re: How do people afford the constant travel lifestyle?

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For folks opening multiple CCs every year--what do you eventually do with those accounts? Are there folks out there with a dozen open CCs and growing? Just curious.

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There's people out there called credit card churners who will literally go through dozens of cards over the course of even just a few years. there's some rules with some issuers they wont give you more than x amt of cards in a given time span (like Chase wont issue more than 5 cards in a 24 month span to same person).

This is mostly signup bonus chasers basically, and yes they can end up with a ton of open accounts. It's a ton to manage obviously, but the annual fee cards they generally product change into fee free cards if they can if they arent using that card beyond the sign up bonus really. So you just pay 1 annual fee, get the bonuses which should cover the fee and beyond, then downgrade to a fee free card which you probably wont use. They tend to only close an account because there's now product change path potentially to a fee free card or the issuer just automatically closes the account due to inactivity.

You can also get multiple of the same cards doing this method. For example there are people who have multiple Citi Custom Cash cards (these cover your top spend category at 5% up to $500 each month) to cover multiple spend categories with 5% back (or basically 5x points). You can open one of those directly, open a Citi Strata fee card, then downgrade it to Citi Custom Cash to end up with 2 (or 3, 4 etc) that way so you can cover multiple categories at 5% back.

Also people who are married or partnered with someone play the 2 player approach where you double up on certain cards by both applying for it to get double the bonus for your benefit basically (instead of adding them as authorized user).

If you can put the time/effort into it, there's a lot to be saved churning credit cards and traveling for "free" on them. I dont think a lot of people realize how cheap you can find some domestic flights on points. I'm out of ATL and can find flights on Delta to New Orleans for 7.5k points one way. I can even hop on an American flight to LAX for 7k points which is insane to me. I can fly to Vegas for 10.5k points on American. For Delta it's a more round about way to book (through skyteam alliance member) which makes it more difficult for average person to understand but American now partners with Citi so if you build up Citi Thank You points; for example $95 AF Strata Premier 60k sign up bonus. Have a partner you can double that with to make it 120k points....thats a decent bit of free flights. Do a Citi Trifecta with double cash and a few custom cash cards and you to earn 2x/5x on everything else and you can pile up some Thank You points to redeem for American flights directly through them.

This isnt even getting into hotel cards - we just did the IHG premier card when their signup bonus was 5 free nights up to 60k points each (300k point signup bonus basically) and it's a $99 AF card. You can stay in some pretty damn nice hotels in IHG for 60k points.

I will never lower myself to churning credit cards just for fricking points.
If I can’t afford to take the vacation I want with the money I currently have, then I just won’t go.