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How to Pass Your Airline Points Down to Your Heirs
June 16, 2025
People can build up hundreds of thousands of travel rewards points over the years — but most of the time, they can’t include those points in their estate plans. Host Julia Carpenter talks with WSJ reporter Jacob Passy about how to rethink your points strategy and hand the rewards down to your heirs.
LISTEN TO FULL PODCAST ON THE WALL STREET JOURNALPartial Transcript
Julia Carpenter: Here's Your Money Briefing for Monday, June 9th. I'm Julia Carpenter for the Wall Street Journal. More than 2% of Americans 55 and older have racked up more than 500,000 reward points or miles after years of travel. According to a survey by rewards travel search platform, Point.me, that's a stockpile worth thousands of dollars, but most of the time those rewards simply vanish when the account holder dies.
Jacob Passy: What do we do with all these miles? Because you feel like it's something you're owed and you don't want it to go to waste, and so you have to be strategic about it to make sure that they're not disappearing when you leave the mortal coil, as it were.
Julia Carpenter: We'll talk with WSJ reporter Jacob Passy about the creative and complicated ways in which account holders protect their points for the next generation. That's after the break. Over a lifetime of summer vacations, business trips and holiday travel, many Americans are sitting on a fortune, a fortune in airline and mileage points. But after you're gone, some airlines will charge you a hefty fee to bequeath the rewards to someone else, and most of the time the companies just take it all back. Wall Street Journal reporter Jacob Passy joins me to talk more. Jacob, these rewards programs have changed so much just over the last decade and now your reporting shows us that people are asking how they can share their rewards even after they're gone. What are some of the common questions these account holders have about that?
Jacob Passy: One of the common questions is, "What do I do with all these points and miles?" A lot of people nowadays have credit cards tied to different travel programs, airline branded credit cards, or Chase Sapphire's general credit cards. And those can rack up a lot of points for you if you put your spending on them, and then people don't touch them nearly enough. And a retirement are planning on using all those miles and oftentimes they have more than they need or life gets in the way. And they're not able to travel as much as they thought they were going to and suddenly are sitting on these rewards that could be put to good use but are just sitting there. LISTEN TO FULL PODCAST ON THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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