If you followed #8 on my Lets Get Started page, hopefully, you have opened frequent flyer accounts for your children. However, many airlines have account mileage expiration dates due to lack of activity in an account.
My kids received the following email from the American Airlines AAdvantage Program.
You’ve earned valuable AAdvantage miles, which expire on June 30, 2015. To keep your 4,402 miles from expiring, all you need is one qualifying activity every 18 months.
Obviously flying on a paid fare and earning miles count as a “qualifying activity”. But we have no paid fare trips coming up on AA in the next 6 months. Other “qualifying activities” include buying miles, charging on an AA credit card, or redeeming miles for travel. None of these really work as buying is expensive, they are too young to have an AA credit card to charge and they really don’t have enough points to redeem for travel.
The option I used is Magazines For Miles, a program through American AAdvantage where you can use your miles for annual magazine subscriptions. In each of my 3 kids accounts, I redeemed about 400-600 miles per magazine subscription. I ordered mostly travel magazines. I could use them anyway. :-). Now their 18 month clocks starts again and the balance of their miles remains.