Happy Tuesday everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful Passover & Easter weekend. My Husband and I celebrated a very important milestone in our relationship this week. Anniversary? Promotion? New House? No, this week, we reached half a million points for our travel club.  My husband and I have had the opportunity to go to some pretty amazing places with equally amazing perks because of our travel club, and we often get asked by our friends and colleagues how we do it.  We’ve travelled to Bora Bora and stayed for free in amazing suites for 14 days, had free champagne breakfasts in San Francisco, lived the life in a “complimentary upgrade” suite in Las Vegas. In this 3-part blog series, I will tell you how we have “maximized our earnings” in our membership. While I am focusing on the travel aspect of rewards, all of these principles can be applied to any rewards program really, be it gas, groceries, The Loft by Ann Taylor, whatever floats your spending boat. 1.Do your research: First, you need to find out which platform suits your needs best. Do you fly often, especially for work, or do you tend to drive to your destination and stay in hotels more often? Does your airline go everywhere you need it to, or has miles partners that do? Is the hotel chain you frequent accessible in most places and suits your travel needs? Are blackout dates a concern? Do you need a program flexible to YOUR needs, or are you able to be flexible with your travel? Many airlines and hotel chains have blackout dates, or points expire within a certain time frame. Some have different “levels” of membership where the more you travel, the more points and perks you...

About a month ago, the video rental and streaming subscription service Netflix announced that it was nearly doubling its charges for its most popular subscription plan from $7.99 a month to $15.98. Upon hearing this news, we all went ballistic. I certainly did. I’ve been a loyal customer for years, and now they want to raise my rates simply because they can? Well, screw you, Netflix! How about I just cancel my membership altogether? Suck on that! This was my initial reaction. Of course with time I learned that the plan wasn’t really changing. I could keep getting the one disc at a time for the same price, or for the same price I could simply go without discs and have unlimited streaming of movies. I just had to pay more if I wanted to keep both. And I never actually signed up for both—I just got the free streaming when they added it for no additional price and soon found myself using it more than the discs I get in the mail. So really, they’ve been giving us something for nothing for a while, and now they just want to start charging for the extra stuff. What I find interesting here is not the story of Netflix or iTunes or the New York Times, or any other Internet content provider that suddenly decides it needs to charge more for its material. What is interesting is how it feels like such a violation to us as consumers—a betrayal of charging more for our basic content consumption necessities. Yes, necessities. Because with most forms of entertainment today, especially entertainment that is regularly fed to us in our homes or on our mobile devices, things have evolved from being exciting frills to our lives to basic...