Most personal finance advice boils down to this: Save as much as you can, and spend as little as you can. That’s the simplest way to accumulate wealth, build investment income and achieve financial independence (even if it’s not so simple in practice).
Yet when it comes to travel rewards—those points and miles earned through airline, hotel and credit card programs—this conventional wisdom is turned on its head. Saving a million miles might sound impressive, but it’s generally a poor financial decision.
“I hear all the time from business travelers who ‘saved their miles for retirement,’ and are devastated to learn that the purchasing power of their miles isn’t what it would have been five, ten, fifteen years ago,” Tiffany Funk, co-founder and president of travel rewards booking search tool Point.me, said in an email. “Programs have successfully made loyalty currencies feel so valuable that people are often reluctant to use them because they are afraid they are giving up too much value.”…