rebalance our points strategy. Yep. How do we do that.
So these are the four cards that I recommend. Now again you can have other cards. I also have some other cards. But, I personally believe the Chase Sapphire Reserve is the most useful card you can have. These two freedom cards from Chase are also, there are no fee cards, but if you don't have one of the two sapphire cards, they're cash back cards.
When you get a sapphire card, they become points and you can share all those points. Also, you can get signup bonuses, you can get referral bonuses. You can even refer your own spouse and your own kids. And you each get sign up bonuses. And you can co-mingle points with the spouse as well through Chase and Amex. Just have to call them to connect your two accounts.
And then the Amex Gold is the one that's four times points on restaurants and groceries, and then the both the Amex and the Chase Sapphire card have no, foreign transaction fees. So when you do travel internationally, they're very powerful cards.
Oh, thank you very much. This has been absolutely, I think, a masterclass in, credit card points.
And I think for me, what's exciting is that I think when you align your spending habits with your values, whether that's family, philanthropy, entrepreneurship points become more than just rewards. They become a way to stretch your dollars and a way to create memories and support the life that you're intentionally building. Thank you, Greg, for your valuable insights, and thank you all for being here.
And remember, if your card is going to charge you a fee, make sure you buys you dinner in Paris as well.
Absolutely.
Wow.
The information presented herein is for educational purposes only and is not intended to constitute a recommendation or endorsement of any specific credit card. The views and opinions expressed are those of the interviewees and may not necessarily reflect the views of Morton Wealth. The above information may not be representative of the experiences of other clients and does not provide a guarantee of future success or similar services. These views are not intended as a recommendation and should not be relied on as financial, tax or legal advice. It should not be assumed that Morton will make recommendations in the future that are consistent with the views expressed herein. Credit cards discussed herein are based on general features and may not suit every individual. Benefits and rewards mentioned are subject to change by the issuer. Please verify current terms before applying. No compensation was received from any credit card issuer mentioned herein. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. You should consult with your finance professional before determining which credit card best suit your situation and before implementing any transactions and/or strategies concerning your finances
