Steven’s Tips: My credit card moves this month

As I said, I’m in Paris this month after a week in Munich. Paris is a notoriously difficult place to land an affordable medium-term stay unless you’re working. Thankfully, my partner is doing some business here, so that’s enough to justify the six weeks we’ll be around.

Our rent for the time we’re here is costing around $2000, quite a bit more than we were hoping to spend. I wanted to make that work as hard as possible for us, so before we left Scotland, I opened up the Chase Sapphire Preferred card, a long standing legend in the travel world.

The Sapphire Preferred’s current intro offer is a generous 60,000 points after spending $4000 in three months. Tomorrow, I’ll pay for our short-term rental with the card, and I’ve already paid for our December Airbnb in Prague, leaving me with just $300 of general spending over the next two months to break the $4000 threshold and grab those points.

Combined, they can be worth well over $1000 in flights. I’m getting a 25% travel return on spending that I was going to do anyway.

Here are some ways that I might use that 60,000 point bonus:

• Our flights from Paris to Qatar for the World Cup (24K points)

• Our flights from Qatar to Prague for Christmas (29K points)

• Our flights from Scotland to Egypt in February (10K points)

• Our roundtrip to the States in May (from 30K points)

Suddenly, Paris is feeling a lot more affordable for me. If you happen to catch me sippin’ coffee outside a Parisian cafe, go ahead and put that pain au chocolat on my tab.