A few years ago I was just an ordinary credit card user. I regularly paid my bills in full when they were due each month. On a trip to Florida I read in the airline magazine an offer for a major bank airlines credit card with an 8000 point gift for signing up. I was somewhat concerned because they imposed a $60 annual fee which I was not used to paying. In any case I decided to pay the fee in hopes of being able to earn enough points to make it worth my while.

My goal was to earn 120,000 points in one year to pay for three free tickets to the Caribbean. A strategy needed to be developed in order to accomplish this goal. On a piece of paper, I wrote down all of the things that I ordinarily pay for by cash and for which I could pay for with a credit card. I was able to group these expenses into categories. They included groceries, household expenses, college expenses for my children and transportation related costs.

What I found was that most grocery stores and restaurants will take credit cards. I was even surprised to see that you could buy a cup of coffee and a donut at Dunkin' Donuts and pay for it is a credit card. You could use your credit card when you buy food for the week, make a short trip to a dollar store or go to the local McDonald's and buy a couple of hamburgers.

I started to use the credit card whenever I went to Home Depot to buy hardware for the house or purchase appliances at Sam's Club. I don't think that there are many places that wont take your credit card even for the small purchases.

One major area in which you can earn anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 air miles is through making your children's college tuition payment through a credit card. One of my childrens schools would allow payments to the made by credit card and the other one wouldnt. I also charged all of the books and school supplies incurred on campus.

Lastly, transportation and auto repair costs are another way of adding to your airlines credit card miles. Every time you go to the gas station, you should charge your fill up. Car repair will also give you many airline miles.

What's most important here, is that you charge almost everything you buy which you would normally pay for in cash. This gives you many more airline credit card travel miles that you would normally not have. On the other hand, you will need to budget your money in order to pay the credit card off at the end of each month. It doesn't make sense to have the airline travel credit card and hope to earn miles at the same time paying a tremendous amount of interest which offset those miles. So if you want to travel the world, like I do then sign up for one of those excellent airline credit card points deals and use the card responsibly and treat yourself to a nice trip. I do and working on getting points to go to Tahiti next year!