美国国家公共电台 NPR How One Man Used Miles To Fulfill His Dream To Visit Every Country Before Turning 40（在线收听）

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Now we have a story of people who earn credit card points as though it were a game. They go for sign-up bonuses and point multipliers and balance transfers. But it turns out you can lose the credit card points game, too. Here's Darius Rafieyan.

DARIUS RAFIEYAN, BYLINE: It's 7 o'clock on a Tuesday night, and in a crowded bar in downtown Brooklyn, 20 or so people have gathered to sip craft beers, nibble at appetizers and talk about credit cards.

JANICE LINTZ: Well, I've taken out over 46 credit cards in five years and earned 2.6 million miles just in sign-up bonuses.

RAFIEYAN: Janice Lintz is a regular at the Reach for the Miles meetup. It's a gathering of travel hackers and deal optimizers who meet once a month to trade strategies for maximizing credit card rewards. For her, earning points is a kind of sport.

LINTZ: I just came back this morning from Easter Island. Plus, I got 26,000 points from that. Plus, because American Airlines was late for a flight, they gave me another 7,500 points. So I'm not sure where I came out, but I think I may have, like, been paid to go to Easter Island and Uruguay.

RAFIEYAN: And Lintz isn't alone. Nearly 90% of all the money spent on credit cards last year was on rewards cards. And as points have become more popular, so too have websites like Million Mile Secrets and The Points Guy, which help consumers game the points system. Meanwhile, card issuers have been pushing more and more generous rewards all in an effort to entice customers to borrow and spend more. But for people like Janice Lintz, it's just one more way to beat the credit card companies at their own game.

LINTZ: So I even make money paying my taxes. I make quite a few thousand dollars by paying my capital gains taxes.

RAFIEYAN: I spoke with one person who opened a credit card and immediately bought $3,000 worth of Amazon gift cards just to qualify for the sign-up bonus. Another person filled up their garage with blenders to take advantage of a promotion offering extra points on appliances. One dad, he even tried to enroll his newborn in a frequent flier program, only to be told that you have to be at least 2 years old to start earning miles. And of course, the ultimate badge of honor among this crowd is the outlandish travel story, like the guy who flew first class to Dubai for less than $20.

And then there's Stefan Krasowski. He used his points to visit every single country on earth before he turned 40. The last one on his list - Syria.

STEFAN KRASOWSKI: On one-day notice, I was able to be on a plane to Beirut and in Damascus by nightfall.

RAFIEYAN: Points can open the door to extraordinary experiences if you have the time and the discipline. But one survey found that nearly 60% of the people who have rewards cards don't pay off their balances each month.

RON STROBEL: They're so focused on the rewards aspect of it that a lot of time I think they just look past the potential downside.

RAFIEYAN: Ron Strobel is a certified financial planner. He sees clients come in all the time, excited about all the points they're going to get with their new credit card.

STROBEL: They'll even pull that card out, and they show it to me, you know, like they're bragging about it (laughter).

RAFIEYAN: But many of those same clients wind up racking up charges, incentivized by that little hit of dopamine they get each time they earn a point. That's what happened to J.D. Malone. He and his wife got sucked into a rewards program a few years ago after opening a Costco cash-back card.

J D MALONE: It changed the way we spent money. We were shopping for a brand-new couch, and I mean, one of the things that we talked about was, oh, hey, if we buy this $2,000 couch, you know, that's nice, but if we buy this $3,000 couch, well, we're going to get more cash back for that. So we might as well buy the $3,000 couch.

RAFIEYAN: When they got their year-end statement, they found that they'd charged more than $40,000 on that card, and for all that, they got about $600 in cash back.

MALONE: It was painful. I mean, to be honest, it was sickening. We were like, this has to change.

RAFIEYAN: J.D. and his wife enrolled in financial literacy classes. They cut up about 18 of their credit cards. And now they say they spend a lot less money. Basically, they traded the rush of earning points for thousands of extra dollars in their bank account.

Darius Rafieyan, NPR News, New York.

(SOUNDBITE OF BOOKA SHADE'S "SACRED")