Management Tools

The tools below are all ones I’ve personally tested and continued using. I hope they’ll be helpful for managing your accounts.

RewardsWise (credit card management tool)

We recently came across a credit card management tool called RewardsWise. After using it for a while, I think it fits our usage habits quite well. This APP has a free version that lets you flexibly track your cards and benefits. The paid version lets you link your credit card accounts and pull in all transactions in real time for viewing and analysis.

In addition, I’ve had multiple conversations with their developers, and I think there’s room for deeper collaboration to continue refining and optimizing this APP so it better fits everyone’s needs. I’ve also shared feedback on some new features and participated in a small portion of their update testing. Their update speed has been quite fast, and they execute very well. So if you have ideas while using it, feel free to send feedback to us too. It’s actually pretty interesting for everyone to help make this APP more useful together.

If you register for RewardsWise through our link now, you can use the basic features for free. If you like it, you can activate the paid version to unlock more features. Use promo code: US101 to get $10 off the paid version, which brings the annual fee down to just $39.99.

Award Wallet (points management)

Award Wallet (AW) is a mileage, points, and travel management tool founded in 2004 by Jeff Bianco. It currently supports management for 669 airline, hotel, rental car, bank points, and other accounts. To date, it has 380,000 active users, stores 80 billion points, and those points have a total value of $1.6 billion. AW’s main function is to display your membership numbers, point balances, and expiration dates across programs. It can also automatically link your flight and hotel reservation information and update flight schedule changes and hotel booking changes in real time.

The feature I use most is checking mileage and points updates for all my accounts directly in Award Wallet. Watching my balances keep growing is actually pretty satisfying. And with AW, I never have to worry about forgetting membership numbers again. The itinerary management is also very useful. Sometimes when an airline changes a flight’s departure time, AW updates it promptly and sends you an email alert. In addition, AW supports managing other people’s accounts, so you can add your whole family’s account information and monitor everything in real time to avoid expiration or account theft. There are also corresponding APPs for phones and iPad now. I’ve downloaded them too, and it’s very convenient to stay updated anytime.

If you sign up for Award Wallet through our blog’s referral link, you can get a free three-month premium membership. Premium membership shows expiration dates for all programs, and mileage/points updates are faster than with a regular account. After six months, if you do not renew (premium membership costs $30 per year), your account will be downgraded to the regular free membership.

Empower (financial account management)

You can use its free financial management tool to add your bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts all in one place, then view account information, every transaction, and payment due dates from its platform. Of course, it also includes spending management and budgeting features to help you spend more intentionally. In addition, investment accounts can also be managed there: it can list the stocks and investment products in each of your accounts and automatically calculate allocations and compare them with the current market. It also supports viewing on phones, computers, iPad, and other platforms, which is very convenient.

Credit Sesame (credit report monitoring)

Credit Sesame is a website that offers advice and help related to personal finance. It provides free credit reports, credit scores, and alerts for changes to your credit report. At the same time, it recommends credit cards and new loans that may fit you based on your credit cards, loans, repayments, and other information. It also includes free Identity Theft Insurance worth $50,000. For example, if you suffer losses because your identity is stolen due to a data breach, you may receive some compensation.

Personally, I mainly use it to monitor and review my credit reports. If anything changes, I can check and handle it right away. It’s very convenient and effective. I generally don’t log in often, because the email alerts are enough for me. The main downside is that the interface has quite a lot of ads, but it is a free service after all. As for the included identity theft insurance, it’s always nice to have it.

Credit Sesame is a free website that you can register for directly without providing a credit card. You only need to verify that your SSN matches your identity. After you fill in your personal information, you’ll usually get 3-5 identity verification questions related to you (from public record). Just answer truthfully. Note that for some questions, all of the answer choices may be incorrect, in which case you can simply choose none of above.

Flights

Seats.aero

A great helper for searching award flights

Google Flights (cash tickets)

These days, Google Flights is the first tool I use when searching for airfare. The results are usually the lowest fares available online. Google Flights itself does not sell tickets; it redirects you to airline websites or third parties to complete the booking. However, it can only be used to search for cash tickets, not award tickets.

Fly Miler

Fly Miler is an award flight search tool developed by Economical Excursionists. It’s very easy to use: just enter your origin and destination. You can also set some filtering options. This site can only provide possible routings; it will not tell you whether award space is actually available. So before I search for award tickets, I usually use it to understand which flights might be bookable. That way I can more strategically decide which miles to use, and then go search for actual award space through each mileage program. It also shows the miles required for each route, so you can start by checking the best-value options first.

Great Circle Mapper

Great Circle Mapper (GC map) is a website for quickly plotting routes, listing flight paths, and providing airport information. It can be used to quickly check the distance between two airports (useful for BA award tickets and short-hop trip planning). If you ever want to draw a route map, this site is the most convenient one to use.

Expert Flyer

Expert Flyer is currently one of the largest and most professional airfare search tools on the market. It can not only search tickets across many airlines, but also show what booking class the ticket is in and how many seats remain in that fare bucket. Even better, it offers award alert services: once the seat you need becomes available, it will automatically send you an email notification. This is extremely helpful for booking competitive routes. It can also provide major help when planning complex itineraries with multiple stopovers, open-jaws, and routing considerations.

Seat Guru

Seat Guru lets you quickly look up seat information for your flight. You can also see seat maps uploaded by other users and their seat reviews. This can be very helpful both when choosing the aircraft type that best fits your needs before booking and when selecting the best seat after booking.

Blog Tools

Blog menu: We keep updating and adding sections to the blog menu, and we hope it helps everyone find information more quickly. If you can’t find what you need, try the Google custom search on the side and you should be able to find the answer fairly quickly.