Frequent Miler on the Air - Chris Hutchins' favorite life hacks | Coffee Break Ep22 | 8-13-24

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

Chris Hutchins is the host of a podcast called "All the Hacks" where he talks about not just travel hacks, but life hacks as well. In today's episode, he shares some of his favorite life hacks with us.  (01:09) - You can find the episodes where Chris Hutchins interviewed Greg and Nick on All the Hacks here: https://frequentmiler.com/check-out-greg-and-nicks-podcast-guest-appearances-with-chris-hutchins/ And you can find all the episodes of All the Hacks here: https://www.chrishutchins.com/ (02:00) - Chris's favorite life hacks for making more time (06:47) - Chris's favorite life hacks for the home (09:30) - Chris's favorite life hacks for money You can find Chris's All the Hacks episode with Remit Sethi here: https://www.chrishutchins.com/live-your-rich-life-ramit-sethi/ You can find Chris's All the Hacks episode with Bill Perkins here: https://www.chrishutchins.com/die-with-zero-bill-perkins/ (16:58) - Chris's favorite life hacks for personal data!    

Here we go. This is not your typical Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Today's coffee break, Chris Hutchins' favorite life hacks. So let me introduce you to Chris Hutchins, who is the host of the popular podcast, All the Hacks. It's a show where you learn to upgrade your life, money, and travel.

Did I get that right, Chris? Yeah, but today we're not going to talk about travel, are we? But today we're not going to talk about travel. So Chris's show, he does talk about travel hacks, but he also talks about all kinds of other life hacks, how to upgrade your life. And so we wanted to have him on to talk about all the his favorite hacks for upgrading your life. Yeah, I'm excited about this because both Greg and I were recently guests on Chris's All the Hacks show, his podcast, and it was great.

I mean, not only did we both enjoy it. I know I'm speaking for myself anyway. I learned from Chris on that show where I was there to share some tips. I picked up some great tips from him, so I can't wait to pick up some more life hacks from him today. So thank you very much, Chris, for being here with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. I loved having both of you on. Hopefully, it's a recurring thing. Yes, our audience has asked for it. So let's get into the optimizing and upgrading life. Yeah, let's get started. All right, Chris. So just go into it. What are your favorite life hacks?

So the way I thought about this was I tried to bucket things into groups. And in order to optimize your life, you need time. So I was gonna start with time. And episode that actually comes out this week is all about how to make more time. I'm just gonna share a few of my favorites. So one is doing a calendar audit.

So if you're diligent about putting things in your calendar, great. If you're not, spend a week doing it so that you can go back and see where you spend your time. It's such a valuable way to think about whether you're aligning time with the way you want. One big takeaway from that episode is to just every day have one focus, one highlight.

This is the thing that matters most. You can have lots of other stuff, but just really focusing in on one thing. That's another one of my favorite time management ones. Another one that's a little bit kind of a magical unlock is that you just don't owe everybody who emails you a response. I feel like I look at my inbox and I think,

oh, I gotta get back to everyone. And then I send out emails and not everyone gets back to me. And this thing clicked in my head where I was like, I don't owe someone an email just because they emailed me. And so there's this great message from a guy named Derek Sivers, who I interviewed back in episode 108. And he said, you should either be a hell yeah or a no. And so like, I try to think about when I'm responding to emails, allocating my time, which one of those do I fall into? The last one on time. Let me just ask you that real quickly.

So do you mean a hell yeah on like, you're excited about responding to that email? Responding to the email, doing anything. Like someone invites you to lunch and you're like, if you're not a hell yeah, you should be a no. Like there's no room in life for like things that you're just like, I guess I got to do this thing. You can say no. You can say no to the email.

You can say no to the work colleague who wants to go to lunch. You can say no to the high school friends who want you to go on a trip. I think we feel so obliged, but time is such a limited resource. We have to use it as optimally as we want in the way that is most best for us. You gotta be careful about saying hell no to your wife though when she wants to do something. Yeah, I know, that's optimizing for a different type of long term happiness.

And then the last big one is like, think about ways in your life you could buy back time. So one really fun one for us was I put an ad on Craigslist looking for someone locally who liked to cook and could just help prep meals, right? I didn't need a chef to come to my house. really fun one for us was I put an ad on Craigslist looking for someone locally who liked to cook and could just help prep meals, right? I didn't need a chef to come to my house. Like we ended up finding a mom in the neighborhood who was like, I'm just going to batch some recipes that you can send us

because we had two young kids and two full-time jobs. And I just thought about, are there more ways to buy back my time professionally? I hired an EA in Sri Lanka through a company called Oceans to try to optimize my time that way. People might not know what an EA is, Chris. Oh, and an executive assistant. I don't feel like an executive, but just hiring someone, a virtual assistant to help. And you can say, here's what my time's worth. And for activities where it's not the most optimal use, can you find someone else that can do that? So what kinds of things do you outsource to, to an EA for somebody who's like, well, how

can they help me? What do you do? I mean, I don't, you don't have to go into depth. I'm just curious. Plan, plan trips, plan a date night, uh, organize gifting for family members. If you are allowed to outsource work, doing research, prepping for content, drafting blog posts, I feel like everyone should try outsourcing for a month

and you're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe how capable other people are of saving me time. We need to stain the patio furniture. You just find someone that can go get three or four bids. We need to replace our air conditioner, go get us some bids, like all this work that you have to do that you could outsource. So that was like, that was really a big unlock in our lives. And the cost relative to what you probably make working in, you know, the US or overseas, like it's probably, it's a big arbitrage and can buy back time in a way that you might not have thought.

What would give us a range? Like what does it cost to hire an EA? Like, I would say you can get a full-time salaried person. It works for you full-time in on the order of like three grand a month. Okay. What if you just want someone like a few hours? Oh, part-time there are a lot of services. There's one I think called Squared Away that is all these spouses of military families that you can hire part-time, hourly. I don't know what it would be hourly, to be honest. I haven't really thought, I haven't broken it down to the hour because one of the benefits is finding someone consistent that understands the tasks you want. But there were services where it's like for a hundred bucks a month, you get,

you know, let's call it 10 hours or something of tasks. And so I would just encourage people to look at your life. And if you are in a place where you feel like you have more resources and less time, there are ways to trade off resources for time. Speaking of time, let's move on. We've got to get more of these. I got two good ones for home. One, a lot of places let you, energy companies let you change your utility plan. And so depending on how you use your electricity throughout the day, there might be time of use plans that are different where it's like, if you don't use energy in the evening, you

can get a better rate during the day. So that's one. And then another one that I recently did that was amazing, especially for anyone living in a high real estate place, we live in California, you can negotiate your property valuation in lots of states. And so we filed an appeal in California and I just said, hey, here's why I think our property is overvalued. And I put a number that was about 30% lower than our current valuation. And they accepted it. And our property tax dropped by 30% for this year. So that's an awesome one. So that's your house in the house family. I did this episode, episode 43 about the 80, 80 marriage. And the concept was instead of trying to be tit for tat, I do the dishes, you do the dishes,

I do the bedtime, you do the bedtime. If you can adopt a mindset of we're all trying to do 80% of the work and we might not get there every day, you can stop keeping score. And the mental burden that goes away when you stop keeping track of everything to keep score, just incredible. And so I actually recorded that episode with my wife

and a couple who wrote this book together. If you like people, hopefully people here, you know, like other people. Sure. But you hate having people over for dinner because it's so much work. Switch hosting dinner parties to hosting cocktail parties. Two-hour cocktail party, limited drink selection, no ordering food, no dietary restrictions,

no massive cleanup. I did a whole episode about how to host the perfect two-hour cocktail party. So that was one. And then a little quick one. If you have children and you're trying to get into daycare, a lot of daycares are full and you got to get on a waiting list, but they might be open for one or two days a week. And so you get priority for the rest of the days of the week once you're on the list. So I know a lot of people I've told this to, they're like, they got in for one day a week.

And then within three weeks, they got in for five days a week. Whereas the people on the wait list for five days a week, they're still sitting there waiting. So that's some of my family stuff. Yeah, that's a smart one. That's one that's probably useful in a lot of big cities. And I love the property tax one because, I mean, my goodness, if you save 30% on your property tax, there goes paying for an EA for a while, right?

So you can save enough to hire yourself an EA. In California, it's pretty meaningful. Right, right. Yeah. And I know we got to give people. In California, it's pretty meaningful. Right, right. Yeah. And I know we got to give people their money back if we take too long. So if you need more money, every state has a unclaimed money database where you can go search for yourself or you can honestly search for anyone if you have their address. And so I have had listeners and family members find $10 and find $1,000. And so it's unbelievable how often people find out that an old health insurance company

or cable company owed them $50, $100, $200, $1,000. So not only do I love doing this for me just to make sure I don't have money out there. And in the Points and Miles world, I had a bunch of Delta gift cards that for some reason I had never used and they just transferred over to the state and I could claim them. But every time I go to one of these dinner parties at someone's house, I always look them up

and I show up and yeah, you could bring a bottle of wine, but it's kind of cool if you walk into dinner and say, hey, guess what? I found out that Comcast owes you $275 and here's a link to go get that. So that's one to get a little bit of extra money. That's a great idea. It's like a double life hack right there. It is. And I ran into this recently because I used to buy a lot of gift cards. Neiman Marcus was a department store. I would do some double dipping to buy merchant stuff and then resell it

and earn miles. And I got all of a sudden something out of the blue that was like, oh, you've got $2,000 in Neiman Marcus gift card money that we're gonna transfer to the state. And it ended up in the unclaimed funds. And it was great. I ended up getting the cash, but I had totally forgotten

that I had had these gift cards years ago. And so, yeah, that's an awesome hack that could apply to lots of us that maybe aren't optimally organized. Yeah, exactly. I won't go too deep on this because I've done an hour episode on each. But when it comes to cell phone plans and insurance plans, the amount of savings, I mean, we all heard

the Geico save 20 percent and, you know, how it was a 20 minutes. But I would encourage everyone to dial in maybe once a year, once every two years. Just do your homework on your insurance and your cell phone plans. I have really consistently saved to the point that I think my T-Mobile plan right now is like $3 a month because I took advantage of a transfer in discount on a phone. And so the net cost each month is pretty, pretty low. And then now there's just so many great carriers from Mint Mobile, US Mobile that have really compelling offers that are starting to bring international travel on board, which was once my restriction for not using some of the discount carriers. If you're paying more than let's call it 30 bucks a month on unlimited everything, you

are overpaying on your cell phone plan. For sure. I'm definitely overpaying on your cell phone plan. For sure. I'm definitely overpaying them. I can probably just say if you're using Verizon or AT&T, you're also overpaying on yourself. There's a blanket statement. Fair statement. Yeah. Two, two, two last little money ones.

One, I love this idea of creating money rules to simplify financial decisions. And so Ramit Sethi kind of coined this. I did an episode early on with him about it. But one that I used last night that this audience will appreciate is we have a rule in our house, which is whenever we buy super budget airline tickets, we just pay up to not have to deal with the stress of all of the extra fees. And so I bought a Transavia, I think, flight yesterday in Europe, and it was like an extra 70 euros to not have to worry about bags and go through the fast security

and being able to change your flight if you need to and all this stuff. So we just have this rule. And yes, it costs some money. But I know that if I didn't have that rule, I would have been like, well, if we do this thing, it's 42 euros. And if we add on this feature and pick this seat, and it's just like all that overhead for a couple dollars. So I just have a rule. Ramit has a rule. He just always buys books, never questions an expense on books because you just, you know, learning is valuable. And so when you can do that, it just makes a lot of your financial decisions easy. You can pre-decide in advance how you want to spend money when you're more intentional. And intentional matters with money because money is so much about psychology. So I did this episode with Morgan Housel about his book,

The Psychology of Money. And it's just like, it's wild how much everything is caught up in psychology. And I would say the biggest unlock for me and what has ultimately been, no offense to you two, the most popular episode we've ever done was with a guy named Bill Perkins on a book he wrote called Die With Zero. And the psychology that changed for me was I have always been chasing that next milestone of my net worth, right? Got to go a little bit higher, got to go a little bit higher, got to go a little bit higher. And he wrote this book that was like, what's the goal? What's the end goal of having all this money? And it turns out that most people don't spend as much money as they think in retirement. And just to be clear, I say this from a place of I've been able to save, not everyone has, you know, that's a privileged

place. But if you're in a place like that, you know, you get to this age where you think, oh, once I'm retired, that's when I'm going to go climb Everest and, you know, you get to this age where you think, oh, once I'm retired, that's when I'm going to go climb Everest and, you know, hike Machu Picchu. And then you look at your parents as they age and you think, wow, they're actually in their seventies and they're not able to do that. And so I just really started thinking about the seasons of life and got more comfortable spending in my thirties and, you know, next couple of weeks from now, 40s in ways that are really aligned with what I want to do and not optimizing for more net worth and optimizing for spending and more intentionally. And so that was a really big unlock. It's episode 91. It literally

fundamentally changed the way I think about money overnight. Nice. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah. I haven't listened to that episode and I haven't read that book, but a friend told me about the book and it really inspired, um, my wife and I to, uh, give me a big raise again, like you said, change sort of the way we, the way we handle money and, and, uh, like donate more to, more to charitable causes that we care about and to start transferring wealth to the next generation earlier rather than waiting until we die to do that because they probably won't need it by then. Yeah. And by the way, way more optimal financially. If you do that, you can gift up to $14,000 a year. I think the number is right now tax-free to anyone looking at transferring money to your kids.

Yep. advised fund. And when you set it up, you can donate money to a fund, you can invest that money, but you can take the tax write off when you put the money in the fund. But you don't have to allocate the money to your charitable causes in that moment. So if you want to say, hey, this year, we made a lot more, I got a big bonus. Let's just donate three years of donations, get the tax write off in my high tax year and invest that money so it continues to grow and donate it over the next few years. Oh, and by the way, now I only have one tax receipt to keep track of. I don't have one for every donation. So I use an app called Daffy that I strongly encourage people to check out because it has lower fees than all of the Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard donor-advised

funds. So that's another great one. And when it comes to taxes, I personally think that if you're trying to optimize your money, the CPA is far more valuable than the financial advisor in terms of ways to dial in your financial situation, both short and long-term. Okay, we're coming up on time. I got one category that I think is particularly relevant

to people who build up large pools of money, but also points and miles, because I've had my points and miles kind of come under attack three or four different times, even before having a podcast. And so just locking everything you do down from having a password manager, which is pretty common, but to consider having a separate email, and maybe even now that some of these cell phone plans are cheap, a separate SIM card with a phone number for all your two-factor, for bank, financial, and airline mileage accounts has kind of really cut that kind of fraud attempts down to nothing. There are data brokers that sell your information on the internet. You can usually opt out of most of them in a long, painful process, or you can use a service like Delete Me and just

pay an annual fee and they'll continually remove that data. If you have a business, I went as far as to get a mailbox. So my home address, which is my business address, is not on every single public record. And so I use a service called Stable and all the business mail goes there. They scan it in. I can get it. If I actually need it, they can forward it or deposit checks. But in the effort to go delete all of this information and hide yourself, I did an episode of 78, which is a checklist. But I would encourage everyone not to remove yourself from the unsolicited mail databases because doing that will sometimes remove your ability to get all of those Amex and, you know, chase targeted mail offers. So I wanted to get rid of everything I

could accept those because every now and then you get those great credit card offers in the mail and, and I'd want to keep those. So I'd run through that checklist, delete everything. Um, but, but leave that last one there so you can get some bonuses. All right. Uh, that was a great lesson. I love how you ended your all the hacks, favorite hacks with a way to prevent getting hacked. That's really nice. So you're going to want to make sure you check this out. If you were as energized and enthused as we were about this, you're going to want to make sure you check this out. If you were as energized and enthused as we were about this,

you're going to want to check out these full length episodes. So where can they find you, Chris? Yeah. It's anywhere you want to look all the hacks. You can find all the episodes we've done. I'll send you some links if you want to put them in the show notes, but yeah,

you can search all the hacks.com. We have a list of all the episodes as well. So if you want to upgrade your life, money, travel, go check it out. And thanks for having me. Thanks so much for being on.

Thanks for being on. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this. Give us a thumbs up. Subscribe frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Check out all of our full length episodes and check out Greg and I on all the hacks.