About

I grew up in a small town, with a blue collar family who rarely ever took family vacations.  Growing up I can only recall two family vacations that we took.  One was to Disney World when I was 12 and the other was to the beach for a three day car show when I was 19.  While I was a kid I always wanted to travel and see new places, and my only way at that time to do that was to compete in technology competitions to travel to events.

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My professional background and 9 to 5 job is in Systems Engineering.  This career has also afforded me to see a lot more of the US than I would have knowing what I knew about travel from growing up.  There were times in my career where I was traveling once a month, but I wasted that time on travel rewards where I could have been cashing in for free vacations.  At that time all I knew was you don't want to have a lot of credit cards, for years all I had was a Bank of America card I had since college.

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While working for a company who's preferred hotel chain was Marriott I decided to get a Marriott credit card to gain extra points toward hotels.  For years that became my primary card for all spend, not maximizing what I could be getting for my dollars spent but it was able to afford me many free hotel night stays for vacations, I was still paying out of pocket for airfare.

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After my family vacation in 2024 where we paid for hotel, and airfare all in points to Disney World.  A trip I thought I could never afford with two kids and paying daycare costs for both.  I decided to dig into credit cards and travel hacking to learn as much as I could to see what other places I could get my family to for reduced costs that I never thought possible.

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I hope that with this site I can help share with you lessons I am learning along the way, and provide you with a different view of how to learn about the credit cards reward system.  Using my systems engineering background I will try to provide you with analysis work, spreadsheets I use for tracking, and diagrams to help understand this world.