The Personal Finance Podcast - How Much Should You Spend on a Family Vacation? (By Income!)

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

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How much should you spend on a family vacation by income? Everybody and welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of mastermoney.com. And today on the personal finance podcast, we're going to be talking through how much you should spend on a family vacation by income. If you guys have any questions, make sure to hit us up at the Master Money newsletter by going to mastermoney.com slash newsletter. And you can reply to any of those newsletters I send out.

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believe anybody in this world can build wealth and anybody in this world can master their money. And that's what we're trying to promote here and teach people as much as possible. We want to bring you as much value as we possibly can. Now today, this episode, we are diving into how much should you spend on a family vacation? And the idea for this episode sparked because I saw a few statistics that the majority of families who go to Disney World go to Disney World by going into debt to pay for it. And I think this is one of the most heartbreaking things that could ever happen. And so today what I want to talk through is first, I'm going to talk through some of the considerations you should have on how much you should be spending on a family vacation or any

vacation whatsoever. But in addition, I'm also going to be talking through the steps that you can take in order to have the funds to be able to pay for that vacation and cash. And paying for vacations and cash is the only way. Now, this is not up for debate whatsoever. I don't think in any circle. The only way you should ever take a vacation is if you can pay for all of it in cash. You should never, ever, ever go into debt for a vacation. Now, I am all for vacations. In fact, I want you to take as many trips as you possibly can. I want you to bring those memories to your family. It is one of the most valuable things that you can do. When you're lying on your deathbed, the number one thing you're going to regret is not spending more time with your family if you spend so much time working or do. doing other things that are for yourself. You want to make sure that you separate time for your family. Maybe you don't like traveling. Maybe you like staying home. It's staycations and doing things locally. Maybe it's traveling the world and you want to go do world travel with your family. I'm going to show you

how to do that too. Maybe you just want to go to the fun family stuff around your specific country. If you're in the U.S. or if you're in Canada or if you're in Great Britain or wherever you are, maybe that's what you want to do. And so as we start to talk through some of this stuff, I want you to know that I think most people value travel, and if you don't, that's fine, but most people value travel and they value the time that they can take to go experience new things. And experiences are part of the reason why I believe people should build wealth, because you can experience so many more things and use your dollars for those things that you value. It is absolutely amazing the stuff that you can do just by learning some of these tips, tricks, and tactics.

So I'm going to dive into A, where your financial health needs to be first, before you start taking some of those vacations. B, then we're going to talk through how you can actually start saving up for those vacations. Then C, we're going to get into travel hacking a little bit again on this episode. Now, if you're not familiar with travel hacking, it's a way to rack up some points in miles so that you can take a large portion of these trips for free. And free, if you don't know, is my favorite number. So I am super excited about this episode. And without further ado, let's get into it. All right. So what most people do is they just willy-nilly go on a vacation and they try to figure it out later.

And some people will just put their vacation on their credit card without having any plan whatsoever to be able to pay that vacation off. Now, we all deserve a break. We all deserve rest. I think you should be taking rest every single week, in fact. And so for most people, you should be out there considering and planning out your rest. And what a really productive person does is they have days that they rest and they have days that they are really productive. So you kind of think through this as you go through this process. But in addition to just having those days off, we also want to be able to rest for longer periods of time. And depending on where you are in your financial situation, that's going to tell you how big of a trip you can take and or if you need to save up a little longer for the trip that you are looking for. And I want you to take

your dream vacation. I am excited for you to take your dream vacation. And I'm going to show you how to do it today. So first off, we're going to assess our financial health. So we want to know things like our monthly income. How much do it? actually make. The crazy thing about this is most people don't know actually how much money they take home and how much money they make. They may know what their salary is and that number, but they don't know how much they actually bring home every single month and or every single year at the net level. And so I want you to know what your net monthly income is. Secondly, most people definitely don't know this is their monthly expenses. I want you to know, especially those baseline bare bone expenses,

how much you spend every single month on your regular month expense. These are things like housing, utilities, groceries, insurance, debt payments. All of these are part of your monthly expenses. And then lastly, your debt status. How much debt and outstanding debt do you have on hand? Now, I am more worried about debt if you have debt based on things like personal loans or debt on credit cards. That's the kind of stuff that we're really talking about here.

If you have a car note and it's a responsible car note that you can pay off and or if you have a mortgage and it's a responsible mortgage under 30% of your income, that's completely fine. I'm not worried about that as much. You can have a mortgage to take as many vacations as you want as long as you're hitting some of these goals that we're going to be talking about here. So I need you to know those three numbers before we dive into this. Then I want you to set up your financial priorities.

So we talk about this all the time. But the stairway to wealth goes through kind of the order of what you need to be doing with some of this stuff. And so your emergency fund. First of all, before you take a vacation, we need to have our emergency fund funded. Why do we need to do that first? Why is it so important to have emergency fund funded? Because if you go on a vacation, you spend all of this money on a vacation and you don't

have an emergency fund funded and something happens in your life and you don't have cash on hand to take care of the scenario that happens in your life. Maybe there's a medical emergency. Maybe your house has an issue. Maybe your car breaks down. And if you don't have the funds on hand to be able to take care of that issue, all of the sudden your vacation took you into debt. And so we need to have an emergency fund in place before we start taking care.

vacations. Now, my minimum requirement on emergency funds is six months. Most people will say three to six months. I am a six month guy. If you're comfortable with three months or you have some sort of plan with three months, more power to you. But my personal preference and my personal belief is that you should have six months on hand. Secondly, retirement savings. You got to be hitting your retirement goals before you start taking those vacays, homies. You just got to. You have to hit those retirement goals first. Why? Because you will never achieve that financial freedom where you can take all the vacations you want and spend all your free time doing things that you want if you're not hitting your retirement goals. Investing your dollars is the only ready to retire. And if you're

not investing your dollars, you will never retire. I want you to hear me clearly on this. You have to invest your dollars. And so making sure you're hitting your retirement goals is incredibly important. If you don't know how to figure out if you're hitting your retirement goals, we have a bunch of episodes talking about this. So make sure that. that you are tuning in and make sure you are following this podcast and we will get you through that. I promise you. We will teach you exactly how to make sure that you are hitting your retirement savings goals. And then also look at your short term goals. If you have short term goals that are really more of a priority than vacations to you, look at those as well. Maybe you're trying

to save up for a down payment on a house and maybe that's more important than taking this vacation and I would prioritize that. And maybe you are trying to think through, you know, how can I save for a down payment on a car or maybe you're saving for a wedding or all these different things. Make sure you got your priorities right, all right? And so that's another really important thing to have in place. Also, we need to look at our debt. If you have high interest debt, anything about a 6% interest rate on credit cards, personal loans, anything outside of your mortgage or the thing that takes you from point A to point B, then you most likely need to be paying that off before you take a vacation. I don't want to see high interest debt with anybody out there and then you go and

take a vacation. It's just not worth it. You need to make sure that you're paying off that high interest debt first. So all of these are super, super important to make sure that you are taking care of before you take this vacation. Now, I want you to go through and next, we're going to calculate our disposable income. Now, if you've never heard of disposable income, this is the income you have by subtracting your monthly expenses, debt payments, and savings contributions from your monthly income. So you're going to go through and you're going to subtract out your expenses, your debt payments, your retirement contributions, your savings contributions, all that stuff, and then you have your monthly income left. And then you're going to determine if there are any existing savings,

specifically at your March 4 vacation. So I want you to start to have a section in your budget or a section of your high interest savings. And your budget, I love Monarch money because Monarch money helps me like track goals. So Monarch money actually has goals in that system where you can start to put in, hey, here's my vacation goal. I want to hit this goal and you can put it in your budget and it will tell you if you're on track, how far you're on track. It's a beautiful, beautiful dashboard that they have there. So really great stuff. By the way, if you want 30 days free, you can go to monarchmoney.com slash PFP,

and that will get you 30 days free to test out monarch money if you want to. But anyways, so as we go through this, we can look at our existing savings, make sure we have savings. But I want you to create some sort of savings bucket, savings segment in your budget. However, you actually manage your money. And if you don't manage your money, you can have it on a cash envelope if you want. I don't care. but you want to have some sort of existing savings so that you can start to save up for those vacations. Now, the optimal place to put that is in a high-yield savings account because you're going to earn

interest on that money, and so you can have more dollars to spend on vacation. And so using something like a high-yield savings account is going to be the best for you. The high-sa. And so that is one of the better things to do as well. Now we're going to look at in budgeting an allocation for vacation. So the way I like to look at things with money is with percentages, because everybody's dollars are different and everybody can spend a different amount based on the percentage. So if you make 100 grand a year, you may have a different dollar amount that you can spend because of percentages

than someone who makes 25 grand a year. And so we want to make sure that we are doing this as a percentage. And so one of the common recommendations is a lot of people will say 5 to 10% of their discretionary income they can use towards vacations. Now here's the beautiful thing about discretionary income is I'm going to give you a baseline of around 5, 10%, you can use as much as you want because this is discretionary income. This is income after you've covered everything else you need to cover. You can take 90% of this and utilize it towards vacations instead of having hobbies or things like that. You can use 100% of this.

It doesn't matter. But what does matter is having a goal in place and starting to automate this process. Because money automation is the only way that you're going to actually make sure that this gets done. You can't rely on your willpower anymore to go into your account and log in and move the money over. No, we're going to automate this process. And so we got to use a percentage in order to start automating it. Now, alternatively, you can use a fixed amount once you start to set up this percentage method. But I would definitely start to automate this process. Now, you're going to have the budget in place. I want you to think through, hey, how much money do I have

left over? Let's say, for example, you have 500 bucks left over every single month. If I had 500 bucks left over every single month, I would most likely use a larger portion than five or 10% in order to move that over. I'd probably use more like 25, 50% of that 500 bucks. If there's a bigger vacation I want to do because I have a family of four going on five in October. And so for me, I got to spend more on vacation. You boys got to spend more doll hairs on vacation. And so because of that, we need to make sure that we are moving money over in a proper manner. And then start saving in advance. So I want you to just start, even if it's a small amount of money, if it's 10 bucks a month,

but you are starting, you're going to be amazed that over time, when you just start saving money and start increasing those dollars over time, how much more you can save. One of my favorite methods is to use the 1% method. So you start with, say, for example, you start saving up 5% towards your vacation budget. And you want to get to 10, 15%, okay? And so you start to save that 5% of your discretionary income. Boom, every single month. Then the next month, you increase it to 6%.

1% a month. The next month, you increase it to 7%. the next month, 8%. And all of a sudden, this is going to build up, it's going to compound over time. And I want you to really try to do this as much as possible and evaluate this. Now, as you start to do this, over the course of every single quarter, I want you to kind of evaluate and see if you are on track to hit that vacation goals. I love that goal dashboard because of this, because it shows you kind of how close you

are to your progress and what percentage you have completed. If you remember like the thermometer charged back in the day where you would do like school fundraisers, for example, and the school would fill up that thermometer. and everybody's looking at that thermometer like, hey, this is a really cool way to motivate me to try to give more to the community or whatever else it is, the school, whatever it is. It's the same thing. I mean, using that psychology is really, really powerful stuff. And then I want you to evaluate and I want you to adjust over time.

And so we're going to talk through what this kind of could look like by income based on what you can do. Now, that's with discretionary income. Now, if you want to take bigger vacations and you have enough disposable income, I am okay with you looking at adding a larger percentage of your income towards vacations. Because really, I want you trying to spend about 30% of your money as you start to build wealth. You need to increase your income.

But as you are starting to really get that thing crank in, people over six figures, that type of stuff where you have lower costs of living, you can start to spend higher percentages of your income on the things that you love. And if you can get from 20 to 30% somewhere in that range, you're living life, baby. I mean, you are out there doing the things that you want if you're spending 20% of your income on stuff that you love. And so as you start to get closer to this, you can start to spend a percentage of your total income that comes in.

So say your net income is 100 grand, you start spending $5, $10,000 on vacations. This is where I really want you guys to get. So at the beginning, if you're at the beginning of your personal finance journey, we're going to look at a percentage of discretionary income. If you are hitting all your goals and you have extra money left over, we want to look at total income, baby. We want to look at that net income and start spending that 5 to 10% of net income. That's really where I want you to be.

And so that's where we're going to dive into in this next segment, as I'm going to show you, how much you can spend by income if you are covering everything else and you still want to be able to spend a big portion of your income on big vacations. So we're going to talk about that next. After that, we're going to get into travel hacking. We'll be right back. Now, there's something about this time of year that makes you slow down a little. more time outside, more time with family, and maybe a trip or two planned. And in those moments,

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I'm going to talk through this by income because I want you to see kind of how much this matters based on certain incomes. it matters a lot more doing this on a lower income. And by a lower income, I'm talking about, you know, folks starting off at 40,000. We're going to start at the 40,000 level here and kind of go up by 20 grand, all the way up to 200 grand. And we're going to talk through, you know, by income, how the folks that are in the 40 grand category, these dollars are going to matter a lot more to them than folks who might be in the 200 grand category. And what I want to talk through is, listen, if you are in the 40, 60, 80 grand, if you're under six figures of income and you feel like you're struggling or trying to get by, this is probably not the best model for you to do

five or 10% of total income. You got to do the discretionary income move. And so until you get that money and system in place, then you can move to the total income move. And while you're trying to do that, what I want to encourage you to look into is travel hacking as long as you've never been in any sort of credit card debt. Because travel hacking is really going to help you through this process. So we're going to go buy income first. I'll get into travel hacking after this. So at 14, thousand dollars worth of income if you spent five percent of your income now this is net if you spent five percent of your net income that would be two thousand dollars that you could spend on a vacation per year or multiple vacations however you want to break that up if you spent 10 percent that's

four thousand dollars now the problem with this is if you make 40 thousand dollars per year that means if you spend 10 percent of your income that means you only have 36 thousand dollars left for the entire year to cover all your expenses and bills and things like that so that is someone who either is, you know, living on their own and they want to be able to prioritize travel. I get it. You can definitely do that. I think it's very possible. And or that is somebody who maybe it's dual income, no kids, then they may be able to do that as well. It's tough to pull that off for a grand a year with kids when you're only making $40,000 net in the household. Now, this is household income. It's not individual income. I'm talking about the household income. So that's

one thing I want you to consider. So folks, in that range, most likely you can start to And if you spend a certain amount of money per year, you're going to be able to get some of those sign up bonuses where you can get free hotels or free flights. And that's going to significantly reduce the cost of vacations where then you can get closer to maybe that $2,000 range that you spend or you can spend nothing. My wife and I went to multiple, multiple trips and we spent $0 on these vacations. And these weren't like vacations in our backyard. These were, we went to Italy. We went to Greece. We went all over the place. So it's like one of those things that you can really definitely do, but you got to make sure that you were thinking through and understanding

some of this stuff. Now, at 60 grand per year net, at 5% of your income, that'd be $3,000. I mean, I know all you can do math, but, and then at 10% of your income, that'd be $6,000 that you can spend per year on vacations. Now, as you can see, somebody who is making $60,000 is in a much better position to even spend that 10% of income than somebody who's making 40. Why? Because you have still $54,000 left over to spend on your lifestyle. Just making 20 grand more is a huge difference to your life because you can do so many more things. Now, one big thing at this level also is you can travel hack, but you can also, like if travel is a huge, huge thing for you, you're like, I just don't have the income to do the trips that I want to do. Another thing that you can do is a

travel hack, but B is to work on some side hustles that might make you a couple hundred bucks a month and utilizing those side hustles and putting them towards travel as well, because that can help you just get over that hump to get to this trip you want to do. Also, maybe instead of taking yearly trips, You take them every 18 months or so, where you take the bigger trip, but it's every 18 months, so you have six more months to save. There's another great hack there for a lot of people. Now, let's look at 80 grand per year. If you make 80 grand per year, you can spend 5% of your income is $4,000, and 10% of your income is $8,000.

$8,000 can get you some amazing trips. You can go to Europe. You can pretty much do whatever you want for two people. For a family of four, it's going to be a little more costly. But at the same time, there's a lot of things that you can do. And at $8,000, you still have $72,000 to live on for the internet. entire year. And so if travel is a huge priority for you, this would still be somebody who has a huge priority to travel over other things. But if travel is a huge priority to you, that is a great

option. Now, let me show you why a hundred grand is a huge difference, because here is where you're going to see a significant difference in how much money you have left over if you spend 5% of your income or 10% of your income on this. At 100 grand, obviously, we can do quick math. $5,000 is $5,000 your income and 10% of your income. But what that means is you still have $90,000 of income left to fund your lifestyle, fund your family's lifestyle. So if your household income is at a hundred grand, maybe, you know, the wife makes 60, the husband makes 40, you have 100 grand left net. I'm talking about net. You have 100 grand left net. And you guys want to go in a couple of vacations. You go on a few per year or you go on some massive huge vacation and use your two

weeks PTO or however you want to do it. That's another way to do that there. So it's really, really cool as you start to earn more income. This is why increasing your income is so beneficial psychologically. It's so beneficial to your lifestyle because you can use these extra dollars and still be able to live a comfortable life in life. Now, it depends on where you live. Like if you live in California, it's going to be tougher to live on 90 grand in San Francisco than it would be, you know, in the middle of Georgia. But at the same time, it depends on your personal situation and where you live. At 120 grand, now we're cooking with gas here because at 120 grand, if you spent 5% of your income, you'd have $6,000. And so you'd still have $114,000.

$1,000 left that you could spend on your life, which you can see how this is just a big, big difference. And then at $120,000 at 10% of your income, then you're coming down to you could spend $12,000 on vacations. You could take at least three awesome vacations at $4,000 each, and or you could break it up into a couple really good vacations. Or if you have kids and you have to fly down to Disney, your boy lives an hour and a half from Disney.

So your boy gets to drive there. But if you live far away from Disney, you have to fly down and buy flights to the whole family. You could do that Disney trip there, too. a lot of people spend right around 12 grand when they go to Disney. So if you have a family, so that's another thing. Now let's look at 140 grand. So $7,000 at 140 grand is 5%. And $14,000 at 140 grand is 10%. But as you can see, again, now you still have $126,000 per year to fund your lifestyle if your household income is 140 grand. Husbands, 70 grand, wife's 70 grand. So you have 140 grand left. And so that's a big, big deal. 160 grand, 80, 80.

is $8,000 is 5% of your income and 10% of your income is 16,000. And then $180,000 of income is $9,000 at 5%. And 18,000 at 10%. I mean, those are some baller vacations at the 180 grand mark. And then at 200,000, it is 10,000 at 5%. And you still have $190,000 to fund your lifestyle. And at $200,000, 10% of your income is still $180,000 per year. So if you prioritize travel, it's a big deal to you.

you still have $180,000 left that you can be utilizing to fund your normal lifestyle, and then you have 20 grand to spend on vacations, which is amazing. So I stopped at 200 grand because we're talking about net here. So if you get into higher incomes, you could spend even more than that. So that's another thought process to have. If you want to take more vacations, you're really, really serious about it. Increasing your income is going to be an amazing way to do so. And you can, you doesn't have to be a day job.

I would start by negotiating your salary, trying to get that salary up. But then looking at side hustles, too, if you can make an extra 5, 10, 15 grand, And that's going to make a big, big difference in your life to be able to do that. And then also, you can travel hack, which is what we're going to get into next. All right. So travel hacking is the last piece here. Now, if you haven't heard our episodes talking about travel hacking, we have an entire episode with the complete guide to travel hacking that kind of shows you how you can learn how to travel hack.

In addition, we also have an episode with Chris Hutchins from all the hacks. And it's a great episode. He's a good friend of mine. And in that episode, we actually talk about. travel hacking as well in some of the ways that you can travel hack and book flights. And really, it was kind of how to book your travel and some of his favorite cards as well. And so those are two great episodes to definitely tune into. And then also, we actually have a step-by-step guide to travel hacking. It's like an email mini course that's free. If you want to check that out,

you can definitely do. So we'll link it up in the show notes so that you could check that out. But that is going to be another really important one to definitely check out as well, is making sure that we have that travel hacking course, because that'll kind of take each step by step on what you need to do so that you can do this. And then if you want to see my favorite credit cards for travel hacking, we will also link that up in the show notes so that you can see all of my favorite cards.

Those are some of my favorites out there. I like Capital One. Just a quick, quick references, I like Capital One Venture for starters. And then I also like the Chase Sapphire for people who are starting out as well. You can get some great sign-on bonuses. And if you have a business,

you can get a ton of points with an LLC or a business. It doesn't have to be some massive business. It can be a regular business. You just have an LLC. You can really rake up credit card points if you have a business as you start to do this. Now, if you don't know what travel hacking is, I'm going to give a quick overview at the end of this episode, just so you guys have just a way to think through this. And then we will do some more master episodes on this stuff because I know a lot of people

talk about travel hacking to me and send me questions. And it is something I love talking about. But if I talk about it too much, I'll get really, really deep in the weeds. And so I've got to be careful sometimes when I go through this. By the way, if you want an episode of me going in the weeds, send me an email and let me know, and I'll do one. But it gets pretty nerdy when you get into some of this stuff. So number one is with travel hacking, the way that this works is that you take your daily bills

that you spend on daily stuff or your groceries, you're dining out, the stuff that you pay for for your kids clothes or your whatever else you can put on a credit card and all your subscriptions and you throw them all on this one card. And the goal is to try to get a sign up bonus, meaning a lot of cards if you spend, you you know, $4,000, they'll give you 75,000 points or 50,000 points, which is worth about 500 to $750 with the travel. If you really know what you're doing, you can squeeze out, you know, $1,200 or so worth of travel through like the Chase Portal or the Capital One portal and be able to really optimize those points. So it's worth it because you're already going to be spending

the money anyway. Instead of using something like a debit card, you're going to be earning points in miles that you can then spend on travel and save yourself every couple of months, you know, $1,000 with the traveling. What a lot of people do is if it's a husband and wife combo, they'll call it player one and player two. And so the first person will open a card. They'll hit that spending limit, get that bonus. And the second person will open a card and they'll get that bonus. And now you have two big bonuses that you earned. And now you can utilize those points for traveling. You have a couple thousand dollars worth of free travel. Again, people at the $40,000 income all the way up to $100,000 income, I want you to be doing this if you have no history of credit card debt. If you have history

your credit card debt, turn this off right now. But if you don't have history of credit card debt, I want you to be trying to do this because this is how when I didn't make a lot of money, how I was able to travel so much, because I was able to earn these points of miles. Now, people who make a lot of money, I also want you to do this because I'd rather

you save these dollars and put them towards other things. Now, you get these sign-up bonuses and you get a lot of cool stuff. You also can join hotel and airline loyalty programs and you can earn points on flights and stays and stuff as you start to do this. And these points can be redeemed for future travel. So it's a double whammy here because now you're getting free travel. You go to

the Marriott, for example, now you're staying at the Marriott with your free travel and you can also earn points and miles with that. And so you can really stack this stuff up over time. Now, you can also use it for rental cars. You can use it for cash back. So if you get in a pinch, you need an emergency fund and you have a bunch of credit card points. You can actually get that cash back and be able to save yourself three, four, five thousand dollars in pure cash. I have a friend, Rob Berger, who's been on this show. Rob uses all of his points and invest it in to his fidelity account. And so he's got something like $30,000 worth of invested dollars just by using his credit card points. And so there's so many different ways to tackle this behemoth.

And it really can get really, really nerdy. I just heard on another podcast, I heard someone talking through how they actually use their credit card points for their emergency funds. So they have millions and millions of points. And they have like 60 grand worth of cash in credit card points because they optimize so much. Now, that takes a lot of work to get to that level. But if you want to get to that level you definitely can now i don't think it's a best use of time unless you really got time but at the same time you can definitely look at that now what you want to do is you want to look for some of the best offers out there so you can kind of start scanning through my page that i'm going to link below with all the credit cards we'll have the best offers out there it'll show you what

your sign-up bonus is how much it costs every single year a lot of times it's like 79 bucks some of the big big cards cost you know three four five hundred dollars uh but if you're just starting out start with either free or like the $79 to $100 range per year. You don't want to be spending tons of money until you figure out exactly what you're doing. And you make that money back off the point. So it's a win-win situation there. But as you start to progress through some of this stuff, then you have things like limited time offers. So sometimes Chase or Capital One will have limited time offers where you can earn a lot more points. Southwest is doing that right now, for example. At the time I'm recording this, Southwest is offering like 125,000 points on their business cards for people who sign up

and hit the sign-up bonus. And one of the cool things about Southwest, and I'm trying not to get in the weeds here again, but if you actually hit that bonus, you also get a free companion pass, meaning that somebody else can travel with you for free when you start to book flights and all that kind of stuff. So the companion pass is a really, really cool travel hack

if you're traveling domestically, which is a whole another conversation. I'm going to do a whole section on Money Q&A on the companion pass, because I think a lot of people need to know about that. In addition, though, we've got things like award travel that you can utilize where you book, flights through those portals. So Chase has its own portal where you can book the flights and you can

really actually maximize the points by booking through Chase's portal. Same thing for Capital One, same thing for Amex, all of these different places, city. They all have different places where you can actually book your travel there. And then one of the cool hacks is if you really want to travel, you can look for off peak times where you can save a lot of money there if you're going to go travel internationally, things like that. But also you can use points for things like upgrades on travel. if you wanted to get free check bags, you can use it for airport lounges, you can use it for travel insurance. There's so much you can use, which is why I love the points in Miles game. Now, there are people out there who will tell you, do not use points in miles because it leads to people going into debt.

And again, that's why I say if you've been in credit card debt in the past and you cannot trust yourself, even though you might be saying, well, I'm not going to do it again. I don't trust you. I don't. And so you got to make sure that you have been responsible to credit cards in the past because I don't want you utilizing them and then going into debt. It's really, really important not to do that. But there are a lot of different things that you can do to utilize this for.

So basically, in a nutshell, this saves you on flights, hotels, rental cars, it can save you on meals, it can save you on activities. There's so many different ways to do this and optimize this.

And it really is for the true optimizer. If you love optimizing stuff, it's worth it to use points and miles so that you can start going on free trips. Really, really important stuff to do because you can save yourself thousands of dollars per year. And if you do that,

you can take a lot more vacation and have a lot more experiences with your family. So that is a really quick guide on how to just get started. I would check out the email course. I get a little deeper into it there. And if you have questions on travel hacking, please send me and I'll answer them all day long on Money Q&A. And then if you want to get started,

just check out my link. I like, again, the Chase Sapphire, the Capital One Venture. Those are two great ones to look into to start off with. The city cards are fantastic. And the AmX cards are also great. So all of those have some great, great stuff going on. But you want to just try to start to maximize your points at miles. get into a little bit, and we'll talk more about it on this podcast as well, because we get a lot of

questions on it. And I want to start answering more of those as time goes on here. So we're going to optimize that. But check out my page with the credit cards there. That also helps support the show if you utilize our links. I'd be truly, truly, truly grateful if you utilize our links if you're looking for some of those cards. But I always want you to find the best deal. If you can find a better deal out there, make sure you go find that better deal. Don't use my links if you see a better deal. But it does help support the show. So thank you guys so much. I truly, truly appreciate it. So listen, that's the episode. If you guys have any feedback, please let me, know, but I truly appreciate you guys listening today. Cannot thank you guys enough? I truly

value each and every single one of you so much and want to make sure that you are getting as much value as possible out of this show. Happy vacationing this summer and into the fall. And I truly, truly cannot wait to see where you guys go this year based on free travel and or just budgeting it out and paying cash. Remember, always pay cash for your travel. That is the number one thing you want to be doing. I'll see you on the next episode. Medium power. 15 minutes. Sounds like Ojo time.

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