The Personal Finance Podcast - How to Maximize Your Travel and Get the Most Out of Your Credit Card Points Points with Chris Hutchins

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

In this episode of The Personal Finance Podcast, we’re going to talk to Chris Hutchins on how to maximize your travel and get most out of your points.    Join Our Newsletter here! Index Fund Pro Pre Launch https://mastermoney.co/index-fund-pro-pre-launch/    Connect with Chris Hutchins : Chris’s Website Chris’s Linkedin Chris’s Twitter Chris’s Podcast Chris’s Facebook Chris’s Instagram  Support Chris http://allthehacks.com/cards  Credit Cards Mentioned in This Episode:  AMEX Gold - Great on Dining and Groceries  Chase Sapphire Preferred  Chase Sapphire Reserve Amex Green Card Chase Freedom Unlimited  Capital One Venture  Capital One Venture X  BILT Card - Best for Renters All of Chris’s Favorite Cards  All of Andrew’s Favorite Cards   Best Airline websites: Air Canada https://www.aircanada.com/  United https://www.united.com/en/us  Airfrance https://wwws.airfrance.vn/  Go to Point.me for a better way to book with points   Best place to find best hotel bookings: @hotel in Instagram   All The Hacks Podcast mentioned: Rental Cars: Saving Money, Avoiding Fees and All the Secret Tricks with Jonathan Weinberg Travel Hacking Bora Bora on Miles and Points    All The Hacks Youtube Video mentioned:  Travel Hacking Bora Bora on Miles and Points | All The Hacks #49    Sponsors:     Thanks to Ka’Chava For Sponsoring the show! Go to kachava.com/pfp and get 10% off on your first order.  Thanks to Mint Mobile for supporting the show! Cut your phone bill to $15 a month by going to https://mintmobile.com/pfp Thanks to Policy Genius for Sponsoring the show! Go to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quote.  This episode is sponsored by/brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/pfp and get on your way to being your best self. Get 10% off your first month!   Checklist of relevant episodes:  How We Travel The World Completely Free! (Travel Hacking 101) How to Choose The Best Credit Card (Plus The Exact Credit Cards I Use!) 10 Rules For Using and Maximizing Credit Cards! 7 Ways to Build Credit Fast (Increase Your Credit Score!)    Want to Support the Show? Follow on Spotify or Follow and Leave a 5-Star Review on Apple Podcasts!   ============   Check out all the Stuff I Recommend!  Check out all my favorite Credit Cards https://milevalue.com/top-offers-mastermoney/    USEFUL RESOURCES: The Year-End Money Checklist https://mastermoney.co/year-end-money-checklist/  The 75 Day Money Challenge https://mastermoney.co/75-day-challenge/  Finally, Get That Raise https://mastermoney.co/resources/   ============     DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial adviser. This Podcast is for educational purposes only. Investing of any kind involves risk. While it is possible to minimize risk, your investments are solely your responsibility. It is imperative that you conduct your own research. I am sharing my opinion.    AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE: Some of the links on this channel are affiliate links, meaning, at NO additional cost to you, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase and/or subscribe. However, this does not impact my opinion.   ============     Check us out on social fam!    Twitter   Tiktok   www.thepersonalfinancepodcast.com   www.mastermoney.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Find your advisor at IG Private Wealth.com. On this episode of the personal finance podcast, we're going to talk to Chris Hutchins on a deep dive on travel hacking. 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 to Chris Hutchins on everything travel hacking. We're going to be doing a major deep dive on travel hacking. If you guys have any questions, make sure you hit us up on Instagram or TikTok. at Master Money Co and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts,

or whatever podcast player, you love listening to this podcast to. And if you want to help out the show, leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcast. So today I am so incredibly excited to talk to Chris Hutchins. Chris and I have become friends over the last year. And Chris has some amazing insight. So he is the host of All the Hacks. And All the Hacks is a fantastic podcast that I encourage each and every single one of you to add to your podcast player list.

because this podcast, he teaches you ways to save money, but he also teaches you how to travel hack. He teaches you ways to actually hack life and optimize your life every single day. And that is why I absolutely love that podcast. So make sure you check out his podcast as well. So today we're going to be diving into the travel hacking side. And Chris has traveled to dozens and dozens of countries.

In fact, he said he's traveled to over 60 countries so far. So he is a travel hacking master. And he's figured out how to utilize credit card points. so that he can travel the world for free. So we get into a bunch of things in this episode, including his favorite card opening strategy to collect points and miles. We talk about how he tracks all his points and miles,

what his favorite cards are right now. We talk about ways that you can maximize your points and miles. And then we go through a framework of how he would book a trip if you're thinking through booking a trip. Then we ask a bunch of other bonus questions as well, like his favorite destinations to travel to, the best deal ever that he got on points and miles. how to travel with kids and so much more.

So I am so incredibly excited to share this episode with you. So without further ado, welcome Chris to the Personal Finance Podcast. So Chris, welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. Thanks for having me. We are so incredibly excited to have you here. And we're going to talk about travel hacking today and a bunch of advanced strategies for travel hacking. But first, before we dive in, I kind of want to get into your backstory because you have a

really interesting backstory about building companies, selling them to larger company. So can you tell us a little bit about your background? Yeah. So I was one of those people that had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And so in college, I was like, I got to find a job. But eventually I found myself in the kind of like Silicon Valley tech world. And I just loved building software products and building products that consumers wanted. And so the core of the last 10 years has been building and then investing in people who build and then building again.

So I started a company that was a mobile app incubator with a few friends, right? Not just me, co-founder, of course. and we built some products. We ended up selling that company to Google. I was fortunate at Google to get to work at Google Ventures, which is our venture capital arm, got to invest in, gosh, probably be a part of the investing of over 100 companies and probably over, I don't know, thousands of pitches.

And then left to go start another company, which was a personal finance company called Grove. And the idea was help people with financial planning, but do it with software so it wasn't so expensive and it was a lot more accessible. Ran that for about, gosh, three, three and a half four years and then we sold the company to Wealthfront. And at Wealthfront, I was, you know, worked on the product team trying to build better products to help people grow their

wealth. Grove was awesome product. And we looked into that like in the past, too. I think it's such a great idea to be able to do that. And we've talked about Wealthfront a ton on this podcast, too. It's an amazing company that we can get into as we go here. So you are the host of all the hacks. And you have so many amazing hacks on that show. And one big thing that you talk about is travel hacking. And you are the Travel Hacking Masters, what I would call you, because you've been to a dozen and dozens of different countries, and you've been more countries than even I have with travel hacking and done some really cool things and found amazing ways to maximize points and miles. So before we go into this episode, I want to kind of talk through some of your favorite cards.

I want to talk through how you actually maximize those points in miles, and then maybe we can go through how to book a trip as well. So before we start here, what is kind of your favorite card opening strategy so that you can begin collecting points? Yeah, I mean, I think for me, I'll first caveat everything saying that if you're not paying off your bills each month and you're paying interest on your credit cards, that's priority one. Travel hacking is not here. Credit card points, Miles. It's a game that I love, but it's a game that you should be playing once you're able to pay off your credit card bills in full. No amount

of interest or financing charges is worth the value you'll accrue from points. So set that aside and I'll talk about how I think about it. So right now, it seems like we're in this amazing age of points earning because financial institutions give you these amazing bonuses when you, you you sign up for a new card. And if you pair the card with your spending habits, you're able to earn, you know, anywhere from two to five points per dollar on basically everything. There's a handful of ways you get up to 10, but, you know, two to five is that kind of really sweet spot range. And yes, you know, one strategy, if you don't want to travel hack, is just get cashback, right? So you can probably get up to 5% cash back with the right card and the right category.

But when you go travel hacking side, you can make those points worth anywhere from the one cent they'd be has cashback to the two cents that's kind of like the benchmark for most of these transferable points prices, which means you're not getting 5% effective, you're getting 10% effective, right? And then you can get a little crazier. And, you know, I've had trips where I've made my points worth 8, 10 cents a point. And granted, I'll be totally transparent. I probably would have never spent the amount of dollars that that trip cost if I had to pay out of pocket.

But it feels really great when you're getting your points to be worth, let's call it 10 cents a point. and you earned three points per dollar on credit card, that's like 30% cash back. So my general strategy is first, find a card, first one card that aligns best with how you spend your money. So if you spend all your money on travel and dining, Chase Sapphire, whether it's a reserver preferred is good, city premiere is good, the built rewards card is good, like they focus on those categories. But let's say that's not you and you spend all your money on groceries and dining,

Amex Gold. It's really an answer that's a little dependent on how you spend money. So step one, figure out where you spend your money. Step two, find the card that aligns. And then slowly over time, look at cards with really big bonuses where you can meet the minimum spend. So if it's, you know, you get 80,000 points by spending $4,000 in three months, well, that's a great opportunity, assuming you can spend the $4,000 in the three months.

So we can get the tactics on doing that later. But ideally, you find a card that also earns. you points in an area that your first card doesn't. So, you know, I love earning three points per dollar on travel and dining on the Chase Reserve, but I spend money on other things. So if I'm going to the grocery store, I'm using Amex Gold and getting Forex. And then for everything else, I use the Capital One Venture Venturex card to earn two points on everything else. So in general, it's like as I'm adding cards, it's to maximize the number of points I'm getting on all my expenses, up until the point that the number of dollars I spend in a new category is not really going to garner

enough points to be worth however many, however much the annual fee is on this card. And then I just stop. That makes complete sense. And all those cards you're mentioning are cards that I love too. And I think there's some of the best that are out there. But maximizing them after you get those bonuses to make sure that you're utilizing the right card for the right situation is one of the best things that you can do. So as you start to acquire some of these points and miles, you're going through this process. Maybe you're opening a few cards and you're maximizing some of these dollars so that you can, acquire some of these points. How do you actually keep track of all of this? I know you're a spreadsheet king. There's a lot of things that you do with that. But how do you actually keep track of this?

There's a bunch of different tools out there. Do you use some of those tools or do you use spreadsheets? Yeah. So there's a couple tools. The points guy launched an app that tracks your points balances. And it works for some, but not all airlines. And I don't know if they've built the features yet, but it doesn't work with partners. So like I can't have two chase logins, but my wife and I each have a chase card. So I was like, okay, well, it doesn't solve all the needs. There was a site called award wallet, and it worked for some of them. But at the end of the day, I have not found a tool that I can use to get a comprehensive look at everything. And so I just have a spreadsheet. And you know, it's not a sexy spreadsheet, right? It's literally like United. And then there's

columns. It used to just be me and my wife, but now I have kids. And so like, you know, I'm putting, I have a free go flyer mile account for my kids whenever we buy a ticket. They're earning points. And so there's just not a good tool to keep track of everything for multiple people. And then, because it's in a Google sheet, I add a column, or I sorry, I add a comment if they're going to expire. So like when you log in, a lot of times it's like, you know, it'll show you in some airlines, like expires in two years. I just add a column there. And, you know, every three or four months when I'm looking at it, if that's coming up,

I highlight the cell red and that's my signal to go do something to make sure the points don't expire. And sometimes it's easy, like hotel points. You can transfer. So it's like every two years, if we haven't had activity, I like, I send my wife the points. So then she'll send me the points. others, it's like just make a charge, right? Like I just make sure I'd make one charge or earn one point or something. So that's keeping track of them all.

I will say, you know, when you're early in this game, it doesn't necessarily make sense to get a bunch of cards in different programs because it just overcomplicates things. So depending on where you want to travel and whether you want to do it, international domestic and economy or business class, like you need a certain amount of points to take that trip. And so if you open a card and you're like, well, I got 50, thousand points in my chase account and then I've got 60,000 points in an Amex and 30,000 points in my

city account, it can be difficult because you can't use them altogether. So I would say until you get to at least like a six figure balance, I think it's best to stay in one program because it just makes it easier to plan and redeem. So while I think personally that like the best everything card might be the Capital One Venture Venture X because you get two points per dollar, if I had a Chase Sapphire reserve, I might pair it with the Chase Freedom Unlimited, which is only one and a half points instead of two, but it keeps everything in the Chase ecosystem and makes it really easy for me to build up one balance that I can use for a trip that's not spread across a bunch of places that might make it harder to redeem. That makes complete sense. And especially if you have people in your family,

for example, that you're opening up cards, it's one of the best things to do is make sure, you know, you open the venture, for example, and then your spouse or your significant other, whoever else is in your family opens a venture as well to keep those points in the same ecosystem. And that makes complete sense as well. That expiration date on your spreadsheet is a key thing to have there because I've had it before, especially a lot of times it happens with hotel points. It seems like for me where I'll have hotel points there and they are about to expire and I don't realize it to like the last second and I panic and try to figure out how to redeem those, but you want to make sure that you're keeping those points over that time frame as well.

So as we start to kind of build up some of these cards, what are some of your favorite cards right now that you'd be interested in? Do you want favorite cards for just like cards I use? use a lot or favorite cards with, you know, bonuses that might be worth checking out today. Where do you want to go? Cards that you use a lot is, I guess, be the best option. Yeah, so for me, travel and dining are big expenses. So Chase, Sapphire, preferred or reserve. I go reserve because I get enough value out of the incremental, you know, lounge access and travel credit and that kind of stuff. But it's, you know, 3x on dining for both and 2x on travel on preferred, 3x on the reserve. So that's like a go-to for me. I think that if you're in the Amex camp, the M-X gold card is,

you know, 4-X on dining and 4-X on groceries. It's like really just a great card. I think one thing that's funny to a lot of people that have kind of not really dabbled enough, they look at Amex and they're like, well, what about the platinum? Platinum sounds so much better than gold, right? Like that's their premium card. And obviously a black card, even better, but, you know, none of us are probably eligible for that. The funny thing is the final card earns one point per dollar on everything, except flights book directly with the airfare where you actually end up getting five. So for me, the gold card is actually probably going to get you a lot more value, assuming you buy groceries, assuming you eat out. And then, you know, a card that's not talked about a lot. So look,

if you want to support me, you know, you can go to all the hacks.com slash cards and sign up. I know you have the similar thing. A card that almost never gets talked about, but I like, is the green card. One of the reasons people don't talk about it much is because you can't earn any, you know, company and people like us that, you know, have links for credit cards. They never have links for it. But a cool thing is it's a 3x on travel, 3x on transit card. And so if you pair that with the MX gold, you're getting 4x dining, 4x groceries, 3X travel. So that's like a good one-two combo in the Amex land. And in the Chase, I like the Chase Sapphire cards paired with the Freedom Unlimited because Freedom Unlimited gets you one and a half on everything.

In Capital One land, the venture card, I think is great because you just get two on everything. And you'll notice that none of the cards I've mentioned are like airline cards or hotel cards. And it's intentional because I think they can be really great for the perks they offer. Right. Like there's the Hilton card gives you diamond status and a free night each year. The United card gives you free check bags and maybe priority boarding. But at the end of the day, you're only earning points on their one program. So you're only earning Hilton points.

You're only earning United points with Chase, with Amex, with Capone, with City, and with Built, which is a card that we own our home. But if you rent, the built card is fantastic because with Built, you earn points on your rent. And it's the only way to do that. And you're getting 3x points on dining and travel. So it's a great card if you rent. They all have transfer partners. So when you earn points, you can transfer those points to lots of airlines and hotel groups. So you just get so much more flexibility.

So there might not be a flight going where you want to go. on United. So if you're stuck with United points, you know, yes, you can fly in United's partners, but United and their partners even don't always fly everywhere. Or maybe they do, but you got to change planes four times. Whereas if you had a chase card, you could transfer to United, but you could also transfer to British Airways, unlock the entire one world alliance of, you know, dozens of airlines. You can transfer to KLM or Air France and unlock Sky Teams network. And there's a handful of airlines like Virgin Atlantic that aren't really in a program, but you can still transfer there.

So you just get all this flexibility when you earn your points there. So I tell people, look, have a United card if you fly United a lot, but you don't have status and you want free check bags, but don't even put the United purchases on it. You actually earn more points putting a United purchase. You earn more United points on the Chase Sapphire Reserve than you do with the United card because you could transfer from Chase to United. So I always recommend people use the airline and the hotel cards to earn perks,

to earn benefits, maybe in some cases to pay for the purchases with them. Like I use my Marriott card when I'm staying at a Marriott, but like I don't use it for anything else. Exactly. I could not agree more. And those flexible cards are the by far the best way to go, especially if you're new to this, you need to be looking at the flexible cards first because you can transfer them to the partners.

Now the only time, like I usually even spend money on some of those like specific hotel ones, for example, is I get the bonus. And then like you said, you get more on the chase side than you would actually utilizing those cards. So I think that's perfect. And we just had somebody asked that same question. How can I earn points on my rent? And that's the same exact card we recommended as well,

was the built card on a Q&A that we just did on Instagram. So I think that's one where if you rent, you can really maximize your points because at least you're getting points from using that built card. So it's an amazing tool to be able to use. Now, as you start to want to redeem some of these points, are there ways that you like to maximize your points in miles? Like I know some people, for example,

won't actually pick where they're going until they actually take the trip, until the day that they're actually looking to actually redeem their points in Miles, they'll pick that day. Are there any strategies or tactics that you use to maximize some of your points? And how can you go about doing that? Yeah, so I want to make sure people don't get too caught out. Like, it's really fun in the points of Miles world to be like, what is the best value and get? Can I get four cents per point? Can I get 10 cents? Like, what's the value? At the end of the day, it's going to be hard to get the maximum value if you're not completely flexible in every way.

And I actually want you to travel. I've had the fortunate, pleasure of traveling to 60 plus countries. Like, I want you to have those experiences. And so I don't want you to get too caught up on, well, I only have this week off work. And I know my points would go farther. So I'm just not going to go because I could get better use out of them. Like, go on the trip. Like maximize the fulfillment of life. However, if you want to try to get those points to be worth a little bit more, flexibility is your best friend. So that's flexibility around a lot of verticals. You don't have to pick one. It's maybe you want to be flexible where you go, but you have specific dates. Maybe you know where you want to go and you're flexible on the dates. Maybe you're flexible

on the routing, right? You're like, I really want to go to Japan. I want to go during the season. And that might be tricky, but you're willing to change planes twice or do a layover, you know, in Seattle and spend the night there. So the more flexible you are, the better value you're going to get from your points. Typically, your best chances are booking far in advance or last minute, but I would say if you're flexible on one or two areas, you could probably do it at any time, especially if it's like within a few days. If you were like, I want to go this exact day during Cherry Blossom season on the nonstop flight from Dallas to Tokyo, like, I don't know if you're going to be able to get a good deal for your points. But in all other cases, I think you got an

opportunity. Most of these programs also have the ability to not just transfer, meaning like, take my chase points and deposit them into United Airlines's program and then book on United Airlines. When we say transfer, that's what we're talking about. So first off, don't go transfer them first. Go to United's website if you have a chase card, right? United's not a partner of Amex, so don't do it there. But if you're a Chase, go to United's website and say, oh, is there a flight on these dates? If there is, then go transfer the points.

The other option is they all have these portals where you can go on Chase's website and say, I want to go on a trip. and basically what they do is they go out, they look at the price, and they assign a value per point, and they do the conversion. For Chase, if you have the Sapphire Reserve, you get one and a half cents. If you have the Sapphire preferred, you get 1.25. And on almost all other cards and Chase with their other cards, but Amex also City, it's about one cent.

So in general, if you look at the points guy who does these great valuation series on how much all these points are worth, in general, it's like, if you can transfer the points, they're worth like 1.0.7. seven to two cents each based on a lot of, you know, experimentation they've done and crunching the numbers. And that's better than putting them in any specific program. But if you need to book in the portal because you really want to go on a trip and cash is tight, and that's the only way you can use your points, by all means, go on the trip.

Enjoy and, you know, have fun. But if you've got a lot of flexibility, one of the things you can do is use your points. And one option is to go to the individual airline websites and search. and I'd say 80% of the flights fall on one of the three alliances. So I say, you know, go to United or Air Canada, which are two of the big Star Alliance websites that have good searching functionality. If it's Sky Team, you can go to Air France,

which is a transfer partner of almost every card system, and you can look on their site. If you are looking at one world, British Airways, similarly as a common transfer partner in most programs, with those three websites, one for each carrier alliance, you could do a lot of searching. Or there's a tool called point.me. Literally the website is point.

me instead of dot com. And for a small fee, they charge $12 a month. If you go to all the hacks.com slash point me and use the code all the hacks, you get your first month for a dollar. And they will go and search all the airline websites for you. So you just say San Francisco to Paris these days. And then they on the back end say, okay, we're going to pull up United. We're going to search if they have it.

We're going to pull up Air France and we're going to save you a ton of time. So I would say that's a great tool to use. If you're like, I'm ready to start booking, they're just going to save you a lot of time. I think I would much rather have UsePoint.Me. We'll link all of your links down below as well, but I think I'd much rather use that to save the time than to actually go through all this stuff. Unless you're really flexible and have all that extra time. I think that's amazing. So that's a great tool to add on as well.

You talk a lot about hidden credit card benefits. And there's a bunch of them out there that a lot of cards have. And the average person has no idea some of these exist. They just sign up for the card. They get the card. Maybe they read some of the benefits that they have. but they really don't even know what that is. So can you talk about some of the hidden card benefits

and which ones do you use the most? Yeah, my favorite is purchase protection. Most people don't know that their card has this. And I'd say most cards have this. If your card has an annual fee, it almost certainly has this. And what it means is basically it covers a purchase. Depending on the card, it could be 500 up to maybe thousands of dollars. And it'll cover if you buy something on that card and it breaks or gets stolen or damaged

in the first 90 days, I think there's a couple cards where it might be 100, 20 days, they will replace it or pay you for it. So, for example, buy an iPhone, drop it on the ground, crack the screen within the first 90 days. I've done this two or three times. Go get it repaired. Reimbursed. Didn't pay for it. I bought an SD card for a camera, put it in the washing machine. It actually still worked, but I just didn't trust it. Reimbursed. Bought a shirt, put in the washing machine with a pen in a pocket of a pair of pants. Shirts ruined. It was within 90 days, reimbursed. So I use the purchase protection all the time. Anytime I buy something, I always make sure to put it on a card that has purchase protection if it's something that, you know, I'm reasonably confident

might need this. So for example, if I ever have an Amazon gift card, I'm going to use my Amazon gift card to buy groceries on Amazon fresh because I'm probably not going to return the groceries. I'm not going to claim purchase protection on like, you know, a lost pineapple or something. But if I was going to buy a camera or an iPhone, like I wouldn't want to use a gift card for that because I want to make sure I get that benefit. Another one along those lines is extended warranty. So a lot of cards will give you an extra year warranty. So if you buy a computer, Apple, for example, gives you a one year warranty on your computer. If something happens in that second year, your card will usually extend the manufacturer's warranty by a year. And so you could normally

you'd go to the Apple store and they'd say, hey, to repair this MacBook, it's going to cost $600. And you say, well, it's in year two. So my credit card's actually going to cover that. So that's one, there are a bunch of cards now that come with cell phone protection. If you put your cell phone bill on the card. The one tradeoff, though, to fight that, a lot of the carriers have said, oh, if you pay your cell phone bill with a debit card, we'll discount you. So it's a little bit of a tradeoff here. Verizon is like, for every line on your plan, we'll give you $10 off a month if you pay with your debit card. So you've got to do the math and say, okay, do I, if I've got a family plan with three lines, do I want to save 30 bucks a month? Or do I want to put it on a credit card,

paying extra 30 bucks a month, but then if my phone breaks or my spouse's phone breaks or maybe my kid's phone break, all of a sudden I'm going to get my phone replaced if the screen cracks for a $50 or $100 deductible instead of paying $200 or $300. So that's another one. If you're renting a car, depending on the card, sometimes they have primary, sometimes it's secondary rental car coverage. And so I always decline the damage waivers when I rent a car and put on the card. One thing for, you know, we probably got a lot of, you know,

why Gen Z people, maybe some of them don't have cars, I will clarify that that covers damage to the car, but it doesn't cover liability. So if you damage someone else's car, so do not, unless if you do not have, usually your personal car insurance will cover you in another car for liability, but if you don't have your own car insurance policy that covers you, then make sure you don't decline the liability coverage when you rent a car because you need that. And in some states, it's mandated and you get a minimal amount in some states it's not. But don't think that if you're someone who doesn't own a car, that doesn't mean you could just decline everything. It just means you could decline the collision damage waiver. Those are a few. Then there's like all of the travel ones,

lost luggage, lost bags, delayed flights, all that kind of stuff. Pretty much, you know, if anything goes wrong on your flight, you hit up the airline and then hit up your credit card company and you'll probably get something back from either or both of them. With the exception of, you know, some things like during the pandemic, if you got COVID overseas and you couldn't test negative and so you couldn't fly home, that was not covered by the credit card travel insurance. So you'd need a travel insurance policy separate to cover you for those things. But yeah, those are some of the many benefits. Obviously, there's other things like lounge access and, you know, discounts on different things. But those are some of the kind of ones that are less common that I love using.

That's an incredibly comprehensive list because I think there's a lot of things that people could use with their everyday purchases that they need to be utilizing. This is why I, always talk about as long as you're responsible with credit cards, you don't have credit card debt or anything like that. You want to be utilizing your credit cards instead of using a debit card or anything along those lines because of all these additional perks that you get from purchase protection to all these other things, specifically if you're traveling. I mean, you definitely want to be using this when you're traveling, even if you're traveling internationally, all these other things. So this is incredibly important. So one big thing, if you're traveling

internationally, most of these cards have no foreign transaction fees. That's an important flag to look for, if you just use a card that doesn't, you're probably going to get hit up with a 3% fee anytime you spend overseas. And by the way, the hack overseas, if you're paying for anything and you have a card with no foreign transaction fees, absolutely never. When you check out of your hotel and they say, do you want to pay in euros or dollars? Always pay in the local currency because they're marking up that exchange rate to US dollars at an astronomical amount. So when you're traveling, it's always pick the local currency, pay with a card with no foreign transaction fees. And if all this is,

crazy. Like I write a newsletter, all the hacks.com slash email, but there was one that you can scroll through the archives about hidden credit card benefits. I want to do a lot more detail than this. I'm sure I've done an episode on it as well, but I want to make sure we try to get as much information as we can now. And if we don't get through it all, I'm happy to come back. Absolutely. We'll definitely include that one as well. And I've read that comprehensive. And I think it's even have it as a like a blog post now too, which is absolutely amazing where like you go through every single perk on there. And I think it's really, it's a fantastic read as well. So I encourage everybody to read that. We'll link it up down below so they can check that out. So lately, I've been noticing how fast things are changing at home.

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Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up. on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero, more like Habinier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. So one big thing is I want to kind of go through the framework to booking trips because a lot of people may not know where to start. They're just trying to figure out what the best thing to do is next. So when you're trying to choose where you want to go, what are some things that you take into account? Yeah. So if I'm planning a trip, before I even think about points, I'm like, where can I go right now? And you probably have. some requirements, right? Like, am I willing to change planes three times or not? If flights are going to be

astronomically expensive to a certain destination, it is almost likely or certain that the points are going to be not very easy to get there. So all my flight searching is on Google flights. It's the best tool out there. You can go in and say from and you can say from one airport or let's say you're willing to drive to two or three airports near you. You could put multiple from airports. You can leave the whole two field blank. You could just leave two blank and hit search and get a whole map of the world and see where can I go. And then you can run filters on it. You could say, well, I got all my United Miles, so let's only look where I can go on Star Alliance carriers. And oh, by the way, I have small kids. I'm not going to change planes a lot. Let's look one stop or less or even just

nonstop only. Or, oh, we're not going to go too far. So let's make it only eight hour total duration. And you could go through all these things and then look at the map of the world and browse around and say where are my options? So I like to do that just to get a good sense of where I could go. And if I'm using dollars, all the fares are there. You know, you can look at a calendar. Once you pick a place, you could look at a calendar and see what is it going to cost for a seven-day trip on any single day of departure for the next year. And you can kind of get a good sense of when's a cheap time to go. Now, sometimes a cheap time to go overlaps with the cost for points. And sometimes it totally doesn't. And especially last minute, you might see flights being really, really expensive. But the

points actually, availability opens up wide because airlines know that last minute are people that are desperate, people that are business travelers, but they need to fill those seats. So with dollars, they're willing to take the risk they don't sell them and still put them at high prices because the reality is if they could sell that flight for five times more to a business traveler, you know, they'd rather do that than sell two flights at five times less because they're getting more revenue. So they also put flights last minute on lower mileage needs so you can go on and get some incredible last minute deals. And by the way, when you're looking at this map, you just start thinking, okay, how far do we

want to go on this trip? How much time do we want to spend traveling? How much time do we want? That's kind of my general process. And then I'm like, okay, now I kind of have a sense, we're going to Europe, or we're going to Central America, or we're going to the Caribbean, or we're going to Thailand. You kind of know where you're going. Then I'm like, okay, is it dollars or is it points?

And if it's dollars, then I just stay on Google flights. I play with the dates. I try to find the best fares. but then if it's points, I'm like, okay, honestly, I would say if you're not so far deep in the points of mileswards, obviously point.comi does this search. They make it really easy. The one thing they don't have yet is any flexible date searching. So you've got to go, if you say, I want to go in March, it's really tough. But like United, for example, you search SFO to Tokyo and you can see a month at a time. British Airways, I think, is similar,

Air France is similar. So I always try to pick those three sites if you're doing really flexible dates because they kind of cover a lot of the routes. And it's really quick. You go to United, search two from, search flexible. You can browse through dates. So I do that. And then once I get a good idea of where I want to go in the kind of weeks, I'll go to point.

dot me because sometimes you might not realize that your credit card points can transfer to different airlines. So my wife and I went to Bora Bora. And on United, I found great availability. It was 80,000 points each way in business, which yes, that's a lot of points, but I have a lot of points.

so, you know, why not? And I went on point. Me and I searched and it was like, oh, wait, if you transfer those same points to Air Canada, it's only 55,000 points. Same flight, same United flight, same time, same business class, but it was 55,000 points each way instead of 80. And that's because every airline kind of decides

how they want to price things out. So if you're on United's website, I say go there first. I don't say go there because you need to use your United miles. All the airlines that are in an alliance, when there's a cheap fare. And it used to be so easy. Back in the day, there used to be like the price for saver and the price for any time, right? And now there's like hidden, unknown, this is available to all partners or like pay up in

miles and you can get it, but it's only for our flights. But when you find an affordable mileage ticket on United or with Air Canada, you could book that with A&A, you can book it with Lufthansa, like any airline that's in the Star Alliance network. So I use the United site to find the good dates. that have low mileage needs. Then I go to point.m. me and I search and say, is there actually a better way to book it?

Should I be transferring which one of my point balances to which airline to get the best deal on it? And that's perfect. That's exactly what I was interested in as well, because I think maximizing those points on the flights is one of the most important things. Obviously, it's one of the most expensive things as part of traveling.

And so making sure you kind of have a system in place to do this is absolutely perfect. So this is a big question I get all the time. Are there actually days of the week that you think are cheaper to book travel? I mean, absolutely, there are more flights that are expensive on like Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays because, you know, a lot of people travel for a week and they leave weekend to weekend. People travel for a weekend leave. So I would say, like, if you're flying on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, it's usually cheaper and, you know, more availability with points.

So I would say yes. But have I found great deals on Fridays? Yeah, I found great deals on every day of the week. And, you know, there's no perfect rhyme or reason. but I would say the flexibility to leave midweek is helpful. But a lot of these routes, like sometimes they just don't fly. Like because there's less demand on those days, the routes aren't there. So they're not as competitive.

So I would say there are better days to look. You know, I always kind of scroll through the different days and check, but I'm not looking at weekends because I know they're typically more expensive. I'm still looking. Okay, perfect. And I think that's what a lot of people, we had so many questions with that too. And I think, you know, we always hear like Tuesday, Wednesdays are some of the cheapest days to book travel.

So that's perfect as well. If we want to book, say we want to take one trip a year and we're really collecting a lot of points here. We have a high spend. We're collecting a lot of points here. Maybe we want to have some nicer. We want to fly maybe a business class or first class. Have you ever done that? And are there ways to actually optimize to get a deal on business class or first class?

I mean, yes, I'm at the point now where I've played the points game hard enough that my wife and I have this funny saying where we're like, look, we don't want to cross an ocean and coach. And I know that sounds incredibly like elitist when I say, but like we would never pay for business class. to be clear. Like, we've never crossed an ocean in business class and paid for it. It's just like, we've played the points game enough and accumulated at this point like 11 million miles that like, I want to use them to have that experience. So yes, I have. And it's an incredible value because typically most airlines are going to charge about 2x the number of points you need for coach to fly business. First class is getting phased out quite a bit. So I'd say most airlines have kind of gotten rid of having three cabins where it's like, and if they have three, it's usually like economy,

premium economy and business, whereas it used to be economy, business and first. There are still a handful of airlines that have first. But for me, like business class and almost every international airline has a lie flat seat where you can take a nice sleep. Like, do I need it to be three times bigger? Do I need it to come with caviar and domperian or can I just have like some prosceco and like, you know, a steak? Like, you know, for me, I don't think it's always worth the splurge. I've had a opportunities to do international first, and it's amazing, but I'm not sure I want to burn my points that way. I'd rather save them for another trip. But because the points are usually 2x to go in business class and the dollar value of a trip, if you're looking to go to San Francisco to Tokyo or

San Francisco to Paris, it's usually like five or six times the price for business. So you're spending twice as many points to get a flight that costs five times as more, so you're getting even more value. Now, would you ever pay that? No, like, I wouldn't. So, you know, it's not fair to compare it that way because if all my points vanished and disappeared and I wanted to go to Japan, which, by the way, if you've heard me reference Tokyo a lot,

it's because I think Japan's like one of the most amazing places to go. I'm actually going to do an entire episode with one of the guys who's written the last few guidebooks to Japan and is there right now, like post-opening, getting all the latest stuff dialed down. But I'm not going to pay for business class. So it's not truly worth that and that I'm not saving myself spending that,

but it sure makes me feel good when I look at a ticket that's $9,000 and I got it, you know, all on points. I feel pretty good. I could not agree more. And I've done it before. Like, we've traveled to Italy and Greece when we were younger. And it was one of those things where we flew coach on those trips. And I'm six, four, 230 pounds.

And so I got the seat where, you know, how there's 10 middle seats in the middle on those international flights. And I'm right smack in the middle flying for 16 hours. So that was like the least fun thing. So now we just try to maximize our point so that we can get either business. class or first class because I think that's a much better way to go on points. I would same way. I would never pay for that.

I would absolutely never pay for that. I'm too frugal for that in the first place. But if I had to pay for it, I'd pay for coach. But at the same time, if you can maximize those points, that is by far the best way to do it. Speaking of Greece, because I want to share a few tips for people who are like, I don't have the points yet. So what do I do? Greece is a great place to talk about one thing that in the points world and the cash world

is interesting, which I'll call positioning flights. So in the points world, sometimes this sounds crazy, but like maybe you want to take this dream trip to Italy from San Francisco. I've had times where I've looked for a flight like that. And it's like, I can go from L.A. But for some reason, the SF to L.A. flight like isn't available on points. It seems crazy. But it's only like $80.

So I will say when you're looking at this, if there are a few airports that are near you, near like under $100 or $200 for a big trip, the one annual trip, it's worth looking at a few different airlines when you're trying to get there, whether it's points or cash. But the interesting thing is, most times when you're searching for flights, almost always, you're only going to find a route from where you start to where you end that an airline or its partners flies to. So let's take Greece as a great example. Santorini,

beautiful place, highly recommend, but there's only a few airlines, maybe one or two, that fly from Santorini anywhere and fly to the west coast of the United States. And so I think it's really a and Airlines, which is national airline, and then maybe like Air France. So it's like those are the, it might not even be Air France, but for the purpose of example, those are the only two airlines that fly to Santorini and the United States. So if you look L.A., San Francisco, Denver, all the way to Santorini, you're only going to get the flights that operate on the carriers that are partners with or are them themselves flying all of the legs of your trip.

But if you searched Athens, all the sudden, you open up probably five times as many airlines. because from the U.S. to Athens, every European carrier flies to Athens, and so you could fly all Italia and change planes in Rome. You could fly, you know, British Airways change planes in London, Lufthansa and Frankfurt, all these options. Or, you know, you could fly a handful of U.S. airlines might fly from New York or Miami to Athens. And then the flight from Athens to Santerini is like $50. So I always say, if you're looking, whether it's dollars or points, to go somewhere that's not a major international city. Also look at what it would cost to fly to one of the nearby major international cities.

And I've seen it where round-trip economy flights from the U.S. to Santorini are like $2,500. But to Athens, they're like $1,100. And the flight to Athens on some obscure airline that doesn't have any partners that fly to the U.S. are $100. So you actually save almost half price by separating your trip. Now, caveat, your bags aren't going to transfer through. So you're going to need to leave a little bit of extra room at the airport to collect your bags, to go recheck them on that airline.

You know, it's going to be a little bit of hassle. But if you're flying a family of four and the tickets are $2,500 and you're able to get them for $1,200, you know, saving almost $5 grand or $6,000 on your trip is probably worth the layover. And by the way, you could just spend a day in Athens. Go see the Parthenon. Like, there's stuff to do in any of these cities you'd be stopping at. So that's a hack that I love for flights that can save you a lot, whether you're paying in points or miles. Exactly. I love that hack as well. And that's exactly what we did too is you can take those smaller planes and they're really cheap to take. And I've even gone by boat island to island in Greece before.

They even have sleeper boats that you're going to kind of sleep overnight. They're like 40 bucks. So if you're really looking to save money, if you have a bunch of people come in your group, that's an amazing tip as well to be able to do that. So the next thing we need is a place to stay. Now hotels can be your biggest cost traveling depending on where you're, traveling and what's going on. In some cases, it's not. The flights are. But as we go through and search for hotels, how do you kind of narrow it down into one place? So this is tough. The narrow it to one place is really hard. So I'll say like, when you get to the final three, we'll work in reverse. When you get to the final three, it can be tough. You're like, gosh, these three places, they're all the same price. They're all the same quality. They all have nice pools. And you're really stressed out. And I would say, they're all going to be good. Like, you're going to look back on this trip and you're

going to have a blast, no matter which one you pick, don't spend the extra 12 hours trying to like read every trip advisor review and try to figure out exactly which one's the best. Like, one seems bright, just pick it. Or put it on the other, if you're always the planner and your spouse isn't, put it on the other person and be like, hey, let me know because they're not as invested in all the research you've done and they could probably pull the trigger quickly. Just accept it. When they say this one, don't come back and back, wow, what about, you know, you got to just accept it. So there's a lot of different ways that you can stay when you're traveling. And I'll present one as a crazy idea and I'll refer you to a recent episode I did of my show,

which is exchange homes, which is something I'd never thought about until recently, which was, I always thought if you wanted to stay somewhere for free, somewhere in another country, it's like, well, I got to find someone in this country who wants to stay in my home. And it's got to be on the exact same days. And it just seems impossible. Maybe you don't want to rent out your home, but we're talking about hacks. We're talking about saving money. Right.

All these sites. And I went through multiple of them on that episode. they let you deposit nights and stays without having an equal swap. So I could basically say, oh, we're going away for the holidays to stay with my parents. Let's list my home on home exchange or people like us. Someone can book it. Stay there. I'll earn some virtual currency in the exchange sites currency.

And then I can use that currency later to go stay at a totally different family's house in a totally different country. So first off, if you want to save money, I'd never really consider this because I thought it was going to be like, I want to go to Paris, so I need to find someone in Paris who wants to stay in the Bay Area, who wants to stay the exact week I want to go to Paris. Like, it just seemed impossible. Now they've moved on from there, and I think it could be a huge opportunity to save money. I love that tip, and I think that's an amazing way to be able to save money. I completely agree. My wife is the researcher on the hotel side always, and like, we just went to Tulum, for example,

in August, and we researched hotels. I mean, she spent hours and hours and hours, and I was like, just pick one. We narrowed it down to three, and then we checked them all out when we were there, just because they were all really close together. And they were all exactly the same. Like it was all the same exact thing. So I agree with that tip as well. Just pick one and go. But that is amazing to be able to exchange your house

and be able to stay for free somewhere, especially if you're looking to save money. That is really, really cool. Yeah. But let's say you're not, and you got this trip coming. There's kind of two options, right? You rent something on Airbnb or VRBO or something,

or you get a hotel. I'll give you a good hack for each. For on the Airbnb side, take the main picture for the Airbnb or the VRBO, or I think they call it Verbo, but I'm going to call it VRBO. and download the picture, go to Google Image Search, upload the picture,

and you might find another site similar to those, especially if this is international, that's listing the exact same property for 10% less, 20% less, directly from the owner with no site commission for 40% less. And so that's my favorite hack for if you're trying to rent a vacation home, because the way Google Image Search works,

it's like, hey, does anyone on any website that we've ever indexed have an image that looks just like this? And chances are, for a lot of vacation homes, they're listed in multiple places, and some places might have a better price than others. So that's my Airbnb hack on the hotel. This isn't a hack for getting a deal, but it's a hack for getting a better experience. So trip advisor, hotels.com, great for searching, great for filtering, terrible for getting the best experience at a hotel. Hotels end up having to not find out who you are, not getting good commissions when they go

through these sites. So the hotels don't love it. So my thing is, book directly with the hotel. Go to the website of the hotel, book with them. If you found a cheaper price elsewhere, definitely contact them and they'll always match it. Once you book, get their email address, whether it's on the website, whether you call the front desk and ask, email them and just say, hey, I just booked your hotel. I'm so excited to stay. Celebrating anything, tell them, hey, we're celebrating anniversary, birthday, something. And that's it. And then three days before you leave, send them another email just to follow up and say, hey, just want to let you know we're still coming. We're really excited. my listeners have gotten so many things.

Free upgrades, free breakfast, free bottles of wine, chocolate covered strawberries, drinks at the bar, free parking. Like, you name it, someone has gotten it comped by sending an email. Like one email, I guess sending it twice, but like two emails doesn't take that long. And the best was someone got their initials monogrammed on a pillow. I personally would rather have the bottle of wine, but that's just me. But still cool. So those are kind of two fun hacks for those.

ask for getting the best deal. The prices are so tough. It's not like you're going to negotiate with the hotel or the Airbnb. So, you know, I would definitely say I don't pick where we're going and when we go based on the prices, but I do do one search before

because you could find out, oh, you know, we went to Hawaii a couple weeks ago. I didn't realize that it was like the Iron Man in Kona, right? Like we were going to Maui, so it didn't matter. But like, there was a world where I could have not looked at hotels, booked flights, and then realized it was a major event.

So I would say definitely check that out before just to make sure you're not ending up in the most expensive week of the year because there's some big event going on. Otherwise, I like to try to filter by like, you know, what minimum level of accommodation. Is it me going by myself? Great. I'll stay at a youth hostel. I don't care. Is it me taking my wife? Okay, we're going to do something nice.

We don't get to travel alone much. Is it the kids? Okay. I really just care that it has a pool because at the end of the day, that's the most important. So that's that. We talked a ton about points. We didn't talk about hotel points. And there's a good reason for that.

For the most part, all of these transferable point programs transfer one to one. So you got a chase point. You can transfer it to a Marriott point or a United Point. Well, for whatever reason, most hotel programs are structured such that you just need more points in hotel programs to do things. So to offset a thousand dollar flight, you might need X points. To offset a thousand dollar hotel room, you might need two, three, or four X points. It's not a consistent rule all the time. And I'd say it applies even more at the higher end.

So if you're trying to book a nice luxury stay. So transferring points to Marriott is just going to get you a much worse deal in terms of offsetting dollars than transfer it to an airline with a couple exceptions. Hyatt, no. Hyatt is like doing it the other way. Hyatt points are like two, three, four times as valuable as most other hotel programs. They're also way harder to earn. You get the Hyatt card. It's like two points per dollar.

You get the Hilton card. it's like 13 points per dollar. And like there's a reason. It's because their points are less valuable. So I don't love transferring my hotel points to Hilton and Marriott and things. IHG, sometimes there's some deals there. And then, you know, on the lower end, if you're looking for just like a holiday inn or, you know,

some kind of La Quinta Inn kind of thing, you can get some good deals across lots of programs at like the smaller, you know, kind of three star budget hotel. There's a lot of deals. At the high end, I'd say Hyatt is your best. bet if you have a chase or built card that can transfer there. Otherwise, your best bet is earning the

hotel points, either from staying there or from the sign up bonuses on the hotel cards. A lot of times the hotel sign up bonuses are 150,000 points or five nights free. So that's kind of how I think about points. But for me, I'm typically booking my points to get there. And then if I'm using cash, it's almost always on the hotels, not the flights. You know, there aren't that many amazing hacks. I think is really cool that I'll share is at hotel on Instagram. So it's an Instagram account and you DM them and they'll send you a link to a website that lets you book super discounted rates at hotels. And the way they do this is hotels have this rule where they're not allowed to discount their price any less than they tell all the other websites. So like they can't offer the hotel cheaper than they

can on Travelocity to the public. They can offer discounted prices privately. So because this is private site that you only get access to by DMing this one Instagram account, you know, they're able to offer severely discounted rates. And severe is not a bad thing for the consumer. So I've seen times where like 20, 30, 40 percent off high-end nice hotels by booking there, you know, this goes back to why I said, you're not going to be able to email the hotel and get an upgrade when you book on, you know, through ad hotel. Like you're just not. The hotel's going to, you know, treat you like, you know, a regular person. But, you know, they're not going to say, oh, thank you for being a loyal member.

You're probably not going to earn hotel points when you do this. But if you're saving 40%, maybe you don't care. Like, you know, maybe if you're saving 40%, you just book the suite instead of book the basic room because it's actually cheaper. But that's a really cool hack that I love. And I got a chance to meet the guy that started that company. And he was saying something like the average discount on even nice properties is like 30 or 40%.

That's an incredible tip. Because typically the only way I knew how to hack it as well was get the actual hotel cards, maybe get a free night or two free nights, whatever you get on the bonus as well. But we'll link up that down below as well because I think that's an incredible way. I would be happy to pay cash for that if it was at 40% discount for sure.

And that's my rule is like book directly with the hotel, book directly with the airline always. Because if something goes wrong, the last thing you want to be doing is like calling, you know, trip advisor, hotel, you know, dot com and be like, hey, can you help me out? Unless you're getting such a massive discount that that's worth it.

And so for me, five percent off, 10% off, I'd rather not throw myself on the risk. 40% off, I'll call anybody if something goes wrong. You know, I'll buy a calling card and call, you know, someone halfway around the world if that's what it takes. Yeah, exactly. I think that's absolutely perfect. The last piece we have here is rental cars.

So rental cars are one, we talked about a little bit on the insurance side as well, but rental cars are one that sometimes you book them, sometimes you don't. Have you found it to be best to book rental cars or do you just take Uber's when you travel? So I did an entire like one hour podcast in like 7,000 word newsletter on rental cars. So we're not going to get out through all that. Definitely check that. If you're renting a car, that podcast episode with the CEO of AutoSlash was like a masterclass in everything rental cars. So I'll give that as a resource to people.

It is chock full of wisdom. We'll link that up down below too. So you guys check that out. For me, it really depends on the type of trip. And I do some quick math. Like the coolest thing is in Uber or Lyft. You can literally type in the airport and the destination. So we went to Hawaii last month or two months ago, and I was like, look, we're going to stay at the resort.

We have a kid. We're not really going anywhere. I'm there for a conference. We don't really need a car. However, I went in and I looked, and the cost to get from the airport to the hotel was like $130 each way. And the cost to rent a car for the week was like $200. So we're like, it's actually cheaper to rent a car. We didn't think it would be.

And we knew that maybe one or two days we might want to take an excursion. So it was like an added perk. If I'm going to New York City, I'm not renting a car. If I'm going to Tokyo, I'm not renting a car. So I think it depends on the trip and where you're going and the cost and then a little bit the hassle. You know, I will say don't fall for the trick in Mexico. You know, you go to Cabo, you look at the rental car website and you're like, God, it's only

$10 a day to rent a car. I should do this. Right. Then they're like, oh, well, we require mandated insurance and mandated this and mandated that and your rental car ends up costing you four times as much. And it's not really actually as cheap as you thought. So, you know, we're going to Mexico, especially countries where, you know, if you if you're going to China, definitely don't rent a car.

Like, I drove in China once in Beijing, and it was the craziest thing ever, and everyone was in the car was like, why are we letting this person drive? So I would say in a lot of countries where traffic rules are kind of, you know, throw them out the window, I would just rely on a local to drive me around. Absolutely. Okay, that's perfect, because that's how I evaluated too. We kind of look at the airports and then kind of go through that process. But I've booked rental cars before, and I figured maybe it's just cheaper to have an Uber, especially if everything's close and local. So I think that's absolutely perfect. So that's kind of the framework, how we'll talk through kind of building out a trip if someone's looking for that.

Now, I want to give you, I know we have limited time here, but I want to give you a couple other questions. Let's do it. That could be rapid fire style. Could be however you want to take them here. So what was your favorite destination you've traveled to? I mean, this is like the hardest question. I knew it was coming. I was like, oh, I'll like rapid fire through a few ways to think about this.

So a place where I was like, this was one of the most amazing places. And this is the worst answer to give because you basically can't replicate it was Syria. like one of the coolest countries I've ever been to, the nicest people, the best food, and then, you know, a terrible situation that kind of took it off the travel list. But that kind of Middle Eastern hospitality and the cuisine you can also experience in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Turkey, and, you know, to some extent on the food side and a little bit of a different, you know, cultural experience in Israel and also in Egypt. So like that region I loved, especially because it's just the nicest people I've ever met.

that's one Namibia like kind of most off the beaten path like drive on the highway for an hour and don't see anyone but the if anyone remembers that old windows desktop background with the sand dune that's like a swirl that's in Namibia amazing wildlife um you know if you just say what country have I been to the most it's Japan uh you know maybe Mexico but you know that's just more proximity driven I think Japan's one of the most amazing countries in the world the culture the food the people everything so you know I used to look at a list of countries and be like, how do I tick one more off the list? And now my wife and I are always like, is the 67th country really going to be better than going back to Japan?

Exactly. So Japan is super high on my list. I don't know. There aren't that many countries that I haven't had a good experience in. So I almost say, like, pick any country and you're going to have a great experience. Like, I loved going to Hungary and Poland and Croatia. Like, I could just go down the list. It's like, how many of the countries I went to would I not recommend?

and I'm like, I don't know what I wouldn't recommend. That's incredible. I'm going to have to put Japan next to my list. I just had a friend who went there too who said the same exact thing. So I'm definitely going to do that. Yeah, check out this episode I'm doing. It's going to literally be the whole idea is I'm going to start a new series on the show, which is first two thirds of the show is find either a local or a dialed an expert,

all things. Where do we go? How long do we go? Where do we eat? What do we do? And then the last third is going to be me deep diving. How do you use your points, miles, and dollars to get the best deal going there? Oh, that's a great idea.

to you by the way. So the next one is what was the best deal you've ever gotten a trip with points of miles? So this one's easy. I know the answer. It was a two part. So wedding, my wife and I got married and we were like, where should we go for our honeymoon? And we decided we were going to go, we were like, where's a crazy place? Like we don't have kids yet. We can go anywhere in the world. What's the most awesome honeymoon destination? So we landed on the Seychelles, which is this small island that I'd never heard of that's kind of like commensurate to the Maldives or French Polynesia, and it's like halfway between Africa and India. And it's beautiful, but it's very far to get to at least.

So that was a great deal because I think we spent 120,000 points each to get there. And the tickets were like $14,000. So, you know, like almost 10 cents per point on those flights. However, there was this deal going on with Delta at the time where if you transfer any number of points to someone else, you could double your points, but transferring points cost like one or two cents a point. So one, I was like, oh, so I could just have my points transfer to my wife.

Now we'll double them and then we'll book two. However, we had just gotten a videographer and I was like, this videographer is amazing. And then she sent us her budget. And I was like, no, I can't afford this. Like it was like $10,000 for a videographer for our wedding and she had two people. And I was like, we can't afford this. And, but I'd become friends with her because we just had these great conversations. during the conversation about the wedding.

And I told her, oh, she's like, oh, where are you going for your honeymoon? I was like, oh, we're going to the Seychelles. She's like, oh, my God, my husband and I have dreamed of going to the Seychelles. I was like, oh, really? What if, instead of paying you $10,000 to do the wedding, we sent you and your husband business class all the way to the Seychelles? And she was like, well, let me think about that. I was like, look up how much it cost.

Those flights are like $20,000. She's like, that would be a better deal for me. And I was like, little do you know, I have all these points in a Delta account that if I just transfer them to my wife, I can pay like $2,400 and double it. So we transferred the points, doubled them. Now we're sitting on 480,000 points, took that $2,400, which was, you know, a fraction of her $10,000 bill for doing the wedding, booked us and booked her. Separate trips. We didn't go on our honeymoon with our videographer. Got the videographer for a huge discount and earned massive, you know, points per month. You know, we basically got the value of a $20,000 trip for us, $12,000 videographer.

for like 240,000 points in $2,000. Oh, that's absolutely incredible. See, I knew you'd have one of those where you just absolutely act it all the way down. That's absolutely amazing. And I should mention, I didn't document, this was over, you know, 10 years ago, so I don't have it all written down.

But my wife and I did just take a trip this year to Bora Bora. And I actually made an episode all about that. My YouTube channel is just, you know, it's a lot of interviews like yours, you know, you could see us, you could see our faces. You should definitely check out.

This video will be on YouTube. So check it out if you want to see us, reacting. But for the Bora Bora episode on YouTube, I actually pulled up my screen and screen shared and went through, let me show you how I'm searching for flights. Let me show you how I'm searching for hotel rooms with points. So if you want a practical hands-on example of how to book one of these trips, I did a whole episode where I walked through the entire experience of booking a honeymoon-level trip with points and shared that on YouTube. It's a podcast too. You can listen to it, but you might like the visuals of the screen sharing as well.

That's amazing. We'll link that up as well down below because that's an unbelievable deal that you got there as well. So you have two young kids and I have two toddlers as well and I refuse to travel with them because it's going to make my life 10 times harder, but you've traveled with yours before. So do you have any tips selfishly for me or for parents traveling with young kids? You have any hacks for that? I got a couple. So one, maybe it will be harder, right? Maybe it'll be the worst trip of your life. But maybe it won't.

So my wife and I pounce each other out in like, Half the things in life, she's like, oh, this could be bad. And I'm like, this could be good. And then the other half, I'm like, oh, this could be bad. And she's like, this could be good. I would push you to say, yes, it sounds like it could be miserable. And we were going to Hawaii and we're like, you know what? We're just going to do it.

We took a two-year-old and like a four-month-old. And we were like, just prepared that it was going to be the worst trip ever. The flight was awesome. Like, it wasn't anything like what we thought. It was so much better. We were like, oh, how's our kid going to sleep in a new hotel? She slept fine. So I'm not saying everyone will have that experience.

I'm sure we're going to take another trip and we're going to be like, oh, this is miserable. But there's always the chance that like it just works. So don't write off a trip because you think it won't work. That's one. Two, the Stokey Jet Kids suitcase. This thing is incredible. It's a little roller suitcase. It's like it's almost like the old thing that's like it looks like it's like briefcase shape size, like, but it's bigger.

It's hard shelled, has a handle and wheels that roll all four ways. So we get to the airport, put my two year old on it. And we are cruising through the terminal. And she's just riding it like it's a bike that I'm in charge of. And so none of this like slow, you know, getting caught up in the airport. Like we're going fast. And then you get on the plane and on like every airline except United, you can use this thing. You flip open the top and it has a stretch out that basically turns the seat into a fully extended leg bed so that they can't get off their seat.

By the way, like if you're listening to this, you don't have kids, you're like, what are you talking about? You want your kid to be in the seat and not be able to leave because then they want to run around. the plane. So this like gets rid of leg room. One, it's great for if they want to lie down, they get a much, you know, bigger area to nap, but also it prevents them from climbing down off the chair into the ground. So that thing was great. Once your kids are five, which mine aren't, a lot of these resorts have these like kids clubs where they can go. Our kids are not five, so we couldn't do it. It's a liability. I've always asked like, why not. And if I guess it's a liability thing to get insurance for taking care of kids under five is so expensive, the hotels

won't do. Oh, interesting. This is a much bigger investment. but we, you know, my wife and I both work. And so we were like, okay, do we send our kids to daycare? Do we get an annie or do we get an opair or what do we do? We got an opair. And yes, that means you're giving up a room in your house, but it's less expensive than an annie. But we bring our opair on vacation with us.

And yes, we have to pay for another room so that she has a place to sleep. But we have someone who knows our routine and knows our kids can do everything with us. But almost any hotel will have a recommendation for local babysitters that like they've used and their guests have trusted. And so, you know, once you're there, even if you don't have an opair that you bring on your trip with you, you can find local child care and your hotel will have a recommendation for something that guests have had a good experience by.

The last thing they want to do is make a recommendation that's bad and have you blame them. Like they really care about hospitality. So, you know, I trust the recommendations that come from hotels and their concierges. And that gives you some time. Maybe you want to go out for the day with your wife. Maybe you want to go to the pool and just like go to the adults pool and not spend your whole time in the kids pool.

So one hack is when you're there. Find some way to get some time without your kids. I love my kids. But that doesn't mean I don't want to go to dinner without them once on a week-long trip, right? Right. And then that kind of solves things. We bought the ride safe kids travel vest, I think,

which is basically, legally it's a car seat, which is really funny because they say if you get in an accident, you should throw it away because that's the rule for all car seats. But this is actually just like a set of, you know, straps and Velcro that basically turns a seatbelt into something safe for a kid. So it's a small vest. You could throw it in your backpack. You put it on your kid and it allows you to use just the seat belt in a car and not have to travel with car seats. So we had to travel with

one car seat because we had a four month old and that doesn't work. For that, the Costco scenario next car seat is a really great car seat. It's super light. But we bought this travel vest and it worked so well because we could just throw in a backpack. And, you know, yes, we were carrying one car seat, but we weren't carrying around two. And once our second kid is older, well, actually, once our first kid's older, we'll buy her the bigger one. And we'll just, the younger one will inherit this other one. And you could fit it all in a backpack instead of lug car seats around. Or maybe the other one will be a booster seat.

It'll be a booster seat and a vest. But that's another hack for kids. I don't know, bring a million snacks. Like, exactly. If you open that suitcase of my daughters, it was basically like books, snacks and an iPad. And like, our rule is like, we don't let our kid watch. the iPad all the time. We're on a plane. You watch as much Cocoa Mellon. You want to watch Mickey Mouse. You want to watch Daniel

Tiger as much as you want. Go wild on the airplane. We're off the airplane. It's gone away. Okay, you've inspired me. I'm going to try it. I'm going to try some of these hacks and see how it works. Maybe I'll do a short trip first. And we'll see how it goes and it's take them on a plane too. My oldest has been asking to go on a plane too. So we'll do that. Okay, so Chris, this is one of my favorite questions that we ask every guest. And the cool thing about this question is we get a different answer every single time. It's one of my favorite questions to ask. I actually want to make like a compilation of all the answers that we get and put them into one episode at one point in time.

So this is one really interesting question. So what does wealth mean to you? It's funny because I think I would have had a different answer six months ago. And I read this book, Die Was Zero. And funny enough this morning, I got to interview the author, Bill Perkins. And I'd always thought, oh, wealth, that's a bit more money, more money, more money, more money. And I was like, no. After I read this book, I was like, what am I talking about? Like, wealth is the accumulation of life experiences. And yes, many of those experiences require money. Many of them don't.

So his whole premise is quit maximizing financial wealth, maximize net fulfillment. And so for me, because wealth is, you know, obscure word that doesn't have to mean money, I guess I'm going to reframe wealth to not be about money and be more about, you know, you have wealth when you have the ability to increase or maximize your net fulfillment in life. and I think surprisingly few people realize that, you know, that is what money actually does to add the most value to your life, is to create experiences. And, you know, we go into a bunch of, I'm not going to recap this book, but it's like, it's super fascinating about why you should spend money earlier, why the memories you have younger pay dividends in the future. And so for me, wealth now is the ability to create meaningful experiences that will maximize my, you know, the happiness and the fulfillment of life. So my wife and I used to be on this like, let's increase our net worth to a certain point.

And now I'm like, no, like maybe we should decrease it. Maybe we should spend some money. Like maybe we should stop focusing too much on saving and make sure we're having the experiences that, you know, we'll leave us at the end of life, like feeling like we were fulfilled and we did it all. Absolutely. I love that answer. I think that's absolutely amazing. And that book is, I love that book.

And it's one that actually kind of changed my perspective as I read through it as well. So when that episode comes out, let me know. We'll link it up down the show notes as well because I think that's absolutely amazing. So, Chris, thank you so much for coming on. We're definitely going to have you come back because you have a lot of topics we can talk about from money to optimizing life. There's so many different things that we can talk about. So we definitely want to have you back on.

But where can people find out more about what you have going on? All the hacks, everything. Tell us everything that you have going on right now. Yeah, so all the hacks. You can, if you're listening to a podcast right now, which I assume you are, you could just search for it. You got episodes. I'd say a third is about travel hacking.

A third is about money, investing, deals. And then a third's just about life. You know, everything from how do you host the best cocktail party to how do you optimize productivity to how do you live a happier life? And so, you know, I also write a newsletter every one to two weeks, trying to get to a weekly cadence on all the hacks.com slash email. So you can find that. And yeah, reach out to me if you have questions.

You have show ideas. You want to learn more. You know, on this topic, I'm like, one thing we didn't cover, I can come back or you can go find a few episodes is I realize we didn't talk about how to earn more points. Like aside from sign-up bonuses, like, how do you get better deals? How do you earn more points? How do you stack things up? So I'll leave you with one little hack to wet your palette of the next conversation, which is,

let's say you have a credit card that gets you four points per dollar on groceries, right? And let's say you got a big purchase at Home Depot. And you're like, well, why would I use my grocery card for Home Depot? That doesn't make any sense. What if instead of using your grocery card at Home Depot, you just go to the grocery store and buy Home Depot gift cards? You get your four points per dollar because you use your grocery. grocery card and then go to Home Depot and pay with Home Depot gift cards. There is one final

little fun hack. Hopefully we got a lot more deals and everything we could talk about next time, but thank you for having me. Absolutely. Thank you. This was amazing and I love that final hack. So we're going to definitely have you back on and we have a lot more topics to cover. So I'm really excited about that. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks.