Winning with Credit Card Points and Miles (A Road Warrior Perspective). 2024 Edition

This is not a typical blog I would write on this forum. Depending on the reception of this, there could potentially be more to come going forward. One of the biggest things of being a road warrior over the last four years is brought me is insight. It is not insight into the job, it is insight into how deep the rabbit hole can go in the realm of credit card points and miles. At my previous job as a traveling Consulting Architect, I did travel some, but I never spent too much time looking into how I maximize what I get back from all of that spend. To be fair, for my first year at this current job; I do not do too much of that as I put everything on one card and did not apply for an get new cards at the velocity as I do today. For my job, I am a staff Sr. Solutions Architect that travels for onsite customer visits/events and community events/trade shows. On a normal year I can travel fifteen/twenty five times. When i travel for work, all expenses are charged to my card and I get things submitted for reimbursement.

 

I wanted to share some of the insight of what I have found, debunk a lot of the bad information and notions that folks have in the credit card space. The most common thing that folks ask when I tell them I get five-eight new cards a year and I cancel/downgrade cards that no longer work for me that carry an annual fee is that “does that not hurt your credit score?”. Not much. As of this writing my score across all three credit bureaus is ~800. Most lenders consider anything over 720 as very good/exceptional. I have yet to ever be denied a new loan or for a refinance of a loan for as long as I have done this with cards. Since I am already an American Express customer, all new cards are soft credit inquiries after the hard credit inquiry for my first card many years ago. Yes, applying for and getting five-eight cards a year elsewhere dings my credit score five/ten points at a time, but the score generally recover in a short period of time. The second most common thing asked is "how do you get business cards and use them for personal spending?" For issuers, the term business can be used very loosely. If folks periodically sell things on eBay, it can count as a business. There is no formal need to establish things such as LLCs, articles of incorporation, etc... When applying for business credit cards, simply apply as a sole proprietorship and use an SSN/EIN for the tax IDs. "Did you just not say that there is no need to establish business documents? Why would I get an EIN?" An EIN can be obtained from the IRS for the sole proprietorship for free and the process is a few minutes on a site. This can be potentially useful in certain circumstances as some banks want this as opposed to just using an SSN. Be aware that some banks may require establishing a banking relationshitp in order to get business cards (typically easily enough to opening a checking account, putting in funds and then apploying for the card).

 

The big question here is why do I get five-eight cards a year? In my world, getting new card and collecting the signup bonus is the quickest way to ingest large sums of points into the docket. An example calculation of this is: ff we were to take a card like the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, the signup bonus that typically is always there is 60,000 points for $4,000 in spend in three months. One of the big multipliers on that card is 3x multiplier on dining. To organically get 60,000 points with the 3x multiplier on dining, one would need to spend $20,000 in dining. Now we see that there can be a significant shortcut to get to points. As that $4,000 in spend can be whatever (aka flights, hotels, dining, gift cards, etc..). If we examine the breakdown from the three credit bureaus, new inquiries only count for 10% of the credit score.

 

Once I found this formula, it became a no brainer for me and my pursuit of points and miles. I do not recommend folks partake without defining the goal outcome from credit cards. Also, do not get cards with annual fees unless you can stomach paying the annual fee. In my setup I always have new cards rolling in, but I also have a core setup that provides me the various statuses that I use when I am traveling for both personal and business. 

I have even taken cards farm enough to go to a credit card meetup that was held by a few credit card content creators on YouTube, This meetup was held in the French Quarter in New Orleans back in September.

Here is my core setup or what folks potentially call a “What’s in My Wallet” at this time review.

1. American Express Personal Platinum Card
2. American Express Hilton Aspire Card x3 (three cards)
3. American Express Personal Gold Card
4. American Express Business Gold Card
5. American Express Business Platinum Card
6. Wells Fargo Business Signify Card
7. Chase Sapphire Preferred
8. Chase Freedom Unlimited Card 

Folks in the know, will tell you that is a low of annual fees and it is. It is $3,835 in annual fees to be exact.

 

1. American Express Personal Platinum Card - $695 annual fee
2. American Express Hilton Aspire Card x3 - $550 annual fee (per card)
3. American Express Personal Gold Card - $325 annual fee
4. American Express Business Gold Card - $375 annual fee
5. American Express Business Platinum Card - $695 annual fee
6. Wells Fargo Business Signify Card - $0 annual fee
7. Chase Sapphire Preferred - $95 annual fee
8. Chase Freedom Unlimited Card - $0 annual fee

 

After talking about what each card provides, we will dive into how to get the various effective annual fees from this.

Lets breakdown why the cards are in my wallet. 

• The American Express Personal Platinum card is in my wallet for lounge access. My home airport is in Denver, so I go to the lounge on a frequent basis. I carry the card in case for whatever reason I need to show the card. 
• The American Express Hilton Aspire Card is in my wallet for the Hilton Diamond status and in a pinch can be used as a catch all as it offer 3x multiplier per dollar in the form of Hilton Honors points. I have three of these as I collect the three annual free night certificates each year and, I have used no lifetime language links (American Express signup bonuses are once in a lifetime) to get the second and third cards.
• The American Express Personal Gold Card is in my wallet for the 4x multiplier on dining and grocery store purchases.
• The American Express Business Gold Card is in my wallet as I originally got the card to pay taxes (there potentailly will be another blog on using credit cards to pay taxes) to collect the bonus but since then have been using it monthly at office supply stores for the $20 credit back to offset the annual fee. This card will be cancelled after twelve months/one year mark as it does not align with the long-term goal. In all liklihood, by the time it comes to tax time in 2025, there will be a different no lifetime language link that I will use to get the card again to pay taxes and once again collect another signup bonus.
• The American Express Business Platinum card is in my wallet for a lot of the same benefits of the Personal Platinum card. It does offer the same lounge access, and I originally got the card to pay taxes. This card will be cancelled after twelve months/one year mark as it does not align with the long-term goal. In all liklihood, by the time it comes to tax time in 2025, there will be a different no lifetime language link that I will use to get the card again to pay taxes and once again collect another signup bonus.
• The Wells Fargo Business Signify Card is in my wallet as I just recently hit the threshold for the minimum spend and until the actual signup bonus hits my card it will stay there in case a return or credit happens pushing me below the threshold. This card will go into my folio wallet long term and once a year I will buy a $5.00 amazon giftcard on it to keep the credit alive.
• The Chase Sapphire Preferred Card is in my wallet if an establishment does not take American Express. It does have some perks such as 3x multiplier on dining, 3x multiplier on online grocery stores. On an annual basis, I will book a hotel through Chase Travel annually to use the $50 credit making the effective annual fee $45. It also offers Primary Collision Damage Waiver coverage on rental cars book throuhg traditional rental car companies such as Hertz, National, etc... and not Turo as it is considered peer to peer car rentals. The plan for this is to hold the card for two more years, downgrade the card to something no annual fee and reapply for the card again or for the Sapphire Reserve card to collect a new signup bonus as bonuses for Sapphire cards are availbale once every four years. 
• The Chase Freedom Unlimited Card is in my wallet as it serves as a second form of ID as that is one of the very few cards, I have signed the signature line on the back. One habit I also have along with credit card points and miles is I collect bank account bonuses as well and some banks require a second form of ID and this card works for that purpose (potentially another blog on bank account bonuses as well).

With these current cards and continuing to apply for new cards to collecting the signup bonuses. Over the course of this year, I have accumulated 425,000 American Express Membership rewards points, 350,000 Hilton Honors points and $1,800.00 in cash back from bonueses this year. I not only have spent through the one of my Hilton Aspire cards, Wells Fargo Business Signify card, but prior to that it was the Huntington Business Voice card and U.S. Bank Triple Cash card. If we take the typical valuation of the American Express Membership Reward points at its lowest value of $1.0 cent per point, converting points to dollars they are valued at $4,750. With the valuation of Hilton Honors points at $0.6 cents per point it is worth $2,100.00. This covers the annual fees and some for the cards acquired this year. This does not account for things such as free food and beverage credits at Hilton properties, resorts credits at Hilton resort properties, annual airline incidental credits, American Express annual Fine Hotel and Resorts credit, annual clear membership, free night reward certificates, Amex cash back on offeres from merchants, etc… that come with cards.

Overall, for me credit cards are easily a big win in 2024. I highly recomend everyone look at their setup and see what can potentially make sense of them, even if they do not travel a substantial amount there is potential justification for some of these cards. The setup does not need to be as extensive as mine. Onwards and upwards in 2025. Let me know thoughts in the comments below.

Johnny @mrjohnnyma

Windows Pagefile Done Right

Over the years there has been a lot of information on configuring the pagefile, paging has gone through the evolution on what size and configuration it should be. With virtual machine RAM allocation going higher and higher and a lot of guidance from the likes of Citrix and VMware to potentially build VMs with 64GB+ RAM. Paging is a very interesting topic as setting the pagefile size too high, wastes disk space; removing the page file entirely is bad as well as Windows needs to have a pagefile even though we do not want the system to page. Not having a pagefile equates Windows complaining about not having enough virtual memory if the actual memory is fully allocated. While no one wants to page and systems should be built to minimize paging aka allocating enough memory to let folks operate their applications without paging but systems should be configured to allow some sort of paging as a "use in case" measure. Lastly the out of box configuration of a system managed pagefile is also a bad idea.

Setting the pagefile to system managed in an enterprise type of environment is a bad practice. The reason why? If there are any monitoring tools a lot of monitoring tools track pagefile utilization and it is typically tracked as a percentage. If the pagefile is set to system managed and the minimum/maximum are not set, it can result in monitoring tools reporting excessive pagefile utilization.

Setting the pagefile with the old school approach of setting the pagefile 1.5x the size of the memory results in this configuration. We will hear a lot of complaints about wanting to capture some sort of dump for Microsoft to "analyze". When was the last time Microsoft successfully analyzed a dump with meaningful results? For me it has never happened.

Here is what the drives would look like if we for instance allocated 64GB of RAM to a VM and are using the old school approach of 1.5x RAM for the pagefile:

Here is the error in the eventlog when the pagefile is completely eliminated as virtual memory is low:

What is the happy medium? Setting the pagefile to either 4096MB/4GB for both the minimum and maximum on single user operating systems and 8192MB/8GB for both the minimum maximum on multi-user operating systems.

Why is this the happy medium? I checks all of the boxes as it allows for Windows to have a pagefile if needed, it allows for a minidump to be configured/captured/analyzed in Windows if needed and it is not too large that we feel like we are wasting space.

What about memory dumps? Well if there is a need for some sort of memory dump to be captured and analyzed, Windows can be configured to generate a minidump. There are plenty or articles/blog posts out on the internet on how to configure Windows to produce a minidump.

If you have any thoughts, we would like to hear from you in the comments.

Johnny @mrjohnnyma

Don't Treat Your Virtual Desktop Security Like Your Physical Desktop Security

 

This blog post complements a previous blog post I wrote a bit ago talking about not using your physical image in your virtual environment. To check out that one please refer here. 

Are you using anti-virus, anti-malware, data loss prevention (DLP) software or the like on your virtual desktops? Are you treating them the same as you would on a physical desktop? If the answer was yes to both this is the blog for you. If you are not using anti-virus on your virtual desktop that is a whole other conversation and potential can of worms that needs to be addressed. When running any of the various security tools out there we need to consider the need to configure the proper exclusions to ensure everything runs properly and the users are not getting performance degradation because these exclusions are missing. I see this all of the time that folks are not properly implementing the proper security tool exclusions into their virtual desktop images or they configure the exclusions in the various consoles and they can be shown when asked but machines are not landing in the proper container to actually get the exclusions. I recently was working with a customer that was suffering severely slow/long application launch times in applications such as Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, etc... Upon examining they were capturing things like the Outlook OST, Teams Cache and OneDrive cache into virtual disks stored on a network share as VHD/VHDX files. When users would log onto a virtual desktop and these virtual disks mounted they were being actively scanned by anti-virus and when the Outlook, Teams and OneDrive clients were trying to read the data on the virtual disks performance was hampered because of the scan.

The above not only just applies to non-persistent desktops but to fully persistent desktops as well. I know I will get the response of "aren't persistent desktops the same as physical desktops?" The answer is yes and no. While anything that gets written to the disk is fully stateful and there may or may not be any profile management happening on these desktops. There are still the core virtual desktop components installed to deliver folks the remote display capability with the requisite virtual channels to allow for things like audio/video redirection and offloading. Therefore we still need the proper security tool exclusions to ensure everything is as optimized from the security perspective as possible.  In addition to this with modern-day laptops/desktops, there are potentially a lot more resources in terms of CPU and RAM compared to what is allocated on the virtual desktop side. So, an un-optimized anti-virus/anti-malware utility's impact on the physical side may not be as noticeable.

Long story short, spending a little bit of extra effort to make sure security tools are configured properly will save the headaches of dealing with complaints about bad experience. Just as I said in the previous blog of the common adage "you can't build a house on a bad foundation." This holds very true on this conversation as well.

If you have any thoughts, we would like to hear from you below in the comments.

Johnny @mrjohnnyma