Yesterday we discussed a complex and risky strategy to earn miles while paying an American Express card. Today we’ll look at a way to drive our costs down in a similar nonstandard way.
I’ve discussed the following in bits and pieces before on the blog, and elsewhere. One of the keys to a successful personal strategy is time management. Time is a vaulable resource, and one which we should treat as precious. In fact between time, credit limit, and available cash on hand only time has a finite limit.
I’ve called time the ultimate non-renewable resource, and today I want to give an example of how we waste time without even thinking about it. I’ll use real life purchase and cash outs in my daily churn and MMRs, and will illustrate how two patterns can have two totally different bottom line results.
Option One: Straight Lines
In Today’s example I’ll be discussing two ways to think of your trips, the first of these is to think of them as straight lines. Let’s say I stop by my favorite grocery store and buy some fee free cards. Next door I pop into my favorite Drug store and do the same. I’m flush with cards, lets say $3,000 worth. And I need to cash these out, I feel like they’re burning a hole in my pocket.
In my haste to cash out I drive to Walmart. Knowing that the afternoon is busy I opt for the closest Walmart with a Money Cetner Machine. After I emerge from the I feel so much relief, my $3000 is safely back in my control.
I drew the following map, from my home to the store and from the store to Walmart:
By treating the purchase and unload as a single event you’ve incurred 20+ Miles of driving, which could be anywhere between 30 minutes and 1 hour. Knowing that we value our time here at Milenomics we can break out the “cost” of this trip:
For me, driving 20 miles is $11 in mileage costs ($.55 a mile). Add in 1 hour of my time ($25 at my T-Rate) and the “cost” for a straight line trip to WM ‘B’ would be $36.
The entire trip, from my house to the store, from the store to Walmart is costing me, in both time and travel.
Scheduled spending. I know this sounds incredibly boring. But I have a schedule. Some of you have contacted me and asked if a certain deal is still working, and I’ve mentioned that I won’t be at that store until Sunday, or Tuesday. I’ve got a schedule, and I’m sticking to it!
The reasons for my schedule are complex; I have too much going on to drop everything and spend 2-3 hours a day on my MMRs. I would love to spend more time earning miles, and cash back, but instead I have a routine I’ve developed. .
My routine looks like this: I’ve randomized things a bit so I don’t give away too much, but my weekly trips are as follows:
Home-work-home:
Home-church-Home
Work-church-home
Home-Gym-home
work-shopping-home
Home-Grocery-home
Overlay all of these trips on top of each other and you start to create a map of my weekly travel patterns:
Notice what is missing from the above schedule? Any and all Walmart trips (Daily), as well as many of the purchase locations I go to on my Milenomics Mileage Runs (MMRs). This is because you need a baseline map, one which has your normal routine trips on it to start.
Once you take this above map and overlay an added place you’d like to start to visit, let’s say Walmart for example (red points are Walmart stores):
In addition to these Walmarts I could make a similar map for any other store, CVS, the Mall, Staples. All of them could be checked against this map, and incorporated into their closest weekly trip.
The first example used in today’s post, of Home-Grocery-WalMart is now represented with Point B above. If done during a scheduled trip to point #8 above the trip from home to this Walmart adds on 0.2 miles. The shortest distance between these two points involves an already planned trip.
In our straight line example we incurred $36 in cost. This compares to an already planned trip where I’m spending just my additional time to unload (maybe 15 minutes), or $6.25.
Make This Map:The above overlay is a composite image, but you could do something similar using the newest version of google maps. It allows multiple destinations. In addition there is the site optimap whic I used to generate these classic google maps examples for today’s posts. I find it works much quicker for me, and recommend it over the new google maps.
What this means for Cashing out
This means waiting to cash out your purchases. For some of you this will impact how much you can spend and float. You’ll want to weigh the benefits of holding vs. cashing out immediately. Fortunately by giving your time a value and counting your miles driven you can see that planning your trips out can save you time and money.
A note about adding unnecessary trips: The above only works if you set your weekly routine before you add in any MMR activities. Going to the grocery store once a week now? If you start going 7x a week because you’re buying Miles with your Groceries then you’ve added 6 trips. You can’t claim all 7 trips add $0 costs since you’ve fragmented your original 1 grocery trip into 7.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
By holding your weekly trips steady while planning out trips you save time. Why not use that time you save to work on earning miles in a way you’ve never thought of before?
This doesn’t mean you should spend less time on your churning, it just means we should work smarter, not harder. Why not focus your attention to earning miles from your desk at work? Or from home while you watch the nightly news? There are plenty of options out there, and sometimes holding onto things a day or two can open them up for you.
Sticking to a routine of buy-cash out, with straight lines, means you are focused on point A and B. One thing to remember is that between any two points are an infinite number of paths. By looking at A and B you miss out on everything between them.
Can you cash out your purchases from home? Why not spend time trying this? Holding overnight or until you’ll be close to a Walmart/Target/WU means you have a chance to at least try to do so.
In addition you won’t be “disappearing” as much. Spend time with your loved ones and your family. Yes travel is great, yes making money via cashback is important–but so are plenty of other areas of life.