Retirement Fund

When I was last in London, I had dinner at my aunt’s house. We were joking about travel and talking about routings that we all do to get back and forth to London from the United States. TH and routed ourselves through Dallas. Like us, she questioned why. I told her that it was because we needed the maximum mileage for our routing for retaining our frequent flyer status and for my retirement plan. Retirement plan? I’m not just talking about your work pension, IRA, outside investments or 401K, if you are lucky enough to have these things available to you, but my frequent flyer retirement plan.

You may raise your eyebrows at this point. What idiot would bank that their airline will be around next year, let alone in 20 years? Ditto for the frequent flyer programs that many of us collect points that are not redeemable when we need them.

I’m about 250,000 miles or points away from what American Airlines calls Lifetime Platinum. What does this mean? It means that I have either flown or earned through various channels 2,000,000 miles on American Airlines and their partners. With this vaunted title, I can claim a lifetime of mid-tier perks while the program exists. I will always be able to access the club on international flights, get double miles on any flight. I will always get to use the first class check in and my upgrades on domestic flights are still mostly going to clear, without ever having to fly another mile through Dallas!

Many get to this exalted status by accruing miles through credit cards purchases, buying and selling real estate, eating at restaurants or hotel stays. Some people attain multimillion-mile status without setting foot on a plane, which gets my goat. Most of my miles are butt in seat miles (BIS) and I’m going to be very happy to reach that goal in the next year. I may drag my friends to some more questionable restaurants that will garner me 400 miles per meal, but they will humor me. ;)

A great source of information on frequent flyer programs and picking one that works for you is Webflyer. If you have specific questions about routings, meals, products and the life of frequent flyer, visit Flyertalk, the consummate frequent flyer message board. NB: read a while, search and then post a question.