Spirit Airlines Will Give You Miles if You Borrow Money to Fund Your Vacation, Because That’s a Good Idea..

by Gary Leff

Spirit is promoting personal loans from Prosper: 200 points for checking your rate online (no hard credit pull, apparently) and 1 point per dollar borrowed up to $35,000.

Whether you need to break free from work or some scary credit card debt, we understand.

That’s why we’ve partnered with Prosper, an online lending marketplace that offers access to low, fixed-rate loans that you can use for your next vacation or nearly anything else you need.

Prosper offers affiliate links, they’d happily pay referral fees to any blogger that wanted to advocate you borrow money from them. I do not have links from them, because I think this is a Very. Bad. Idea.

And it’s not any better of an idea when you get Spirit’s Free Spirit miles for doing so.

Look, I’m a defender of the payday loan industry because I think that people do need to borrow money sometimes to fix their cars to be able to go to work, or to cover emergency health care bills for their kids. People still need to borrow the money, and if you foreclose one option they’ll have to choose what would otherwise have been the next worse option. And I believe that people ought to be permitted to make their own choices.

And I think The Onion makes the point better than I ever could about high interest financial products actually providing a service to people even though of course if that’s the road you’re going down the mileage game is not for you.

So if you want to borrow money, and you want to borrow money from Prosper by all means go ahead. But don’t let Spirit convince you do to do!

(HT: Paul B.)

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. couldn’t you take a 35k loan out, then pay it off immediately? I didnt see anything about prepayment anywherein the terms

  3. Yeah, Gary thinks it’s a Very. Bad. Idea. to earn miles when you apply for a financial instrument that gives you access to borrowed money.

    Hypocrisy at its finest folks. What was it, Gary, the affiliate links weren’t lucrative enough?

    I fail to see how this is any different than any of the dozens of high interest credit cards you hawk.

  5. @Josh you really do not see any difference between a credit card that has a credit line you can use but do not have to, and a product where you pay significant interest no matter what? One comes at a significant cost and the other does not.

  6. was saying good point to chas not to josh btw. People need to get over the credit card thing already. Can’t tell if it’s people that are jealous that bloggers make money, or people who think website content comes out of thin air.

  7. @Gary a lot of the credit cards you hawk have mandatory annual fees, so no, I don’t see a difference.

    It’s one thing to say 35k Spirit miles are not *worth* the interest payments, it’s another to be hypocritical about why you decided not to hawk this particular mileage earning financial instrument.

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