About a year and a half ago I posted about leveraging credit card signup bonuses. If it’s a great deal to get a 100,000 mile signup bonus card, why not get 5? Or 10?

Sure, unless you’re Dan’s Deals himself, you may not get approved for four Starwood Preferred Guest American Express cards at the same time using the four browser ‘trick’ (submitting four applications simultaneously).

But I passed along the controversial suggestion that it would be possible to corral all of your family and friends into getting the cards. You meet the minimum spend, pay off the cards, and you keep the account numbers and passwords to redeem miles later.

Points Envy takes this strategy to a whole other level: why stop at people who are alive?

Getting your family members involved in the points game is a great method for maximizing the total rewards available for all of you…

…One of our grandparents has even been churning from the afterlife for more than a year now, thanks to a large freezer in our basement. The freezer was expensive, but we got it while Sears was offering 10x in the Chase Ultimate Rewards Mall. We plan to buy more when the time comes, seeing that they essentially pay for themselves in a matter of months.

Of course, not one of our grandparents has set foot on a plane since the 1970s, but that hasn’t stopped them from giving their grandchildren the greatest gift of all: first class travel.

Of course, satire is often not far off reality, as this piece immediately reminded me of the story of the supposed world’s oldest man in Japan who had been dead for 30 years but the family concealed that to continue to collect on pension benefits.