My credit card stopped earning points. I earned more without it.

At the end of September, the card doing most of my points earning stopped earning Qantas Points. A programme change, not a decision of mine. The last entry on my statement is dated 29 September and then there's simply nothing.

That card had earned 4,765 Qantas Points in September alone. I expected October to be grim.

Eighteen days into October I had already earned more than the whole of September. 7,330 points against 6,757. With the card switched off and nothing clever done about it.

Here are the actual numbers, because the reason it happened is the useful bit — and it's something I'd had wrong since I started.

The two months, side by side

Straight from the Qantas Frequent Flyer activity statement.

In September, credit cards were 78 per cent of everything I earned. In October they were 29 per cent, and the month was still bigger.

Where the points actually came from

Gift cards went from 2 per cent of my earning to 41 per cent in a single month.

I want to be clear that this wasn't a plan. I didn't open anything, didn't move my spending, didn't sit down and work out a replacement. I bought the things I was going to buy anyway, in the way I already buy them, and the mix shifted on its own.

Which is the whole point. The earning was never really coming from the card. It was coming from ordinary household spending, and the card was one of several ways that spending was being captured — just the most visible one.

The supermarket rewards transfers doubled too, from 1,000 points to 2,000. Same shopping.

Not all gift cards earn the same

Here's the part I'd genuinely had wrong, and my own statement is the proof.

I'd assumed gift cards bought through Qantas Marketplace all earned the same rate. They don't. Same website, same afternoon, and the rate depends entirely on which brand you clicked.

I spent roughly $1,150 on gift cards in October and earned 3,000 points. Had all of it gone on the supermarket cards at one point per dollar, I'd have earned 1,150.

Choosing which card was worth about 1,850 points. Same money, same shops, same afternoon.

The supermarket cards were the ones that got cut — they used to earn three per dollar and now earn one. Plenty of other brands never moved. If you wrote the whole thing off when the supermarket rate dropped, you wrote off the wrong thing. There's more on which brands earn what if it's useful.

The sum worth doing on your own numbers

When a programme changes and there's a fee to keep earning, the question people ask is “is it worth it?” — which can't be answered in general. It depends entirely on what you actually spend.

So here's the arithmetic rather than an answer. Four steps:

1. What do you actually put through that card in a month? Not what you think — look at a statement.
2. What's the new earn rate, all the way through to Qantas Points? Watch for a conversion step. A programme paying “one point per dollar” that converts three of its points to one Qantas Point is really paying you a third of a point.
3. Multiply. That's your annual points.
4. Divide the annual fee by that number. That's your cost per point.

Then compare it to what a point is worth to you. I value mine at roughly 1.3 cents, because that's what they're getting me on the redemption I'm actually saving for. Yours might be different, and that's fine — the comparison is what matters.

If the fee costs more per point than your own redemption is worth, the maths has answered it. I'm not going to tell anyone what to do with a credit product. But you can do that sum in about four minutes with a statement open, and most people never do it at all.

The small stuff, for scale

While I had the statement open, two things worth knowing:

Qantas Wellbeing — the walking one — earns me somewhere between 35 and 180 points a month depending on how the challenges fall. Eighteen points here, thirty-six there. It's real and it costs nothing, but anyone telling you it's a meaningful earning strategy is not looking at a statement. Update, 27 October 2026: mine then dropped to 36 points for the month, because the direct Fitbit connection was retired on 30 September — there's the fix for that here.

Health insurance pays 179 points a month, every single month. Set up once, never touched since. It's roughly the same as the walking, for no ongoing effort at all, on a bill I'd be paying anyway. That's the kind of earning that actually compounds.

What I had wrong

I thought the card was the engine. Everybody does — it's what every guide leads with, and it's the first question anyone asks.

But the card was never generating anything. The spending was. The card was one container for it, and when that container broke the spending carried on and found other ones — gift cards, supermarket points, the insurance, the bills.

I only found that out because it broke. Which is a stupid way to learn it, and the reason I'm writing it down.

Open your activity statement and look at where last month's points actually came from. Not where you assume. It takes two minutes, and if it's anything like mine, the biggest line won't be the one you'd have guessed.

It's the same principle as everything else in my points ledger: the balance came from spending that was happening anyway, captured properly. The clever part was never the clever part.

Questions I get asked

Have you ever looked at which line is actually biggest on your statement? I hadn't, until the card broke.