Financial Feminist - 245. Money Hacks That Actually Work: Side Hustles, Savings, and Free Travel with Chris Hutchins

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

If you thought “hacking” your money meant clipping coupons or extreme budgeting, today’s episode is going to blow you away. I sat down with Chris Hutchins, of the All the Hacks podcast, to talk about how to maximize value in every area: spending, saving, earning, and traveling. Chris breaks down real, actionable hacks that go way beyond clipping coupons—including side hustles that don’t require starting a business, ways to “game the system” to cut costs on everything from groceries to luxury hotels, and how to rack up credit card points without going into debt. If you want to stop overspending, learn to travel smarter, or create extra income on the side, pull up a chair. Chris’s links: Website: https://allthehacks.com/  Read transcripts, learn more about our guests and sponsors, and get more resources at https://herfirst100k.com/financial-feminist-show-notes/money-hacks-side-hustles-chris-hutchins/ Looking for accountability, live coaching, and deeper financial education? Check out our exclusive community! Join the $100K Club: https://herfirst100k.com/100k-pod   Our favorite travel and cash-back credit cards, plus other financial resources: https://herfirst100k.com/tools Not sure where to start on your financial journey? Take our FREE money personality quiz! https://herfirst100k.com/quiz Special thanks to our sponsors: Squarespace Go to www.squarespace.com/FFPOD to save 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Indeed Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com/FFPOD. Rocket Money Stop wasting money on things you don’t use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to RocketMoney.com/FFPOD. Quince For your next trip, treat yourself to the luxe upgrades you deserve from Quince. Go to Quince.com/FFPOD for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Netsuite If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, download the free e-book Navigating Global Trade: 3 Insights for Leaders at NetSuite.com/FFPOD. Saily Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily eSIM data plans! Go to Saily.com/FFPOD download the Saily app and use code 'FFPOD' at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is probably the most valuable conversation we've ever shared about how to save money on literally anything. From travel to groceries, we are getting all of the hacks. Chris Hutchins is the creator and host of the All the Hacks podcast, a podcast that helps you upgrade your life, money and travel. And boy, oh boy, did he bring the heat. We could have talked for three hours. I find that the best ideas and the best things come from how you want to spend your free time and you don't know their businesses. In this episode, Chris completely rewires the way you think about saving money and time.

I can almost guarantee that you'll never look at money or your spending or even your time the same way after listening to this episode. That's where I think it can get dangerous to think about how much value your time is because that space isn't a profitable time up front. Like leaving a day a week or leaving four hour blocks of time to think and to just like mess around on the internet or go for a walk and just kind of get creative. You don't monetize that time up front, but it's so valuable in the long run. We start the episode by talking about some general hacks.

Talking about side hustles that could work for you. How you can take advantage from companies to save money on things like coffee, groceries, and so much more. See where your passion is? I would say if you could give yourself the space, say, oh, I'm going to take a three month sabbatical and instead of going to day one, I'm going to start a company. Day one, just be like, how do I spend my time and like let it evolve. Then we get into the really juicy stuff.

This is the episode so many of you have been asking for if you're trying to play the credit card 201 game and how to really start getting strategic when you're thinking about saving money in a way that's actually worth your while. I'm so grateful to Chris for joining us. You're gonna learn so much from this episode. So let's get into it.

But first, a word from our sponsors. We love highlighting our incredible sponsors that keep the show free for you to listen, and we're giving you all the deals right up top with some more information later in the episode. This episode of Financial Feminist is sponsored in part by Squarespace, Rocket Money, NetSuite, and Salie. Need a website?

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understand what's driving your performance and your portfolio. The best thing about Public though, and the reason I'm really talking about them is their retirement accounts. You can open up an IRA, whether that's a Roth IRA, a traditional IRA, and Public is the place to do it. You can find your account in five minutes or less at public.com slash FF pod and get up to $10,000 when you transfer your old portfolio over. That's public.com slash FF pod. Paid for by Public Investing,

All Investing Involves the Risk of Loss, including loss of principal, broker services for U.S. listed, registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc, member FINRA, and SIPC. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. You have a show called All the Hacks. Do you have a story that sort of personifies

how and when you became obsessed with finding hacks and getting a good deal? I think the story that probably... I don't know if this is the origin story, but I went to boarding school and most kids who go to boarding school's parents give them all the money. They have their parents' credit card. they have all... I did not have that. You know, my parents were like, here's a little money, but like, it couldn't... I couldn't afford to buy pizza every night, like all my friends. And I was like, but I want pizza, you know? Like, the origin story is I wanted pizza, I couldn't have the pizza,

and so I thought, what could I do? So I started ordering multiple pizzas at night and selling pizza by the slice, not because I thought of it as a business. Like my thing is how do I do what everyone else is doing? How do I live that life without having to spend the money? So I would buy the pizza, sell the slices, and eat my profit because I wanted pizza and I didn't have the money to buy it.

And so I think there's these two approaches of I can't afford this, so I'm gonna not do two approaches of I can't afford this, so I'm going to not do it or I can't afford this. Let's get creative so that I can. And that's been the mantra ever since. I think for me and my experience, it's very similar to yours where as soon as you find something like that, it also it almost becomes like a drug. You're kind of like, how can I do this again? I've told the story I think only once before on the show, but my dad would go play golf at the country club he was a member of

and I'm not going to say which one. We would purposely have him tee off at like 830 at night in the summer because we I would carry a backpack and he would get in the lake and we would fish golf balls out of the lake and then go clean them at home and sell the like title as Pro V1 balls for you know $25 or something for a couple balls and so it's like once you start doing some crazy shit you're like oh this is kind of fun and then everywhere you're walking you're like oh that's a way to make money oh that's a way to like do something cool for free oh why is nobody doing that okay so we before we get into a lot of the ones that work, can you share some of the stories of the money hacks that you tried that absolutely did not work? I think that it's less about not working and more about realizing you spent, I don't know, five hours and then you're like, ah, it worked, I saved 37 cents. I clipped all these coupons, I did all these things

and I didn't actually get any return or I did. And then when I think about the value of my time, it's just not worth it. So, every time I'm buying something online, I used to go and say, oh, is there a promo code? Let's go search and search and search and search. And I spent an hour and I'm like, yes, I got one. It took 10% off my $8 order.

Yeah. So I think the majority of the errors are spending too much time. And now I think the process is time box the time, focus on specific things, wait till it's worth a lot. But there are plenty of times where I'll use points and book a flight, decide I wanna cancel it, but actually forget to cancel it.

And then boom, like, lost them all. I make mistakes all the time. I don't think you can get good at anything without learning the hard way, which is to make mistakes. And I just try to brush it off and cost it up to the cost of education. Well, let's talk about that for a second, because that is my biggest issue with, like, the hacks or the frugality is that I think a lot of people lose sight of the time and effort it's just going to take to save a couple dollars. So before you decide, okay, this is something I want to spend time like what is the time versus

benefit analysis that you do? Even if it's just like, okay, I asked this question of myself before I decide, yeah, I'm this question of myself before I decide, yeah, I'm gonna spend and invest time here. And it evolves, right? If I go back to high school me, like, I don't know what a slice of pizza was, but probably a couple of dollars. Like, I was willing to go through extreme lengths for $2.

You know, over time, that number goes up. And maybe for me, I'd probably tell you that it's in the hundreds of dollars. But if I see an opportunity to save like $50, like realistically, I'll probably still try to do it. But I'd like to think that it's in the hundreds of dollars. But if I see an opportunity to save like $50, like realistically, I'll probably still try to do it. But I'd like to think that it's crossed over the hundred dollar mark. But I just kind of think, how long is this going to take? What enjoyment do I get out of it?

Like, sometimes I'll do things because it's almost a sport more than it is just a practical way to save money. But I like to look at a purchase and if I'm spending less than $100, I'm not going out of my way to save money on that purchase. If I'm spending $1,000, I'm absolutely gonna do it. And if I'm gonna undergo a massive car home kind of purchase, I'm definitely thinking, what are the angles here?

How can I save more? Is there something? And there might not be, but it's at least worth exploring. And honestly, we live in this great age where normally you do all this research yourself. Now there's both content of people talking about it and there's these AI tools where you could probably go to chat GPT and say, Hey, I'm thinking of doing this. What are 25 ways I could save money? And you could fast track it. I don't think it's going to know all of them. But, you know, there are better tools now to fast track the process.

Yeah. So let's talk about side hustle hacks first. You had a great episode with my friend and yours, Paula Pant, where she brought up the idea that she thinks of side hustles in two ways, gigs and then businesses. Can you talk more about that? I'm gonna say there's a third way, but.

Okay. Yeah, so I traditionally have always thought of side hustles as like, how can I go make money for my time, but in a way that I'm not getting a job? And so is that I'm going to build, you know, make something and sell it on Etsy? Or am I going to go drive for Uber or am I going to go be a Task Rabbit and go put together Ikea furniture? Like that's always been what's in my mind for side hustles. And I met this guy and at the time, I mean, actually now he still just goes by Kai. He doesn't share his last name and he has this podcast called The Daily Churn.

And I was listening and Kai was just, he did the financial independence retire early thing, but he was able to do it early because every time he saw a deal, he was like, I'm going to dial in and turn that deal into profit. And I was like, it blew my mind. He'd look at meal kits and he'd be like,

hmm, what if I stack all the meal kit promos to replace my grocery cost? And he was like, look, there's like 10 or 12 companies that do meal kit deals where the first meal's free. And he's like, you, there's like 10 or 12 companies that do meal kit deals where the first meal is free. And he's like, you know what's really crazy? You can just cycle through them over 12 weeks, right? And then if you have a spouse, they could cycle through them over 12 weeks.

And then you cancel and about 12 weeks later, they're like, hey, can we re-engage you? Do you want another week? And so he basically cut his grocery cost out. Now, maybe that's not a thing for someone listening. Maybe it's exactly what they want to do. But for him, spending a few hours a week finding these deals allowed him to cut his grocery costs down.

And old me never would have called that a side hustle because you're not actually generating income. But if you could find seven different ways to cut all of your expenses in your life out, well, guess what? That's just as good as income, if not more, because if you make $10, you're going to pay taxes on it. If you save $10, you're not. expenses in your life out. Well guess what? That's just as good as income, if not more, because if you make $10, you're going to pay taxes on it. If you save $10, you're not. So,

this class of side hustle, which I'll effectively call like finding online deals, finding, you know, different discounts and ways to monetize your time by saving is arguably just as interesting. Though I don't think everyone profitably or confidently thinks of it that way or consistently thinks of it that way at least. So we would define gigs as like the task rabbit, businesses as you know, what her first 100K was before I took it full time of like,

okay, I have to have a business license and I'm maybe a freelancer on the side. And then this kind of like third option, which is how can I save money as a way of almost earning money? Is that right? Yes, or even it could be earning. Every year when the iPhone comes out,

all these cell phone carriers have these crazy deals where they're like, switch to our cell phone carrier and we'll give you a thousand dollars off an iPhone. And so one of the things this guy did was he's like, well, I'll just open up a bunch of phone lines and cancel them after a month, but I end up saving, you know, like so much money on the cell phone deal.

And then I just flipped the phones and like, if these carriers are gonna give me such a good deal, why not? And now not every carrier is going to let you cancel the line after a certain period of time. But like there are some rules and nuance. So you're kind of like going to the school of hard knocks, learning how to do it is like reading the fine print of T-Mobile's like promotion. But that's definitely something you could do. And there are people out there, like the US happens to sell iPhones for a lot less than they do abroad.

And so there's these companies called buying groups where you can go buy iPhones in the US and sell them to them. And sometimes you might make no profit on the sale. Sometimes you might make a hundred dollars, but you also can put the purchase on your credit card and earn those points. And so this other friend of mine, I think he bought like a somewhere on the order

of like 500 iPhones or something, like on iPhone release day, and then just flipped them to people who would pay more than street price because they could resell them overseas. It's like, to me, old me is like, that's not a side hustle. Like I'm not starting a reselling business

where I'm gonna go like get a little booth at the mall and like try to convince people to buy my phones. But it just seems like it's never been easier to say, wow, there's a deal here. I'm going to turn that deal into profit or savings. And that version of side hustles is super interesting. So I think I ended up titling that episode, how to make an easy $3,000 a month with online deals.

And like we walked through an actual, like here are all the kinds of things you can do. And like, who doesn't want an extra 30 grand a year? Yeah. I have a very specific example of this. So you know how, if you order enough at Starbucks, you get like a free drink, right? And so I don't drink a ton of coffee.

I'm not like a daily coffee drinker. Like I had one this morning, so I was just like, I want something fancy in my life. But you can get, when you get enough points to get a free drink, it can be the biggest drink. So I will order a cold venti drink and then drink half of it and then save the half for the next day. And it's like one of those like very specific things that's like, okay, it's free. I'm going to get the most of the free thing I can get and then parse it out over time. Yeah. And look, that cost is maybe on the order of magnitude of like four to five dollars. Yeah. God, it feels good. Like it feels so good when you get something for free

and when you don't overpay for something. Like that feeling is like a rush of endorphins that can sometimes exceed the dollar saved. And I don't know, you don't get those that often in life. Like life sucks sometimes. And so if you could get a huge win by getting the two coffees for the price of one, awesome. Another fun Starbucks one is,

there are a couple credit cards that give you credits when you spend money at Hilton, like the Amex Business Platinum, some of the Hilton cards, they have Hilton credits. Well, it turns out that a lot of Starbuckses are in Hiltons. And so if you don't wanna have to go stay at a hotel to get this credit, you could go pick up Starbucks at a Hilton

and get your credit that way. And I was at a nerdy conference for people that are obsessed with points and miles. And it was like, let's all walk three blocks to get our coffees at this Hilton because everyone's coffee is going to be free because we all have like a card that's going to give you some credits for spending money at Hilton. So like finding those little things to just feel like you're, you know, you're kind of like pulling one over the system. I love it.

Yeah. So we have a lot of listeners who want to start side hustles or businesses, but they feel stuck on what that side hustle should be. How do you guide someone through figuring that out? So my principle, I think I probably started, I don't know, lots of companies that haven't worked and like two companies that took three years to realize didn't work.

I find that the best ideas and the best things come from how you want to spend your free time and you don't know their businesses. So I find that it's really hard to just like think what do I want to do and just find it. But if you give yourself the free time to see like, oh, I have 10 hours a week. How do I spend it? give yourself the free time to see like, oh, I have 10 hours a week, how do I spend it? And then you slowly evolve to realize,

oh, this thing I love doing actually could be valuable to other people. And maybe you love knitting and it's like, well, do you wanna keep knitting and sell what you make? Do you wanna start a knitting blog? Do you like talking about knitting? Do you like showing people on video how to knit? Do you like finding the best knitters

and reselling their amazing stuff? Like do you want to create a marketplace? Like see where your passion is. And instead of just like doing the academic exercise of like thinking about it, I would say if you could give yourself the space, say oh I'm going to take a three month sabbatical and instead of going in day one, I'm going to start a company. Day one just be, how do I spend my time and like let it evolve? Because my full time job and my wife's full time job is to run a podcast and a newsletter. But when I started the podcast, I was working a day job at a company called Wealthfront, like a fintech company. And I actually started working there and I asked if they wanted to own it. I was like, would you guys be up for

giving me like 25% of my time and to work on this and you guys can own the podcast? And I couldn't appreciate the fact that they said no more than anything in the world right now. But at the time, that's how little of an ambition I had to turn it into a thing. Like I was just doing it because I really wanted to do it. And I wish I had a friend at the time who's like, no, no, no, don, don't even offer. Fortunately, I was lucky. But it came out of like, how do I want to spend my free time? And so look at how you spend your free time, talk to your friends about what you're best at.

I love calling a friend and being like, why are you my friend? What is it about me? What do you tell stories about me? What am I the best in the world at? And just kind of like go down that rabbit hole and explore it, but you need space for that. And that's where I think it can get dangerous

to think about how much value your time is because that space isn't a profitable time upfront. Right, like leaving a day a week or leaving four hour blocks of time to think and to just like mess around on the internet or go for a walk and just kind of get creative. You don't monetize that time upfront, but it's so valuable in the long run.

Yeah, I have a formula that I talk about in my book to like determine your side hustle and I call it the three T's. So it's time, talent, treasure. So time, exactly what you were saying. How much time do you have and how much time do you wanna spend? Talent, like what are the talents you already have

or do you need to cultivate a new one if there's a certain kind of side hustle you wanna do? And then treasure is like, how much money do you want to be making? And are you okay if it doesn't make money for a while? Like her first 100k, I had lofty ambitions for the company. So I was okay if it wasn't profitable for a while, while I built it up. But for some people, they're like, no, I just need money right now. So that's going to be a different kind of thing that you choose versus something that might take a little bit of, you know, runway to get started. Yeah, one book that I really enjoyed was called Burn the Boat. I think it's Burn the Boats.

Yeah, Matt Higgins. And I had him on and we had this discussion about like psychologically, when you create a plan B, it can actually hold you back. So one thing I'd encourage everyone to do, read that book, listen to an interview with him. It's like, don't worry about if it's not gonna work. That is gonna make it harder for it to work. So it's not just like a waste of time, but it actually has a psychological impact on the success of the thing.

And when I see the most successful entrepreneurs, they are just so all in, pot committed to everything they can do to make this thing work. And when you ask them, like, I don't know, what about this other company that's doing something? I don't care. Like, we're going to win. And, and that mindset is great for building massive companies. But if your goal isn't to go build the next billion dollar thing, you know, maybe it's prudent to understand what your competitors are doing. You know, it's kind of like you said, treasure, it needs to scale with what you want it to become. And I have two young kids, I'm not interested in empire building at this stage in my life, because I know the time commitment that goes into that.

And I just, I'm not willing to make that trade off, which means this business isn't gonna 10X next year, and that's okay. But maybe those kids go off to college one day and I'm stuck with lots of free time. Maybe that's the time I want to go build an empire and that's okay. Right. Well, it's also, yeah, it depended on the life stage. I think we hear from a lot of people who do not have the time to think about, you know, and we're, I always say on the show, side hustle is just a glorification of the word second job, right? Like side hustle for some people is absolutely necessary

in order to get by and live their life. And so I think what you were talking about before of like, are there small ways that you can quote unquote game the system that don't involve a ton of extra labor, don't involve you commuting somewhere, don't involve you having to put, you know, a bunch of upfront costs and are just like, okay, can I do these small things that maybe save me a little bit of money, put more money back in my pocket? Yeah.

And I'd encourage you anytime you find something that you think is a deal, like you as a child, you're like, wow, all these golf balls are free. You know, it's one thing to say, now I have 10,000 golf balls, but you might not have even golfed, right? Like look at any time you see something that you think might be a deal and push yourself to think, is there any way that the fact that I found or know about this deal, that I could turn that into income

for other people who want to deal? And so young you said, here are all these golf balls. I found them for free. Other people buy them. I can sell them. And so whether that's like a sale at the grocery store, like sometimes that might be the deal. I know people that buy grocery store gift cards at Kroger and resell the gift cards when they go on sale.

But they keep all the Kroger fuel points so they can fill up their car for free. Like there is always an angle anytime you find something that feels like a good deal. So if you've become a good deal seeker, it doesn't have to just be to save you money, it can also be to make you money. When we come back, we're getting into the most

in-depth conversation we've ever had about credit card points. From travel to points and everything in between. I've been doing this for years and even I learned some mind blowing information. Stay tuned. It is official everybody. I've been doing this for years and even I learned some mind-blowing information. Stay tuned. It is official everybody. I am going on the cooking intensive. I know we've talked about it before. I've been dallying with the idea, but it is official. I've literally booked it.

I'm filling out the forms right now. I am so excited. But boy, do my knife skills need work. So masterclass is where I'm gonna be turning to today. With masterclass, you can learn from the best to become your best. With plans starting at just $10 a month, billed annually, you get unlimited access to over 200 classes taught by the world's best business leaders, writers, chefs, and more.

You get thousands of bite-sized lessons across 13 categories that can fit into even the busiest schedules. So I'm going to Masterclass to learn knife skills from Gordon Ramsey. Not Dave Ramsey, Gordon Ramsey, who is a better teacher for teaching me how to use a knife properly than the chef himself, the king of chefs. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at Masterclass.com slash FFPod. That's 15% off at Masterclass.com slash FFPod. Masterclass.com slash FF pod. That's 15% off at masterclass.com slash FF pod.

masterclass.com slash FF pod. It is official everybody. I am going on the cooking intensive. I know we've talked about it before. I've been dallying with the idea, but it is official. I've literally booked it. I'm filling out the forms right now. I am so excited, but boy, do my knife skills need work. So Masterclass is where I'm going to be turning to today. With Masterclass, you can learn from the best to become your best. With plans starting at just $10 a month billed annually, you get unlimited access to over 200 classes taught by the world's best business leaders, writers, chefs, and more. You get thousands of bite-sized lessons across 13 categories that can fit into even the busiest schedules. So I'm going to Masterclass to learn knife skills from

Gordon Ramsay. Not Dave Ramsey, Gordon Ramsay, who is a better teacher for teaching me how to use a knife properly than the chef himself, the king of chefs. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash FF pod. That's 15% off at masterclass.com slash FF pod. masterclass.com slash FF pod. So the one hack that I think is such a valuable spend of your time and research and energy is the credit card point ecosystem. And we have talked a lot, especially this year, we had Brian Kelly on, we had my friend Janelle and a jet on, and I've talked a lot about it on the show too, of ways you can

use your credit card in a smart way. So how did you start travel hacking in the first place? Like let's walk through those early years of you travel hacking. I mean, the early years were so unoptimal, right? It was just went on some flights. I accumulated some miles. I didn't really know what they were. I needed a credit card. I was living in, you know, Colorado because I went to school there. So I opened a United card. That's most people, right?

Most people open a card that somebody is like their dad is like, this is cards, a good one, maybe. And then that's most people, right? Most people open a card that somebody is like, their dad is like, this is card's a good one, maybe. And then that's most people. Yeah. And then I remember a very distinct moment where some kids that were like maybe one or two years older than me that I've become friends with, they were like, we're all going to rent a house in Mexico. I think it was in Puerto Vallarta or Cabo.

I can't even remember at this point. And I was like, I want to go. And then I looked and I was like, oh, that flight's like $400. So like, I guess I'm not going. And I was like, oh, I have all these miles. Like, I wonder if I could use them. And then I was like, oh my God, I can go to Mexico. And I paid, I don't know, $10, $20 of taxes and fees.

Was it the best deal for those miles? I don't care because it was the most amazing thing. It was the difference between going and not going to Mexico. And so I will say, when you learn how the game works, sometimes it can be debilitating because you're like, Wow, I know I can get incredible value if I do this other thing. But I want to encourage people to realize that if you don't get the best value in the world, but you get to go on a trip that you couldn't have otherwise gone on, gone on, that's an amazing value. And so that's where it started was like, I went on one trip that I could never have gone on. And's an amazing value. And so that's where it started was like,

I went on one trip that I could never have gone on. And then I was like, these points are incredible. And I was like, why don't I open up these two American Airlines credit cards? Why don't I open it? Like, why don't I start doing whatever I can to accumulate points? And I would say, I'm sure you've talked about,

oh, these welcome bonuses can be lucrative, open up a card, someone's gonna give you 75, 100, 150,000 points. One of the things I did earlier in my career, because I just wasn't spending a lot of money. Like sure, if I had a business that was putting a million dollars a year on a credit card, I'd be racking up points, but I didn't.

But every time a new trip came up in the future where friends were like, let's go here, or let's do a bachelor party, I said, okay, great, can I plan it? Like, I will plan the bachelor party. And everyone's like, really, you wanna do all that work? And I was like, absolutely. We need to book six hotel rooms.

I'll book all of them. I'll put them all on my credit card. We need to book eight flights to Vegas? Great, I'll buy all eight flights. And so, you know, I made sure I had a card that earned a lot of points on travel and hotels and flights. And I was everyone's travel agent.

And then I'd be like, hey, if you want to pay me, send me some Venmo, send me some, you know, whatever the app of the day was. And probably back then some of it was like a check. Yeah, write me a check. But I was able to spend so much more than I actually spent. And that was the early way in which I was starting to accumulate points faster than

just opening up lots of cards. Because earlier in your journey, I will say you could open up 10 cards and you'd be surprised that your credit score will probably go up. Like it's a counterintuitive thing. And there's somebody that posted this thing about he and his wife opened up, I think it was like 26 cards over 18 months, and both their credit scores went up. They accumulated 2 million points and like, it was this, they went on, you know, a bunch of trips.

So I wouldn't be turned off by the credit score thing, but I would also look creatively at, is there a way that I could be spending more without spending more? Just like, to be clear, I'm not, I'm not suggesting you just ramp up your spending. I absolutely am not suggesting you don't pay off your balances, like spend within your means.

But if you work at a company and they're like, hey, you don't have to file expense reports if you use your corporate card, but you could use your personal card. And maybe if you're going out for a coffee, it's not worth the hassle. But if you need to buy, you know, an international flight, maybe that time it's worth using your personal card

and going through the hassle of the expense report so that you can keep the points. For all of the kind of basics of what we're talking about here, I'm going to send everybody to episode 213. That's the one we did with Brian Kelly, because I really want to like double click on all of the like kind of crazier shit. So if you want the sign on bonuses, if you just want to understand generally how credit card points work and how to redeem them, that's a good episode to start with. But like, let's talk about the walk for blocks to get Hilton. Like, what is the like the crazy shit like the you know, I've seen people with the binders of 70 cards like,

what is the next level on Hed shit for people who are ready? Oh, is that, oh my God, you're one of them. How many you got in there? Probably like at least 50, but- Holy shit, Chris. Between me, my wife, some old debit cards, Costco cards. Yeah, wow. Okay, see, I'm not even this bad, everybody.

Like, I talk a lot about like, you know, I got this trip for free or I got this hotel stay, but I have eight cards, seven cards, and just the average person, that's a lot. But I don't use, I use only two or three on a semi-regular basis. I built a model where I put in like every credit card that could be good.

I put in both like Bureau of Labor Statistics spending data and my own spending data. And I was like, where where is the optimal point on the curve? Is it to have 27 cards? Like if you had every card under the sun and you used it optimally, you would earn more points than if you only had one or two. But I will tell you, the return going from one to two is massive and the return after two really, really diminishes unless you spend a tremendous amount of money for work or personal in specific areas. So when it comes to like what cards do you spend on, I think everyone should get a card that has elevated return on whatever they spend the most on travel, dining, groceries, whatever. And then everyone should have an everything else card. Right. So like, I think the Bureau

of Labor Statistics best two would be the AMEX gold. And because you get 4x on dining and groceries and like something like the Capital One Venture Card where you get 2x on everything else. That would be like the staple. So I just want to make sure people see a binder full of cards and they don't think, wow, in order to do this optimally, I need all these cards. No. My general framework is I really, you really only need two or three cards for all of your spending.

And then if someone's like, hey, this week, we're going to give you a hundred thousand points. Okay. You know, I'll take the bait and, and I'll make sure that I use all the perks that come with it, so that if there's an annual fee, I've netted it out. And then at the end of the year, if I'm still going to be paying an annual fee and I can't get my value, I'll reach out and say, hey, is there any bonus if I stick around for a year? No? Great. Can I just change this to another card that has no annual fee?

No? Okay, I'll cancel it. And some cards, like these Hilton cards, the Hilton Aspire card gives you a free annual night every year. And so me and my wife have a couple of them and we've been able to stay at properties that cost, I don't know, more than $1,000 a night for a card with an annual fee of like $500. So, and I probably am at the stage of my life

where maybe not a $2,000 a night hotel room, but I would spend more than $500 a night on that hotel room. So why not keep that card open? Am I spending money on it all the time? No. You know, so it doesn't hurt you to keep the card open if there's no fee or if you're getting value out of it. But I'm not spending money on all of these cards.

The reason they're in this binder is because I leave it at home. I don't need to carry it. But when it comes to some of the kind of, I don't know, ninja crazy stuff, let's think about it. I mean, the welcome bonus is I ran this analysis. If you can't tell, I really like making spreadsheets. And I took as at some point, I think it was late last year. I was like, what are the top 20 bonuses cards will offer you

to open up the card? And the average return, meaning if a card said, we'll give you a thousand dollars for spending, you know, a thousand dollars on the card, that would be a hundred percent return, right? Like they're gonna give you your entire money back. The average return was 17% or like somewhere on that order. It was like 16.7 or 17.3.

So you and I both know there is no credit card that offers you 17% cash back, right? Like maybe in a perfect world, you'll find a card that earns 5% on one category up to maybe a cap per year. That revolves every three months too. That 5% category is only there for a quarter. Yeah. Yes. So like, if you're saying what's a baseline, maybe, you know, Robinhood has a 3% card,

doesn't work well for business. Bank of America, if you put some money on deposit, it's like a 2.6% cash back card. So 17 is incredible. So hands down, your best value is to always be spending on whichever card is going to give you the best return on a welcome bonus. Like that is the optimal way to spend.

But if you don't want to open up 15 cards a year, or even five or six, I could say just pick one or two and focus on that. And, but those welcome bonuses, I would argue, are the place to focus. And if you have a partner that you're playing this game with, it's not a one plus one equals two, because you could open one card, then you can refer your partner to it, get some kind of referral bonus, then they could open up a card. And now you get the same bonus twice, plus a referral bonus. So like that is where it starts to get really fun. And you know, I have a friend who every time there's a big welcome bonus, he not only signs up for it,

but he refers his mom, his dad, his sister, and his partner. So like he's getting four welcome bonuses for them, four referral bonuses, and one welcome bonus for him. And he's just, you know, kind of printing points at this point. And that is where it starts to get really fun, is starting to figure out how you can help the whole family and take big fun family vacations. And that is where it starts to get really fun, is starting to figure out how you can help the whole family and take big fun family vacations. But that's all on the earning side, right? I think that a lot of people listening have probably been doing that to some extent, right? They probably opened up a car, they probably earned tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe a few people cross the million mark. And they're like, but it's just so hard to use these points. Like, I feel like I wonder if people kind of give up.

And I'm sure Brian talked about it. So I don't want to go too deep. But the one thing I'll say is it's never been easier to find out if your points can get outsized value, because there've been all these tools that have launched recently. So one that I don't know if you talked about is called points path. It's a browser extension that layers on top of Google flights. And it only works for the major US airlines. But it's like I'm searching for a flight on Google flights. And it's like, hey, on United, if you use your United points, it's a better deal with points. You don't even have to like use another tool.

I mean, you're technically you're using a tool because it's a browser extension, but you're not going to some miles and points tool or paying a subscription. It just sits where you live. And so that's one where I think it can easily help you kind of optimize without even having to think about it. There are others. There's like points. Yeah, an award tool. For those who are listening on audio, I now have another tab open and I am signing up as we speak.

Point.me is a partner of ours, that's the other one I love of seeing like, yeah, I want to go this place at this time or you can be more general than that to see like what my points are going to get me to. Yes, yeah. So I would say find a tool that you like for when you're searching for a flight and take a few minutes, not hours, to say, hey, I'm looking to go from here to here. Is there a better deal with my points? No? Great. Let's save them for the next trip. I find that the more flexibility you have, the easier it is to get really, really outsize value. And so flexibility doesn't mean dates. It could mean where you go. It could mean how far in advance you plan it. Sometimes my wife and I will say,

you know what, we really wanna take a vacation and we don't have any flexibility. It's spring break. Like we are going this week, but we're really flexible where we go. And you know what, if we don't decide until a month before, we're okay. And so some of these tools have alerts.

And so you can basically say, hey, I'm looking to go to Europe. You can search. I can't remember PointMe has this yet or not. I use PointMe a lot because I think they have one of the best sets of all partners. There's another tool called Points Yeah, an award tool. And I'll say, hey, San Francisco to Europe,

set an alert for the date I want. And I might set it six months in advance. And maybe three months later, I get a ping that's like, hey, San Francisco to Paris, 50,000 points in business class, which had I redeemed those points for, I don't know, Amazon, you know, I probably would have gotten like $300 or something. And so now I'm here. I am going to business class for for something that is way less than that all the way to Europe. So don't be afraid to think about flexibility outside of just dates. It could be where you go. It could be when you go, whether you change planes.

And then think about trying to get places not necessarily from where you live, which might sound crazy. But a lot of the things these search tools do now is like, give me a flight from the West Coast to Asia, right? And you're like, I want to go to Japan, or I want to go to Hong Kong. I'm willing to fly to LA before I get, you know, because not, it sounds crazy, but sometimes I'll find flights where it's like, the hard leg to get to Europe isn't LA to Paris.

It's San Francisco to LA. But you can buy a San Francisco to LA flight for like 60 bucks sometimes. So like, don't lock yourself into only leaving from or going to a specific place. And then I'm going to throw a curveball here. And then I'm gonna throw a curve ball here. So I recently came across this perspective shift. And when I say all the hacks, when I talk about my show, it doesn't have to be like a little trick. It could just be something that kind of opens your eyes

to a different way of thinking. And so we were planning this summer trip and we found this hotel on the island of Majorca in Spain. And if anyone ever gets a chance to stay there, it's called Cap Rocot. It is unbelievable. It's built into a fortress. It's the pinnacle of luxury. It's amazing. And I think when we were looking to go last summer, it was like twenty

eight hundred dollars a night. That is past the threshold of what I will spend on a vacation. But the reason we found it was because I was using this tool called Rooms.Aero, A-E-R-O, and I just went to Hilton, small luxury hotels of the world. And I was like, what is available anywhere in the world in the month we want to go for four nights? And it was like Caprocot is available. And I was like, great. It was one hundred twenty thousand Hilton points a night. Now, I happen to have that many Hilton points or free night

certificates. But here is the crazy thing. On that day, just for fun, as I was going to book it, Hilton said, hey, we're having a sale on our points on the Hilton website. That day, you could buy one hundred and,000 points for half a cent each, which made it $600 per night. So let's pretend you're listening to this and you're like, this points and miles shenanigans like I just it's not for me. I'm a cash person.

I love cash back. Great. But if you're going to the Hilton site, you're about to book this thing that's $2,000 a night and you could just buy the points to book the exact same thing for $600. Like, I don't know, seems like a great opportunity. And points and miles go on sale all the time. And so you can use these tools to say, is there a great points and miles deal to get to Japan, to get to Paris, to get wherever you're going? Even if you don't have the points, one of the airlines that you can use to book that flight, because

one of the things to know is like a flight on United is bookable by United, but it might also be bookable by Air Canada or Avianca LifeMiles or these other carriers. And Avianca as an example, a Central American carrier, they their points of miles go on sale all the time. And there are times where you'll be like, wow, I don't have one hundred thousand points to get to Europe. But boy, do I wish I would because I could fly business class. And oh, turns out Avianca selling these points for like one point something cents.

And so you could just buy it there and book it. Now, I would encourage you to make sure it's available, like get to the checkout screen before you buy the points, because if you don't, you're stuck with a much Avianca points. But I don't know, it's this mindset shift where I was always all in on points. Now that I realize there's the opportunity to buy them and use them, it just made me wonder, like, are there times where cash back might be better? You know, I earn all this cash back, I invest it, it grows. And then when I'm ready to go on a trip, more often than not,

I might be able to just use those points to buy, or use those dollars to buy the points and go on that same trip. Get that crazy outsized value without having to even play the points game. The answer is like for me, no, like I'm still doing it. But for someone who doesn't want the overhead

of points and miles, you can still benefit from points and miles by buying those points on sale. Everybody listening, you need to go back about 15 minutes and you need to listen to all of that again. That was no, it's so good. I know I just said it, but I mean it. Go back and re-listen to all of that. Take notes. This is probably the most thorough conversation we've ever had about travel credit cards and traveling for free or at major discounts. When we come back, we're getting really granular about what this process looks like from step one all the way through checking into your hotel.

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Go to rocketmoney.com slash ffpod today. That's rocketmoney.com slash ffpod. Rocketmoney.com slash ffpod. The thing we keep coming back to in all of these episodes is like, you can be as crazy about this as you want, right? It can just be, you know what? I don't want to spend a lot of time on this or you can spend a million years on this, right? And you can hack it all you want.

The thing you said about like being really flexible is something that single-handedly changed my travel experience. I would go on what we called Friend Moon with my friend. We would go on a trip every year, but we would let the deals determine where we went because we were super flexible of like, oh, okay, there's a deal to New Zealand. I've always wanted to go to New Zealand. Great. We wanted to go to Morocco, but there were no deals from Seattle to Morocco. It was extremely expensive. But guess what? Seattle to London was a deal and then a Ryanair flight from London to Morocco.

So you can start to think about ways to be more flexible with your travel that are both just the deals, but then also the credit card points to your point of, okay, I want to, you know, potentially go at this time or even just like this area, get me close. This is what I just did. My partner's family, somebody was getting married in Italy. If I tried to go to Seattle to Italy, it was a specific time last year, it was going to be so much money. But I found us a deal from Seattle to Frankfurt, Germany, and then hopped on a Ryanair flight from Frankfurt to the Oman coast. Like that's what we're talking about here. And it's always funny that you're probably sitting here like you get off this business class flight in Europe and you're like, all right, where's the economy check encounter

for Ryanair? Chris, that is the funny thing. And I've been meaning to do a post about this. The year before we went to Paris, lie down flat seats. It was my first ever business class flight. The first time I ever turned left on a plane and it was thrilling. It's like five course meal in the sky. All you can drink champagne, full lie flat seat with a bed. We got off, we took the bus to get to our Airbnb. It wasn't even a hotel. It was the Airbnb that I found that was nice and clean, but pretty cheap. And then we got on a Ryanair flight from Paris to Scotland where we actually wanted to go. And then I checked us in at the Balmoral, which is like a literal

castle and is a $900 a night hotel that I did with credit card points. And again, we took a bus from the airport to get to there. So it's like, you get to choose where you want to spend your money or spend your points. And I think that the incredible thing about all of these hacks, especially around travel is you and I are not spending $2,500 on a hotel room. Like we probably could. I refuse. That is an obscene amount of money. And for the average person listening, that is way outside your budget. But you get to have these once in a lifetime experiences. You get to stay at the five star hotel where they say your name when you walk in the door. You get to have the experiences that you could not afford

otherwise because you've done a little bit of due diligence trying to figure out how to use these miles effectively. Yes. I got two quick things. So one, there's this thing called the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it's like this cognitive bias theory. So the way this works is when you have really low competence on something, you're actually way less concerned with being optimal, and you could use your Amex points for Amazon and feel good, right?

And then you go through this. I just did this episode with this woman, Devon Gimble, who has really thought deeply through this. It's like once you learn. So for some people, that will be this moment. You have this moment where you're like, I've been doing it all wrong. And now you don't understand how to do it. But you know that what you've been doing is wrong and not wrong. Wrong is the wrong word. But it's like not as've been doing is wrong. And I, or not wrong, wrong is the wrong word,

but it's like not as good as it could be. And I want to encourage you to not feel, like this is a not fun place to be. Like you are not yet an expert, but you have just enough knowledge that you're doing it wrong and it feels bad. And I just want to let you know, the more you think about it, learn about it,

experiment with it, you will climb back out of that kind of valley of despair, if you will, and it will be amazing. And so we had this episode where we talked about, like, you start at the top, then you're like, oh, my gosh, my entire life could be so much better off. But I don't actually know how to do it. And you feel awful. And if that's you, like there is hope. We have all been there. And then the other side of that valley is amazing.

So I want to flag that. I also want to say on the Airbnb front, because some of these like optimal hacks, tips, tricks don't have to be points and miles. I met a host of an Airbnb and I don't know how it came up, but the idea of negotiating your Airbnb came up and they were like, yeah, about 50% of my guests negotiate the price with me. And I was like, what?

Like I am a deal seeker and I didn't know that you could negotiate Airbnbs. Turns out you can and I've used it and it works. So it sounds like you have done this also. Yep. Absolutely. I negotiate every Airbnb, especially if I'm a return guest. So if I went to an Airbnb and I really liked it and they knew I was nice and clean and didn't throw a rager and I'm going back, I'm a return guest. So if I went to an Airbnb and I really liked it and they knew I was nice and clean and didn't throw a rager and I'm going back, I'm like, hey, I was lovely to work with last time. I will be lovely to work with again, or especially if I like solo travel

or I'm just with one other person and we're like renting a place that has multiple rooms. This is actually what my friend and I did in New Zealand. There was like multiple bedrooms that we weren't gonna use, but it was in a killer location. And it was a little outside of our budget. And I said, hey, if you can give us, I don't remember what I asked for,

like 20% off or something like that, we're not gonna use that bedroom. So you're not gonna have to clean it, right? And, you know, it's just me and my friend traveling, we're two women, we will book right now and they gave it to us. And again, the recurring theme, one of the recurring things with this show is why not ask? Like, yeah, you might hear no, but you might hear yes.

And that's fantastic. Even negotiating. I mean, I always ask for a room upgrade at a hotel, always. And they don't know who I am, right? They don't know I have millions of followers. They don't know I'm an influencer. They don't know who I am. But I just go, hey, do you have any complimentary upgrades you could offer me? And, you know, let's call it 30, 40% of the time, they're like, no, I'm sorry, we don't. Okay, no worries. And some of the time they do.

And I get a really nice room out of it for free just because I asked. And you can ask without asking. Yeah. So one of my favorite things to tell people to do, if you book a hotel, book it with the book it directly with the hotel. Absolutely. You book on Travelocity Expedia. Booking.com.

Yeah. It's not that there's a flag on yourself, but book it directly with the hotel. Find an email address, call and ask for one and send them an email in advance and say, hey, I just booked this thing for three nights. Here are my dates and my confirmation. I'm really excited to stay with you. We're celebrating my husband's birthday, whatever it is. And you don't have to ask in that moment

because hotels love hospitality. And I guarantee that some percentage of the time that's probably close to or above 50%, you will show up at the hotel and something will happen. Whether it's champagne, whether it's, you know, free drinks at the bar, an upgrade, a better view, like sending an email to the hotel in advance is one of my all time favorite tips

because it costs you nothing. You're not even asking. For people who are uncomfortable, you don't even have to say, can you upgrade my room? Just let them do the thing that hospitality companies like doing. But book directly with them so that they know you actually are interested in building a relationship with them. Because if you just book on the internet, like with TripAdvisor,

they might not even have your reservation until the day before you check in because of the way this whole system's work. So book direct. And if something goes wrong, you are working through booking.com or Expedia's customer service, you are not working with the hotel. So if you have to cancel or something goes wrong, yeah. Chris, I'm going to add a hack to your hack. If you are emailing them, which I highly recommend doing as well, email is your fake assistant.

I love it. They don't need to know you don't have an assistant. I literally have an assistant, but I don't make her do this because she's got better shit to do. So I have made up an assistant. And by the way, it's a dude because dudes get usually more respect, unfortunately.

So Scott emails all the time. Scott is the hard ass. Scott will come in and be like, Ms. Dunlap is coming at this time at this, like make up an assistant. Again, you don't have to be an influencer. You don't have to have a podcast. Like make up your assistant because you will get so much new shit.

It's so fun. It's so great. It worked. Like these things work. You don't have to. They work. There are hacks that take a lot of time, but one of my favorite ways to find a little extra income

that for 10% of my audience, because we did a poll, resulted in more, resulted in hundreds of dollars of money is, and maybe you've talked about this before, but whatever state you live in, go to the state's unclaimed money database and search for yourself. And, and yes, some of you will be like, I found nothing. Some of you will be like, I found that I'm owed $3, but it's gonna take me an hour to figure out how to get it back.

Yeah. I would encourage you to do that anyways, because if you don't, someone can probably find your address. Like it's a good way to reverse engineer what is someone's address. But some of you will find hundreds of dollars. A few of you will find thousands of dollars. So it's a great way to just check if there's any free money out there for you. I like using it as my like dinner party thing,

you know, cause you know someone's address cause you're going to dinner at their house. I'll just search it up and come over and be like, hey, you know, we brought you a bottle of wine, but did you know that like Verizon owes you $400? That's so good. I'm like, I'm making you money and I haven't even stepped foot in your house yet.

Yeah, father's days around the corner. I couldn't figure out what, I'm making you money and I haven't even stepped foot in your house yet. Yeah, father's days around the corner. I couldn't figure out whether to get you tie or socks, but I did find out that Etna owes you $1,300 from seven years ago. Dad's going to be stoked. So you're welcome. Yeah, that's so fun. Okay, so we were talking about travel hacks. And again, this is the thing I could talk about forever. So can we start at the beginning of booking the trip? So the flight, what are the hacks that obviously points we're checking, we're checking, you know, I love that tip about, you know, can you buy, you can buy miles, right? Not just like Hilton points, but you can buy Alaska airline miles or Delta miles. So what other hacks around the flight as we're planning the trip can we be thinking about? Okay, I think there is a lot here. So when I'm thinking about booking a flight, there's probably I did this episode with this

guy Zach Resnick, and I can't remember what number episode it was. But we went through like a checklist of like 25 things you can do. So checking if it's available for points, we talked about that. Buying points if you can. Looking for gift cards. Sometimes airlines have gift cards on sale. So right now, at least in the Bay Area,

you could buy Alaska gift cards for 10% off. Very often Southwest sells their gift cards at Sam's Club and Costco for 10% off, I think, or maybe sometimes 14% off. So that's one. Chris, can I pause you for a second? Yeah. Can I just, we have to talk about Costco.

Like that's a hack in and of itself is I, everybody knows this because I'm from the Pacific Northwest. Costco, if they raged out and they're like, Tori, we need a kidney. I'd be like, which one? Like I love Costco so much, but they do a lot of like, you can go in and they're like, Tori, we need a kidney. I'd be like, which one? Like I love Costco so much, but they do a lot of like, you can go in and buy the cards, you know,

and then you exchange them for the stuff at the register, you know, but like right now they're doing a three day park hopper pass to Disneyland. And I'm a huge Disneyland addict for like way less. I think it's like 75% off and it includes like a meal ticket or something, but like Costco is your secret weapon, both for like Costco travel, renting a car, getting gift cards like I love Costco just as a hack for things beyond the rotisserie chicken.

So you mentioned Costco. I can't not talk about it. I mean, we haven't talked about it, but I have two Costco things on my desk. One is a Costco membership. The other is a rack, which you might not know what this is, but it's from Pamp, which is a Swiss company that makes gold. And I asked for an extra one. It's one of the racks that Costco puts gold on in their store room. Oh, I probably bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of gold at Costco in the last

six months. Wow. And I've started a gold reselling side hustle that is quite lucrative. So Costco's amazing. We can come back to that, but I want to hit on all the flight things. Yeah, sorry. I just got excited.

You said Costco and I was like- No, no, I love it. Look, believe me, last, like two weekends ago, I think we went to Costco five times. More because the gold, the limitations on gold purchases and the number of Costco's in the area. But a few other things. So there are rare cases where a travel agent is going to get you a deal on, you know, for a flight.

I would say if you are flying internationally, especially if it's one way, there might be some obscure options. I will say if you're booking a one way flight international, you are going to be faced with an outrageous price. And if you just simply change it to a return, a round trip, even if you don't need the return, the price will go down. And so I had a friend who has way more money than I do. And he was like, I'm looking to go to Europe. It's just a one way ticket.

It's like $9,000. And we added a return in economy and the entire ticket went from like nine thousand to four thousand. Like he saved five thousand dollars by adding an extra flight. The same thing is sometimes true. There's this website Skip Lagged, which basically does what's called, you know, like hidden city ticketing where it's like, well, flying from San Francisco to New York is five hundred dollars, but fine from San Francisco, connecting to New York and going to to Boston is $300. You know, you could if you weren't checking bags, like get off in New York and miss

your flight to Boston. The airlines don't love this. So I wouldn't do it a ton, at least not if you have your frequent fire and up flyer number on the account. But if you're doing a one time trip to Asia, and I don't know like Japan Airlines is You know a thousand dollars if you fly through Japan to Taiwan and it's you know $4,000 just to Japan like I don't know that'd be a case where if I'm not checking bags I'd be willing to to kind of take the three thousand dollar savings on a one-off case If you're flying a ridiculous amount I would say

do everything you can to become friends with someone that works at the airline and kind of encourage them to make you their buddy. There's kind of a gray market for brokering these buddy passes, but I would say it's very gray. But if you found the right airline, like we talked about this in this episode where it's like, how do you go about getting those things? I think that was a 156 and like there is a way to do it. I was like, should I just be reaching out to people on LinkedIn?

Like, how do I find it? I don't travel enough and I have a family, so it's not worth it. But if I were single traveling a ton and maybe taking a sabbatical, I would do everything I can to find out if I know anyone that works at an airline that might be able to make me one of their partners.

If you do have a company, most companies can enroll in like the business program of the airline. And it might only be three, four or five percent off. But I don't know, like I want my principle is every time I'm buying something, whether it's, you know, a new toilet at Lowe's or it's a flight. It's like, what's my checklist of all the ways to save money? Like, can I buy a gift card? Is there a shopping portal where I could use Rakuten to, you know, layer on some extra points? Is there a coupon or a promo

code? Am I using the card that gets the most points? Can I, you know, like all of the things every time. So I don't know, I think that's the most of it on travel portals. I will say you and I have a similar belief that booking on Expedia for a hotel

can leave you in a frustrating situation if you need to change things. So I rarely will do that. You also might not, if you had status with Hyatt, you might not get any elite nights. You might not get treated well because they're not always required to do any of those things for third party bookings.

On the airline side, things are evolving. And so keep an eye on this evolution. There's this thing called NDC, which sounds like it could be a cool thing. It stands for New Distribution Capability. It's like the dumbest moniker, but it allows these travel portals to book flights with airlines, as if they were booked directly with the airline, you can still manage them with the airlines, you can still change things. As these travel portals adopt these platforms, you won't have that problem with flights. And so Capital One, the Venture

X card gets you 5x points on flights if you book in their travel portal. You know, I may be questioning whether I want to do that, depending right now on whether my flight will change. But in the future, if that travel portal adopts this, which honestly, I don't know how you would know if it did yet, but they'll probably do some marketing around it. I'll certainly be talking about it on my show and newsletter. Like then I'm down to go book in a travel portal to get more points.

Oh, that was so good. When we come back from a word with our sponsors, we're wrapping up our conversation with Chris by talking more about credit card points and other ways for you to hack your everyday life, including how Chris is teaching his kids about getting better with money. We also talk about how to know when a deal is actually worth your time versus a waste of your time. Stay tuned. your time versus a waste of your time. Stay tuned. It's a crazy time to be a business owner. We have tariffs and trade policies that are changing all of the time. There's talks of a recession and cash flow feels tighter than

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And if your device is an E-SIM compatible for whatever reason, you get a full refund. Get an exclusive 15% discount on SAILI eSIM data plans. Download the SAILI app and use code FFPOD at checkout. That's S-A-I-L-Y. Use code FFPOD for 15% off. Something you've brought up in one of your episodes on your show that we haven't talked about on ours is the 524 rule. I don't even know what this is. Tell me what it is. So almost every credit card issuer, meaning bank, has rules that they typically use to decide if you're eligible for a new card.

So, you know, Chase is notorious for this 524 rule, which is if you've been approved for five credit cards in the last 24 months that show up on your credit report, and I'll come back to that, they're almost always not going to approve you for a new card. Now, I say that show up on your credit report because business credit cards don't always show up on your credit report. Most of them don't. A lot of other issuers have similar rules. Amex, it's like you can't apply. I can't remember all of it. It's like you can't apply for the same card within 90 days.

And if you go search card approval rules by bank, there's a blog post that the frequent Myler team wrote where it's like a list of every single one of those rules. Obviously, if you're going to be applying for a card, make sure you don't break those rules. Like some issuers are like, we'll only approve one card within six days. Well, then don't apply for two cards back to back. It's just not gonna work. That one's the most notorious. What that means is if

you saw two great sign-up bonuses, maybe apply for the one at the bank that cares less about those kind of rules second and the one that you know cares about those rules first. So if you'd opened four cards in the last 24 months and you're really eyeing two cards with big welcome bonuses, get the chase one first because you might not get approved for the chase one second. I would say high level, capital one is like, if you've opened a lot of credit cards, they get skittish.

Chase kind of has more rules, they're less skittish than that. And then Amex is probably the least skittish. And then obviously they're not the only three issuers, but high level like those are three of the biggest. But, you know, sequencing what order you apply for a card in makes sense. And if you want to hit the game hard where you're opening, I guess, more than five personal cards over 24 months, then, you know, that rule is going to matter.

But we talked about business cards. And I think one thing that's important to clarify is I know a lot of people who think, well, I can't have a business card. Like I don't own a corporation. And I will say there's a wide definition of what a business is. If you have an Instagram account and maybe one day you might want to monetize that. Well, every time you post, you're kind of laying the foundation for a future, you know, influencer business. You don't need to go get your EIN from the IRS, though that is a very, very simple process, like fill out a form online and get it immediately by email. But if you have anything that could one

day make money, that could be a business and you could do that business as a sole proprietor. So I know a lot of people who are like, oh, I've done a little consulting. I'm like, you have a business. Oh, sometimes I like buy things and sell them on eBay. Will you have a business? Like, I would imagine that almost every single person here listening, listening is doing something in their life that would legitimately classify as a business, even if it doesn't have revenue yet, even if it's not, you know, filed with the state.

I teach piano lessons. I yeah, all of these things. This is one thing actually, Chris, this is perfect to talk about because I've been meaning to talk about this. I almost want I like beg of people to just quote unquote, start a business, even if it's not really a business to get all of the additional perks of business owners, the write-offs, the points and miles, especially if you pool your business points and miles

with your personal points and miles. There's so many opportunities for you, to your point, to come up with what the business is and immediately start saving a shit ton of money on the things that you're already spending money on or thinking about on a day-to-day basis. I do, I can't remember. I think it maybe is like the hobby rule or something, but the IRS doesn't look too great at people who have a business that has a bunch of expenses and no income forever. Oh, totally. Yeah. So there's a massive asterisk on that.

Thank you. Yeah, so I say, if you don't have any revenue, those write-offs might not be as lucrative as you think. But again, you would be surprised at how many things might generate enough revenue that it's a business. I buy a lot of gold at Costco, I sell that gold, I have a business, even though I might not think

of it that way. If anyone has a credit card, which I imagine most people do, and you log into your issuer and they, you know, there's all these deals, like a card-linked deal where it's like, oh, if you spend $200 at Lowe's, we'll give you $50 off. If you go spend $50 at Chewy, you know, we'll give you $15 back. Well, every time I see one of those, I think, is there a way to make money? And so this is a fun exercise with my daughter and we had this Lowe's offer for $5 off $200. And I don't need anything at Lowe's right now.

Like, there's nothing that I need at Lowe's. But I use this app called Card Pointers and it added that offer to seven of my AmEx cards. So we go to Lowe's and then I look at the gift card rack at Lowe's and I look for whichever gift card has the highest resale value, which was, I think at the time it was Apple or Dick's Sporting Goods. I think it was Dick's Sporting Good. They were all sold out of Apple gift cards. That what I wanted.

And so for $200, I buy a $200 Dick's Sporting Good gift card, which I could sell for like 89 cents on the dollar. So I lost 11%. But I was getting 50 of the $200 back. So I was getting 25% off. So I get 25% off and I can sell it for an 11% loss. Like I made 14%. So we just bought seven, we went to the self checkout,

$200 gift card, one Amex, $200 gift card, next Amex. Like we're just buying these gift cards, taking advantage of this offer, reselling the gift cards. And I think that day we made like 200 bucks. Now, was it worth my time to go through this hassle, drive to Lowe's, spend an hour buying these gift cards? You could argue no. But do you wanna know how excited

my five-year-old daughter was when I like put $200 into her like little bank account and we started talking about what she could do with $200 and that afternoon we went for ice cream and she's like, can I buy mommy and daddy ice cream? Like she bought me ice cream. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So even when the like, now that we have children, when I see these little plays, if you will will I'm like, it's maybe isn't worth my time I'm like, but could I teach my daughter a lesson in this process and I don't know what that lessons worth but it's worth a whole lot more than the dollars we saved. So I

Don't know. I like you can see I like I just could go down all these rabbit holes on on this You you you take this where we wanna go, but I feel like every time I see a deal, it's like, how could I make money on this deal? You and my father would be best friends. I don't know if you know this about me. I started my first business when I was nine years old because my dad bought a candy vending machine,

like a gumball machine, and brought it home and said, do you wanna start a business? And I owned 15 of these vending machines by the time I graduated high school and all the profits went to my college fund. And this was the thing that my dad and said, do you want to start a business? And I owned 15 of these vending machines by the time I graduated high school and all the profits went to my college fund. And this was the thing that my dad and I would do once a month on a Saturday, is we would go out and we would service the machines.

And like, I didn't invent anything, I didn't go on Shark Tank, right? But I learned how to run a business, I learned how to manage money. I was writing checks as a 10 year old. I was writing checks at Costco to be able to buy my chocolate covered raisins to go in my vending machine.

And like, I learned so much from that. And I also have so many memories with my dad. It wasn't really about the money. It wasn't, you know, we barely made any money. It was about spending quality time with my dad, learning something new. I 100% believe that a lot of the skills I learned throughout my childhood of running this business, I use every single that a lot of the skills I learned throughout my childhood

of running this business, I use every single day and running this business now. And so those kinds of things, yeah, it might not be worth your time, but wow, it becomes an activity. And it's an activity like I didn't have to take her to the fair to spend a bunch of money or to a movie. We didn't spend any money. We actually made money. Like I love that. I'm looking at this can and I'm like, so one of the things we do is we take all the aluminum cans and we go recycle them for the same shit. I did. So you live in California or Michigan or Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii or Iowa. Like at least on this can, we just collect all the cans. We go cash them in. The place is kind of grimy.

But my daughter's like, I don't really like this place. I'm like, but at the end, somebody hands are like $4.85. And she's like, this is so cool. I made money. Yep. So that leads me to something that is really important. We talked about it briefly at the beginning. But in my head, usually, because I think, you know, when you get to the point where either you're a busy person or a business owner, or honestly, my mindset kind of switched as I started to make more money, I realized like, okay, there's a certain cost benefit analysis

that I need to do of can I be using my time to make more money than, again, trying to find out all of these hacks. So you had briefly talked about it, but I just want to return to like, when do we determine what's worth it for us versus what isn't? Because some of these are 100% worth it. I can spend two hours researching business class flights and get them for super cheap. Amazing. Some of these other hacks, I'm not sure. So how do we how do we determine that and how do we determine that for each of us as individuals specifically?

I'll give you an answer and then a caution. So you could do it as simply as saying, OK, what is my hourly rate? And that can be tough when you're an entrepreneur, because the three hours that you spend thinking about your business could come up with an idea that makes you an unlimited amount of money or could be completely useless. And so I like to think of it not as an hourly rate, though maybe it's kind of backed into it, but I just kind of set it. More than trying to calculate my income divided by my hours.

It's like, what is my threshold for when an amount of money moves the needle? And for me, I have one when I'm with my kids and one when I'm not, assuming that the thing is a teachable lesson, right? Like for 50 bucks, I might take my kids to do something to teach them. But if I'm if it's during the nine to five workday and they're in school, like, I'm not going to do it. So I would say everyone has to come up with that dollar amount It's going to be relative to how much you currently earn how much you save?

How much savings you have like if you've saved a ton of money like maybe you're not interested in spending more time to save more It's gonna be relative to what else you would do if you don't have a business idea And then you know, that's probably different than if you have an active business you're running and you're taking time away from it. I would not encourage anyone to, you know, with an active business to be spending the weekend going to flip gift cards from Costco when they could be building a company. If that if that's their their main thing. So I try to think of a dollar amount and then I say, wait, wait, wait, pause. Is this thing going to cross that threshold? Right. Is going to Costco to flip this gift card going to make me enough money that I want to do it?

But I would encourage you to maybe choose the hours by which you do this, because for me, I've probably set that thing at hundreds of dollars an hour somewhere. But I don't wanna think about it on the nights and weekends because the last thing I wanna do is my daughter's like, hey, do you wanna play a game? And I'm like, well, the game's gonna take an hour. I gotta pay $400 to play a game with you, sorry kid.

So for me, when I have work hours, I try to value my time. When I'm not during work hours. I try not to value my time. And I set a much higher bar. And so when I was talking about Costco gold, my wife and I like the bar for weekend time with the kids is like $1,000 an hour. So and it just happened that last weekend there was this like any trip to Costco, we'd make $1,000 and we were like, kids are going to Costco again. But if it was three hundred dollars, like I might do that during the workday when it's just my time.

But but on the weekend, I set a way higher bar and I'm not really thinking it's more like opportunistic than trying to, you know, track every hour and value each one. So I would say earlier in my career, it might have been twenty dollars, went up to one hundred, maybe now has a few hundred. And during times when life is busy or families involved in my cross a thousand. So you don't need just one number. It can be relative to the situation and relative to your time. But I can't overstate how important free time is when you're running a company,

because you're just so caught up in all the day to day that it's always so hard to think, you know, what should we do? And so for us, I really wanted to go to Iceland and we ended up starting like a tours business where like we found a guy that knows more than anyone in the world about Iceland. We did an episode about just Iceland.

And then we said, hey, we're gonna go on this trip. Does anyone wanna come? And we took a group of people to Iceland last year. And now we're taking two groups of people to Iceland this year. Like that didn't just like pop in my head until I was kind of ruminating on Iceland and it came there.

So leave time for that. It is valuable. It's just hard to put a put a specific dollar amount on it. Yeah, I just realized we didn't talk about Costco. So let's touch on Costco really quick. And then I have one last question for you after Costco. OK, so yes, so the four ninety nine rotisserie chicken is absolutely incredible. But the one that I found that literally everybody in my life knows, because I was trying to bully anybody and everybody

Into taking this on with me. They had a Costco travel deal. Did you see the Four Seasons Bora Bora situation at the beginning? I think of this I was saying at the st. Regis Bora Bora on points and every couple we met we were like How did you decide to come here and they're like Costco Costco Costco Costco? couple we met, we were like, how did you decide to come here? And they're like, Costco, Costco, Costco. It was, so it was round trip economy from LA to Bora Bora. And as anybody who's tried to get to Bora Bora knows that flights are so goddamn expensive. So I think it was round trip flights. And then it was like,

you get free breakfast, you get all of that, but it was four nights, I think, at Four Seasons Bora Bora, which normally costs like $2,500. And I think all in the whole trip was like 4000, 5000. Like it was so cheap and I didn't end up pulling the trigger, but everybody heard about it. I was like, it was so good. I don't know when this will come out, but right now, for whatever reason, Hilton has a ton of open inventory at the Conrad Bora Bora

for 120 to 140,000 points a night, which again, Hilton points go on sale all the time. We've been to the Conrad Bora Bora twice. Economy flights ever since French B, which is like a discount French carrier, came. Economy flights have gotten very cheap. So like from San Francisco, I've seen Bora Bora for like six, seven hundred bucks round trip. So if you have Hilton points,

if you want to buy Hilton points, a trip to Bora Bora can be in your future. I don't know why Bora Bora doesn't get as much love as the Maldives, because if you live on the West Coast, it's like an eight hour flight. Like it's almost as it's like not that farther than like Miami and New York.

And you went on this trip. It's amazing. If you are an active person that wants to like have a thousand places to drive and do, it's not a trip for you. Like if you're someone who wants to just relax at a hotel and, you know, have everything catered to you, it's fantastic. And if you open up one of those AEx Hilton cards, you are at least the Aspire card. You get diamond status on Hilton.

So at least when we went free breakfast, which these breakfast buffets are just unbelievable. And I actually did an episode that I filmed from the Conrad Bora Bora talking explicitly about how we like the price mechanics of that deal.

It was a little windy, like the audio quality isn't as good as others. But Bora Bora on points specifically, like looking at it today in June twenty twenty five, I was blown away at the availability to go during the summer, which we've been in the summer is a great time. It's a little warm, but not like, you know, desert valley warm. It was great. So I would encourage anyone with Hilton points or a desire to buy them to check out the Conrad and Bora Bora. Highly recommend. Or check out the Costco travel deals.

Yeah, guys, I have, I think seven tabs open just from you and I talking. Like, again, you think I'm good, Chris is next level. Okay, my last question'm good, Chris is next level. Okay, my last question for you, your show, All the Hacks, which is literally going to be my next, you know, 12 hours of listening, you talk generally about upgrading your life or optimizing. So what are some of the best non-money related hacks

that changed your life for the better? Like I'm thinking especially about that episode you did on sleep. Yes. I mean sleep, it's so funny that in our world, especially with the kind of people on Instagram, everyone's like, you know, do you use an infrared or do you use a like dry heat sauna? It's like how you know, there's you can optimize so many things in your health. If you're not dialing in your sleep, like I would say on the order of important things, it's like

sleep, exercise and nutrition, like all the other little tiny things you can do to tweak your health don't really matter. So I always laugh when I see someone ask me because we have a sauna and I love the sauna. And they're like, do you think I should get a sauna? And I'm like, how often you exercise for longevity purposes? They're like, I want to live longer. Saunas are known to do that. Do you want to get a sauna? Should I get a sauna? Like how often do you work out? They're like, I'm not really working out right now. I're like, I want to live longer. Saunas are known to do that. Do you want to get a saw? Should I get a sauna?

Like, how did you work out? They're like, I'm not really working out right now. I'm like, you know what's going to move the needle on longevity a lot more than a sauna exercise? Like, you know, so. I think that definitely sleep is important,

definitely nutrition is important, definitely exercise, important, all those things. Some fun health things that I love, this is a very simple hack. I am really bad when it comes to saying no to eating unhealthy food. Like, you put a plate of cookies in my house, I will eat a lot more cookies than a normal person.

So what I've started doing is I don't try to say no. Don't say no to the cookie. Say no to the cookie for five minutes. Give yourself permission to have the cookie just in five minutes. And for my brain and the way my psychology works, it is so much easier than saying no. But in those five minutes, I get distracted

and all of a sudden I'm like, on to some other thing and I forgot about the cookie. And then maybe I come up to the kitchen an hour later, I let myself eat a cookie. And then I say five more minutes till the next one. But old me would have eaten 13 cookies before I even left the kitchen. And so like that is a very simple thing that has actually

changed how much unhealthy food I consume in my own house. I also think that if I'm going out to restaurant, I sometimes look at the menu in advance, usually like right after lunch. And I just like decide what I'm going to order for dinner because I make a much better decision when I'm not hungry at home than when I'm sitting at the restaurant. And if I go to the restaurant, I'm like, well, that burger looks good. If I'm at home, I'm like, I don't know that salad looks good. And so I just like pre commit to what I'm going to order. It's not like I'm calling the restaurant saying,

when Chris shows up tonight, do not let him order anything. You know, I just, it's like little mental ways to change my perspective in my mind. And it helps so much. Yeah. I'll share two with you that you may have talked about on the show.

I love it. One blew my mind a couple of months ago and it's so fucking simple. If you want eight hours of sleep, you need to be in bed for nine hours. Like it's so easy, but all of us are like, okay, we're doing the math of like, okay, if I wake up at seven, I gotta go to bed at 11, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, no, you're going to take 20 minutes, you know, to fall asleep. You're going to have to get up and use the bathroom. You're going to toss and turn a little bit. Like you

will not get eight hours of sleep. So you need to spend nine hours in bed. And like that single-handed, I was just like, okay, I need to stop doing the mental calculations for eight hours, and I need to do the mental calculations for nine, and I need to get my ass in bed with nine hours to spare. So that's the first one that like was so simple. The second is, with nine hours to spare. So that's the first one that was so simple. The second is I have a history of diabetes in my family and the order in which you eat your food matters so much. Do you know about this, Chris?

So much. I mean, I'm guessing you've worn a continuous glucose monitor to even see the data. I'm not quite that crazy yet, but no, I like, listen, glucose goddess is the one I listen to. Do you know this woman? I know, but I do not know her. Basically, it's like the one I listen to. Do you know this woman? I know, but I have not. I do not know her.

Basically, it's like the order in which you eat your food matters so much for our blood sugar and our energy. And even if you are not diabetic, it's like basically you don't want to put carbs in first and you definitely don't want to like have a sweet breakfast. Protein first. Protein first with fiber. So bread often is the first thing that comes out, right?

And same thing with your cookie example. I don't, I'm never going to turn down bread, okay? But the bread sits on my plate until the salad comes out. Then I eat the salad and then I eat the bread. So I eat the salad first and then I eat the bread. So just even that has like changed my energy level so much. Same thing, I don't drink a lot of coffee. I had a coffee this morning.

I know if I drink that coffee on an empty stomach, I am gonna be a fucking crazy person all day. So I wait, the coffee sits there. I do not even take a sip. I eat the food and then I get to have a sip. But it's like, it's not deprivation. It's just doing things in a different order and it's single-handedly changed so much of my life.

So that's another act. I think you have more self-control. My version would be to tell the waiter or the waitress, I'd be like, could you just bring the bread later? Like I see it on other tables. Yeah, I mean, sometimes it doesn't happen. So I will be 100% honest. If I am ravenous, sorry, I'm eating that bread.

But in general, I try to say, okay, I'm at least gonna have like two bites of salad, three bites of salad, because the way she describes it, and I think most dieticians and nutritionists describe it the same way, is it's like your body is a sink, and what you're shoving down the sink first is the thing that sits there, right? So like, you need to think about, okay, I'm gonna put veggies and I'm gonna put, you know, I'm gonna wait to put the fats or the sweets until the rest of it. So that's been super helpful for me. Totally. Now, I would say I've got I've done a lot of like health testing.

And to anyone that's interested now, I believe you can get continuous glucose monitors over the counter now. You can. And it's wild because I wore one for a week. And there are a few things that people say are like, for some people, if you put like cinnamon with your carbs, the spike is lower. So I was like, let's experiment with this.

Oh, apple cider vinegar is the one I've heard. Apple cider vinegar. Yeah. I'm not even kidding. I would like just experience, my wife and I had some fun experiments. We were like, what happens if we eat 30 Swedish fish? And it's like, your blood glucose is like,

literally so high off the charts, it's insane. But when I would eat like cinnamon rolls versus bread, the cinnamon rolls did not spike me as much as bread, because I guess my body cinnamon. But when you actually see the data working, you're like, oh, wow, eating my protein before I eat my carbs. Like, you can see that it has an impact and you can try different foods all week. And like, I would encourage you the first time I did this, I did not do it. Like write things down because it's so interesting in the moment. And then three months later, you're like, wait, what was the thing that spiked my blood? I totally forgot.

Or even just take photos and then you can figure it out later. At this point, you could probably export your data. Take a photo of every meal. The photo has like a timestamp in the data. Put it all in chat, GPT and say, here's all the food I ate this month. Here's my data. Just tell me what I should and shouldn't eat. Like probably if you're not leveraging AI for almost everything you're doing, it's like having an army of interns for free. And that's just one

great hack. But it was so fascinating to see the data that comes off of a continuous glucose monitor. Because then I was like, now I'm changing this thing. And it wasn't just because someone told me it's because I actually saw it work in my body. Yeah, Chris, you should follow glucose goddess because she literally does charts of like, cookie, cookie with milk, toast, toast with avocado. Like, and you can see the different spikes. It was, it would just tickle your brain.

Okay, I can talk to you for hours. We have to wrap up. Chris, tell me everything about the podcast and newsletter. Where can people find more about you? Everything's at allthehacks.com or chrishutchins.com. They're the same place. You can search my name. If you're listening to a podcast, just search for it.

I would say similar to what we were just talking about. I try not to focus on just points and miles. I feel like if you had a podcast that was all about that, a lot of people like me and you, we might just be like, it's too much. So we actually just did an episode on gut health. Like we've, I'm looking at this board, we've done an episode on happiness, medical tourism.

I like to dive into upgrading your life, your money and your travel. There's a special place in my heart for points and miles, but my goal is every episode, no fluff, let's just get to the tactics, let's get to the playbooks and let's figure out how to dial one area of your life in. And I hope that every single time someone leaves with like one thing that will change their life and make them happier, make them healthier, make them feel better. And that is the goal.

And so it might be a lot like I'm not just sitting there like shooting the shit, right? Like it's like I want you to learn and then get back to your busy life. And so you can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm always open to people reaching out. You can contact us on the website. Links to everything are there. Yeah, that's where I am. Amazing. Chris, thank you. This was so valuable.

Thank you so much. This is a lot of fun. Thank you so much to Chris for joining us. All the hacks is available wherever you're listening right now. I know I subscribed immediately after interviewing him for this conversation and it's such a great show, especially if you love financial feminist. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. This is a great episode to share with loved ones, with your partner, with your family,

especially if you're trying to save extra money right now or trying to get creative with ways to save money that you may not have heard or seen elsewhere. We appreciate you sharing the show. We appreciate you supporting feminist media. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First 100K podcast. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First 100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you're confused about your personal finances and you're wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com slash quiz for a free personalized money plan. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap.

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