The Liz Moody Podcast - How To Network Like A Pro, Fly First Class For Free, and Invest Like A Mega Millionaire with Chris Hutchins

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

My guest today is Chris Hutchins, the host of the All the Hacks podcast. He’s also the Head of New Product Strategy at Wealthfront, an online platform to help you build wealth through investing. He and his work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNBC and more. Previously, he was an investor at Google Ventures, and the founder and CEO of Grove, which was acquired by Wealthfront, and a co-founder of Milk, which was acquired by Google. the best life hacks he’s learned from interviewing the world’s leading experts the surprising way he started and sold his companies to Google and Wealthfront super actionable, pragmatic networking tips that will change your life his best advice for anyone who wants to start a company the best books for aspiring entrepreneurs a simple way to think about investing money a must-download app for budgeting how to know if you need a financial advisor, and the one rule for choosing a good one the best way to get rich right now what rich people know about investing that normal people don’t whether NFTs or cryptocurrency are worth investing in travel points hacking tips for beginners I was also on Chris’s podcast, so search for All the Hacks wherever you listen to podcasts to hear all of my best healthy cooking and living hacks. I would SO appreciate it if you shared this episode or any favorite episodes with someone you love in your life! This episode is sponsored by Seed. You can get 15% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s DS-01™ Daily Synbiotic by going to https://seed.com/daily-synbiotic and using the code LIZMOODY. This episode is sponsored by Olive and June. If you want to try Olive and June for yourself and have mani’s that last over a week, visit oliveandjune.com/HEALTHIER20 for 20% off your first Mani System! This episode is sponsored by Wild Blueberries. To find wild blueberries in your local grocer, just look for the packaging in the freezer section that says “wild” on it. If you want recipe inspo or more info, go to wildblueberries.com. This episode is sponsored by AG1 by Athletic Greens. Visit athleticgreens.com/healthiertogether and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today. Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the healthier together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a cookbook author and longtime journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're learning how to hack our glucose levels to have more energy and better balanced hormones, optimizing our dopamine to stop reaching for our phone so much, or simply learning how to love ourselves, like really in a sustainable, empowering, and not at all cheesy way. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those, topic sound good, scroll on back in the archives. Today's episode is a little bit of a hodgepodge,

but in the best way. My guest today is Chris Hutchins, the host of the All the Hacks podcast. He's also the head of new product strategy at Wealthfront, an online platform to help you build wealth through investing. He and his work have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and more. And previously, he was an investor at Google Ventures and the founder and CEO of Grove, which was acquired by Wealthfront, and a co-founder of Melf, which was acquired by Google. We're clearly going to be getting into money stuff today from a few different angles. We start off getting into the entrepreneurial stuff, which I think is fascinating, both for anyone who might want to start a company someday, or just if you want to peek behind the curtain of

the Silicon Valley startup scene. He shares the surprising way he started and sold his companies to Google and Wealthfront, super actionable, pragmatic networking tips that will change your life. His best advice for anyone who wants to start a company and the best books for aspiring entrepreneurs. Then we get into all things investing, including a simple way to think about investing money, a must-download app for budgeting, if you need a financial advisor and the one rule for choosing a good one, the best way to get rich right now, what rich people know about investing that normal people don't, whether NFTs or cryptocurrency are worth investing in and more. Finally, I wanted him to give us a primer for hacking travel points because he's incredible at it,

and it's a world that I didn't really understand at all but wanted to, mostly because the idea of flying first class and staying in fancy hotels for free sounds very appealing. I wanted someone to be like, okay, if you have never done this point thing, but you want to start reaping real rewards, here's where to actually begin, here's what you can actually expect to get, here's what's not to do, all of that type of stuff, and Chris definitely delivered. I was also on Chris's podcast. He interviewed me about all of my favorite healthy cooking and living hacks. I know you guys are always asking about my favorite takeaways from this podcast,

which is a lot of what I shared with Chris. So search for all the hacks on your favorite podcast platform and give it a listen. And if you're new here, if you found me through all the hacks or anywhere else, I would love it if you would subscribe and join our little fam. We have so many good episodes coming up, including a deep dive into the future of gut health, an interview with a money expert who insists that we can all be millionaires with just a few tweaks and a new edition of our popular pros and cons of having kids series.

So subscribe so you do not miss any new episodes. We have won every single Wednesday. All right, without further ado, please welcome Chris Hutchins with all of his genius life hacks. Okay, Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. I'm really excited to talk about all the hacks and also to have you explain travel hacking to me because I do not get it. and I'm really excited to like understand it. I would love to.

And I'm so happy to be here recording in person. In person. Oh my gosh. It honestly feels like such a breath of fresh air to start to do in person interviews again. I would love to start off with what are some hacks that you've learned that you actually employ on like a day to day basis that have changed your life that you've done like today or yesterday the day before? I'll think of a couple.

So one we'll probably get a lot more into which is using credit cards and maximizing points. So every time I buy something, I'm always trying to make sure I use the optimal card. And I've unfortunately already used my credit card to spend some money today. Another one is last night. We're recording this on the first of the month. And I have a credit card that gives me Uber credit every month. And I forgot to use it.

So last night, we're like at 31st. We have $25. What are we going to do? Did you go for an Uber Joyride? No. So we ordered cookies with Uber Eats, which were not healthy. And there is a hack that I learned from, I think it was, was near Aol, which we talked about distraction. And he was basically like, look, if you want something

really badly, just give yourself permission to have it in five minutes. And so I looked at these leftover cookies that were sitting on the table this morning. I said, you know what? If I really want this cookie in five minutes, I'm going to eat it. And do you like literally set a timer? Or is it? Like how precise is it? It was not precise timer precise, but I was like, in five minutes, if I still want this cookie, I can eat it. Well, guess what? Five minutes later, I was on to something else. I didn't eat the cookie and I felt a lot better for not doing it. So the idea is like our brain is like a small child and you can just like distract it with a shiny thing in a different direction. Exactly. Like I saw the cookie. I was like, oh, my cookie sounds really good right now.

Five minutes later, I was back at work. I was not even paying attention to the cookie. So that's a hack I use all the time because I have very little food self-control. But it works pretty well. Okay. What about psychological hacks? Like are there mindset shifts that you've learned that have changed how you approach the world? Yeah. So I had on a couple Nate and Kaylee Clem. They're a married couple that did a bunch of research with couples to talk about relationships. So if you want to dig in deep, go find that episode if you're listening. But the gist of it is they wrote a book called the 8080 marriage.

And the backstory of it is if you look a long, long time ago, our parents generation probably, you know, like usually there was one partner who was doing 80% of the work. Most often it was the woman. And the man was doing like 20% of the work. And by work, I mean things to make the family function, kids, everything like that. Okay. And what they found is that then we made this shift with our generation to a 50-50 marriage, which came with a handful of problems that we as a society haven't figured out how to address.

Yeah. So a great example is, I put the kids down last night. You put the kids down this night. When once you're 50-50, it's all about keeping score and it becomes this like total disaster. And nobody kind of like owns an area in the same way. And so they're like, one, take a new approach of what they call, radical generosity where it's like, look, we're all, as long as we all know that we're all going to try harder. And by the way, when you see one person carrying more weight, uh, oftentimes other

people like want to pick up the slack in a relationship they care about. If you don't have a healthy relationship, that's maybe a whole separate problem. Another issue to do it. But so, you know, they call it the 80-80 marriage and it's like, we're not going to keep track of who is, who's done the dishwasher, the dishes more often or who, uh, cook dinner, which night. It's like, We all know that we're all going to try really hard in different places. Yeah. I'm the person who maybe is gathering everything right now for our tax returns. And like if you kind of look at it all together and even one of their hacks, which we still

haven't figured out the name, but is to name your family relationship. So it's like what is frame a decision on what's best for the family. And they think it's even better if you have a name for it. Wait. So what like your explain that. Yeah. I'll give you example. The one they gave when we interviewed them.

And by the way, there was the first interview I'd ever done with my wife. We both interviewed them. Oh, that's so fun. And it was, they were trying to figure out who is going to take off work to meet their daughter at the bus when she gets off at 3.30 because someone needs to do that. And if you framed it as, well, what's best for the family? And it was like, as a cohesive unit, right now for whose career is taking time off harder, it was easier for them to be like, oh, Nate decided he was the worst.

one that was going to take off. But when it was just like, should I take off an hour and a half early to go get our daughter? It was like, no, that doesn't make sense. So they started framing everything with what's best for the family. I like that in general because I do think that it's so easy to kind fall into very individualistic thinking. And that almost encourages a more community-based thinking, even if your community is like your tiny nuclear family. Yeah. And I think their nickname for their family was something that was like the first three letters of their themselves and their daughter or something. It was very simple. You didn't have to have a fancy name.

But you come up with any name. Do you guys have one yet? We don't have one yet. We were thinking about it. Are you workshopping stuff? Well, we have a daughter coming in two months and we're like, let's just wait until she's here. Now we don't know her name yet.

Then we can come up with a cool name. Okay. Let's get into some entrepreneurial stuff. I think a lot of people dream of like starting a company and selling it to Google, but you've done that, which is really cool. So what advice would you give to somebody who like came to and was like, I want to do that someday, man? Like, how do I start?

I mean, I think I'm very fortunate. to have had that experience, I think that the most important thing to any kind of successful entrepreneurial endeavor is to realize, like, it's way worse when you dig into like how that experience was for almost every entrepreneur than what you see on the outside. It's like, ooh, this person runs a business. And then you're like, oh, no, but it is all consuming. Like I couldn't have even imagined having a startup and a kid and like starting a family and being a present member of the family. Yeah.

You know, the decision of what's best for the family wouldn't have gone as well. So the only thing that makes the really hard parts work is knowing that like this is the thing you really want to do. So I would say if someone, the worst reason to start a company is because you want to start a company. Like the best reason to start a company is that there's a thing that you're so passionate about doing or making or producing or selling that like you can't think of doing anything else other than that. That's like a great reason, which when times are really tough, which they

inevitably will be, you're like, okay, I can get through that tough time and do that next thing. So when people come to me and they're like, God, I would love to start a company. I'd be like, well, don't think about it as I would love to start a company. Think about it as what do you doing. Can you do that? Maybe it starts as a side hustle and it's not a company. And by the way, starting something as a side hustle is a great way to test whether it has legs before you quit your job and try to make it work. And then to full transparency, the company we started that we sold to Google, yes, we did get some money for doing it. But like, it was not a successful company.

Like, we started a company. It didn't work. And Google was like, hey, if you shut your company down, we'll hire you to work at Google and we'll give you like a bonus for joining Google that like I wouldn't say was all that different from the signing bonus. Some people might get. So it wasn't, you know, it always looks even in that example, the way you introed it sounds more glamorous than like. like, I took a job at Google. I got effectively a signing bonus that wasn't that different for me than if I probably had gotten a job at Google. And then in order to get the other money, I had to work there for three years, which was kind of like getting an annual bonus or working at Google.

So, you know, our investors loved that we framed it as an acquisition because their investment looks great and all that. And they didn't lose money. But at the end of the day, all of the winds of entrepreneurship look better than than they might seem often. And all of the losses usually get swept under the rug because we don't like to talk about it. But I've had two companies that on paper were acquired and both companies were effectively failures and that like the company didn't work. Interesting. How does it even, if the company's not working, how does it even get on the radar of like a Google or a wealth front? In both of the cases, we like emailed people at these companies and said, hey, I'm working on this company, you know, I remember the email to Google and it specifically said, we have this

problem. We love solving it, but we think it could be even more impactful if we were working on working on the problem with more scale. It was like, basically the email was, hey, we want to work on a bigger problem. You guys have a bigger problem. We should come work at Google. And they just like emailed you back and they were like, yeah, let's have a chat. Now, in that case, my co-founder had a relatively established brand in the industry and they really wanted him to come work at Google. And I kind of got to go along for the ride. In the case of my most recent company, Grove, which was all about financial planning, wealth front was trying to solve a similar problem to what we were solving in a very, very fundamentally different way. And they were like, oh, why don't you come and work on that problem?

But we shut the company down. No one got any money when we did it. We got jobs. We got stock packages like we normally would. Our investors got to invest in Wealthfront. But it wasn't like a true were buying your stock. Interesting. Like no one's stock was purchased. That's interesting. It's interesting to me how much a lot of the stuff seems to come down to like who you know as much as what you're doing. Like your co-founder was known by Google or he knew the people at Google.

How much do you think that your network impacts your ability to have this type of career versus, you know, the skill set and what you're actually doing? I would say it's like 99% network. Really? It means like mostly network and luck And like a little bit like right play Well I guess right place right time is luck So like so then how do you build that network? I think that's such a fast like

You were on Tim Ferriss's podcast He was on yours as well right? We aired the episode from his show on mine So like you know Tim Ferriss I feel like I listened to the Did you guys meet at the rock climbing gym? I met my old co-founder Who is friends with Tim

Which is how I met Tim through that relationship. Okay. So the mutual friend, which is how I met Tim, was from meeting at a rock climbing gym. Okay. I feel like the nexus of networking in the Bay Area seems to be the rock climbing gym. Yeah. I think in 2008, what?

Like, that was a hot spot. I would say the thing that I would do all the time. Here's a great example. If I went to a conference, I would email the people organizing the conference in advance and be like, do you have an attendee list? And sometimes they'd send it. Sometimes they wouldn't. At a minimum, all the speakers.

of the conference are always listed on the website. Okay. And then I would go and I would look at all the speakers names. I would download it and make a list. Then I would go find all the people that I wanted to meet. And then I would go download a picture of all the people. Wow. And I would put a head shot next to the name and put it in the notes app on my phone.

And like when I'm standing there like, who do I go talk to? I would like scroll through and back, oh, that's the person I want to talk to. Let's go talk to them. I love that because I feel like people make networking sound very casual. and I like that there's like a process and effort and energy you're putting into it. I'd say a very big chunk of all of the people I've met in my career that have been valuable, came from just being genuinely authentically valuable to people. Like I would say, oh, how can I help you out?

Is there a person you want to meet? Is there a problem I can help solve? And do you feel like even from that, though, I think a lot of people feel like when they talk to these people who they feel like are more advanced in their careers, that they don't have anything to offer, which is why they're just asking for, Like, you know, I've heard people give the advice that like a mentorship should be two way. You should be offering something to your mentor position. But I think a lot of people are like, well, they're so successful.

What do I even have to bring to the table? I would say two thoughts come to mind. One, that there are a lot of people that like to be heard and feel wise, if you will. I use, I say wise because I would often send an email to people that I think I didn't know what I could offer them. And I would say, hey, I would love if you could share some of your wisdom. them on this topic. And I found that that email got really good responses because people are like, wow, this person like, yeah, I know what I'm talking about. I would love to be an ed. You know, it's like,

you know, let them be a college professor for an hour on a call with you. Yeah. And like, you know, people like that. It feeds the ego, which is something we have, whether we wanted or not. So that's one. But the other is, you know, let's say you were really excited about working at some company and you don't have, you know, you're fresh out of college. You could provide value by trying to add value to the company. Let's say someone really wants to get to know you. They could go out and say, hey, I found a podcast you've never been on. I emailed the host of that podcast about how amazing you were, and you have to have Liz on the show. And they could email you and say, hey, Liz, I found this podcast. It has a pretty big following. I reached out to the host. I told them how much I think

you're amazing in the topics you could talk about. Would you be interested? I bet you would say, yeah, I would love to. It will help me build my brand. It would be a good conversation. All that took was like a little bit of like hustle and like cold outreach and like initiative. I think a lot of people, I have a life motto that's like never be the one to say no to yourself. And I think a lot of people are like, I could never do that. Like, why would they even listen to my email or whatever? And it's like, well, try it. Like it's not, it might not go well. It might go well, but there's no harm in trying it. Yeah. So that's what I always, I did an episode on someone else's show. It's a show called Choose FI for Financial Independence. And it was like called How to Get Any Job. And it was just like,

when I wanted a job at a company, I was like, what is every way to get in front of this company? I made like a presentation. I emailed it to them. I asked one of the investors if they'd listen to me. It was like, I just want to work at this company. And eventually I got a job at this company. I didn't just send my resume and say like, oh, they never wrote back. That's it.

Right. I was like, let's try everything. And it ended up working. I love that. Accepting that you're not going to always network also with the top person. I think there's a lot of people that go to a conference and they're like, ooh, Mark Cuban's on stage. I'm going to try to talk to Mark Cuban. I promise that if you want to get in front of Mark Cuban, finding someone that works at his company

who's close to him and pitching that person is one going to be way easier to get to because they're not as in demand as him. They're actually going to listen. And it's probably going to increase your likelihood that he finds out about it. So if you have an awesome company you want to get in front of Mark Cuban, like find someone on his team, talk to them and get to know them. And that's probably more likely to work than trying to get in front of Mark Cuban. Look, I'm never going to make everything that I wear organic. But your sheets, your pillows, your comforter are literally touching your skin for eight hours every single night.

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I also think that building a network of people who are in the same places as you in your career is really valuable too. And something that people don't talk about enough, they're like, you need to kind of always be networking essentially and people who are where you want to be later. But like in social media, for instance, finding people who are kind of at a same level as you and then you can all grow together. If you're all starting a company at the same time, I think that there's value in both in kind of being with the group you can grow with and then having the people who are more in the mentorship role who can teach you things. And certainly some of those peers are going to go on to a more accelerated or a less accelerated career than you. And the ones that aren't moving as fast are an opportunity for you to mentor them. And the ones who are moving faster, an opportunity for you to get mentor. Okay.

We're going to get into investing stuff in just a second, but just to kind of put a little bow on the entrepreneurial stuff. I love super pragmatic, like actionable, tangible takeaways, which obviously you do, you hear like the all the hacks guy. If somebody was listening and they had a little nugget of an idea in their brain and they wanted to start a company. Could you give them like one thing they could do today, whether it's a, you know, workbook exercise or an app they could download or one thing they could look up on the internet, but just something really tangible that they could do right now? Yeah, I mean, I think we get caught up in all of the, ooh, I have an idea. What's my business plan?

Ooh, I have an idea. What should I make a website about? I would say find the like most simple way to test whether people will rip the thing out of your hands. So, you know, it's a process. There's a book called Four Steps to the Epiphany. and they walk through customer development, which is something you can do

without building your product, without creating it. I would say, go read that book. It's like definitely an old school book. It's not like a cool, fun book, but it's like the general idea is if you think that this thing

will cause people to rip the product out of your hands, you want your customers like pulling it from you. You can go test that without even building the product. Call if you think it's a product for people who, you know, are fed up with dieting, go stand around the mall, try to find 10 people who are fed up with dieting

and be like, would you buy this product? I think trying to validate the idea is something we don't do as much of as trying to create the product. So, you know, instead of saying, ooh, let's go spend three months trying to make the coolest X, go talk about X to 10 people and see if they're even excited because that would be what it is. Go run a process that at Wellfront we call customer development, but that, you know, the book Four Steps the Epiphany walks through. Go test it out and go customer develop it before spending the time to go start a company.

and definitely do that nights and weekend. Like, don't quit your job to go find out if people are desperate for what you're building. Yeah. Are there any other books that were really helpful to you in your entrepreneurial journey? The hard thing about hard things is a great book from Ben Horowitz. I really liked it. I might send you a couple other ideas if you want to put them in the show notes. But the hard thing about hard things is like one of those ones that really, really works.

And then in a nutshell, like what's about like a sentence or two? It's interesting. It's kind of a book where there's like 20, chapters about different things instead of, there's another book that I really liked, and I interviewed this guy, David Marque, and he's a former submarine captain. I think I listened to that one. It was one of those episodes of yours that I was like, do I want to listen to this? And then I was like, oh, this is really valuable and very different than what I thought it would be. Yeah. And I'd listen to him. You can find a YouTube video from him or just listen to the episode that we recorded on all the

hacks. But his general leadership principle is like, don't tell people what to do, which is like almost the exact opposite of everything you've ever heard about leadership ever. And he was wildly successful in doing it. He took the worst performing submarine and the entire naval fleet to be the best. It produced more naval captains from the crew than any other ship. Wait, so the idea is if you don't tell people what to do, how are they knowing what to do? Yeah. So most people know, have an idea of what to do. So instead of saying, hey, can you go do X? Say, hey, what do you think we should do. And then someone can come to you and say, I think we should change the website to be green. And you could be, you could ask clarifying questions, be like, why green? And you can try to help

coach them through inquisition, but let them own the decision. Let them own the recommendation. So he had everyone say, you can't come to me and ask what to do. You can come to me and say, this is what I intend to do. And I can either say, here's why you shouldn't do it, or I can say yes. But like put the, put the, put the bonus on the other person, give them the autonomy. to make the decision, and you can always veto it. You can always ask questions to help them get to the right place. But as a CEO when I was running a company, I watched the video or reread parts of his book like every year.

Interesting. Okay, let's get into investing. I'm going to preface this by saying that I'm like very much newbie status with all money stuff. So I want to approach this from a newbie perspective, but I want to get into some of the more like complicated stuff. I just feel like people are either like very high level or very low level. And I want to start low and go high essentially.

Perfect. I will do my best. So can you explain to me like a five-year-old how you approach investing in your own life? Like what is your investment strategy? Why are you investing? What's the thought behind it all? Yeah. I'll even go one step before and be like, is it saving or investing?

And like where do you think about the difference? Yeah, sure. For me, and I think there are people that are fall into two camps. You're like a default spender and a default saver. And if you're a default saver, unfortunately, for the rest of the world, like, you're in a great spot. And if you're a default spender, it's harder because, you know, as a default saver, which I am, it's like every dollar I make is for the future.

And I kind of feel in my mind like I'm borrowing from it to spend money. And it just makes it easier to save. On the flip side, when you have money, it makes it harder to spend, which sounds like, you know, a champagne problem. Yeah, yeah. But like, there are a lot of... But then it's also like, what's the point? Like, literally, I think...

I feel like sometimes you look up from like working so hard and you're like, what's the point of doing this? If I'm not for, to what end? Like money is a tool to an end. It literally doesn't exist to like sit somewhere. Yeah, there's a great book called Die Was Zero. And the whole principle is like, you don't want to just die, Scrooge McDon't know. Literally. Yeah.

With pools of money. You want to enjoy your life. So I won't go into budgeting because it's like a whole rabbit hole of things that lots of people have different opinions. If you want to start playing around, check out YNAB. It's a pretty cool app. YNab. You need a budget. If you want to talk about budgeting,

they have a whole podcast that digs into a handful of things, a great blog. But as a default spender, you have to learn, okay, I need to set aside money for the future. Why? Because we're not all going to work until we die. And, you know, some of us need to have money when we live, most of us. So if you look at your longevity in your life, most people stop working in their 60s or 70s. And we have an expectation now of like, I want to live to live. until I'm 90 or 100. It's like, you need to save enough money so that you have 30 years of,

you know, spending funded by your savings, which is a hard thing to do, which is why lots of people work much longer than they want. So when I think of saving, it's like, okay, all the money that I'm not going to spend, where do I put it? And my first place that I always put it is, I want to set aside enough money. So if something happens, I just have money. So if you're listening to this and you're like, I have zero savings. My bank account is $10 in it. Like goal one, should be maybe set aside like a month worth of expenses so that if something happened, you didn't have to borrow money. Because as the second thing I focus on is like paying down any expensive debt because

it's really expensive to borrow money. With the exception of like a mortgage and some student loans and maybe some auto loans, like debt is expensive. Credit cards can be over 20%. Medical loans can be expensive. And there's no point in putting money in an investment account that maybe you hope will earn 7% if you could otherwise pay off debt that's growing at 25%. So once you've knocked off those two things, you're like, okay, I've paid off high

interest debt and I've set aside enough cash that if something were to happen, I could use it because I don't have enough in my regular spending account, then I'm like, great, maybe you should invest. And by invest, I mean set aside money for the future in a way that it grows, hopefully exponentially. if you've ever heard someone talk about the magic of compound interest, it's that, you know, if you have $100 and you get 6%, you have $106,000, next year you're going to get 6% on the 106.

And then next year, you're going to get 6% on that other number. It's the people who like to make you feel bad about not knowing any of this stuff when you were like 22 because they're like, oh, if you'd been doing this since you were 22, you look how rich you'd be now. And I'm like, well, I'm in my 30s. And I did not do that. Yeah. But the reality is, okay, great.

You probably had a fun time. Oh. And you didn't say that which I remember. Yeah. And so I would say now is a good time to start. You know, it's probably true. We did. They started literally.

My husband and I started like last year investing. Great. That's better than starting in five years. Next year. Yeah. So I think anytime you're ready to get started, that's a great time. Okay. And the reason why investing is better than just putting money in your checking account is that in

general, the stock market over the history of the last hundred years has grown, depending on what sector was there, more than 5%. And cash right now, if you deposited at like Chaser or Wells Fargo is going to grow at 0.01% maybe. So you're losing money. I think that's something that like is almost hard to get your head around. But like if you just put money in a savings account, you actually are losing money with the rate of inflation over time. Yeah. Right now. I mean, inflation prior to this year has been pretty low. and no one's really noticed it. And I'm sure your parents or your grandparents are like,

I remember when a bottle of milk was five cents and that kind of stuff. It's like, yeah, if they had left their money in their checking account, they probably wouldn't have had a lot. But when you invest your money in the stock market, a lot of the goods that you buy are being sold by companies. So as the prices of those goods go up, those companies make more money because the goods are more expensive. And so, you know, the investing in this stock market is a way to kind of hedge inflation.

And so that's generally why you, want to invest. The challenge with investing is that as we've seen in 2008, as we've seen in 2000, as we saw briefly during the pandemic, the stock market can go down. Yeah. And so the general rule without getting too crazy is like if you need money in the next five years, putting it in the stock market is not the best option for most people because investing your money and then having it go down and then having to sell it is the worst thing to do. Right. If you had sold all of your portfolio when in like March of 2020 after the market crash 30%, you would have missed out on the fact that we actually ended 2020 higher than we started. And so when I think of investing,

I'm putting money in that I don't need for more than five years and in many cases for 20, 30 years. And finding a place to do that, whether you want to go and research index funds and buy them yourself, whether you want to pick a product like Wealthfront or other software product. online to invest your money, that's fine, and they'll do it for you. So that's kind of like your options is do it yourself and learn or find someone to do it. You can use a financial advisor as well. The fees end up being expensive. And so it's hard for me to recommend it because that comes out of your return. A financial advisor can be really helpful with a process called financial planning. I actually started a whole company around this that didn't work out. But the process of financial

planning is like take an inventory of where you're at, what you're doing, and try to see what kinds of optimizations you can put into place. How much should you invest? How should you invest it? Do you need a trust or a will for your family? All that kind of stuff. That process, you get usually for free with a financial advisor, but you pay for over 30 years as a percent of your money. You can also hire a financial planner one time for maybe $2,000 and they'll go through that process for you and you can hire them each year to update it. I like to separate those two things because the percentage of my investments model doesn't make sense. If I have 10 times as much money, why would I pay the person 10 times as much to go through the exact same process?

So the other big problem is that most financial advisors, the vast majority in the U.S., are making most of their money by selling products for which there are usually better, cheaper alternatives. Those products are often life insurance, whole life and universal life. They can make sometimes as much as like the entire premiums you pay for the whole first year they get to keep. And then there's lots of really high fee mutual funds that a lot of financial advisors sell. So the general question is ask any person that's a financial advisor, whether they're a fiduciary. And if they give you anything other than an answer that is yes, the most common answers are let me talk about why I care about you. But if it's not yes, that means they're not

actually legally required to do what's in your best interest. Oh, wow. What you'll find is that many advisors, the vast majority of them in the U.S. are not fiduciaries. They're broker dealers and they make their money from commissions. Oh, that's so interesting. They're required to get it directionally right. So if you say I want to invest in the stock market, they have to give you a stock market fund. And if they gave you something totally different, they could get in trouble.

But they could give you one where they're making 2% of every dollar you give them versus one that's exactly the same and they don't make anything and only cost you 0.0.0. 5%. Okay. So if you get a financial advisor, ask, are they a fiduciary? And if they don't say yes, run for the hills. That's my advice. Okay. Good. I think a lot of the confusion around investment, and this is something I was very much guilty of, is that we're like, oh, I have some money. How do I use this money to like get rich right now? And every person that I've ever heard talk about investment who seems knowledgeable about the subject. She's like, no, it's more just like, you're hedging the market. It's a long-term play. Blah, blah, blah. Is there anything that you

can do if you have money to just like get richer right now? Not with I mean the whole thing is risk right right. Think about a casino right. There are a lot of ways you get rich really quick at a casino. You're just much more likely to not get rich. When it comes to your money, it's the exact same thing. If there were an obvious way that you could just take money and get rich, like whoever knew about it wouldn't be telling you. Well, are there things that like the really rich people know that we don't know as normal people? There are a handful of, you know, like, tax treatments that might help out. But at the end of the day, like the types of investments that really rich people make, let's take endowments. So if you look at the story that Andy

Rackcliffe, who founded Wealthfront had, was that he sat on the board at the University of Pennsylvania for their endowment committee, which is like most giant universities have billions of dollars sitting in a bank account that people have donated. And it's the university's goal to invest that money. And they have billions of dollars. It's like, how are we going to invest this money. He's like, why can't we just build software that does it the same way? It's like, we're going to invest in these index funds that are super low cost. Granted, are they making some private investments in venture capital and stuff like that that you can't? Probably. But is the majority of the money in like broad market exposure? Yes. And so if you look at my

investment portfolio, it's really boring. It's like I have a bunch of money in a, you know, few index funds that are low cost that try to play the market. I'm not trying to beat the market. I'm just trying to like cruise with the market because historically it's done pretty well. Yeah. I'm genuinely confused how master class gets literally the absolute top people in every single field to teach every single one of their classes. I use it when I want to learn things directly like the cooking class from Thomas Keller has all of the wisdom that you would normally have to go to culinary school for.

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So what do we think about NFTs? So I think that shat, like, NFTs are interesting. people buy sneakers and handbags that from the materials they're made with cost the exact same to make as other ones, except because of the brands that are associated with them, they're worth 10, 50, 100,000 times as much. People like to spend money in the real world to show off the cool stuff that they have and status. You could buy art, and you're buying the art that a person made, even though it might just, be, you know, we've all seen like a piece of art in a museum that's like, hmm, why is that blue canvas?

Like, worth $24 million. Well, it's because this person made it and they did it with a special, I don't know. Sometimes I struggle with it. It's the intent behind the work. Exactly. It seems only realistic that with everyone doing things online, there will be a digital version of that. People are buying axes to like mine things in Minecraft.

Kids are like buying things. They want to show off their identity to their friends and games. So the idea that. we will have things in this digital world that we operate on on the internet that we would want to own, it's definitely true. I think there will be value there. What I don't think is that it's clear what will be value. So to say, will some people make money with NFTs? Yeah, of course. There are a lot of artists that make a lot of money. There's also a lot of art that is worth with that you could go buy. So, you know, NFTs is like a weird space. Do I think like the blockchain

technology will be really powerful to the future of the internet? Yes, 100%. Do I know how to pick what company or what thing or what cryptocurrency will like a thousand X? I have no idea. Do you own any crypto yourself? I own like Bitcoin and Ethereum, like major like large, but I don't own any like weird edge case small things hoping they're going to be wildly successful. Maybe you could argue it would have been great. It like, you know, it would have been great if I picked them, but for me, I'm not trying to pick something that I don't feel like I know more than everyone else about. And like, how big of a piece of your portfolio is something like crypto? It's interesting because I was fortunate to get exposed to Bitcoin, like, back in 2013.

I talked my husband out of buying Bitcoin in like 2011 or something stupid. Yeah. And I, in preparation for... So that's why we live the life now. So it's grown to be a larger percentage than I would want. but it's still, it's like not more than 10%. So like in my general rule, it's like everything that isn't my long term diverse passive portfolio of index funds is like less than 10%. And that lets me make stupid investments in like, oh, I think this company's really cool. Let's buy some stock in this company.

Right. And I like want to actually say that very clearly because I do think a lot of people think of investment as picking individual stocks. And even when I again first started doing it, I was like, oh, I'm staying in Airbnb's and I like Airbnb. so I should buy Airbnb or like, let's make a bet on alternative energy for the future or something like that. But you view individual stocks as like fun investments too. I think for me, individual stocks are a fun investment because I'm not creating a system whereby I'm going to invest in enough

of them that it's going to be more passive. I interviewed a guy named Brian Ferraldi a few weeks ago, and he's created this investor investing checklist that he follows and he invests in lots of stocks. And his methodology for investing in stocks is much more like my methodology for investing in index funds. It's playing the broad market, buying and hold for a really long time. Okay. If I'm just picking a random company that I think is cool, but I haven't done a bunch of research. Yeah.

Like there are people in Wall Street who's like, there is a person whose only job is to decide whether Apple is a good buy right now. Right. Every day, all this person is doing is reading research about Apple, reading news about Apple, looking at financial reports about Apple, maybe hiring people to stand. outside of Apple stores to like count whether the number of people going into the Apple store is going up or down. I feel like that person is a better judge of whether Apple is a good buy right now than me. I'd rather buy all the companies because then I just own the whole basket. And when Apple

does well, like, I own some Apple. That's great. Every now and then there's a company where I'm like, this company is really cool. Let's just buy it and see what happens because I think it's cool. I'm not betting that it's a good buy right now. I'm betting that maybe this company will be like 10 times bigger in the future, which is something that I often get wrong. But it's kind of, I'd like to say that having the fund investments with 10 or less percent of my portfolio makes investing exciting because the 90 percent is super boring. I bought like five index funds and they just sit there for 10 years. I don't do anything. Yeah, I have to say when I realized that's what investing was, I was deeply disappointed. Yeah. Investing. So like the investing that I think builds most people's

wealth consistently is super boring. This is a little bit of a weird question, but outside of investing or even inside of it, if somebody was just like, well, I just want to like be rich sooner. Like, I just want to have more money sooner. Is there anything you would say to them? I don't think money buys happiness in the way that someone who would ask that question would be thinking. So there's an interesting book called Happy Money. And it talks about like the five ways to spend money to truly make you happy, I'd say, go read that book and you'd realize that you might already have enough money to do a lot of those things. So I would say, you'd challenge the assumption. I would definitely challenge you something. Start talking to your friends that you are jealous of

because you think they have more money because you saw their Instagram post of going on some ridiculous vacation and ask them like, hey, quick question. Like, do you guys have any debt? The number of times we've helped in my past role, people who you would think had tons of money because the way they live and in the reality is that they're not rich. They do not have, you know, they're over their skis. I think there's just this misconception where it's totally normal to post all the great things of your life on the internet. I haven't seen a lot of people go online and be like, hey, we couldn't pay our bills this month.

Like that's not a thing people post on Instagram. Like what photo would even go with that? Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, here's the addiction notice on my, on my door. It's just, I don't know why, like, what is, rich mean to someone. So there's a community called the financial independence community. The fire, right? So fire is like the retire early version. Financial independence is just, I want enough money to not have to work if I don't want to versus retire early is like, I want to

stop working as soon as possible. The general thing that I think everyone kind of agrees on is trying to get the most money is not as impactful as trying to spend less money. So for me, as someone who wanted that independence to be able to do whatever I want. One option is, okay, well, if I live the life I'm living now and I'm spending as much as I'm spending now, and the general rule of thumb, very general, is like, you need 25 times whatever you spend to stop working forever. So if you spend $100,000 a year, you need $2.5 million. You can cut that down to $50,000 a year. Now you only need $1.25 million. And the idea is you're not, you're putting that in some sort of investment. So you're getting, it's growing as it over time. So the idea was they did,

there was a study that was done that said, uh, you know, in general, you can live off an investment portfolio taking four percent out every year, the four percent rule. And four percent, one divided by 0.04 is 25. So it's like, you need 25 times or you need money that you can live off four percent of. And so the, if you have a million dollars, you can live off 40K for the rest of your life. So one option is, okay, well, you know, I don't want to live off 40K. I want to live off 500 grand. So now I need to go find a way to make, you know, $12 million or something.

The other option is how do I find ways in my life to cut back and do it creatively? So I think like the entire theme of the financial side of my life and my podcast is like, what are creative ways to go on vacations where you're not having to stay at the motel 8 in, you know, off the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere, but you can go on a really lavish vacation, but you can do it with points or you can do it with miles or you can do it with hacks so that you don't have to spend as much. So ultimately you can bring down your annual cost of living, which means you can save more, which means you can get rich faster if you want to think about it that way. But you could also just need less each year, which would make it easier for you to be

financially independent. Okay, let's get into points hacking. What? Like, everybody starts so high and they're like, here's my 75 credit cards and like, here's the miles and whatever. And I'm just like, okay, the goal of points hacking, right, is that just by spending the normal money you spend in your life, you can go stay at like fancy hotels or fly first class, right? Like, that's the whole thing. I mean, I think the goal would be that you can not have to spend as much as you want on travel. I know a lot of people that just still don't want to fly first class. Like, I'd rather go on three trips instead of one first class, yeah. Yeah. But the idea is can you not spend as much money on travel without having to downgrade the quality of the travel.

Or even there are people who are like, look, I want to maximize the way I use my cards, but I just don't want to deal with points. So I just want to make sure I have the right cashback cards. But it's like a much easier version of points hacking because there's like, okay, well, if you just get a 2% cashback card for everything, you're pretty close. How lavish does the spending need to be to start having the rewards that you might see on TikTok? Yeah. So I think a lot of people accumulate most of their points through the fact that credit

card companies will give you huge bonuses to sign up for a new card. Okay. So if you take an example of the Capital One Venture X, which unfortunately is not still offering, but recently offered 100,000 points when you sign up, and you had to spend, I think it was $20,000 in six months and you got $100,000. If they didn't offer that, they offered two points per dollar. So you would have had to spend $50,000 to get those $100,000. And instead, it was actually, you got the points from the 20 you spent.

So like you got $140,000 for spending, you know, $20,000. So that is how a lot of travel hackers, miles and points enthusiasts, optimize the system is they wait until a card has a really sweet sign-up bonus and they get that card. And then they kind of hang out. Some people take it to a really intense extreme place and they're like, I'm going to open three cards every quarter so that I'm getting sign-up bonuses. Yeah. You know, galore. I have not taken it to that extreme personally. But, you know, I would say at least a dozen times a year, there's a card with a six-figure sign-up bonus.

Okay. And you're just kind of like always watching out for those. The Chase Sapphire preferred card is soon, maybe even by the time you hear this, going to have, I think, an 80,000 point sign-up bonus. Okay. And you let's, for the sake of argument, say you need to spend $5,000 and it earns $3.3.000. points on dining and two points on travel. So if you spend that 5,000 well, maybe it's 10,000 and you now have 90,000 points. Okay. 90,000 points would be enough to stay at like one of the nicest highates in the world for three nights. Okay. It would be enough to stay at like a pretty great resort in

Mexico that isn't the nicest high in the world for maybe five night. Okay. So we're not talking about like, and that's for spending maybe five or six thousand dollars. So are these like, like, Would you basically say opening a new card, a new card equals like a vacation sort of? I mean, it depends on how nice a vacation you want to take. Yeah. But I would say if you're getting started and you know, you're doing it for yourself for sure, if you want to take a trip halfway around the world in business class and stay at, you know, an overwater bungalow in the Maldives, maybe that's like seven cards.

Okay. But that's usually a thing that, you know, you're doing for your honeymoon and you're hopefully not going on lots of honeymoons, although maybe, hopefully you are, but in the same marriage. But yeah, I mean, I always tell me, like, start with a trip. What are you trying to do? If you're trying to go on a certain type of trip, you know, what should you optimize for? The reality is that many hotel programs other than Hyatt have made it pretty hard to accrue enough points to stay in a nice hotel unless you get their credit card. So I think points in miles are best used other than Hyatt for flights.

Okay. The caveat out there I said was Hyatt, which is like has these amazing redemptions that you can get by transferring points to Hyatt, which you can do with a chase card or with a built, uh, the new built card. Okay. Okay. There's a lot to unpack there. Um, okay.

So is there any negative to just like opening all these new credit cards? Yeah. That feels very nerve-wracking. Yeah. So there's two negatives to keep in mind. One, if you're not paying your credit cards off each month, right? Like, this is not a game for you. Yeah.

Okay. This is like fast forward to, you know, whenever we stop talking about this. You know, I think it's good for everyone to log onto credit karma and look at how your credit's doing because, you know, every time you open up a card, it has an impact on your credit. There's probably a whole episode I haven't done but should do. I'll find some cool article and send it to you as you can put in the show notes. but when you open up a new credit card, it adds to the number of cards you have, which is a positive to your credit.

The whole idea of a credit score is that people who are about to lend you money want to get a sense of how reliable you are, right? The more times you've borrowed money, and effectively a credit card is like, I'm taking a loan even though you're not drawing on it. It's like if you've done it 20 times and paid it back, and paid it back, that's more reliable. Okay.

So more cards better. Having more credit available to you. So if you had one card, with a $10,000 limit and you spend $9,000 a month, I know that you're spending 90,000, 90% of your credit every month. Okay. If you open up a second card and didn't change your spending, and it also had a $10,000 limit,

now you go from spending $9,000 of $10,000 to $9 of $20. Is that better? And that's better because now they're like, oh, wow, this person's actually using 45% of their available credit each month. So they're not assuming you're pushing yourself to the max. So when you open up a new card, the bonus for your credit score, is that more credit means that you're using less of it each month. Does it work the reverse way?

Like, if you closed credit cards, does it hurt your credit? Close a credit card and it had a high limit, then it would negatively impact that factor of your credit score. Okay, but not like, it's not like close a credit card is a ding unto itself. It's just that like your math, you're using all of a sudden a greater percentage of your overall credit. Yeah. So ways around that, one, you don't really need to close a card, right?

The only reason that I would say you should close a card is if it has a high annual fee and you don't want to use it anymore. Okay. But if you call Chase and say, hey, if this card has a really high annual fee, can I downgrade it to a free card? Very often they will. And that doesn't hurt your credit at all. Nope. Doesn't hurt your credit at all. So the things that really boost your credit is having cards for a really long time.

So one of the factors in your credit score is the average length of credit. So if you have one card that you've had for one year and one that you've had for 11 years, maybe the average is about five. If you have only cards you've opened up this year, then the average year is one. Banks look at you and say, hmm, this person's average length is only one year. I don't have a lot of data.

Okay. I say, this person's average length is 20 years. I have more data. So the card that you've had the longest is the one you probably don't want to close. And so I still have this one MX that I opened up almost 20 years ago. And I never use it other than once a year. I try to put one purchase on it so that it doesn't get closed

because it's like the anchor of my credit report. Oh, that's so interesting. Okay, that makes sense. Okay, so how many cards do you have right now? I would say right now, if you include, like, my wife and I kind of do it together a little bit, but between two of us is probably like 12. Okay. Which is like way.

That's not wild. It's not wild, but it's like way more than most people need. Yeah. I think for me, part of it is like, this is my thing, right? Like, if you go listen to my podcast, there's like a lot of episodes about this. I try to optimize this to a level that I don't think most people should. I think most people should say, where do I spend most of my money? Okay, what card should I start with?

So, like, one optimization is just if you spend all your money going out to eat and you spend all your money on travel and it's all dining and travel, you should probably have one of the like two or three cards that pays a high number of points on dining and travel. But should you optimize for that before you would like be optimizing for these big sign-up bonuses? I mean, I would say always have like the one card that's going to. maximize your regular spend. Okay. So you have your daily use card and then you have your anchor card, which is keeping your

credit score good. And then you have this mix in, this like melange of cards you're opening because they have big sign up bonuses. I would say that is how like the most extreme travel hackers are doing it. They're opening up lots of cards for the bonuses. In a perfect world, you could say, wow, let's find a card that meets my requirements for how I spend money and have. a big sign-up bonus.

But then you only get that bonus one time. You only get one time. So it's one vacation. What if you want more than one vacation? Yeah. So if you want more than one vacation, obviously you can get more cards as you go. And the general rule of thumb is like keep the card a year. And at the end of the year, if the net value of the card is positive, you could just keep it open.

Right. If the card has no annual fee, keep it open. If the card has a really high annual fee and you're not getting any benefits from it, I would try to downgrade it. I would try to ask the credit card company if they have. any offers for you. You can call Amex and say, hey, I'm not getting a lot of value of that this card. I'm thinking about canceling it. Sometimes they'll be like, well, we'll waive the annual fee and you can try again next year. Or you can say, hey, I'm going to downgrade it to a free card

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I don't have like a home improvement store card because it's like not a huge part of our budget. But if you did, if you were a reno person and you love that, maybe look for a card that optimizes that type of stuff. Exactly. Or if you drive a lot, look for a card that optimizes gas. Exactly. For me, I know that dining and travel and groceries are three, like, huge areas. So I definitely have a card that's like, this is the grocery card, this is the travel card, and this is the dining card. So for groceries, if you're like a Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh person, even though it's not a points card, it's hard to argue with getting 5% cash back with like the chase.

Amazon Prime card. Okay. I didn't even know that existed. Yeah. So Chase has a card that gives you 5% back on Amazon, Whole Foods. And it's not points. So it'll help you go on the vacation with dollars. Yeah, yeah.

But like, yeah. The Amex Gold gives four points per dollar on groceries. If I'm going to like a Safeway or the local grocery store here, Lenardi's, which is not part of Whole Foods or Amazon, then I use that. Okay. You know, I have a Chase Sapphire Reserve, which is three points on travel, three points on dining. That's the only card I have and I use it on everything, which I feel like is what I'm trying to get away from. Yeah. So that's a good card. Let's take you as an example. Let's pause for a second.

So you use that card. And one of the things that I think a mistake some people can get into is like, ooh, there's another bonus. So now I open up an Amex card. And now I open up a Chase card. And now I have a city card. Now I have points all over the place. It can be hard to use them because, you know, Amex might transfer to Delta and Chase Chances to United. It's like, how do I make use of all this? Right. So until you want to go to like level two, I would just start with how do I stay in one ecosystem? So you're playing in the Chase Ultimate Rewards system right now. And you've got a great card for travel and dining.

Which I did not know, but good to know. It's great for travel and dining. Three points for dollar travel, three points per dollar on dining. But everything else is getting one point. Chase has a card that's the Chase Freedom Unlimited card. And you get one and a half points on everything. So the simple like one two Chase game is I've got Sapphire Reserve, everything travel dining, freedom unlimited, everything else. Two cards. That's it. You're getting

one and a half points on everything that isn't travel and dining on one card. Three points on travel and dining done. And should I wait until there's a big signing bonus to open my Freedom Unlimited? So the Freedom Unlimited is a rare zero annual fee card. And so it's not really going to be a huge sign-up bonus card in the first place. Every now and then they have like a promo where it's like for three months. You get 3% back on everything, but it's not the kind of card where you're going to see a huge bonus because there's no annual fee. So in your case, that could be something. If you don't spend a lot on travel, this is like a hack. If you don't spend a lot on travel, one thing you could do is you could say, you know what, I don't actually need the Sapphire Reserve. I'm not getting as much

benefit out of it. The Sapphire preferred is three points on dining also, but only two on travel. So you're going to miss out on the extra point on travel, but maybe for you, you're like the annual fee has gone up. It's almost, I think it's like $600 now. Maybe you're not getting as much value. You can say, okay, I'm going to downgrade my chase reserve to the freedom unlimited. So I don't cancel it. Now it's free. And then you can go open up the Sapphire Preferred, which is going to have an $80,000 signup bonus soon. Now you still have two chase cards, but you got a bonus by opening up the Sapphire preferred. Now, I wouldn't do that if you're actually traveling enough that that extra one point is worth it. Travel include gas usually or is that like a different type of travel?

Okay, so it's like, flights, rentals, rental cars, flights, that kind of stuff. Okay, interesting. And do you think that getting like a Delta card or a Hyatt card or a Hilton card, like the cards of the travel companies is ever worth it? So it's funny. I know a lot of people have a United card because San Francisco United Hub. And the United card usually pays like one or two United Miles per dollar,

maybe even three. But the Chase Reserve pays three chase points. And you can transfer a chase point to a United point. So you just say, Chase, send my points to United. So it's actually better. So I was telling someone, I was like, you know you have two cards. The one that isn't the United card actually earns more United miles than the United card.

And they were like, dang it. And they were like, but I get a free check bag. I was like, I know you'll get a free check bag even if you don't spend money on it. So you can keep it for the free check bag. Right. But just put the United purchases on your Chase card. It really depends. It's hard to earn Hilton points unless you're staying at Hilton or using a Hilton credit card.

because most of the hotel program's points are just worth a lot less. And all of the credit card companies, if you want to transfer your chase points to Hilton, which you can't, but if you want to transfer to Marriott, it's one to one. If you want to transfer to United, it's one to one. But United points are worth a lot more than Hilton points, so you're much better off doing that. Which I think is a thing I didn't hit on.

So let's pause. When you earn points, you can either earn them in one place. Hilton points, you use them at Hilton. United points. Use them on United. it's pretty straightforward. When you were in a chase point, there's a lot of things you can do with it.

And the same is true with Amex, Capital One, City. This is the transfer thing that everybody talks about, right? Yeah, everyone talks about this, but I'll try to make it super straightforward. You can use those points, and you can do things with them, like redeem them for gift cards, which is like the notorious, like, worst thing to do.

Okay. Or you can book travel in the portal of the air. That's as far as I've gotten, and I don't think that's the right thing to do, right? Yeah, I wouldn't say it's like the worst thing. do. Like redeeming for gift cards or like paying for your Amazon purchase, you're usually getting like one cent for every point you have. Okay. With Chase, if you have the Sapphire Reserve and you book a trip in the portal, you're getting one and a half cents.

So you're already doing better than a lot of the alternatives. In some cases, if you took those points and transferred them to United and booked it with United Miles, you could get two cents. You could get two and a half. In a perfect, like most optimal, very rare, don't hold yourself to it. You could get. 10 cents. How do you know? Like when you see the travel hackers, they're like, well, right now you can transfer it to United and it's 10 cents or like, where do they get that info? So they're usually getting it from a redemption.

So recently, my wife and I wanted to go to Borobora. And we were like, we're going to go in business class if we can do it with points. But we weren't going to do it if we couldn't, right? Tickets and coach were pretty cheap. San Francisco was like 500 bucks round trip. But in business class, it was about $5,000 round trip. We're like, well, we're not going to do that. But we transferred points and it ended up being 55,000 points.

Transferred points to the airline. Yeah. So we transferred 55,000 points to Air Canada. And we booked the flight on United in business class. Because Air Canada and United are partners? Exactly. Okay. So there's this website, point.

And it's not free. But for under $10, you can do like a week trial. And like, I would say if you're about to plan. a trip. That would be a good time to try it out. And you go in and you say, I want to go from here to here. And they're like, actually, if you have Chase points, you should transfer them to Air Canada because it's better than transfer them here. And it's available on this flight at this time. They like kind of make it a lot easier for you. So we ended up transferring 55,000 points and we got a ticket that was worth $5,000. If I had booked 55,000 points on Chase's website, I would have gotten one and a half cents

or like roughly, let's call it $800. So I got this $5,000 United ticket for the same thing I would have otherwise only gotten an $800 United ticket on. That's where people are talking about it. And this is silly, but how are you transferring them? Is that just like... No, no, no.

When you log into Chase or MX and you say like redeem points, it's like usually says something like transfer to travel partners. And you go in, you put in your United mileage bus number, and then you say, buy 50,000 points, go. And then you go. And then you go over log in United and there are your 50,000 points. But it is not, it's not reversible. So you should always kind of like have an idea in mind of how you're spending it if you're going to do this transfer thing.

I would go even farther and say, I would go to United and be like, I want to book this flight. It's 28,000 points, whatever, however many miles it is, and say, great, it's available. Log on a chase, transfer the points. Log out of United, log back in. Now the points are there. Now book it. So it's not even an idea. It's like have the itiner you want to book.

Okay. And if somebody's a total newbie, do you recommend they start with like, I want to do this trip, let me work towards it and work backward from there? Or do you think it's what you said about downgrading there or like looking within the credit card family and kind of staying within the credit card family of what you have or looking for these big sign up bonuses? Like if somebody's a total newbie, but they're just like, I want to start upgrading my travel in this way. Where should they start? If there's a trip in mind, you could probably go online for any trip and be like, I want to take a trip to Disneyland what's the best credit card. I want to take a trip to Europe, one of the best points. And someone's written a blog post about that.

And you could start to piece together what's going to make that the most optimal. I love that. That makes it like, I want to go to Hawaii this year. Exactly. How should I do it? And I will say that like sometimes Hawaii, for example, if you live in the Bay Area and you want to go to Hawaii in April right now, you can get tickets to Hawaii for like 200 bucks, 300 bucks.

That's cheap enough that like using points might not be worth it. Now, if you don't have the cash and you have the points, use it. Like, I don't want to get people. people in this mindset of like, I'm only going to use the points that they're optimal. If your points will let you take a trip that you don't have the money to take and you will enjoy that trip, promise it's worth it. Even if they could have taken a more optimal version of a trip in the future. But if you don't have a trip in mind, I would say, look at how you regularly spend money and get a card that kind of accommodates that.

If you spend money across lots of different things, I love the Venture X card, the Capital One Venture X, because it's just two points on everything. So you don't have to be like, I know exactly where I'm spending money. It's super straightforward. They still have a 75,000 point sign up bonus. It's not 100, but it's still pretty good. So you could sign up, start using that. Capital One also, like Chase, lets you transfer points to different partners.

So you could just start with that and then just accrue points and then wait until you have a trip in mind and then start to figure it out. You could go either way. But I always say, like, just start small. Like get one card with a signup bonus that's like cool right now. I try to post all of the signup bonuses that are like hot right now at All the Hacks.com slash cards. I try to put like these are my favorite cards or these are the higher signup bonuses. I try to do that regularly.

I do like special episodes sometimes on like a Friday. Guys, it's a hot deal. Yeah. Like I want to make sure. Like right now built rewards just launched a new card. All the Hacks.com slash B-I-L-T. Okay. And it pays you money on rent.

or pays you points on rent. That's amazing. So they have no sign-up bonus. Wow. They have no annual fee. Downside, upside. Like, you're not going to get a bunch of points just for signing up. But even if your landlord only takes a check, they will mail a check to your landlord for no fees.

Wow. And give you points. Oh, my God. That's phenomenal. Because rent is for so many of us, the number one expense we all have. Number one expense. Yeah, that's huge. The card gets three points on dining and two points on travel and one point on everything

else and there's no annual fee. The points transfer to American Airlines United and others, the points, you know, you can use the points to transfer to Hyatt also like it's great rewards program. I think it's like if you rent, I think it's a great starter card. I know that was a lot that we threw out to people. I would say if you have questions, you can shoot me an email, find me on Instagram, find me on Twitter, ask me questions. I think it was like the best primer, though, that I feel like I've gotten. Like here's where you can start if you just want to like dabble with upgrading your life in this way, which I really like. Do you want to take a second to pip out your show a little bit? Yeah. I mean, if we keep talking about, we like upgrading

stuff. The whole premise of the show is upgrading your life, upgrading your money, travel, everything. So you'll find a bunch of episodes on travel hacks, on points, on miles, on credit cards, but also on relationships and happiness and your career. I just want everyone to have a more optimal life. And I don't want you to have to sacrifice these things, money and happiness to do it. So each week we try to explore a new topic that will hopefully make your life better. I love that. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thank you for having me. And now we're going to go record me on your podcast. So also, if you want to go listen to all the hacks and hear me share all of my hacks, you can go over to all the hacks and hear that.

Yeah. And hopefully there'll be some new stuff. Your listeners haven't heard before. Oh, I have so many hacks that I have not. I'm an interview show. They got to come over to your show to hear me be interviewed. Awesome. Well, we'll see you there. I hope you loved this episode with Chris. I hope you learned a ton about starting a company and budgeting and investing and you have enough information to start travel hacking. If you're interested in that, I'm definitely going to be experimenting with it. So if you are to hit me up on Instagram, I'm at Liz Moody and we can take this journey together. Also, don't forget that Chris interviewed me on his podcast, All the Hack. So if you want to hear all of my healthy cooking secrets,

all my healthy living hacks, search all the hacks on your favorite podcast platform and give it a listen. And if you found this podcast through all the hacks or you're new here for any reason, welcome. I am so glad that you're here. I'm so glad that you found the podcast. Do not forget to subscribe on whatever podcast platform that you are listening on so that you do not miss out on any future episodes. They come out every single Wednesday and we have so many good ones coming up. And if you love this episode or if you've been loving the podcast generally, I would so appreciate a quick rating or review on whatever podcast platform that you listen on. I know everybody says it.

I know it gets boring. But it's because it is one of the best ways to help support the podcast that you love. And I promise it's super quick to do. I do it all the time. It costs you nothing but a very, very small amount of time. And it's massively appreciated. Of course, the most appreciated, the most helpful thing for the podcast is to spread the word. So if there is anybody in your life who you think might benefit from the information that we shared in this episode, please shoot them a link, send them the podcast generally, tell them why they need to listen, tell them why you want to talk about it with them.

I appreciate it so much. It helps grow our little fam. And I just, I don't know, I love all of you guys. I love everybody in this community from the bottom of my heart. All right. That's it for me. I will see you next Wednesday on the next episode of the Healthyer Together podcast.