Essential Travel Hacking Apps
Stay on top of your travel hacking efforts with these apps that help manage everything from points balances to tracking MSR progress.
Travel hacking can get a bit overwhelming when you’re just getting started. Here are all the ways I keep up and stay organized. All tools are free or have free versions.
Personal Capital
A personal finance tracker that collects all your info across multiple accounts. As you keep opening more accounts, it can be hard to tell how much you spent on each card without manually checking all accounts. This simplifies the process. It also helps track bank account bonuses.
Referral link: we each get $20 to Amazon when you add a retirement account. Bonus: have more than one retirement account? Refer yourself to new accounts with one and net $40 each time. This requires a unique email and phone number for each. Google voice works.
Credit Karma
Free access to your TransUnion and Equifax credit reports. Essential for tracking things like average age of accounts and when exactly you opened a credit card. It’s also a good idea to keep an eye on your credit scores over time but if you pace yourself, your score should only trend upwards.
LastPass
A secure password manager. I store credit card details and all login details in this app. It can also generate secure gibberish passwords for you which is recommended for financial information. 1Password is also recommended but LastPass has the crucial advantage of being completely free. Get the browser extension as well for seamless logins.
Award Wallet
Like Personal Capital but for tracking your credit card points and airline miles. Unfortunately some airlines have blocked access but it’s still good to use for the overview. Note: they will relentlessly hassle you to upgrade to the pro version.
Feedly
An RSS app I use to ensure I never miss a post on churning blogs. Highly recommend Doctor of Credit. Feedly is not perfect; I would love to hear recommendations for an iPhone RSS reader app with notification and dark mode in the comments.
Google Sheets
Keeping track of your accounts and spend requirements is essential. Here is an example of what I use to track credit card, bank account and other bonuses.
Reminders
I use the default iPhone reminders app to remind me when to apply/cancel/any other time sensitive churning activities.
Plastiq
Pay your rent or other bills with a credit card. Great for hitting minimum spend requirements but make sure the 2.5% fee is worth it. This is less useful now that CIP no longer codes at 3x but still a good app to have.
Referral link: get your first $1,000 processed fee free.
Square
A service that allows businesses to process credit cards and is an easy way to meet a minimum spend with some caveats. Make sure you have a trusted friend because they will shut you down if you charge yourself. There are per use and per transaction fees and they vary by method (swipe vs typed in credit card number). I only use this when I have a fee free processing credit, which reminds me…
Referral link: get your first $1,000 processed fee free.
Venmo
As a last resort you can Venmo a friend for a 3% fee (when using a credit card) to hit a minimum spend requirement.
With the help of these apps, you should be able to organize and manage all your credit card churning with relative ease. How do you keep track of your MSR progress? Any other apps you use to make this easier? Leave a comment below.
