As we know all too well at this point, when it rains, it pours in this hobby. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but this week was one of those times where you wished things wouldn’t all happen at once. 

It was one of those rare occasions where pretty much everybody was affected, pending the final consensus on one major play. Regardless of your MS specialty, chances are something(s) you were hitting died in the last week. 

Things are always dying in this hobby, but it’s harder to accept the change when it’s things that seem like they’d be around forever. While some of these plays were relatively nascent, others were longtime stalwarts of MS. Hell, I lost an account this week that was old enough to buy a lottery ticket.

While the surgical precision of a particular wave might make you panic over the increased usage of AI for anti-fun measures, I still don’t know how much that factors into this. Again, our activity is not hard for anyone with a brain to figure out. 

When you repeat the same action that is unprofitable for them over and over – every 24 hours, every promo, every 90 days, eventually somebody will notice, LLM or not.

There isn’t really any sage advice to pass down in this situation – MS always feels pretty cyclical, and this is one of the first bust cycles since the last big one ~18 months ago. It felt like the sky was falling then, but in the end, we’ve all done pretty well.

For me, the path forward is pretty clear. What’s here today is not promised tomorrow, and anything you think you’re hitting hard is being 10x if not 100x by someone else. 

Earn as much as you can, and try to resist the urge to napkin math your profits into the future, even if the play feels sustainable. Unless you’ve found a unicorn that you should take to your grave, it’s not going to last forever, and it will only make the inevitable shutdown more painful. 

Today is a great day to take a break from thinking about MS and go enjoy yourself with the spoils from these fallen plays. The forecast by me calls for “abundant sunshine”, which seems a little too optimistic. But hey, let’s give it a try. 

Máistte!

One thing I’ve alluded to in a few different posts before is the effect of consumer protection legislation on certain aspects of the hobby. Things like state restrictions on gambling or federal legislation regulating interchange are written (in theory) to protect consumers.

And in general, I think we’d all agree that protecting consumers and small businesses from predatory fees and business practices is a good thing. But in many cases, these laws are wildly convoluted, creating both heaps of confusion and opportunities to exploit inefficiencies. 

Today, we’re going to focus on legislation that aims to regulate interchange and interest rates and how that affects us as MSers. As discussed in the interchange post, there’s a wide range of standard rates charged globally. 

When looking at western countries, the US and Canada stand alone with average credit card interchange fees around 1.5% (Canada) and 2% (US). In comparison, most of the EU is capped at 0.3%, Australia is capped at 0.5%, China is 0.35%, etc. etc. 

These fees aren’t good for your average merchant, and they’re a big reason why your local bar and grills increasingly have the “cash price | card price” menu. But for better or worse, they are a major part of what enables the fairly unique rewards systems in North America, together with our sky high credit card interest rates. 

I find the political discourse around credit card interest rates and how it relates to consumer protection extremely interesting because it’s one of the rare issues in Washington that produced a bipartisan proposal.

But it’s been 20 months since S.381 was proposed, and when Jamie Dimon takes the stage in Davos and says that a 10% cap on credit card interest would lead to “economic disaster”, it’s fair to say there is too much institutional resistance for the bill to get passed.

While this bill is unlikely to go anywhere in the face of that resistance, there are other times where the big banks don’t get what they want (granted, in a very different political and economic landscape). 

Those who were old enough to care at the time (I was not) will remember Dodd-Frank, the major legislative response to the 2008 financial crisis. While it’s been 16 years since it passed, the act continues to have plenty of influence on our hobby.

While a lot of the headlines like Volcker and changes to mortgage lending were important as a response to the crash, they weren’t really relevant to MS. However, one could argue that certain parts of it created the current state of MS that we’re in.

First off, Dodd-Frank established the CFPB. While it’s unfortunately toothless these days, it reunited many MSers with funds unfairly frozen by sketchy fintechs before it was gutted. 

However, the most consequential part of the legislation for us requires some scrolling past the summary paragraph on Wikipedia and, like many inclusions on large acts like this, was far from the main focus and added during consideration of the main legislation.

At face value, it’s not super interesting. But there’s things both at the middle and at the very bottom of the proverbial MS iceberg that are fully enabled by certain items in this legislation.

If Dodd-Frank hadn’t passed, we would have been spared a lot of the dead plays of the last year or so, because they never would have been feasible in the first place. 

While there isn’t a clear number to call out, Chase pays United a pretty penny for all of the MileagePlus miles they issue, plus whatever else they’re paying as part of the partnership. So why don’t they issue the United debit, instead of some random bank in Minnesota? 

Well, would you use a United co-branded debit card that didn’t actually earn any UA miles? Maybe the most DYKWIA Global Services flyers would, but nobody reading this blog would.

Next time you joke with a fellow MSer that “we need to make a churning friendly fintech!!!”, remember that the hard part isn’t starting the fintech – it’s finding the unlikely bedfellow within the carveout that is also ok with wild shenanigans. Credit where credit is due to those who have succeeded.

ꯅꯨꯡꯉꯥꯏꯕ ꯐꯣꯛꯗꯣꯛꯄ!

Pictured: the competitor that beat you to the punch of finding a fitting “unlikely bedfellow” to offer their product

One of the first things I ever wrote about churning was this guest post for MEAB. Embarrassing usage of AI slop aside, I think it’s still helpful advice to keep in mind. When something keeps popping up but isn’t obvious to you, you’re probably missing something.

Today, let’s dig a little deeper into that concept and get more tactical.

Over the course of your MS adventure, countless opportunities will show up. Some of them are instantly exciting, some of them are instantly not, but most of them are in a vague middle that requires some probing.

Within that vague middle are a lot of things where you can see the utility, but it’s not immediately clear where it fits for you.  Let’s take adding multiple players as an example. 

Even the most beginner of churners can easily understand the basic benefit of adding a player – it’s a new credit report, a new phone number, etc etc. But for awhile, the idea of managing other people sounds awful. You have to deal with their credit profile, spending for them, and the inevitable case of them opening a store card. 

But as you advance, you find easy ways to get around many of those pitfalls, and you realize that the true utility in multiple players is orders of magnitude more than getting an extra 300k MR every 90 days. 

In this case, it’s ok that it takes you time to figure out why it matters, and it’s probably good that it does, because you’re better equipped to make the lives of your other players as easy as possible. 

As we all know though, the majority of other opportunities that pop up afford you very limited time to have the tools and structure in place to fully take advantage. 

In this current MS ecosystem, things change really quickly. You don’t have the luxury of growing in the hobby for years to understand how valuable something like multiple players is. 

And the type of things I’m thinking of as inspiration for this post are nowhere near as obviously valuable as multiple players, either. It’s often something as subtle as a different variant on something you’re already doing that requires some extra effort to obtain. 

The thesis of my old guest post was to probe and understand why people are talking about something without an obvious benefit. That remains true, and I’d go so far as to say that sometimes the order of operations is to obtain something when it’s available to you, even if you need to take time afterwards to understand the point. 

Even if it’s not part of your portfolio when you find out, that may not stay the same in the future. Plus, things change – applications close, payment methods stop being accepted, and it’s much better to be grandfathered in than locked out (or in a never ending queue of requestors). 

In the end, this hobby just does not reward procrastination, both in the high stakes example above and down to /r/churning Purge shitpost tier stuff like Paze credits. If you’re a natural procrastinator like I am, do whatever you need to do to kick the habit when it comes to churning. 

I might still wait til the last minute to pack for a trip, but not when something new comes across my desk, regardless of where I see it fitting into my current setup. 

Does this mean I probably have a decent chunk of money hidden in my digital couch cushions? Yes, but it’s far outweighed by what I had access to because of planning ahead.

Kuri ubuzima bwiza!

Pictured: how MSers should look when a new product hits the scene

When I was a kid, my mom always had the Coldplay album X&Y on in the car. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve listened to it, but I still know every word to every song and one lyric is the perfect title for today’s theme.

As a community, we spend quite a bit of time handwringing over risk (for good reason). The neverending decision between going as hard as possible and burning something forever vs. making a more calculated choice to try and make more by staying alive is something we wrestle with every time something new appears. 

While the type of risk that earns the lion’s share of discussion is the risk that you can control as a grown adult that can make their own decisions for how much they want to push, there’s a handful of risk factors that are outside of your control.

Matt at MEAB wrote about one of the most important ones a couple of weeks ago, and if you haven’t read it, it’s an important one to keep in mind. For the most part, things go swimmingly between parties in the churning world, but there’s always a chance of things going sideways that you can’t control. Let’s all ski on the bunny slopes, ok?

To channel Matt, I’m going to talk about a slightly different type of risk, apropos of nothing. As I’ve blabbed about many times, there’s levels to this hobby. In knowledge, in risk tolerance, and most importantly for this topic, raw throughput. 

It’s wise to keep this in mind when an opportunity comes across your desk and you’re considering how to handle it. Let’s face it – unless you stumble upon a credit union in Tuvalu, there are virtually no plays where you’re the only churner involved. There’s always a bigger fish in the sea, whether that means higher risk tolerance, more capital, more players, or some combination thereof. 

And that’s ok – if nobody else (especially experienced whales) wants to hit something, there isn’t actually anything there. But it does mean that there is now some collective risk when there is a group of people doing something that costs a company money, especially since there will be commonality in methods to achieve that action. 

How much risk there is in following the heaviest hitters varies, and we don’t really have visibility into how much a target will care about scale. To illustrate, let’s look at two major shutdown waves from the last two years:

The first one was inevitable, and I think most people who were shutdown have no regrets. However, many many churners who were doing the exact same thing at a slightly smaller scale (or even a similar one in some cases) were spared and continue to be a thorn in the side of this company. This unprofitable activity was extremely easy to root out, but they drew some arbitrary line in the sand.

The second one was more scorched earth, in that if you had ever been within 10 miles of someone that had run $500 on this play, you were shutdown. Thankfully, this wasn’t a banking relationship that many people are worried about (unless your knitter grandmother AU was pissed to lose her favorite card).

The first example had room for churners of every level of volume to eat, for better or worse. The second is more of what I’m talking about today – where volume doesn’t matter whatsoever. If you have the scarlet letter on, you’re done. 

So, why am I talking about this today? Well, it’s safe to say when something is being touted as the play of the year from the rooftops that the entire churning food chain is going to be pulling up at the table.

Some plays, like ones involving Fortune 100 banks, take awhile to be unraveled due to all of the cross functional red tape. If I were picking a situation to be more measured in, it would probably be one of these.

Others can be effectively neutered by pushing a tiny update. In those cases, I’m not sure how confident I’d be in them sticking around in a profitable form. Fortune favors the bold, and that is certainly the case in this hobby.

In the end, sometimes calculated restraint can be a valid strategy. In certain places, you can stay alive for a very long time while remaining an extremely unprofitable customer. But in most other cases, whale watching from a position of reasonable volume is pointless. This isn’t going to last, and do you really care about keeping this platform anyway? 

Manuia!

Fun fact: Tuvaluan is the first language I tried to cheers in that is not on Google Translate. Thankfully omniglot.com has us covered!

I started writing this post a couple of days ago on a flight back to the US from Edinburgh by way of Geneva. Up until right before arriving in Edinburgh, we were supposed to be flying home from Malta via Paris instead. 

A week before, I was at Pijana Wisnia in Krakow having a cherry liquor with my P2. We met a veneered lad named Robbie while chatting on the outdoor patio. In between big clouds of cotton candy vape juice, he told us how his lads group of 20+ had chosen Krakow over their usual annual destinations of Lanzarote and Tenerife. 

When I asked him why, he just shrugged and said he wasn’t sure, because it was harder to get drunk in Krakow (although I beg to differ, because it was 9pm and he said the rest of his crew was already asleep at the hotel). And just like that, his phone buzzed, and he said his Mcnuggets were ready for pickup and he had to go. 

Robbie was actually a really nice guy, vape flavor choices aside. But after a few more days of being outnumbered by stag and hen dos in Krakow and seeing the real feel in Malta reach 105+ in the days before arrival, P2 and I started thinking about going somewhere cooler and with less lad holidays and saving Malta for the off season.

These days, the litany of resources available to churners makes it so easy to pivot quickly. I found new flights home from Geneva with way less YQ, which paid for cash flights to and from Edinburgh. I found a very nice Hilton in Edinburgh that had standard award availability. And most importantly, everything we wanted to change was fully cancelable. The entire process took about 45 minutes over a coffee. 

In a way, it brings back the best part of being a young backpacker – not worrying about planning every second, save for maybe some placeholder flights for flexibility. And believe me when I say that the bed at the Caledonian was much more comfortable than the average hostel bed. 

A lot of you are already evangelists for this style of travel – I know plenty of people who book most of their trips on a week or two’s notice. For anyone reading who finds the idea stressful, I really recommend giving it a try. Many of us were raised by (or are) airport dads, so I get it, but it’s just fun to be able to switch things up mid-trip based on what happens.

But you already knew all of this about award travel flexibility – it’s not exactly a secret. Where things get more interesting is on the cashback side of things. MS provides you an extreme amount of financial flexibility. And I don’t just mean “extra income = more flexibility”, which is obviously true, but isn’t the point.

Let’s take a hypothetical scenario. You’re doing well at MS (and possibly your W2) and you’ve saved more cash than is needed for you to feel comfortable as an emergency fund (or you already follow Cashback Cowgirl’s idea of the BHEF)

Let’s say you also recently got a mortgage at the prevailing market rate of ~7%. What’s the best way to deploy this excess cash?

The conventional personal finance logic would likely be one of these options:

• Keep it in a HYSA for flexibility and earn somewhere around 3.5-4%
• Invest it in an index fund and likely earn more than the HYSA, depending on how you feel about the AI bubble popping
• Put it towards the principal on your mortgage and lock in the guaranteed 7%

These are all solid options, but they all have downsides. The HYSA is a relatively low return. Investing carries risk (especially if you need liquidity during a market downturn). Putting money towards your mortgage requires a HELOC or cash out refinance if you ever need access to it, which aren’t exactly the quickest processes.

As a MSer, the calculation could be different. Even the most boring broad-market funds like VTI and SPY have been extremely lucrative the last 10 years. But as a MSer, the unit of measure you’re using isn’t APY – it’s more like DPY (or at least WPY). That kind of turnover adds up quickly, and you’re also free to deploy cash whenever things come up. 

Anyway, insert “I am not a financial advisor, this is not financial advice” copy/paste here. I’m not recommending that anyone liquidate their brokerage for MS. These are advanced strategies, and the flexibility I talk about goes completely up in smoke if you end up with frozen funds. I’ve had it happen before, and it’s not a good feeling. 

This is just a suggestion to think outside of the box and use the flexibility afforded to you by this hobby. Whether it’s avoiding an army of Cisk-pounding lads in Malta or having cash on hand to move quickly when an opportunity presents itself, the ability to change your mind without taking a financial hit is one of the best parts of the hobby. It’s worth remembering how valuable that flexibility is. 

Saħħa!

I’ve tried to avoid really ranting about too much on the blog outside of grifters (and Bilt). I think a lot of us are pretty exhausted with grifting, since it seems like everything is a grift these days. But there’s a particularly egregious example in our hobby that is worth discussing today. 

There’s no shortage of churning groups out there born out of a grift. While most (if not all?) of the OG groups were tied to a blog or a podcast, the insanity that was the last few years of couch MS inspired a whole new cohort of groups designed around spoon feeding. Much less “join the community’ much more “join and earn $x amount of money via this step-by-step guide”. 

As I’ve said before, I don’t think the creators of these groups shoulder all the blame. More like 95%. When the organizers of some of these plays are presenting them step by step at what amount to public meetups, it’s easy to think some things are ok to discuss quasi-publicly. 

When it’s possible to cut out the middleman and make money by sharing these things for a much lower price because you aren’t booking an entire convention hotel in the Midwest, why wouldn’t you?

I like to think we know the answer to that now. Most of these groups are now virtually dead, sans people trying to figure out how to meet a SUB in 2026. 

To me, that’s a direct result of spoonfeeding instead of actually teaching someone how to probe and be discreet with a play. Maybe giving anyone with $20 that found your reddit ad promising secret MS methods a play that promoted reckless (and obvious) abandon wasn’t such a good idea after all.

You may wonder why I’m talking about this now since I just said most of those groups are effectively gone. Well, we have a new contestant for “churner that ruined their reputation the most in 2026”. I thought it would be hard to top mailer expiry drama and ill-advised mentions on podcasts, but apparently I was wrong.

I’m going to be intentionally vague because this website doesn’t deserve more attention. But let’s just say that a community member uncovered a public website sharing things that should not be shared publicly. Unlike some of the other community discussions going on right now about sharing, this is unanimous agreement. 

What compounds the issue is the way in which the website was found – the community member stumbled upon it because this website is the only one short-sighted enough to mention certain MS topics on the publicly indexable Internet. 

Everybody makes mistakes, I know I certainly have. I like to think as a community we give folks that do make a mistake quite a lot of leeway to correct them. But like a handful of others this year, this person has decided the grift is more important than their reputation. And as we’ve seen over and over again, your reputation is everything in this hobby. 

Maybe this rubs me the wrong way more even more than others because I write a blog that actively loses money instead of trying to earn affiliate payouts or ad revenue. But I have to imagine that most of us are sick and tired of people refusing to listen to the community because they’re too busy convincing people to sign up for AI-regurgitated slop directly from a private community (one that I’ve heard doesn’t take kindly to leaks, either).  

In case you’re reading this, take it from me that blog traffic ≠ blog success. If your traffic explodes, it’s because you’re creating controversy, not because you’ve done some groundbreaking work that totally isn’t written by AI. 

When I write a long, personal post about how I think about MS, I get light traffic. If I rant about Richard Kerr, I get tons of traffic and FM backlinks. I’d really recommend that you take the advice of the community on this one and think about long term health of the ecosystem over $10 signups.

乾杯！

Pictured: the apparent worldview of some people in the hobby these days