so for anyone out there who uses American Express cards like the MX platinum or the MX gold it's pretty easy to earn points right you just get a few signup bonuses and you put some spending on these cards and then before you know it you've saved up a bunch of points but even though earning MX points is the easy part redeeming them is actually what's hard here and the truth is that redeeming credit card points is sort of intentionally designed to be confusing because companies like American Express give you a lot of options however some of these options actually devalue points While others boost the value so in this video I want to give you guys a full guide on how to redeem AMX points the right way with step-by-step examples of not only the best options like redeeming for travel with Transfer Partners but also the worst options you want to avoid like redeeming for cash back in the form of a statement credit which is where we're going to start this video now if we jump over to my American Express account at the top we want to click on where it says rewards and benefits and then once we're on that page there we can click on where it says earn and redeem where we're going to basically see all these different choices here that AMX gives us for how we can redeem our points and the first option there is to use use points for a statement credit so let's go over there okay now on this page they actually tell us the value of our points if we want to redeem for a credit so in the upper right corner we can see that it says 10,000 points equal $60 you can enter in any amount below that to see the conversion for yourself but if we just do some basic math here we can calculate what we call the cender point value which is a pretty important concept to remember and CER point is just a number that we can use to basically compare this option right here to all the other options throughout the rest of this video on sort of an Apples to Apples basis so in their example of redeeming 10,000 AMX points to get $60 as a credit we would just take $60 and then divide that by 10,000 to get 0.006 and then we can multiply that by 100 to get 0.6 cents per point and that's going to be the fixed rate when redeeming any amount of AMX points for a statement credit which honestly is really bad considering that there's some other really easy ways to get at least one cent per point or even two to three cents per point or more so if you're watching this and you want to redeem your AMX points for basically cash back as a credit then I highly recommend not doing that at at all because that is going to be one of the ways that I always see people devaluing their points now at the top of the screen under the earn and redeem tab again here we have the second option which is going to be to cover your card charges and with this here American Express just gives you the option to sort of erase specific charges on your statement but really that's not going to be any different here than the statement credit option that we just talked about so if we look at a recent statement charge for $12.47 on my AMX gold card for a recent trip to Giant which is a grocery store where I live I could have rased that for 17,785 but if we do that calculation for Cent per point value that works out to be the exact same 0.6 cents per point which again we definitely want to avoid another way that I like to explain this to beginners is that I look at that 17,785 points at a value of 1 cent per point would be about $170 so I like to ask myself is it a good idea to redeem $170 worth of points to erase a $12 charge and for most people they would say of course not because that's almost like saying would you pay $170 for $12 worth of groceries so you would pretty much never want to do that now hopefully that makes sense and if it doesn't then I promise it's going to start to get easier to understand as we start to see more and more examples of the best ways to redeem points later on in this video but before we get to that here next let's quickly talk about the gohost shopping tab which is probably going to be appealing to a lot of people because they might think they could just buy stuff that feels like it's sort of free by using points but in reality these are still just really terrible ways to redeem so when you click on the go shopping tab you're going to see this homepage here where you can just search for something specific or you can go ahead and just search by category if you want to shop around for different stuff so let's search in the sports and games category for fun here and let's say that I want to buy a new Callaway Paradigm driver because of course buying a $650 driver is obviously going to help with my golf game but we can see that instead of paying 650 bucks I could redeem 130,000 points instead which to some people might sound better however that is not better at all because 130,000 points could be worth at least $1,300 at a value of 1 cent per point with other Redemption options but instead of getting at least $1,300 we would just be settling here for only $650 in value for the same amount of points for the actual send per Point number we would just take $650 and divide that by 130,000 points to get 0.005 and then we multiply by 100 to get a value of 0.5 cents per point which is actually even lower than 0.6 cents per point from the previous options of redeeming for a statement credit so if you take away any from this video at all I want you to remember this you need to factor in opportunity costs when redeeming your credit card points or in other words with this example don't settle for $650 in value when you could have at least $1,300 in value or potentially a lot more now in addition to shopping through your American Express Account you also have the option to actually pay with points a checkout through PayPal and on a few other popular websites like Amazon and many of you have probably seen this before when you go to buy something online and then you're given the option to use points to pay a checkout so for example if I wanted to buy the subscri t-shirt from Amazon to remind you guys to go ahead and subscribe down below that's going to cost me $17.99 or if I had an AMX card that I linked to my Amazon account then you can see that it gives me the option to use American Express membership rewards points and for this purchase it tells me it's going to cost 2,570 points and if we do the math there that works out to be 0.7 cents per point which is still just too low and another option that we want to avoid because it devalues our points and as a general guide here that I like to use anything below one cent per point is bad and D values points and anything at 1 cent per point is just okay but then anything that's at least 2 to three cents per point or even more is generally where we want to aim to redeem by the way if we can get this video here up to 3,000 likes then I'll actually go ahead and buy that subscribe t-shirt and wear it in my next what's in my wallet update video just for fun so again go ahead like And subscribe if you haven't already because it is completely free now next here we've got the option to redeem for gift cards within our AMX account if we click on that right there we're going to see sort of a gift card marketplace where we have a ton of options and for gift cards we're usually going to be able to get around anywhere from 0.5 cents per point up to around 1 cent per Point depending on what kind of gift cards we choose so if we just click on a generic American Express gift card that's basically a cash equivalent that you can use Anywhere MX is accepted it says that we can redeem 5,000 points for a $25 gift card which works out to be 0.5 cents per point in value meaning that we want to actually avoid redeeming for a gift card like this but then if we click on a gift card to Home Depot we can see that a $25 gift card costs only half that amount at 2,500 points so that means that with our calculation we can see this is equal to a Redemption value of 1 cent per point which again is just okay so yeah the value of redeemed for gift cards can vary but in general I still would say this is not the best use of your points now if you have a special version of the AMX platinum card like the Charles Schwab MX Platinum then you're going to have a bonus option of redeeming your AMX points over into a Schwab brokerage account at a fixed value of 1.1 cents per point so that's going to be a little bit better as a Redemption option compared to the other things we've talked about so far and there's some other versions of the platinum card as well like the Morgan Stanley Platinum that gives you the ability ility to redeem at 1 cent per Point into a Morgan Stanley investment account so those are kind of nice because you can just cash out of your brokerage account after redeeming your points or you can even invest those points and basically grow the value of them over time now personally I think it's best to just leave your investing strategy and your credit card strategy separate and that's because investing is really just a long-term game that's meant to play out over decades while credit card points have the most power in the short term when they're really just redeemed with the best Redemption options and that is going to lead us into the most important part of this video which is going to be redeeming AMX points for travel now when it comes to redeeming AMX points for travel we basically have two options so option one is that we can redeem for travel inside the AMX portal which is just okay and option two is that we can redeem by transferring points out to different hotel and Airline Partners which is the better option here by far with more upside value so next I'm going to show you guys some examples of how redeeming for travel Works to make it a little bit easier to understand but I want you to keep these five tips in mind as we go through these examples here first again transferring points is usually better than the MX portal so typically most hotels in the AMX portal can be booked at 0.7 cents per point in value with some getting up to 1 cent per point and then most flights are going to get 1 cent per point in the portal as well but transferring points is usually going to be able to get you at least between two to three cents per point or even more tip number two is do not transfer until you find a word availability and that's because once you transfer your points out of your AMX account you can't transfer them back so it's kind of like a one-way Street third take advantage of transfer bonuses when you can because throughout the year you're going to see American Express run these different promotions where maybe you can get at least a 20% or a 30% bonus when transferring points so basically instead of transferring 10,000 AMX points into 10,000 British Airways avios you might be able to transfer those same 10,000 AMX points and get 13,000 avos instead tip number four is to spend your points and don't save forever so just make sure you're redeeming points for travel in the near future instead of saving for a trip 10 plus years from now because first of all Nothing in life is guaranteed and second of all credit card companies and Airline and hotel programs are always devaluing points adjusting award charts and changing the rules so save your points in the short term but make sure you use them and don't get analysis paralysis and then tip number five is that value is subjective meaning that everyone out there is going to have different preferences for how they want to redeem their points so maybe you want to save some money on economy flights maybe you want to travel more or maybe want to travel Better In First Class the important thing is just to make sure that you're not redeeming points the wrong way but after that just redeeming points for what gives you value personally is the whole point of this game okay now with all that said for this first example let's look at booking a hotel stay at the Ritz Carlton Half Moon Bay Resort which I think just looks really really cool and it's on the California coast this is going to be more of a higher end Marriott property where we can see that it's normally going to cost $5,775 for a 5 night stay in August and if we look over in the AMX portal we can see that we can book this hotel for around $554,000 Points Plus $300 in property fees so that's pretty expensive for both cash price and the points price inside the portal now when there's fees that we have to account for we need to adjust our Center Point calculation so we're going to take the cash price of $5 $ 5,774 minus the fees when booking with points of $300 and then we're going to just divide that all by the points required to book here which was a little over 554 th000 and that gives us around 0.99 cents per point the reason we want to do the cash price minus the fees from booking with points is just because we're going to have to pay at least some cash no matter what here so the difference between those numbers is just going to be the amount of cash that we're actually saving when we're comparing these options so that's what we want to have as the top part of our equation however this is not the best option here because marot is also a Transfer Partner with AMX so if we do an award search over on the Marriott website we can see that the points price is lower at 400,000 Points Plus 355 in taxes and fees and that's partially thanks to the fact that when you book Five Nights with points through Marriott you're going to get the fifth night free as a bonvoy member so using the same cash price of $5,775 as a reference point minus the 355 in fees divided by 400,000 points that we could transfer over to Marriott from 400,000 AMX points that gives us a cent per point value of 1.35 cents for point which is decent but that's still pretty expensive so the better option here might be if we managed to book this when there was a 30% transfer bonus going on from AMX over to Marriott for about a month last year so with that bonus we would only have to transfer over 308,000 AMX points to get at least the same 400,000 Marriot points so doing the math with 308,000 points that would have worked out to be a Redemption value of around 1.76 cents per point now obviously there still a lot of points to redeem for just a hotel stay so this might not be a good idea for people who are working with a limited number number of AMX points they've saved up but I just wanted to show you guys the difference between booking in the portal versus transferring points here so the portal price was 554 th000 points whereas the transfer price was as low as 308,000 points if we're able to take advantage of a transfer bonus and that's going to be some pretty significant savings now to transfer points from AMX to Marriott or any other program all you got to do is just go ahead over to the rewards and benefits page inside of your AMX account then go over to earn and redeem and then go to the bottom of that list where it says transfer points and that's going to bring you over to a page where you can see a list of all these different trans transer Partners along with what transfer bonuses might be going on at the moment then all you got to do is just enter your account number with whatever Transfer Partner you want to link to your MX account enter in the number of points you want to transfer in increments of 1,000 points and then transfer over those points so yeah it's pretty straightforward but again do not transfer over any points until you search for it and then confirm award availability first now I also wanted to mention that with that last example of the Ritz Carlton Half Moon Bay that was a part of the fine hotels and resorts collection which I have access to with my MX platinum card so because this hotel was a part of that collection that's why the AMX portal was giving me a value of around 1 cent per point if we actually search for other hotels so for example if I search in my home city of Philadelphia and we see this standard Marriott that's going for $26 per night or 29486 AMX points the math there works out to be a value of around 0.7 cents per point which is going to be standard for booking most other hotels with points in the AMX travel portal so overall I'm going to say that's not really a good use of points to book hotels through MX for booking flights let's say that I want to go ahead and fly from from Philadelphia to London in business class in late September on British Airways with their Club World Suites and for this I want to start by actually finding award availability first before we compare the different options for booking this so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to a website that I've really enjoyed using a lot lately called seats. Arrow now I have a premium subscription to seats. Arrow which cost $9.99 per month that I definitely think is worth it because I can basically just search for up to a year of award availability with a bunch of filters so I'm going to have a link down below to seats. Arrow if anyone wants to go ahead and check that out out but on this page I'm going to click on search and then let's say that I want to fly from Philadelphia to London Heathrow in late August so I can just go ahead and enter in those airports and a departure date and then I checked off this box here to search for plus or minus 7 days because another good tip here is that it really does help to be flexible when booking award tickets with points and Miles so after all that is filled out then I'll go ahead and click on search this brings up a lot of options so I'm going to click on where it says business and what that's going to do is it's going to sort by these green boxes first which shows award availability for direct flights and I'm going to look at this one here where it says American Airlines for 57,500 mil so a click on the more info icon to the right and then I can actually click over to view this on the American Airlines website now this is going to be a British Airways flight that I'm seeing here on American because both British and American are part of one world Alliance we can see that it shows the same flight for 57,500 Mi Plus $732 in fees because most award seats in and out of London have really high fees but we actually can't transfer AMX points directly to American Airlines to book this so I'm going to search for this flight over on the British Airways website next because ba is a Transfer Partner with AMX and I made this Transfer Partner guide here that I like to use to remember where I can transfer my AMX points and what airlines are within the same alliances so I'll go ahead and leave a link down below for this if you want to download that for free as well now over here on British Airways the same flight cost 90,000 avos plus $350 in fees some more in points but less in fees than American and while I'm over here on the ba website I also went ahead and checked the cash price of this flight and found out that it's going for $3,200 88 so when we do the center point calculation we would take $3,288 minus the 350 in fees and then divided by 990,000 AMX points that we can transfer over to 990,000 British Airways avos and that's going to give us 3.26 cents per point which is actually pretty good now the center point number is not the only thing to consider here because that same flight could potentially be cheaper if I was booking a round trip flight or it could even be cheaper if I was flying out of another busier airport like JFK but for this example I wanted to show exactly what I would do here because I live much closer to Philadelphia International and the points price is the exact same for here or JFK now again if there's ever any transfer bonuses going on with AMX and British Airways then I could potentially transfer less than 990,000 points over to ba for this flight but assuming there's no transfer bonuses going on at the moment there's actually another one world Alliance member on my Transfer Partner guide that I could book with for a better deal here and that is going to be Cafe Pacific so over on cath's website I can just enter in the same exact search information and find the same exact flight for 63,000 Mi plus around $237 in fees after the price is converted into us so the Cent per Point number here with this calculation is going to work out to be around 4.84 cents per point which is a better deal than the British Airways option we just looked at so I would just go over to my AMX account enter in my cath Pacific account number to link things and then transfer over 63,000 AMX points to book the seat on the British Airways flight now if we want to compare this deal to what we pay within the AMX travel portal we can see that if we search for the same flight from pH to London we could redeem that for a little over 328,000 AMX points which is going to Value this Redemption at around 1 cent per point and typically that's what you're going to find whenever you want to book a flight inside the AMX portal so I would much rather pay 63,000 AMX points transfer it over to Cafe Pacific plus some fees instead because that's going to be a huge difference now if I want to keep playing around with flying to Europe in the fall with seats. arrow I can maybe just set the origin to USA so that it's going to search for all major US airports then I'll put in let's say Frankfurt Germany and then search for plus or minus 7 days and here I can see that there's something direct from JFK for 60,000 points with Air Canada aop plan so I can click through to that from here to see this deal over on their website that's going to show me that award seat for 60,000 airpl Points Plus around $57 us after that's converted this is actually going to be a Singapore Airlines flight because both Singapore and Air Canada are a part of Star Alliance so if we search for the cash price over on Singapore Airlines website that's going to be around $198 if we paid in cash so calculating the value of this Redemption that's going to be around 3.08 cents per point which is pretty good and we could actually compare that to the price and miles from the Singapore Airlines Chris flyer program directly because they're also an AMX Transfer Partner according to my guide but the price through them is going to be 81,000 Mi plus $560 in fees and that's going to be a Redemption of around 2.35 cents per point so the Air Canada option is still the better option now just for fun we're going to compare the price inside of the AMX portal so that would cost around 188,000 AMX points through that portal directly so transferring only 60,000 AMX points is by far the best deal here for booking this and maybe you can even get lucky with a transfer bonus like I said before where you'd have to transfer even less points over to Air Canada now there's just an infinite number of examples that I could walk through of redeeming points for travel but this video is already getting kind of long so if you want to see more examples of redeeming for business class flights with points and Miles then make sure to go ahead and check out this video over here next or you can go ahead and watch some economy examples in this video over here if you want to use your points to fly more us domestic flights but as always thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one