New Year's Resolution: Fly For Less!

Happy New Year 2011! We're now just a day and a half away from our trip so we thought that we would talk about flying today.

Almost every year, we try to make a New Year's resolution so as to have better health, greater prosperity, or just, in general, improve our lives. We've vowed to eat better, exercise more, and reduce our ecological footprint. Well, if you're like us, most of the time, and in pretty quick order, our resolutions falls by the wayside and pass from memory. However, last year was different! We finally made a New Year's resolution that we kept and plan on keeping for some time to come. We decided that we would work harder at traveling cheap!

We love to travel, but, like everyone, we hate the high cost of airfares. In the past year, there haven't been the bargains out there that many of us were able to find in the past. Why? The simplistic answer is the economy. Everything today is more expensive! As fuel prices went up so did airfares. So, with prices going higher and higher, how can one make travel more economical? The answer for us last year was the mileage programs offered by airlines through credit cards. Yes, they've been out there for a long time, but we'd never really taken advantage of them since we weren't frequent business travelers. We were  members of any number of mileage programs, but we didn't have many accrued miles on any one airline. Our philosophy has always been to look for the best fare regardless of the airline offering it. If we can get a cheap ticket on an airline that we don't regularly use, they've got our business. It always pays to shop around.

However, for the past twelve months, we've tied nearly all of my purchases to credit cards with mileage programs. For years, we had, like many people, used our debit cards for most of our shopping. The downside was that we got no benefits from this practice. So, as an experiment this past year, we chose two airline credit cards, one with a fee, one without, to use (and pay off every month) for nearly all of our purchases. Because we fly to the west coast on a regular basis, we found Southwest Airlines one that would work well for us. As they fly out of Albany, NY, it was a pretty convenient choice. Keeping international travel in mind, Delta was the other airline we decided to do business with. In just one year, we've earned three round trip tickets on Southwest and enough miles on Delta to fly to almost any international destination.

We now tie most of our spending to our credit cards. Whenever we buy groceries, gas, movie tickets, dinner at our favorite sushi restaurant, car repairs, widgets, etc., we accrue mileage points or credits. We pay for as many utilities as possible through our cards too (unless the service charge by the company would negate any real gain). We are buying no more or no less than ever before; we're simply managing the business end of life differently. Instead of spending off our debit account, we charge all of my purchases and then pay them off at the end of every month (very important to do). We've also learned to discipline ourselves better with regards to spending. We stay within our budget, but now we have a return on my spending. We're also making choices that help us maximize our reward points. For example, with Southwest, if we stay at particular hotels when traveling, we get credits that far outweigh the actual dollars spent on that room.

We started our mileage programs too late last year to buy our tickets to Cairo. However, next year, Delta will be subsidizing our travel to some new exotic part of the world.

Tomorrow: Restaurant.com