RAF - can I use it?

I have 5 vanilla accounts.

How do people use RAF to their benefit?

I note with RAF, you get the EXP bonus and the 'friend' doesn't even have to subscribe at this point they can be using the starter, but I guess starter's are limited be level 20? So I guess you can't level a bunch of characters on the new and old accounts then abandon the new ones.

Do people level a lot of chars then abandon their old accounts in favour of the new ones with all the 80s they've levelled? Transferring all those characters to the original accounts would cost a lot.

It seems like such a nice thing that I can't think how to use without incurring excessive monetary expense.

most people either make all new accounts, and abandon the old ones, transferring any characters already created, or make new "throwaway" accounts, use RAF for all its awesomeness, then transfer the newly created toons to the old accounts, and let the throwaway accounts expire. You could also just level more toons and not transfer anything, depending on if you have more time than money.

The best way to do it was when they were offering the battlechest for $5 and wrath for $5, making new throwaway RAF accounts $10 all the way up to 80.

I'm planning on doing it once, and thats it. When my Raf runs out oct 29 whatever i've accomplished is going to have to be good enough, because I'm not doing it again due to the costs of new accts, and i'm not really wanting to move characters around and do new accts on top of that. My goals are probably more modest than most, I want 1-2 teams at 80, and at least 2 of every class at 80 across the accts for my alliance side, and whatever times left I'll be dedicating to my horde teams. Right now I've got a team of shaman at 71, a team of druids at 41, and a 2mage/2priest team at 38. Boosting with my 83 dk. Horde side so far i have a team of 1pal, 4 shaman at 7, with a 70 dk to boost with (probably gonna leave the first team at a level where i can possibly farm stockades for the guild run money, to help fund my toons). Once my Raf runs out I'll start the grind to 90 and go from there, and flesh out my tradeskills etc.

the maths

6+7+13 = £26 for 1 cata account from Amazon

if you currently have old abcde accounts and you don't want new accounts, what I did was:

b recruited F (new account) and d recruited G (new account)

A boosted BDFG through dungeons (I actually deleted a few lvl 40 characters and started again, now at 80 I have 5 mages, 5 druids, 3 pallies, a hunter and a priest not including my current team. I have limited time to play)

So initial spend was £52 (actually a lot cheaper as I got the accounts during the discount).
Month 2 is free
If you complete your goals within 2 months, you then have to transfer the accounts at £15 a pop. I transferred 4 toons from F & G to C and E at a cost of £50 for a total cost of £100. Either that or I spend many many many more hours on the levelling curve.

Thanks, that's helped.