Canadian Personal Finance Blog

I have many, many different accounts associated with my name. I have a few bank accounts (hopefully I know of all of those, hate to think I left money somewhere, and you should never do that), I have many, many points accounts for various institutions and systems and I also have other accounts for insurance, and also for my business too. I also have ID numbers for many other things, like my University of Waterloo alumni ID, which is my old student id, I am sure there are many other numbers associated with my name and my person.

The reason I mention this now, is that I accidentally re-enrolled in a loyalty program for Holiday Inn (Priority is the name of their reward system). When I enrolled a second time, I set my Holiday Inn account as a “feeder” to my Aeroplan account (points go there), so I collected more points for my Aeroplan account. I then saw that I already had a Holiday Inn account but in that account I simply accumulated points for later use.

Luckily I was able to clear up this mess and merge the two accounts, and hopefully I will not create any more dual accounts for any loyalty programs, but watch out for that.

Points to Points?

It used to be that Petropoints actually transferred directly to PC Financial Points, which in turn meant real money in groceries at Loblaws. This ability to transfer has since been cancelled unfortunately, but that actually gave me a lot more “bang for the points” when it was available. Always check your points programs and figure out whether you can consolidate points or such. Learn all the rules and all the loopholes in the systems that are set up.

PC Points

My two main loyalty programs are with PC Financial and Aeroplan. I have actually been with Aeroplan for almost 20 years, and have got free flights and such from this system, so I do enjoy it a great deal. PC Points I started using a few years back and I have accumulated thousands of dollars in free groceries using it (and I got free banking to boot).

I find that if someone wants to give you free money, you should take it.