BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 355: All the Money Hacks We WISH We Had Known About

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

Travel hacks, spending hacks, medical hacks. If there’s one thing that Chris Hutchins has learned from hosting the All the Hacks podcast, it’s that everything is negotiable. You can travel to over sixty countries for (almost) free, outsource your cooking at a reasonable rate and even get free money once forgotten. Chris should know—he’s done all this and more as he works to optimize every aspect of his life, both financially and personally! Chris was hacking at a very young age. In high school, he made a fake magazine so he could score free press passes to concerts. When he was away at boarding school, he would buy whole pizzas and sell them by the slice just to afford a few slices of his own. Then, later when he quit his job to travel the world, Chris and his partner hit over sixty countries, using credit card points to globetrott from South Africa to Singapore! Now, as a father, Chris is more concerned about hacking his time. He’s got kids to take care of and doesn’t want to waste a second of his day that could be spent planning for, or playing with, his children. In today’s episode, you’ll hear some of the most insane life hacks, from hiring a personal chef for a fraction of the cost to getting free champagne at any hotel stay and even snagging twenty to thirty percent off of your dream vacation villa. These hacks work (we tried them in real-time), and you may need a pen and paper to write them all down! In This Episode We Cover Credit card points, travel hacking, and how to get flights for free (or at a steep discount) Outsourcing and delegating everything so you spend more of your time with those who are most important Simple principles for an optimized life and why conventional wisdom is usually out of whack How to get deep discounts off of vacation properties during your next big trip Why you should NEVER cancel a flight until twelve hours before takeoff Where to find “unclaimed money” you never knew you had (we found some ourselves!) And So Much More! Links from the Show Find an Investor-Friendly Real Estate Agent BiggerPockets Money Facebook Group BiggerPockets Forums Finance Review Guest Onboarding Mindy's Twitter Scott's Instagram Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Apply to Be a Guest on The Money Show Podcast Talent Search! Subscribe to The “On The Market” YouTube Channel Listen to The “On The Market” Podcast: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, BiggerPockets Check Out Mindy’s 2022 Live Spending Tracker and Budget All The Hacks Podcast Click here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/money-355 Interested in learning more about today's sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Check out our sponsor page! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast where we interview Chris Hutchins and talk about all the hacks. If you're booking a villa or a, you know, like a house, you're looking on Airbnb. If it's in another country, sometimes this works in the U.S., but off really great in Mexico and overseas, take the image that best represents the property, save it to your computer, go to Google image search and upload it. And chances are there's probably three or four other websites that are a broker for booking that same property. you might find that property somewhere else, and it can be 20, 30% cheaper. You might even find a website that the owner themselves has set up. So there's no extra commission going to the booking agency.

And you could save even more. Hello, hello, hello. My name is Mindy Jensen. And with me, as always, is my hack-fanatic co-host, Scott Tredge. And with me as always is my cyber secure, Mindy Jensen, co-host. Co-host Minnie Jensen, whatever it is. Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else. To introduce you to every money story because we truly believe financial freedom

is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you're starting. That's right. Whether you want to retire early and travel the world, go on to make big time investments in assets like real estate, start your own business, or accumulate a large number of tactical wins that help you advance your financial position. We'll help you reach your financial goals and get money out of the way so you can launch yourself towards those dreams. Scott, I am so excited to talk to Chris Hutchins today from the All the Hacks podcast. He is filled with tips and tricks for making your life a little bit more optimized or a lot more optimized and getting things done in the easiest way possible. He was just an absolute delight

to talk to. And literally the whole episode is tip after tip after tip. And I just loved this show. Yeah. I mean, he's fantastic. He can just rattle off great tips one after the other for the entirety of this show. I mean, he is a wealth of information and definitely encourage folks to learn more about Chris because he is he's an expert in this space. Before we begin, Chris, let's take a quick break. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing. And if you're like most folks, it can be a little eye-opening. That's why I like Monarch. It helps you see exactly where your money is going and more importantly where your tax refund can make the biggest impact.

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Audible has been indispensable for me over over 10 years. Kickstart your well-being journey with your first audiobook free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash BP money. And we're back. Today's guest is Chris Hutchins, the host of the All the Hacks podcast. Chris has an impressive resume filled with big names like Google, Grove, Milk, and Wellfront, and has been featured in The New York Times, a Wall Street Journal and CNBC, but it's his

ability to master ways to hack his life and come up with the easiest way to get something done that truly caught my eye. Today, we're going to talk with Chris about all the hacks. Chris, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. I am so excited to talk to you today. This has been a long time coming. I'm so excited to be here. So let's jump into a little bit of your background before we look at some of your favorite hacks. Where does your journey with money begin? Oh, my journey with money. It's one of these things where I always try to pin it down with my parents and I never get a good answer. I'm like, come on, tell me the childhood story that I can come on a podcast and be like, I had the lemonade stand and then I hired my neighbors to run it. And I don't have a perfect

like childhood money story. There were a bunch of random little like, ooh, I'm going to create a magazine to pretend that I'm in the press to go to concerts for free. But like little, little stories. Wait, what? I wanted to go to concerts as a kid in high school. And so I just made like a fake magazine and print it out on paper so that I could just kind of like go and be like, oh, I have this cool zine about music. Can I come to this concert as a press person? And it worked for shows that were 500 people shows, like in a church basement kind of shows. It was not, it was not like I was going to a, you know, a giant stadium concert. But it still got you free tickets into a concert. That's like, so your life hacking skills started when you were in high school. Yeah, but,

but there's not like a journey. It's just like a random thing that was like, hmm, how do I get into this thing? Or in high school, another one was I went to boarding school. And, and, you know, And there were a lot of people to go to boarding school to have a ton of money. My parents didn't give me this allowance and this credit card that allowed me to do whatever I wanted. But I loved pizza and everyone was always ordering pizza. And so what I did was I would just order Domino's pizza and I would sell the slices at enough of a markup that I would get two slices every night. So I feel like my whole life was just like boarding school was a good example because everyone had their parents credit card except me. So I had to find ways to make money and kind of keep up.

And so I convinced the school to hire me to run the mailroom because I was like, then I can make some money. I don't know. And then I could curry favors because I was like, oh, I can unlock the mailroom after hours if you didn't get your package. So, you know, my life is full of these like random things. But the kind of broader, bigger picture financial story kind of came after college. I took a job in investment banking and management consulting. I took two jobs because I didn't know what I wanted to do. and I had two offers that started nine months after each other. And I didn't have the time to figure out what career path I wanted because I was late to the game. So I was like, asked friends, what's the best job? And they're like, manager consulting, investment banking. I was like, I'll do those.

And I hated both of them. So nine months into the first one, I said, I'm not going to do this. And I took the other offer that I'd already accepted. I went to work there. And I was like, wow, if I don't love working, what am I going to do? Like, I have 50, 60, 70, 80 years left in my life. And if I don't like working, I'm screwed. So I was like, I have to save every dollar and find a way to be very optimal because otherwise I'm going to be stuck doing a job I don't love.

And so not knowing at the time that there was a fire movement, not knowing all of this stuff, not having read Mr. Money Mustaches blog, I was just, I need to find line item by line item a way to reduce all the costs on, you know, my spending so that I can save as much money as possible. So I don't have to work a job I don't love because my naive self was like, well, I've only had two jobs, but I didn't love either of them. So I must not like working. what do I do? I disagree with you. I think the broader story is you going back to high school, always looking for ways to figure things out instead of playing by the rules. Yes. Because the rules are you work for 40 years and then you retire at age 65 and the rules are you pay for concerts and the rules are you buy a pizza or you don't eat a pizza. You don't sell it by the slice. Why would you do that? there's I love that you are always looking for ways to I don't want to say like get well you're looking

for ways to hack your life you're looking for ways to hack the system it's funny I I was working with this woman to I hired someone who helped me figure out what are my like life principles like if I were ever going to write a book what how do I distill everything I think about the world into something that is not just you know a five hour rambling story and And over the course of a month and a half, we kind of came up with like, what are the principles of living an optimized life? Mine. And the first one is that conventional wisdom sucks, which I think is where you're going. It's like, I always, when someone says, oh, this is how it works? Even when it's like normally accepted, I'm just like, is it? Like, is there another way to do this?

Like, maybe that's actually not correct. Maybe this other thing will work. And that's like the guiding principle. And then there's a bunch of others that we kind of came up with after talking this. And now I'm like, ooh, now I have nine principles for living an optimized life. Now I've got to figure out how to put more of them into pros and something that someone could read. Can you roll through a couple more of those principles, please? Yeah. So the next one was question the outcome you think you want. So I think a great example of this is someone says, you know, I need more money.

It's like, well, why do you need more money? Oh, I need more money so I can retire early. Well, why do you want to retire early? Oh, I want to retire early because I want to spend time with my family. It's like, well, what if you found a way that you could, you know, find a job. that gave you a little bit more time now and then you had time to spend with your family. Or hypothetically, maybe you decide you want to be a teacher and you get summers off and you spend all the summers with your kids and you don't have to. So like there are, if what you really want

is that you want more flexibility to spend time with your family, like the only way you might get there is questioning the original outcome you thought you wanted, which was, oh, I need more money to retire early. And so that was one. Another one I think is I really believe in structured information gathering. We have a note on this one that's come up with a catchier way to say this. whenever I'm collecting information about anything, I try to figure out how I can structure it before I do any research. So my wife and I were deciding, gosh, our daughter's two. Our neighbor has a daughter and she's going to ballet class. We're like, should we be sending our daughter to like a class or something, gymnastics?

I don't know. And so I was like, well, let's figure out what all the options are. But instead of just doing casual research, I was like, let's build a page in our notion board. And let's like figure out what we want to collect. How often does it run? How much does it cost? like how far away is it, you know, how older are the kids in it and all this stuff. And now we have this little like mini database that when I go to my wife, she's like,

oh, well, what could she do on Wednesdays? Because she doesn't have preschool. I don't have to go back out and do all this other research. I've already kind of like collected in an optimal way. And it forces me to think about what I want to get out of learning when I'm trying to do research. And then I end up finding more optimal outcomes because I just, I've been able to collect more information in a structured way. So that's three of them.

Where can people find all of the principles that you have here? Nowhere, yeah. That's the, like, these are fresh. So what of my jobs actually, you know, if you want more, email me, you know, Chris at all the hacks.com and we can, I can get some feedback. But the conversation I had with Sarah Stibbitts, who's this person who's excellent at helping people distill their thoughts on the world into, you know, principles or a framework, we just came up with them.

These are like draft form days old, and I'm still supposed to go and test them and see how they should be iterated. So this is not something ready for prime time, but you know, you heard it here first. Well, for a show on hacks, we really started with the deep core fundamentals to get going here. So this is awesome. Where is a resource or what's something that we could link to in the show notes where people could learn more about this concept before we move into some of the other discussions we want to have today?

the concept of coming up with these like life principles. Yes. I wish that I had a place. Maybe I'll come up with like all the hacks.com slash principles and I'll put my draft principles there. I don't know if I'll get it done, but you know, I'll lease a landing page or something. If you subscribe to the newsletter I put together, I'm going to write a newsletter to test this out. But it might be a couple weeks.

So I don't know. This is so fresh on top of my mind. I don't have a place for it yet. For now, it's something to consider life principles. Go Google it and try to figure out. ways to research if you're interested in learning more. Yeah. I mean, Ray Dalio wrote a book about life principles that I think was a little bit of inspiration of just like what would mine be. But for me, it's less about life and more about optimizing your life. Like the thing that I feel like is my thing.

Yeah, I think that is your thing. Let's talk about optimizing your life. What is your absolute favorite optimization under any category at all that you have ever come up with besides, you know, the free concert tickets in high school? That would have been my favorite. favorite. No, no. Oh, man, it's really, I mean, there's like the obvious favorites and the like kind of obscure favorites. So like the obvious favorite is that my wife and I have traveled extensively on credit card points. But I feel like that's not like unique enough to come out and be like, oh, my favorite life hack is like earn points and take trips for free. Though it doesn't have to be some brand new thing that nobody's ever thought of. That's a really great life hack is I just spent this year $6,000 on airfare.

because I was going to Germany with my daughter, but she was going on a school trip, and the school trip gets a huge discount, and they can book whenever they want. And Lufthansa's like, yeah, you already buy like 5,000 tickets a year. So whenever. But I only buy three tickets once on Lufthansa. They're like, you can pay full price. So if I would have thought about it in advance, I could have gotten a Chase Ultimate Rewards credit card and started earning those points and transfer them over to Lufthansa when it was time to buy

with three weeks notice, even though I knew that I was going on this trip for 18 months. So being able to travel extensively for almost nothing is a great life hack. I think that's one of the best life hacks out there. Where have you gone? What have you done? Yeah, I mean, I've done the tally. It's probably 65, 66 countries at this point. Oh, my God.

That's, okay, so that's not just to grandma's. No, no. We've been all over. I mean, we hit a lot of places once where we took a trip. We flew one way to South Africa. We quit our jobs. And we just said, we're going to figure out where we go. And we ended up mostly overland trekking from South Africa to Singapore on trains and buses and hitchhiking and all kinds of stuff.

Yeah, all the way up Africa, through the Middle East, through India and Southeast Asia. And so, but for us, travel was the thing that we wanted to do that, you know, wasn't in the budget. Right. If you look, we were trying to, this was early on. My wife and I have been together since 2004, so a long time. And when we were just kind of living on our post college budgets, we were like, well, how do we do all the things we want to do and not run out of money? And, you know, there are ways to hack housing, you know, house hacking. I'm sure you've had plenty of episodes on that. Like there's ways to, you know, eat for cheaper. But travel was this thing where it's like, there's not really a way to get a flight to Europe or to Asia for $7. Unless you play the points of miles game, which is why I think that that became this one huge item on our budget that the only way to get rid of was either to not do it, which we didn't think was what we wanted or to play the game. And so that one for us has let us take, I don't know, all kinds of things. We've done, you know, we've been to so many places. Like Japan is awesome. Namibia was one of our favorites. Thailand and the whole Southeast Asia circuit was amazing and so cheap. So it's like once you get there, if you can use your points to just cross the ocean and land

there, then all of a sudden it's really cheap. So I think most of our travel has optimized around going to places that once you're there where it's not as easy to use points in miles, it's a lot less expensive. So, you know, my wife and I have never been to the UK. You know, we've never like a lot of these like mainstream like, I was joking with my wife. we've been to all over the world, but she's never been to London. And I've only been because I went once as a small kid, but like, we haven't gone to the expensive places. Japan aside. We've been to Japan a few times because it's just like our favorite place. Can you tell us what you did to earn all

of those points, how you optimize them? And what, if anything, is available today? Because I know that the reward systems change. And so that many of the hacks you probably used are not available. And then there are new ones that have taken their place. So I think the biggest thing is there's kind of like two main ways to earn points. One is just make sure that every time you're spending money on a monthly basis, you're putting it on a card that optimizes where you spend money. So if all your money is being spent on groceries, the Amex gold card gets four points per dollar on groceries. There are a lot of card, you know, the Amex platinum card, which someone might be like, ooh, that's even better. It gets one point on groceries. So like, it's not, there's not a one size fits all solution for

everyone. And so I always say, look at where you spend the bulk of your money. If it's travel and dining, Chase Sapphire preferred, reserve, great options. You know, it kind of depends. If you spend all your money at Home Depot, there's not like a great option. So you might get a card like the Capital One Venture or Venture X that just earns two points on everything. So that's one. And then the other is that credit card issuers, banks, you know, give massive bonuses to try to lure new customers to use their products. And so if you sign up for a credit card, you know, you can get anywhere from, if you're picking the right opportunities, let's say anything 75 to 150,000 miles or points to open a new card and spend some number of thousands of dollars in 90 days. And so a lot of my points have come from that.

And you just, you know, oh, there's a new card. It's got a 100,000 point sign up bonus. Let's sign up for that one. And I'll say before going any deeper on this, no amount of points is worth paying interest on any of these cards. So if anyone listening right now is like, I need to pay off my credit card bills, do that first. This is not going to outweigh the, you know, the 17, 25% APRs at all. So if that's the circumstance you're in, this is not the game for you yet. But I promise there is another episode of this wonderful podcast that will help you think about how to save and pay off debt. So I have one little tip about your credit cards. You just said that the Amex gold gives you four points for groceries. So now I need to go get one of those. But you can have more than

one card at a time. And what you should do is if you can't remember, especially if you have like 50 different credit cards in your wallet, write on the top of the credit card what you're using it for. I have a card that has an address on it because it's for that house. That is the only thing I use that card for is to put purchases for that house on that card. I don't want to mistakenly use it for another house or another project. So I don't. And I'm going to get this Amex gold and write groceries on there because I want to make sure I use it for groceries. I've got a Costco card that's, I think, three or four points per dollar for gas when you're at Costco.

So write on these cards so you're using them in the most optimal way. But what I do is I have a hotel points card. I have a Costco card. And I think we have a Southwest card as well, just because that's where we travel the most. So we're constantly earning points for these things that we are using anyway. Yeah, and I'll say with the advent of Apple Pay, I feel like, you know, I'm not carrying all these cards around anymore. So I'm going to give a plug for an app that's really fantastic called card pointers. And it's basically load all the cards you have in.

The one great thing that I know anyone that cares about, you know, information, security or privacy, this is not an app where you go link your accounts and they like pull down all your spending data and you have to share your passwords. This is just, I have these cards. And they'll just say, okay, here's the card of your arsenal of cards that is best for, each category. It works really well if you're trying to do this with a partner that's maybe not you know, as excited as you are. You say, hey, let me just load this up and then you have an app. They can open the app and it's like just a crib sheet for what to use where. Probably helps with categorizing expenses as well because they're all the same buckets of

spending that are going on one card. Yeah, I think if you go to all the hacks.com slash deals, there's a card pointers deal there if you use their pro pro. If you sign up for pro. But it's a great I use it. I pay for it. I think it's an easy way to give it. And I helped set it up for my mom once. I was like, hey, you have three cards. Here are the settings for you. You know. Okay. This is obviously the best hack is the travel hacking. What's the most unusual hack that you love? I think one that it seems so obvious, but somehow it just never came to me. And I, I've shared this with you before we recorded. I know you love it. We were trying to go through this process after we had a child. We're like, gosh, we don't have time, right? We used to have all this free time. Then you have one kid. And then you

you have less free time, but there's only one kid, so one of you could slip away. And then we have two kids. And we're like, now we have no time. Because, you know, when we're not working, like, we have to be on the kids. And so what are we going to do? And we started going through, what are all the things in our life that take time, uh, that we could outsource? And there are the obvious ones. You know, you probably all either have or know someone that has someone who could help clean your house or you could drop off your laundry, uh, to get it washed and these things. And, we had someone help clean the house, but we did our own laundry. I think my wife would never want someone else deciding what gets dried, what does it, never in a million years. And then someone,

I don't remember who was like, well, what if you outsource your meals? And I was like, well, we're not going to outsource to a chef. Like, we're not the kind of people that have the money to just have some chef come over and cook us fancy dinners. And someone had told me, oh, no, no, no, there's people that'll just like prep meals for the week. Like you send them five recipes, they'll go to the grocery store, they'll make them, they'll put them in Tupperware and drop them off at your house. And I was like, really? So I made an ad on Craigslist. And I'll even send you guys a link if you want to put it in the show notes of like, here's the ad I made. And I got like five or seven people wrote back. And for, I think I did the math, about half the cost if I were to like order DoorDash

for dinners, for about half of what DoorDash would cost, someone went to the grocery store, bought all the ingredients, cooked meals, and dropped them off twice a week so that we had each time two days, of enough food for two dinners and leftovers for lunches. And so basically it was this woman who just like, I like to cook. She was not a professionally trained chef. She's just like, I like to cook and I can follow directions, you know, in a recipe. And sometimes she's like, I have some ideas. Can I try this recipe?

And it was the best thing ever. So for like six months and my wife and I love to cook. But for six months, we just didn't have the time. And we were just trying to get into the right routine. And we didn't have to think about it. And it was the best thing ever. That is my favorite hack because I've never heard it before, first of all, like the travel points, I love that. But like you said, that's not a new hack.

This I've never heard before. And I absolutely love that because it can be so hard to find the time to cook sometimes. You're like, well, I don't want to go out to dinner, but you kind of, that's the only option. Or, you know, DoorDash, which is also very expensive. Or, you know, we've had meal plans that sponsor the show. Those are awesome. But if you haven't already ordered those, what are you going to eat tonight? Or you have to cook them.

Like if you have meals delivered, even if they chop up the ingredients for you and get it already, you still need time. This, it's take something out of the fridge, put it in the oven for 15 minutes, and you know, you don't have to sit and watch the oven cook. You know, like you can step away. And so that was just amazing. And then we started thinking, gosh, are there other things? And unfortunately, we couldn't find any other like huge unlocks in our life.

Though I'm now thinking, you know, I've never been. one to hire a virtual assistant, but what we've been doing is cataloging various tasks that could make sense for an online virtual assistant. And one that sounds so silly, but takes like 20, 30 minutes, is we put, now we're cooking and we have this app called paprika, which is like a recipe manager app and a meal planning app because my wife and I were like, gosh, we kind of miss cooking. Let's bring that back. And we might, you know, go back and forth, cook for six months, go back. And I was like, we have all these recipes. I just need someone to go through all the recipes and put them all in a list and then just add them to our Amazon fresh cart.

And I'm like, I wonder if that's a task for, you know, a virtual assistant or these sites like fancy hands where you buy like five, 15 minute tasks a month or something for $20. So that's something we're going to experiment with next is are there little kind of research driven tasks like, oh, we need to get our dog vaccinated. We haven't found a vet. Can you just call around and find a vet that can get them in this week? You know, like little tasks like that will, you know, maybe they take you 15, 20 minutes. but those things add up.

And at the end of the day, if you spent 15 minutes three times, you know, you almost spent a whole hour of your day doing these things that you could have spent, I don't know, working, reading, hanging out with your kids, relaxing, sleeping. So for me, I'm trying to find these things. I'm trying to catalog them so that I can kind of really feel like I have something to fill the time if I had five tasks a month. I want to fill them all. Okay.

The most surprising thing that you just said is that you have not yet hired a virtual assistant. Is that something you guys both do and I'm just like late to the game? No, no. I'm just way behind you. I just, we have virtual assistants at bigger pockets, but I don't have one for my personal life. I have experimented with personal assistants in the past, including back in college a few times. What was the funnest one that you had your virtual assistant do, Scott?

I had the virtual assistant call my mom for me. and hear about her day. That didn't go over too well. I don't advise that one. But now that you can break it up into like, I only need an out, like I'm looking at fancy hands and it's like three requests a month, five requests a month.

Like you don't need to go hire a full-time assistant. And you could have people do everything from research to scheduling things. I could have done, when I described earlier, trying to research all the classes that, you know, our daughter could go to. That probably took me 45 minutes. But, you know, I could have found someone that could do that.

So I don't know. I'm starting to think about whether I'm going to have enough tasks that it would make sense. So outsourcing things. You know, I like to calendar audit. So like, where am I spending my time? Am I spending a lot of time on things that someone else could do that would give me more leverage on my time to do the things? Ideally, that could earn money so that I could make up for the fact that I just hired someone to do these other things. I think the framework here is whether or not you articulate it like this, you have a very clear understanding of the value of

your time and you know these things are below that threshold and value and these things are above it. And I am generally at max capacity. Therefore, if I have a good handle on that, everything above below the threshold needs to get outsourced in some way to somebody else. And if you can do that, that's great. And you know, for those listening, a great tool for that is if you earn a hundred thousand dollars a year, then you can compute the value of your time at $50 per hour.

That's all pre-tax. might be a little less than that after tax, but that's a great way to compute, you know, that's $2,000 hours per year at $50 an hour, gets you to $100,000, an annual income. So if you're doing tasks that are $10 an hour or $15 an hour, like going to the store, shopping and cooking, perhaps, then that may be a good arbitrage like it was for Chris. Otherwise, you may, you know, you'll need to do that. And that number should move over time. So I really struggled with that because I was like, well, but it's not like my employer is going to give me more money if I work a little more.

So the thing that I finally did was I signed up to be a Lyft driver. And I did one ride. And I was like, oh, my wife had worked at Lyft. So I was like, oh, this is kind of fun. I get to go do the thing the company you work at. So I gave a ride. And I was like, oh, now at any point in time, I could open an app and flip a switch and start making in the Bay Area right now. I think it's like $30 an hour or something.

So now I struggled with, could I really value my time at $50 an hour? Because if I spend this, if I don't spend this hour researching, you know, activities for my daughter, I'm not actually going to make $50. Now I sign up for Lyft and now I know if I'm not, like, if I want to make $50 or $30 in the next hour, I have a way to do it. And that immediately made me think, okay, every hour I'm not turning this on, I'm with go, you know, I'm foregoing $30 an hour, which means that I should be able to. spend $30 an hour for someone else to do something. So for me, it needed that one extra step of actually creating a simple way to show myself that I could go make that money at an hourly rate. Even though that might be lower than my hourly rate at my job, it at least put a floor that was like, if I'm just hanging out doing nothing, like, I know that I could be making $30 an hour.

And so that changed everything for me. And now I'm like, well, if it's not worth $30 an hour to pay someone, then why am I not out there earning that $30 an hour? So that helped me get comfortable. Love it. You just take that a step further and go to the marginal value of the addition of the next hour worked. So you're an economist. Yeah, I try. And I just want to loop back quick because I don't know if we're going to get back to travel, but there are a couple cool fun travel hacks I want to throw in there. One of my favorites is when you book a hotel, book it directly with the hotel. And here's the reason. So hotels are still in the hospitality business. And they love building relationships with customers because the loyal repeat business is what drives a lot of revenue for them.

So, and if you book on Expedia Travelocity, they kind of don't really get that opportunity because the channel between the consumer is with Expedia Travelocity. So you book directly with the hotel. You get their email either on their website or call the front desk and email them and just say, hey, here's my confirmation number. I'm coming on this day. I'm really excited to stay with you. If you're celebrating anything, let them know. Then a few days before reply and just say, hey, just wanted to follow up. We're still on track to be here in a couple days.

Really excited. I have gotten hundreds of emails, Twitter messages, you know, Instagram footposts of people who've gotten upgrades, gift baskets, wine, free cocktails at the bar, their parking comp, free breakfast, all the way to my favorite, which was their initials embroidered on the pillow in the room, all for sending an email. So like if you want a hack that will get you something for nothing, it's just send the email to the hotel and see what happens. I'm not going to promise it'll work every time. But if it's the kind of hotel that has room service and could deliver, you know, chocolate-covered strawberries or a bottle of wine to your room, I think it'll probably work if I had to peg it 40, 50% of the time. That's awesome.

And you could hire a VA to do that for you. I probably could have. Yeah. I'll add it to the list of tasks. Every time I book a hotel for the confirmation, have that person go and send that. Yeah, so I'm a big, like, nerd on the travel hacking, I think it's like the core. I always tell people the podcast, all the hacks. It's like one third all about travel, one third about money, and one third about life.

And life is career. It could be hosting cocktail parties. It could be anything you do. But the travel side is like where I think I find all these kind of weird crazy things. Chris, these are fantastic. Let's go, let's fly through a bunch more of these tips. What else you got for hotels or other travel tips? Okay, I got a couple cool travel ones.

one, if you're booking a villa or a, you know, like a house, you know, you're looking on Airbnb. If it's in another country, sometimes this works in the U.S., but often really great in Mexico and overseas, take the image that best represents the property, save it to your computer, go to Google image search, and upload it. And chances are there's probably three or four other websites that are a broker for booking that same property. So you might find, you know, some local version of Airbnb in Mexico. There's a site called Cabo Villas, which is like great for booking villas in Cabo. Like you might find that property somewhere else and it can be 20, 30 percent cheaper. You might even find a website that the owner

themselves has set up. So there's no extra commission going to the booking agency. And you could save even more. So that's one. If you're flying international, don't always look from where you live to where you're going when you're searching for flights. First off, I do all my flight searching on Google flights. I think it's the best tool. You don't book there. You go book on the airlines website, but Google flights is where I start when I'm using dollars to book a flight. If you're using points, it's a whole different ballgame. But if you're using dollars, Google flights, you can put open-ended things like San Francisco up to one stop, go anywhere and look at a map in July for one-week trips. Like, you can do all this crazy stuff. But if you were trying to get from where I live,

San Francisco to Santorini in Greece, there's like three airlines that fly all the legs necessary to get you there. But if you say, I want to go from San Francisco to Athens, there's probably 15 airlines that can get you to Athens. And the flight from Athens to Santorini is like $50. So if you're looking to go anywhere that's a little bit off the beaten path, it's not a major city, maybe it's an island, maybe it's a small town. Just try to buy your ticket to the like the closest destination. people call these like positioning flights get yourself really close to where you want to go and then just do that last leg separately because the way all these flight searches work is they're all looking for some carrier and their partners that will get you the entire way there

very few of them will pair up like you know in the u.s like a southwest flight with a leftanza flight like you probably never seen that happen so if you were in germany trying to do this and you're like i want to get to seattle it's like we're only looking at places that united and leftanza work together because they're partners. So that's one. I love if you're booking car rentals. Auto slash is this great website where you can go in and just say like, here's where I'm booking.

And even if you've already booked separately, they'll just continually monitor for you. And if they find a cheaper price, they'll say, hey, we found a lower price. And because almost all car rentals, you can just cancel the reservation and book it, book it again. They really help with that. And then if you're not booking with a credit card that has all the travel benefits, you know, delayed bags, lost bags, trip delay cancellation, evacuation stuff, make sure you do that. And then just stay on top of, you know, if you have something come up, make sure you cancel it.

If you have something come up, there's a little tiny hack that doesn't always work. But if you need to cancel a flight, if you know you're not going to take that flight, I always wait until like 12 hours before to cancel it because every now and then there's a schedule change or a delay or something and then you get to cancel it for free. A lot of the airlines now will let you cancel for free, but you get credit. But we were in Hawaii, and we kind of wanted to come back a day early. And so we booked a Southwest flight the day early, but we didn't cancel our other flight until we were ready to leave. And sure enough, they changed the flight.

And they're like, hey, if you need to cancel it, no cost, you can't. Because they pushed it back by four hours. So I always wait to cancel flights. That's, I mean, look, I've got a whole, I probably have 15 episodes on travel hacking. So we could probably do the next three hours on this, you know, I've got, go check out more there, but I don't know, those are some of my favorite travel hacks. That was fantastic. What's another category of hacks that, you know, outside of travel that you have?

I'll call this like spending money. It's pretty broad, but I'll put in the money category. There are a few ones that I love here. So one, Amazon Smile. It's like this site where you could basically, if you buy everything through Amazon Smile, it's basically you get to buy the same stuff that's on Amazon, except Amazon will donate 1% to charity. So that's a cool one, help other people.

I think that if you have a family and you look at the cost of buying memberships to zoos and museums, it's because most of them are all nonprofits when you join the membership to the zoo or the museum, it's a taxable, it's a tax deductible donation to a charity. And if you factor that in, most zoos and museums, and we're talking like science museum or history museum or art museum, most of them end up. costing about 25% more and sometimes even as little as less when you factor in the tax deduction. So we had family in town for Thanksgiving a year ago and we all wanted to go to the Oakland Zoo. And to get a membership to the Oakland Zoo that included four guests and kids was the exact same price after you factored in the tax deduction as just buying all the tickets.

So we just got the membership to the zoo. And then for the next year, we've been able to go to the zoo for free. I do want to tag on to your zoo tip with my museum tip that I think I got from Jillian Johns Rood from Montana Money Adventures. Your Nature and Science Museum membership is good at something like 360 Science and Nature Museums around the country that are more than 90 miles outside of your home museum. So we are close to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. So any museum within a 90-mile radius, my membership wouldn't get me into.

But there's a list of more than 360. I'm on their website right now. There's a list of more than 360 science centers and museums that you can get into with your museum pass. And I think actually somebody up in Oregon told me this as well. There's a Portland museum that's pretty interesting. So it doesn't work with zoos, I don't think, but it works with science museums. around the country. There's another version of that that a lot of zoos have. So if you're in a,

if you have a science museum, you might be able to go to the science museums. If you're in a zoo one, you might be able to go to the zoo ones. Or there's actually a museum in the Bay Area called Curi Odyssey. It's like half zoo, half science. And I think they're in both. So we have a membership there. Yeah, it's wild. And, you know, I don't know, kids love it. So it's like anytime you're traveling, you're like, oh, what's the free museum we can go spend the afternoon in? Because we made, you know, we made a one-time donation, you know, in the last year at our local one. The other fun one, library extension, you know, you installed this browser extension. And when you're browsing Amazon, it'll just tell you whether your local library has the book

that you're looking at either available in digital download right away format or check out at the library. So, you know, you're looking at a library. You're like, oh, I'm about to buy this book. Or you're looking at Amazon. You're about to buy a book. It's like, oh, I could just literally download the Kindle version of this book right now for free from my local library.

Ooh, that's a good tip. Unclaimed money. I don't know if you've talked about this a lot, but there's a website for every state where you can just go search whether there's money owed to you. Anytime I'm, so, you know, that's probably like the version one of it. Go see if anyone owes you money.

I just cash a check for $1. So sometimes you get a check in the mail that's not really, you know, it might not be worth your time to cash it. But on the flip side, that website's also a place where people can go find your address because they just need your name and your city and they confirm your address. So I like to clear all my unclaimed money out. But I also, anytime I'm going to a friend's house for dinner or something, I'm like, oh, I got your address.

I got your name. I go look them up and I show up to dinner. And I'm like, oh, I brought a bottle of wine. But I also found that Verizon owes you $35. So if you want to go to this website, you can get a free $35. And so that's my like party hack is bringing unclaimed money. What is this website? So every state has a website where you can go search a database of unclaimed money or unclaimed property.

So California has one. that I've gone to because I live here. And you can search by last name and city and find out whether you have unclaimed money anywhere. So, you know, while I get through any other ones, go look and see if you find any unclaimed money. We can have a live report. Yeah, I'm doing this right now. I found $1,000 once. I don't remember what it was for. But I was like, how do I not remember $1,000? It was really crazy. By the way, no one knows me money. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing. And if you're like most folks,

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I did a whole episode on this if it's interesting about paying your medical bills. And there's these crazy things that happen where your insurance might only cover. a certain amount. And so they're only allowed to bill you for that amount. But it's legal for these companies to send you the bill for the rest. So I fractured my foot and they gave me a walking boot. And it was like the cheapest, crappiest walking boot you get at the hospital relative to the really nice one on Amazon for $50. And I got a bill in the mail for $350. And I was like, I could buy a better version of this for $50. This is crazy. And I had been in touch with this person who eventually came on the podcast, Marshall Allen, who wrote this book,

never pay the first bill. And I reached out to him and he was like, oh, well, here's what can happen. Your insurance might have only covered $50. So it was a $400 boot and they can make up whatever price they want. This is a $400 boot. Insurance says, no, no, no, we're only paying $50. It's legal for them to send you a letter that says, hey, the rest of this boot was $350 that your insurance didn't cover.

Now, what they don't make clear is that the letter actually says, if you, out of the goodness of your heart, want to pay the rest of the $350 you are welcome to, but you are under no legal obligation to, the letter shows up and looks like a bill that's like your insurance didn't cover the rest. You owe $3.50. And so over the course of getting shingles, I went to emergency room twice because I had no idea what was going on and it was excruciatingly painful. And I got all these medical bills that my insurance covered most of. And people were just like, oh, do you want to pay the extra fee? You know, the doctor at the insurance, even though the ER was in network, the doctor wasn't.

And so if you want to pay this extra, you can. And through a series of, you know, following his book and, like, playing through these tactics, I ended up owing nothing extra. But I got bills for hundreds and thousands of dollars. And one of them I thought was legitimate and I paid $52 and they gave it back to me once the insurance company finally settled it all. But a lot of people, if you have gone and paid these and your insurance company eventually settles it all, that's where you might be owed money because the hospital might be like, oh, we couldn't find them. And eventually they have to hand that money over to the state, and then the state holds on to it.

Well, I just checked all three states that I have lived in recently, and nobody owes me money anymore. That was a great tip about the legal, or the health bills. That's awesome. I had no idea that that's the case. Yeah, on the health side, like, never pay the first bill. I mean, like, Marshall Allen wrote the book. I'm not going to coin the phrase. But, like, if you get a bill from a medical provider, there are like 10 steps you can follow.

I did a whole episode. We walked through all of it. there's a book, do not pay the first bill you get. There's like 10 reasons that we don't have time to get into about how you could argue not paying that bill, getting your insurance company to cover it. You know, there's some laws in different states about not being able to charge you for out-of-network things at an in-network facility that just changed. So that was a great one.

On the health side, I learned this trick when I was working at Google. Just like hide the unhealthy things at your house if you feel like you have to have them. Google basically at one point was like, well, we don't want to get rid of the M&Ms because people like M&Ms. And we don't want to get rid of the Coke because there are people that really want this. And we don't want to be mad. But they would black out the fridge, the section of the fridge would blacked out with the coax behind it. And then above that where there's like waters and other things, it was not blacked out. And then the jars on the counter with like, you know, healthier snacks were clear glass.

And the other ones were completely blacked out. And they found that they just massively reduced the amount of unhealthy snacks. and drinks people were consuming without having to remove them. So if you have healthy snacks at home, you don't have to get rid of them, though that's probably the best move. You could also just obfuscate the cover of them and hide them in less convenient places. Or my favorite on there is just give yourself five minutes every time. So if you see this cookie and you're like, I really want that cookie.

Just say, you know what, I can have the cookie in five minutes. Don't tell yourself you can't have it because now you're depriving yourself and that's depressing. But if you tell yourself you can have it in five minutes, you feel really good. good about walking away because you know in five minutes you can eat it but 90% of the time in that five minutes you've gone and done something else and forgotten about it love by the way um since me and mindy are continuing to giving you updates my wife is owed between 11 and 49 dollars you are welcome as a dinner guest anytime chris look at that i hope it's on the 49 side yeah no bottle of wine necessary so great i want an update what it was yeah we'll have to figure it out later

back to the spending. This kind of goes in line with with kind of my shopping strategy. If I'm buying something online, you know, a lot of people know that you can go to Racketon and you can sign up and get cashback. And there's a bunch of other sites to do that. I love cashback monitor because it basically says here's all the cashback websites that you could get. So the way it would work is you want to buy something on a website. You go see if they have the ability to click a link on one of these shopping portal sites and then you earn cashback or a lot of the credit card companies. So Chase has a portal.

You buy it through their portal. You earn one or two percent back in points. So that's like level one. I kind of go a little crazier sometimes. So if I'm trying to buy something, I will go as far as to see if I can find or even buy coupons. So there's this website that's like, I think it's save letter n deals.com, I think.

I'll double check. But I buy Home Depot and Lowe's gift cards online. and so you can basically go to this website and you pay. They have like crate and barrel coupon. Oh, I bought it for crate and barrel. This couch in the background, I got like 10 or 20% off by buying a crate and barrel gift card on the internet. And so I'll always look to see if there's a way that I can find coupons or buy coupons

because if you're buying a couch, spending $4 to get a coupon that saves you 15% is totally worth it. And then if that doesn't work, I will go and buy gift cards. cards for the retailer, but I'll do it wherever I get the most points. So for example, if I needed to buy a, we just bought a, we just renovated bathroom, so we need to buy a toilet. And I really wanted to splurge for like little Japanese toilet, built in toilet seat, heated seats, all the, all the good stuff. And so we wanted it at Lowe's and I was like, okay, I need to buy this. So I bought a Lowe's coupon. That brought the price down by 10 or 15%. And then I was like, well, how do I get the rest of it? So I went to the grocery store where I get four points per dollar.

on my Amex gold card, and I bought Lowe's gift cards. Because if I use my credit card at Lowe's, I'm just going to get one or two points per dollar. But if I use my card at the grocery store, I'm getting four. And so I'm getting the four points on the gift cards. So then I buy the toilet with the coupon. I plugged in the coupon. I went through the shopping portal link to get one or two percent back. I'm paying with gift cards that I got four points per dollar for.

And at the grocery store, usually don't get variable amount gift cards. And so, you know, that brought it down to like, there's still $75 or $80. Then you can go to Amazon and you can buy an $80, you can buy a gift card to the exact amount you need and gets delivered and fulfilled instantly. I got the Amazon gift card for, or I got the Amazon credit card for 5% back on Amazon. So all in, I think it was like 25% off by stacking cashback portals, buying coupons online, and then using the right gift card.

And then my, if you can't find a coupon online, my hack there is just pop up the live chat on any website and just ask for a discount. 50% of the time, I just say, hey, I'm shopping on your site. I really would love these floor mats. We got a new car. There's another format that's a little less expensive, but I love yours. What can you do? And I've gotten, hey, here's a gift card.

Or, hey, refresh your cart by clicking this link and you'll see that I've discounted your price. Or one time someone's like, I can't do you anything, but if you search social media for someone's referral link, you'll get 20% off. So I go to search.com and I'm like, you know, referral name of company. and I find someone who is inevitably posted their referral link on the internet. So anytime I'm buying something online that's over, I don't know, $50 or something where this is worth the effort, I try to stack as many of the things as I can to earn as much back or get as much of a deal as I can. I'm just speechless at all the ways that you can.

I mean, I thought I was frugal. Yeah, this is pretty impressive. I'm not getting, I'm screwing up left and right compared to you. Look, you can go off the deep end here, right? I could do this when I'm like, I need to buy a hammer and like, how can I get my $11 hammer down to, you know, $9 and spend 45 minutes saving $2. And honestly, I think maybe the satisfaction I get from saving that $2 is probably worth an amount equivalent to 30 or 45 minutes.

But now that I have two kids, maybe that's gone down. So I will say you can go too far. I think a good example of this is I realize part of this own claimed money thing, I was like, gosh, my my information's on the internet. We have kids. Like, I have a podcast. I don't really need the whole world knowing where I live. And if you Google yourself, you'll find, oh, wow, there is probably your address and your

phone number and your email address are probably available on the public internet for anyone to find. And so I was like, I got to get rid of this. So I started doing some research. And there's like 600 data brokers who sell your personal information to each other and publish it all over the web. And I was like, you know what? I'm not going to pay a service to go do this.

And then I was like, let's go find the 600 data brokers, go to each of their websites, request them, remove my information. And like five hours into it, I was like, what am I doing? And so I found this company, delete me. I went and signed up. And for like $100, they contact all 600 data brokers and have them all remove all of your personal information off the internet everywhere.

And now, you know, I challenge you to find my personal address or phone number on the internet because it's been scrubbed. And then, you know, in true optimization fashion, I went, step further and I emailed them. I was like, hey, guys, I love your product. I just used it. I got rid of all my information. I have this podcast. I want to talk about it. Do you guys want to be a sponsor of the podcast? And so now they're a sponsor. All the hacks.com slash delete me, get 20% off. But I thought like half of my sponsors ended up coming from me just finding a product I love and reaching out to them and saying, I love your product. Can I talk about it to my audience?

And most of those products are ways to optimize your life in some way, shape, or form. So there's a great example of it was not like figure out how long something's going to take, find out if it's going to be worth your time and whether there's a service that'll do it. So my wife got caught in this trap once. We have a small children and she was thinking, oh, it's time to start feeding our children. Food. We were like, what are we going to cut it in? What are we going to serve them?

How do they get a variety of foods? And she was doing all this research. And I was like, gosh, wouldn't it be great if someone just made a meal plan for like the first hundred days your kid eats and it just has all the ideas of everything there. And she's like, oh, I found one on the internet, but it's $30 or something. And I was like, you just spent the last like seven hours. I was like, can we just pay the $30? So I think we went, you know, this swings both directions. It's like not optimal. Now it's so optimal. And now we're finding that middle ground where it's like, you know what, this is either worth our time or at the end of the day, the incremental value from

picking the best of the three incredible hotels we could stay at in our budget is just not worth it. All three are going to be fine. Pull the trigger. And that's where we balance each other out because we can both find ourselves going down rabbit holes. But if you just kind of think, okay, let me bounce this off my wife and she's like, yeah, stop. Just we found a ho-pick any of the three. It doesn't matter. For food, I'm always the optimal person.

Like, what's the best thing on the menu? Someone told me, he's like, narrow it down to two. I don't wear a watch, but conceptually, pretend you wear a watch. Narrow it down to two. Call one right, call the other left. Look where the second hand is and pick it. Like, don't try to get to that last level, you know, that Pareto 80, 20 rule. Like, don't feel like you have to optimize the last little bit, unless it's a huge thing.

You know, if it's like buying a house, you know, yeah, figure out how to optimize it because it's a massive purchase. But if it's what you're going to have for lunch, you know, maybe don't spend 30 minutes reading Yelp reviews trying to get the most optimal thing because you're probably not even going to remember what it was. three weeks from now. I asked the waiter, what would you choose the bison burger or the chicken sandwich? And he'll be like, oh, the chicken sandwich is great. The bison burger is dry. Great. That made my decision. We did that one time. And I was like, I asked this waiter. I was like, how are the, how's the beet salad? And he goes, oh, I hate beats. And I was like, oh, okay. And that's kind of scarred me from like, well, what is this person's personal view on certain types of foods? Like, you know, you ask that sandwich to a vegan and they're like, both of these are.

terrible. But that's, that is my go-to, by the way, but I've been scarred a little by by people who have strong opinions about certain foods. Well, Chris, this has been fantastic. I mean, there's, I mean, that you are a gold mine of information about ways to say, a large number of little ways to stack enormous savings and save yourself a lot of time as well. This is really impressive. What's the best way for people to learn more about you and go deep into the rabbit hole of these little tips and tricks. Yeah, I mean, if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably in a podcast app. So you could probably search for all the hacks.

That's my show. It's also at all the hacks.com. We have a newsletter and a podcast each week. And my goal is to help you upgrade and optimize your life, your money, and your travel. And if you want to get in touch, you can find me on social media. You can email me, Chris at all the hacks.com. I love to hear from people. And I hope I can help you save money.

live a happier, healthier, wealthier life and, you know, feel like you got a little back the next time you're trying to buy something or take an adventure. Nice. That's awesome. And I'll tell you what, I'm definitely going to sign up immediately following this recording. This was great. Yeah, this was an awesome show, Chris. I knew about auto slash, and that's the only one that I already knew.

Everything else was brand new information. And I'm super excited to listen to your show every week that it comes out. I appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. And we will talk to you soon. Thanks for having me. This is fun. All right, Scott, that was Chris Hutchins from All the Hacks Podcast, and that was fantastic. We didn't share this during the recording, but our producer was sitting in on this episode,

and she found $183 on unclaimed money just from listening to Chris. So she's going to invite Chris over to her house for dinner, too. Nice job, Kaelin. Yeah, that was really cool. I mean, all of us found money, I think, for either other. us or are significant others within a few minutes on the search. The unclaimed property thing is legit. Do encourage you if you're going to follow that tip to look, Google your state's website, you know, your state.gov and follow their link to the unclaimed property because there are

some sketchy sites out there. But if you do that, you may find your wrote some money. Yeah, that's a great tip. I thought this was a lot of fun. And you could make money just by listening to this episode. That's a bonus. Scott, you ready to go? Let's do it. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jensen saying take care, polar bear.