Anyone who has been in miles and points for more than a year will recognise the pattern.

You are standing by the office coffee machine, explaining a recent redemption or sign-up bonus with all the enthusiasm of someone who has just discovered fire. You know what you are saying is correct. You know the person you are talking to could replicate it with very little effort. You also know, about thirty seconds in, that their eyes have glazed over and they are actively scanning for an exit.

They leave having absorbed exactly one thing.

You are now “the points and miles person”.

That is fine. Normal, even. Until one day they need to travel.

Suddenly they remember you. You have a large balance of points. You got them “for free”. Surely the friendly, reasonable thing would be for you to share.

This is where the tension starts.

I am usually happy with the outreach. Less happy with the framing. I tried to teach you how to fish months ago. If you had listened, you could have picked up two or three sign-up bonuses by now and be well on your way to a diversified stash. But the deeper misconception is the idea that because miles did not come out of your bank account in a single visible transaction, they do not really cost anything.

Irrespective of how they were earned, miles are a scarce resource. And if you are not using your own capacity, it does cost me something to tap into mine.

In my case, that cost is unusually explicit. I have bought millions of miles over the years as part of a deliberate travel strategy. Even when I am inclined to help someone, I cannot bring myself to redeem miles for others at a price I would not redeem them for myself, and certainly not below my own purchase price.

I am very comfortable spending money. But do something that is obviously sub-optimal, leave value on the table, and it sticks in my head. I am absolutely the person who walks into Tesco intending to buy a £2.50 Red Bull and walks out with the £3.00 meal deal because paying 50p more for a sandwich and snack feels compulsory.

That mindset matters.

This question surfaced recently in a Reddit discussion with someone in their twenties trying to work out how to handle business class flights to Asia with a friend. He had a healthy points balance across programs. His friend had contributed some reimbursed spend, but nowhere near enough to fund a full premium redemption.

The situation was simple and awkward. Business class cash fares were far beyond the trip budget. Economy was affordable. Award space existed, but only if someone acted immediately.

This is where most people get stuck. They anchor on the retail price of the premium ticket and start arguing about what miles are “worth”. In real life, that framing is wrong. The honest baseline is the ticket that would have been bought anyway. Everything above that is an upgrade, not an obligation.

Once you accept that, the question changes. It stops being about cents per mile and becomes about timing, liquidity, and trust. Who can act now, while space exists, and how does repayment happen later without turning the whole thing into an accounting exercise?

That same question showed up much closer to home this year.

My daughter and her boyfriend wanted to join us for a multi-generational Asia trip this summer. That was genuinely great news, and exactly what we hoped would happen.

I’m always happy to help my kids travel when it matters, especially early on. What I’ve also tried to encourage, gently and consistently, is that adulthood involves learning how to stand on your own two feet over time, not all at once. Points and miles are part of that learning curve.

I’ve nudged her for years to use her US credit card capacity to build a balance. Like most people early in their careers, it never feels urgent, until suddenly it is.

For this trip, one-way flights made more sense than returns. London to Phuket for the two of them priced at $1,352 cash. American Airlines miles offered a Qatar routing for 70,000 miles plus $415.80 total.

On paper, that is real cash saved. In practice, it was a redemption I would never make myself. Roughly 1.3 cents per mile on AA, at a time when those miles were hard to replace. My brain was already objecting.

But I also wanted to reduce their out-of-pocket cost at exactly the point it mattered.

So we did not redeem my miles at a price I disliked. Instead, we used the situation to unlock her own capacity.

We signed her up for a Citi AAdvantage card offering around 80,000 miles after roughly $4,000 in spend. No fee in the first year. I kept the card and ran the spend myself. Within a few months, she had a usable balance in her own account.

She needed the flights upfront, though. So my wife and I fronted the 70,000 miles and booked the ticket. When her bonus posted, 70,000 of those miles were understood to be mine to redeploy for future plans, which we have already done.

Functionally, we became the miles bank. Temporarily.

She avoided a large cash outlay at exactly the point it would have hurt. I avoided making a redemption that would have annoyed me every time I thought about it. And she finally engaged with the points ecosystem in a way that stuck, because it solved a real problem in real time.

This is not about generosity versus selfishness, or about assigning the correct theoretical value to a mile.

It is about recognising that miles are a form of optional liquidity with expiry risk. Used well, they remove constraints at the exact moment constraints bind. Used poorly, they create resentment, faux precision, or missed opportunities while people debate fairness.

Fronting miles makes sense when availability is perishable, the other person has future earning capacity, and there is enough trust that repayment can be implicit rather than invoiced. Outside of that, it often does not.

For this Asia trip, becoming the miles bank was the right answer. Not because it maximised value on paper, but because it allowed the trip to happen cleanly, without mental gymnastics, and without leaving me stewing over a redemption I would not make for myself.

There will be more to write about this trip. The flights, the routing, the family logistics, and what actually happened once we got there.

But this was the moment that set the tone.

Miles did not need to be priced.

They needed to be deployed.