I'm Alex Payne.
And I'm Pam Iorg.
We travel the world for almost free using credit card points.
And we show other families how they can plan their dream vacation on any budget.
So I was a stay at home mom for many years.
I think that as I brought up my children, we said, "this as your budget and whatever
you don't spend, it's yours to keep."
And that made them be a lot more frugal and look for bargains.
I had just learned that like, oh, you can't spend more than you make.
My parents taught me a really healthy relationship with credit cards.
I've actually never had debt besides a mortgage and my
husband, we got married young.
I was 21 and he was 24 and we had $3,000 in our bank account.
I became a history teacher or you were able to live off of his
paycheck and then just save mine.
And then I also had our first son and at that point I decided
to be a stay-at-home mom.
Soon after, we had our first three about two years apart.
And having that many children, your finances change.
I always grew up loving to travel and I felt like when I had my kids,
that it just seemed unrealistic.
Should I be spending that much money when we have their future to think about?
And the type of traveling I wanted to do
wasn't just like going on a road trip.
I wanted to go to Hawaii and Europe.
And then about four years ago, I learned I could travel with
credit card points and miles.
I realized, okay, I can save money and have money for my children's future.
Nine months after I first signed up for our first card,
we were able to go to Hawaii.
That would have been about $3,000 that we saved.
And it made me realize, okay, we can travel.
When Alex started telling me about this, we kind of both at the
same time, started really delving into it, reading all we could.
Alex decided that she was going to start a travel hacking blog.
So she said, Hey mom, do you want to do this with me?
And I was like, oh yeah, People usually think that to get a lot of
airline miles or hotel points, you have to fly that airline a ton.
But for everyday people like us, we're not going to earn a lot of points that way.
So what we do is we open up new credit cards to get the welcome bonus.
I was just opening up a credit card right
and left.
I amassed between five and six million points.
I've been to Greece and Thailand and Vietnam.
I'm able to fly business class for just paying my taxes and fees.
And you're going, this is real.
We are normal everyday people.
We're actually doing this.
Some of these offers will say something like spend $3,000
in three months and you'll get
60,000 points or something like that.
Having kids costs a lot of money and so if I'm just spending a thousand dollars
a month, that will make it pretty easy for me to hit the minimum spend.
So I'm literally putting every expense that I can on a new
credit card when I sign up.
And the key is to just use your credit card for normal expenses.
It's just important for people to not sign up for a credit card
that's outside of their budget.
So with all these credit cards, it can be really easy to overspend, but I just
look at my credit cards like a debit card.
We use some apps that make it really, really easy.
I can't emphasize enough how they really do all the organization for you.
We always just do one credit card at a time to keep things simple and easy.
A key thing is taking your savings out first before you start using your cards.
A lot of people really have concerns about how this can affect your credit score.
Having a lot of credit cards actually helps your score.
I was in the seven hundreds before we started this, and now I'm above
800 and we're able to save the money that we would have spent on
travel and hit our financial goals.
We've been able to keep the retirement money.
And so it has really enabled us to make our retirement income go further.
Just this last May, my husband and I went with our four kids and my parents to Maui.
And we went for six nights and the total cost for our flights in our hotel was $55.
And if we would have paid for it, it would have cost us about $10,000.
If you have credit card debt, then you want to get all of that debt paid off.
Travel hacking isn't going to be free if you're paying interest on your cards.
As long as credit cards are willing to give me points and
miles, I will be doing this.
My husband and I just keep planning to invest and hopefully
become financially independent
so we can just enjoy traveling more and working less is the goal.
The one piece of advice that I would give to other parents
is that life is expensive.
You might as well be earning points and miles and getting rewards for some of
those things that you have to pay for.