My son, Mason, plays travel baseball. In our town, the kids go to Cooperstown the last year together as a team before high school. Mason and his team are scheduled to play in Cooperstown next summer, 2016.
My loose plan is for all of us to go and make this our “summer trip”. Maybe with a stop in Vermont post Cooperstown. While Mason is on the field, and either Rob or I or both are in the stands, I want Daniel and Jessie to have a nice place to spend their time. Enter the The Otesaga Resort Hotel, which I have heard from many who have come before me, that this is the nicest place to stay in Cooperstown.
It does not come cheap. Our 5 night stay is costing us about $2,500 and you know how much I hate paying for hotels.
Enter my Barclaycard Arrival Plus MasterCard, which I have now made my main card just to earn the miles to offset this hotel charge. Don’t forget, I earn unlimited 2X miles on every purchase and can use these miles for statement credits against travel purchases.
I recently needed to leave a $1,200 deposit. I now have 120 days to spend on the card, to get my balance up to 120,000 miles to offset the $1,200 charge. (I already had a respectable balance so I am just earning miles to make up the difference).
So, aside from making it my new everyday card, I have moved a lot of things to this card from other cards including purchases that I have already tapped out the annual bonus potential. For example, I moved Rob’s advertising expenses to this card from his American Express Business Gold Rewards card because we already hit the advertising cap and I moved food shopping to this card from my Amex Everyday Preferred card because I already hit the $6,000 cap on food shopping. By doing this, I am taking my own advice and being mindful of my spend caps.
I also plan to pay for a lot of Fall activities over the next few months with this card. Like I wrote about in a prior post, if you have a family, the fall is a good time to meet minimum spend requirements (or in my case spend the money because I need the miles).
Another part of the equation was that I needed to up my credit limit on this card to handle all of the additional spending. I applied for a credit line increase online and was approved the next day. :-). Who says you can’t cancel credit cards and still have good credit?
I am confident I will be able to offset the hotel charges. After all, I was successful with this same plan with our deposit for the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. I actually never earned the rest because I used all of my additional miles earned on our Hawiian Airlines inter-island flights.
We’ll see how I do here….