One, two, three…ten thousand, fifteen thousand, sixty thousand.
What am I counting? I’m counting up my airline miles. I was admiring all of my airline miles in a few different affinity accounts while logged in to my Points.com account and discovered something interesting and annoying.
(Points.com, for those of you who don’t know, is a site where you can exchange points in various affinity programs that normally wouldn’t let you exchange points. For example, I can exchange points from a gas station program into an airline’s program and vice versa. Not every program is a member of Points.com, but there’s a pretty good list of ones that are.)
I’ve got over 20,000 points in Delta’s SkyMiles that I earned when it was Northwest Airlines, and living in Canada it would be quite hard for me to use the points as I don’t fly to the States all that often. While SkyMiles is a member of Points.com, annoyingly they don’t allow swaps out of the program, so I can’t actually use the points other than to fly on Delta. *sigh*
BUT, Points.com has a new program where you can trade points rather than swap (trade usually costs money, while swapping doesn’t). This would allow me to swap out my SkyMiles into something that I would use, like Air Canada’s Aeroplan points. My basic question to you is this: do I spend the money to trade out the SkyMiles?
Here’s the more detailed question:
- Trading out 15,000 SkyMiles would net me 5,000 Aeroplan points and cost me US$140.
- Buying 7,000 SkyMiles to top up to 30,000 would cost me about US $200, THEN I could trade 30,000 SkyMiles for 15,000 Aeroplan points for US$220.
Option 1 would cost me US$140, while Option 2 would cost me almost US$500. Considering the Canadian dollar is almost at par right now with the US dollar, it’s not as bad a cost as it would have been last year. But do I do it? I’m quite tempted to do so because I will never use those SkyMiles to fly Delta, but transferring them over to Aeroplan would mean I could use them, either to fly or to exchange into a gift card or something.
What do you think? Should I go for it? If yes, which option should I choose?
As you can see, I’ve had to pull out the good old calculator this week in order to do my income taxes. Okay, I don’t actually use the calculator as I do my taxes online, but you know what I mean. It’s time to see if I owe the government any money, or if they owe me a refund. I suspect I’m getting a refund as I changed jobs last year, which means that I would have over-paid on a few of the various taxes they withdraw automatically from my paycheque, so my fingers are crossed.
