feel free to PM if needed
no, i'll swallow my pride.
so, like, doesn't all of these new cc's and cancelling cc's hurt your credit score?
not really.
my credit really hasn't changed much. my fico score has actually gone up since I started. It's good to have a very high amount of available credit and a low percentage of use of that credit. I probably have $150k in available credit card credit amongst the various cards and use $0 of it since I pay everything off every month. They do a hard pull of your credit when you get a new one which is factored into your credit but at a very small amount. The portion of the credit score that takes into account the hard pulls is only 10% of the score now (used to be higher). cancelling the cards would have really no effect on credit other than to lower your available credit so if you carry some balance you will then show up as using a higher percentage of available credit but this obv. isn't a concern of mine.
how much money (or % of savings if $ is too personal) have you saved since you started on hotels and airlines?
It's kind of hard to calculate because some of the places we've gone or stayed we wouldn't have gone or stayed at if we didn't have the miles. But, if you just take the rack rate of the flights and hotels and junk from all of the award stays/flights we've taken it would probably be more than $50k over the last 4 years or so. We've gone to HI twice, Florida 3 times, San Diego, Napa, NYC twice, flown to Vegas about 5 times, a couple flights to both Denver and Chicago, flights to Cancun, about 10 nights in the Hampton in Manhattan and 10 at the Hilton Garden Inn in Wichita, 8 hotel nights split between 3 rooms at the NCAA in OKC. Our last trip to HI would have probably been about $10k if we were paying rack rates for the flights and hotels. Again, we wouldn't be staying at the $450 a night Hyatt if we were paying OOP for it though. We would prolly stay at the $200 Sheraton just down the road.