If you’re here, I’m going to assume you either know nothing about hacking credit cards, or you’ve heard of it here and there but haven’t managed to yet dip your feet.

I’m here to make you painfully aware that every minute you spend not hacking credit cards is another minute of your life slipped away that you’ll never get back during which you could have been living a much more incredible life had you been hacking credit cards.

You will look back on these minutes of your life with deep and sincere regret in the future.

I’m trying to hammer this point in, because in my personal absolutely anecdotal experience I’ve found it to be a generally true fact that it takes about a year from the time of first introduction to an idea for people (myself, really) to start taking action on that idea.

If this were to be the case with you and credit cards, this year of inertia would cost you 525,600 minutes of lost time in which you could have been enjoying the incredible life of credit card hacking, but weren’t. As mentioned above, you will never get this time back and will regret it acutely for the rest of your life. So I’m here to do my very best to hope that we can skip right past that year of regret-filled waste and jump straight into the credit card hacking.

So here goes: why hack credit cards?

The list goes on and on, but I’m going to keep it to three big ones here. If these don’t convince you, more probably reasons won’t either, so it’s not worth the effort.

1. (a) Travel for free all around the world

This is the big one. If you decide to start hacking credit cards, you’re basically deciding to let yourself fly for free all around the world for the rest of your life. I’m not even exaggerating a little bit here – I’ve earned more than a million frequent flyer miles by hacking credit cards, have used those miles to travel to all 7 continents in a single year, continue to travel to 5-10 countries every year, and my rate of frequent-flyer mile accumulation still well outpaces my spend.

How is this possible? Credit card signup bonuses. Credit card competition is fierce, and to win customers over to their cards banks have been offering more and more outrageous signup bonuses. The average signup bonus you can expect for a card that you open is somewhere between 60-75,000 miles, given that you open them at the right time and in the right way. That’s more than enough miles to book a roundtrip flight almost anywhere in the world.

So that said, generally for every card you open, you can get one completely free roundtrip ticket anywhere in the world. You can easily open 5-10 of these cards in a year, and repeat each and every year.

Long story short, you’ll never be able to fall back on the excuse of not being able to take an amazing vacation or go abroad on some incredible adventure because you can’t afford it again. Your only problem will be coming up with enough time to take all the adventures you want to have.

1. (b) Get thousands of $$$ dollars for free

If for some absurd reason you don’t enjoy traveling all around the world for free, signup bonuses are also generally redeemable for cold hard cash. Depending on the card, you can generally earn anywhere from $500-1500 in Real Free Money™ for little to no work.

Given the fact that I spend about $500-700/mo, total, on all my expenses (rent, food, and gas included) living here in the San Francisco Bay Area (and you can too! This is another life hack I highly recommend – living an absurdly great life while paying next-to-nothing and saving buttloads of cash), it’s actually feasible that I—and anyone else—could live well literally just on opening credit cards and collecting the signup bonuses. I should actually try that at some point.

2. Get insanely good credit card perks

Not all credit cards are made equal. There are layers upon layers of increasing benefits, and many are truly amazing.

On the most basic level, having any kind of credit card is infinitely better in most cases for a financially responsible person than cash, debit cards, checks, or whatever the hell else people use. Why? With a credit card, you get a ton of basic financial protection.

If someone steals your card, in the vast majority of cases you have zero fraud liability. Not so with cash or debit cards. If someone withdraws money from your account with a debit card (don’t think PINs make you safer, either – true story, I was mugged in a car in Tanzania once, and it’s hard not to divulge your PIN to someone who’s keeping you hostage and will be verifying real-time if you gave them the right PIN number) or steals your cash, you have far less recourse.

Credit cards are also insanely consumer friendly – if you have a dispute about something you purchased, you can file a credit dispute even months later, and in the vast majority of cases, the credit issuer will side with you and refund your purchase in full by conducting a chargeback against the merchant in question.

And while it’s almost in no circumstance recommended to keep any kind of balance on a credit card, it *is* sometimes helpful that you don’t have to pay a credit card off until at least a month after your purchase without accruing any interest, instead of immediately as with other forms of payment.

More and more credit cards are coming on the scene with no foreign transaction fees as well, which mean that credit cards are rapidly becoming the easiest way to spend money anywhere in the world with zero overhead cost – infinitely better than trying to convert your money to different currencies and back again, trying to calculate exactly how much money you’ll need, and paying a commission/spread every time you do a conversion.

On more advanced levels, with better credit you’ll be offered cards such as VISA Signature or World MasterCard cards, which come with a whole host of additional benefits, such as purchase protection, a free 24/7 concierge that can do basically anything you want them to (http://fourhourworkweek.com/2010/05/01/credit-card-concierge/), free rental car insurance, free travel insurance, and a ton more.

And on the most elite of levels, you get cards like the AMEX Platinum (or even the Centurion card), where they’ll basically pay you to do things like get Global Entry, or buy airline tickets ($200 reimbursement every year), and will get you into airport lounges and other exclusive nice luxurious places for free almost anywhere you go.

3. It’s insanely easy once you get the hang of it

The opportunity cost is basically zero, especially if you have someone guiding you step by step through the process, who’s already done all the trial and error and can just tell you what to do and how to do it right.

To put it in quantifiable terms, to get one free roundtrip flight anywhere in the world, your realistic feasible time expenditure might only be 20 minutes: 5 minutes for filling out a credit application, 10 minutes to setup your account and manage it, and 5 minutes to close your account. Gain: 50,000-100,000+ frequent flyer miles. Cost: 20 minutes of your life and $0.

Still not convinced? That’s fine. Change is hard. Doing something new and unfamiliar is hard. Inertia is easy. It’s incredibly difficult to compel someone to action, even when the benefit is so astoundingly great and the cost/risk is literally nothing, so I don’t expect to convince everyone who comes through here on the first go to start taking advantage of this amazing opportunity. Just bookmark this site, and set a reminder to come back to it every month or so until you finally are convinced. And just remember that when you finally do decide to start hacking credit cards, you’ll kick yourself for having wasted so much time :).

Convinced? Want to learn more? Alright, let’s do it. Read on.