613 | How Do You Know You're Making the Right Financial Decision? | Roundup with Ginger

23:47And like, that's not that far in the grand scheme of things. Like there's almost no way I can screw up my financial life. It's like what helps me sleep well at night, which is actually pretty fun. I don't get too bogged down in the 5 % of like optimizing. And I know this is not what you were talking about because what you're talking about is really important. So many people just get bogged down in like the mega backdoor Roths and all this other stuff. I just, I've never been bothered with that. Like I've never done that backdoor Roth. It just doesn't interest me. And to me, it's like the big rocks.

24:18What are the big rocks? And I think what you brought up is a big rock in terms of, okay, I need to figure out how I'm actually going to do this. Yeah. There's going to be a time when no money's coming in. What do I do? And then I think the other aspect that maybe to put on your list also is, are the different types of accounts that I have. This is where optimizing might actually make a material difference in that you can have Roth accounts. You can have traditional retirement accounts, which are taxable upon withdrawal. Roth accounts are, you paid the tax upfront. So pulling the money out is tax-free.

24:53And then you have your regular savings, which we confusingly call your taxable brokerage or just money sitting in your checking or savings account, et cetera. I think part of the fun, Ginger, is to massage where to pull that money from to really lower your taxable income and ultimately your tax liability in early retirement. That's something that would move the needle in terms of optimizing. optimizing, we have some really powerful tools when it comes to tax optimization. We have the massive standard deduction now, which for married filing joint, I think it's over$32 ,000.

25:31Ginger:Let's say your life costs$32 ,000. Of course, for almost everybody, it's going to cost more than that. But let's say it's 32. You pulled 32 ,000 out of, you took a distribution from your 401k or your traditional IRA of 32 ,000. All of that is taxable income, right? But then the government says, hey, you get this 32 ,000 standard deduction that's totally free. So$0 tax liability. And then we have the long-term capital gains at 0 % for up to a certain amount. And I think I don't have the exact numbers in front of me. It was something crazy like$96 ,000 or something the last time Cody was on talking about it, that was probably for 2025.

26:14So it's probably higher than that now. If all of these things work out where you're in that 0%, you can get up to that 96 ,000 of taxable income. And if whatever portion of that is long-term capital gains,

26:29Ginger:that the government says, okay, I see you, but that's$0, please, which is also amazing. And then Roth distributions are$0. Again, if you're after a certain age, when you're allowed to pull it out. That to me, Ginger, is something that would be very much worth asking a CFP or somebody like that who's doing it hourly. It's like, all right, help me really craft how I can do this with getting as low of a tax liability as humanly possible. And that's why I think personally, a lot of us are going to pay almost zero dollars in tax liability in early retirement, assuming that we have a mix of those accounts and assuming that our expenses aren't hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, which just by virtue of how life works, it's not going to be.

27:13I know that was a lot to kind of close on. Any thoughts on that?

27:17Ginger:Well, you said it might sound kind of flippant, but I think it was very comforting when you say, you know, it's going to be okay. Thinking about the scale of some of these things is helpful. And at first when you were like, oh, you could just pull from your index funds every month. I'm Like that's the most chaotic I've ever heard. Right. But then after that initial response, I was like, oh, yeah, that would be OK. Right. Like if you pulled three grand from your portfolio in March, it would be OK. And so like taking that step back is helpful for me. That should be our foundation of like, OK, we're safe.

27:55Ginger:It's OK. Yes, yes, yes. If that's the worst case scenario, for most people, that's going to feel uncomfortable-ish. It almost feels like you said, chaotic. Okay, I didn't really come up with a plan. This is just what I'm doing. But I think, frankly, that would work for just about everybody. Okay, I'm at FI. I've already done all the work of figuring out what my life costs, what my FI number is. I've saved. I've compounded. I'm there. And you're probably being too conservative as it is. So most likely, you're FATFI without even knowing it. and then you just log in on the first of the month and you sell that amount or get a distribution from one of your retirement accounts.

28:34And again, doing it so that, yeah, I don't even want to get into the doing it so that your income tax is low because we're just saying like, what's the easiest way? You just log in, you sell the 3000 or$4 ,000, transfer it to your checking account and you go on your merry way.

28:47Ginger:Yeah. For the vast majority of people, it literally is as simple as that. Yeah. Okay, well, this is super fun. But let's transition to something even more fun. I want to talk about your recent trip to Japan. Specifically, I really want to talk about the trail that you did. What's the name of that? Yeah, it's the Kumano Kodo. Yes, because for some reason, people in the Phi community, I'm saying for some reason, but I'm one of these people, we want to do all of the special walks. And this is one that's on my list. And I bet on a lot of other people's lists. So give us the dish here. How was it? The trip was amazing.

29:29Yeah, it's been a couple months since I've been back. It does seem like just yesterday. And I have not been there since college. I studied abroad a summer in college in Japan, lived with a host family and learned Japanese at the time. Unfortunately, I let most of it go. It had been 25 plus years since I've been there. And it was just beautiful to be back. It's a wonderful, wonderful country. One of the neat parts about the whole trip was just the spontaneity of it. I had been talking, I suspect people are getting tired of me talking about, oh, I want to climb Mount Fuji. That's what I've been saying for five years now.

30:05I'm going to Japan. And this was the year. 2026 was going to be the year. There's a certain climbing season. It's basically the summer. That was really the plan. Aaron and I were going to go to Japan this summer. And then it's interesting how sometimes quirks of fate just happen. we're both fans of the band Pearl Jam. We had been kind of stalking the Pearl Jam website to see if Eddie Vedder was doing a solo tour anytime soon. And it was January. Erin saw that he was playing a four-night acoustic tour in Japan, of all places, in April. She saw that there was a lottery to buy tickets and the lottery was closing.

30:47I forget, it was like two days later or something. So we're like, do we do it? Do we not do it? Do we put in for it? Because like if you put in for the lottery and you get selected, you could automatically purchase the tickets. We knew that if we were going to go in April, that it would basically foreclose the ability to climb Mount Fuji this year. So it was actually a decision. We're like, this is too good to pass up. Let's just try. And if we get the tickets, it was meant to be. And then we'll just plan the trip. So we got the ticket. So we had tickets for April 17th in Kyoto to see him, which is only three months after we got the tickets.

31:19So we had to quickly, furiously plan this whole trip. first off that highlights wow five is pretty amazing you can just do something like that where hey three months from now we're going to spend three weeks in japan and we can just do that because we're both five and aaron owns her own business obviously i have shoes of i but i can front load work so that in and of itself was pretty fun it was just really neat to be there and this hike we did. So it's the Kumano Kodo and it's on this fairly remote-ish peninsula on the main island of Honshu. I guess it's remote in the sense that it doesn't look that far afield, but it's not on the bullet train.

32:00It's not on the Shinkansen. It's a little more difficult to get to, but this whole peninsula, obviously real people live there. There were real towns and cities. So this is a bit of a stretch, but this is how it felt, how welcoming it felt was that a lot of this peninsula is set up for this Kumano Kodo pilgrimage hike. And that was what was so beautiful about it. There was this bus that ran the entire width of this peninsula, I suppose, because it was an east to west trail. And it was just set up to make things easy. I think that's like another meta lesson, if you will, that I took from Japan in general is society just works there.

32:38And I know that's kind of a big statement, but it's a collectivist society in the best possible way, at least to a foreigner's eyes. And now, granted, I don't know what it's like to be a resident, et cetera. You can never put yourself in someone's shoes. But looking at their society and saying, man, everything just works. The trains literally run on time to the second. There's no garbage. To the point where, I kid you not, there are not public garbage cans. They don't exist. You carry your own garbage and you bring it back to your house or in our case, your hotel room and you dispose of it there.

33:13And there's no trash. There's no litter. I know that sounds kind of weird, but like the add-on benefits of that are like, there are no squirrels running around rummaging through garbage cans. There were no even bugs. There were no ants or anything. It was wild to see. And that's not to say there's not wildlife because there's an amazing amount of wildlife in Japan generally. But like, it was just such an example of this society just works and people actually care about each other. It was just, it was really neat in that. I think part of what we're doing also when we travel is where do we want to live at some point in the future?

33:48Like what is life going to look like? And it was really fun to see a society like that. And I think that could be a place that we spend a couple months a year in. And part of what we do when we travel now is to kind of think about what does life look like a couple of years from now or 10 years from now or 20 years from now. Like we in the fight community, most of us get to build the lives that we really want to live into. And I think a lot of that comes down to the micro. It's not just the, well, I'm talking about a big trip. It's not just these pinnacle trips. It's the, what is an average Tuesday or Saturday look like?

34:29And how can I build the best day-to-day life? That is what I'm looking for. Even when I'm on vacation, it's like Aaron and I, we spent three weeks in Japan and we didn't really go to any museums. We didn't, I mean, we walked into some temples. If you ask us, what did we actually do day-to-day? We walked around, we walked around, we saw the city, we got a pulse of the town or village or city and had breakfast and lunch and dinner. And sometimes that meant, most of the time, frankly, grabbing at a convenience store in Japan, which are like, are totally ubiquitous. The food is fantastic there. So we even did this when we were in London and Edinburgh.

35:05We went to one of the local markets and cobbled together meals. Because for us, the two of us, we don't really value going out to fancy restaurants or those specific restaurant meals. And that's not to say that's good, bad, or indifferent. I'm not implying that for anybody else. We just really enjoyed walking into these markets and grabbing lunch and sit on a park bench or something like that. Like for me, travel is what do I want to learn about myself? What I want to learn about what I want my life to look like in the future. And those little micro lessons are pretty useful. I talked a little bit about the hike, but did you want to know more about that?

35:43Ginger:I want logistics. So I want to know, did you do the thing where you had someone move your luggage from place to place? How many days was this? How much did it cost? Give us the details. Oh, the cost. Okay. The cost I'm going to have to follow up on. I would absolutely love to share that. Okay. The logistics. We took the train down and like I said, it's not the bullet train or no, that's not true. I think we took a bus actually. That's what's really wonderful. There's like a amazingly intricate system of buses in Japan. And also, of course, the trains are fantastic. We started on the west side of this peninsula.

36:25The town I believe was Kitanabe. This was like the starting point for the Kumano Kodo. And there was a bus right there. And like I said, the people are absolutely wonderful. They were right at the main station in Kitanabe. There was a visitor center basically for the Kumano Kodo. So you would see like a couple dozen people who were going to walk this. I was going to say foreigners, but it wasn't only foreigners, certainly, but people getting ready to walk this trail and they just walk you through exactly the buses to take, et cetera. So we just stayed at a local hotel that was like a five minute walk from the bus station.

37:00We got on the bus in the morning and it took us to the beginning of the trail. I think the first day was something like, I want to say 10 to 13 miles or something like that. The beginning was pretty difficult because there was a couple thousand feet elevation gain over the first handful of hours. But it's just like anything. There's no rush first off, and it's just one step after another, just like any kind of backpacking. And it's not backpacking in that you're not bringing tents necessarily because that's a fun part about Japan is they have luggage forwarding, which is really cool. Like, and this is not just on a hike like this, this is anywhere in Japan.

37:41And this goes back to like the country just works. It just absolutely works. We forwarded our luggage from this little spot right by the train station in this Kitana Bay. And we basically said, we're going to be at this particular hotel in Kikatsura on Wednesday or Thursday. And when we got into our hotel room, Ginger, our luggage was just sitting there waiting in the room as if it had been there always. And there was no concern. It was 100 % guaranteed that these two pieces of luggage were going to be sitting there. So we had our little carry-on luggage. We just forwarded them. And then we just had like a little backpack.

38:19It was nothing special. It was just for the four days that we were on the hike. And I've also started buying a lot of clothes that are really versatile for travel and hiking. I mentioned this in my newsletter and hopefully it didn't give people the ick, but this is something I've been thinking about. It's like, all right, what are clothes that I could hike with and still go out to dinner in the same night? And like, there are these like Merino t-shirts that I've been wearing. I wore them in Bali and they're just, they're amazing. I've been doing the same thing with socks and boxers and shorts, things that are really versatile.

38:52It's more like the one bag packing kind of mindset of, all right, how can I do this and not have to wash clothes every third day, but have versatile clothing for whatever I need. So it was actually shockingly easy. You're shaking your head. I love it.

39:08Ginger:I love it. Yeah. So am I getting this correct that for those four days, you survived on everything that was in your tiny backpack. Yes. Gotcha. That's exactly right. Just clothes, a little bit of toiletries, just knowing that in four days, we'd be perfectly fine because we'd be reunited with our luggage. We're just going to be hiking anyway. So I brought enough clean clothes for the hikes. It was really pretty easy. And then we would just load up on food in the morning because every place that we stayed in had just like a tiny little market along with it. I bought protein bars everywhere I went.

39:44There were really great protein bars available at all the family marts and 7-Elevens in Japan. It's similar to London in that they just have these ready-made sandwiches everywhere. And obviously I love America, let's be clear. But I think we take for granted a lot of things that we just get gouged all the time. And we just take it as like, that's just how life works. Oh, it's just how life works that when you go to an airport, that turkey sandwich that should be$8 is actually 18. Or when you go to a baseball game, that hot dog is not$3. It's$13. Ready-made food is$13 a pound everywhere you go in the US.

40:24And it's like, sometimes they just don't gouge you. Like in most other countries, they just don't screw you over for no reason or like scalp tickets. It's like, isn't it hilarious? Like we actually take this as a given that all of this rapacious capitalism is normal. It doesn't have to be. I heard Chris Williamson on the Modern Wisdom podcast talking about this the other day. It's like the meal deal in all of Britain. You walk into any Sainsbury's or M &S stores or whatever the local market, and for like three pounds 50 or four pounds, you get a sandwich and a side and a drink. That's just what everybody does.

41:02There are tens of millions of these things made and sold probably every single day. It's insane. And it doesn't have to be that when you're in an airport in a different country, the turkey sandwich costs$18. Sometimes it just costs the same thing. That meal deal at the M &S right by the London stadium that I went to to see an English Premier League football match was the exact same price. They don't gouge you. It's really pretty wonderful.

41:28Ginger:Yeah. I'm laughing because I'm thinking about you saying, oh, in Japan, they don't have public garbage cans. I'm like, can you imagine if we did not have public garbage cans? Because already we're like too lazy to go the five feet to throw it out. So that, yeah, we're different. We are. And so back to the Komano Kodo. The cool thing is you actually can do portions of it. Okay. Well, this leads into my next question. My biggest fear about doing this trail personally is when I kind of looked into it and was looking at all the different routes and stuff. It looked like maybe I could get lost and die.

42:09Could that happen? I don't think so. I really don't. The signage is fantastic. I mean, I don't know how lost you get in the woods. The signage is amazing. It was really great. And this is like the sister UNESCO World Heritage Trail to the Camino in Spain, but it's dramatically shorter. I think if you did the entire Kumano Kodo, I think it would only be maybe five or six days, depending on how much you wanted to hike each day. And honestly, Aaron and I actually only did two full days for some health reasons. Everybody's fine. But for some health reasons and kind of overall satisfaction with the trip, we decided to bail on the third day of the Kumano Kota that we were going to do.

42:51And we just took the bus to our hotel in Kikatsura and went to some of the onsens, you know, the hot springs and such. And it was just, okay, this was the right decision for us. And I'm not a completionist. I'm not like some weird, I don't know. There's no like competitiveness with, oh, this is how you're supposed to do it. or we didn't really do it right. And like, no, we had two amazing days where we probably walked 10 to 15 miles each day, just saw this beautiful part of the world where we never would have had the opportunity to and got to see just how amazingly efficient like this whole bus system was for the, the Komano.

43:29I forget that it was like the Komano Koto Express or something. It was just really, really cool. So that was just like a neat, fun part of the trip. I'm just so glad we took the time to go down again to this fairly remote part of Japan.

43:42Ginger:The pictures look so pretty. I mean, that is like my main motivation about doing that walk is just the scenery looks incredible. It was really something. And yeah, again, like learning about yourself. That's another part of travel that I think is really important for all of us. It's I am not necessarily the most spontaneous person in the world. So I said we had tickets to see Eddie Vedder on April the 17th in Kyoto. We'd seen another guy, an American who was going, we saw him in an Eddie Vedder shirt on the train and just chatted with him for a couple of minutes. He's like, oh yeah, I'm going to all four shows.

44:17And we're like, oh, that's interesting. We didn't even think about that. So we looked into the night before on the 16th in Osaka, he was playing there. There were still a couple of tickets available. or there were tickets available, even for this tiny little 2000 person venue. So we're like, it was that morning we were in Kyoto, which is a separate metropolis. Now, granted, it's only like a 40 minute, 35 minute train ride. And we're like, should we just go tonight? Like, should we try it? And we're like, let's think about it. So we walked around Kyoto all day. It was 4 p.m. We were in our hotel in Kyoto, a separate metropolis.

44:54And we're like, let's go. So we walked to the subway, we took the subway, then got on the train to Osaka, 35 minute train ride, walked to the venue, got tickets, had time to get dinner for the 7 p.m. show. And again, this is another thing in Japan. Like when they say 7 p.m., the artist goes on at like 7 p.m. I think he was on by like 7.07. So no joke, we were in our hotel room in Kyoto at 4 p.m. And we saw Eddie Vedder on the stage at like 7.07 p.m. Or thereabouts, you know, something like that. It was the coolest thing. And like, that was just a fun, spontaneous thing that was in this instance, literally once in a lifetime.

45:34And my natural inclination was to be like, oh, no, it's too much hassle. Like, we're already here in Kyoto, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was like, after we got done with it, it was that was amazing. Why did I even second guess that? So again, just learning a little bit more about yourselves. It was really fun.

45:50Ginger:That sounds fun. How did that spontaneity affect your finances? You figured out you were going to this thing. You only had like three months. Did that stress you out in terms of how you were going to get those tickets or what was an acceptable price or amount of points for you? Interesting. So for the flight and hotels and such? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. this was not the travel rewards optimized trip. We definitely used travel rewards in Kyoto. So we stayed at an amazing, I think it was a Hyatt place. There was a Hyatt place Kyoto, which if that's not the best Hyatt place in the whole world, I'd be shocked.

46:33It was astonishingly good. Our good friend, Christine Wheatley, who's been on the show. She has the amazing business in Nashville, a little local flavor. She gave us a guest of honor certificate. So we were able to get free breakfast, which is super cool. It was like 9 ,000 points a night or something like that. Yeah. I think 9 ,500 was what I paid on average for the four nights. So we said, I think it was four nights we stayed in Kyoto. So fantastic for again, this amazing hotel right on a subway stop. It was perfect. We could have used Hyatt points in Tokyo, but Erin's a really good traveler.

47:09She's been a solar traveler around the world for a lot of different places. So she has a bunch of different websites. I think she uses a website called Agoda, A-G-O-D-A. It seems like that's a really good option for hotels in Asia specifically. She's used that to great effect in multiple countries in Asia. And I mean, it's just an aggregator, so it's not like some secret or anything, but we're able to get really great deals. I don't think we spent on average more than a hundred dollars a night in Tokyo, which is amazing. We were actually shocked at how inexpensive Tokyo was. And I found this in a lot of big cities.

47:48You think big city, and this is again, like America versus the world. Everything was so cheap there food-wise. And granted, the exchange rate was fantastic in Japan right now for the US dollar, but almost every meal we ate was six to eight US dollars for delicious, unbelievable food. It was amazing. And there's no, I guess, tax and there's no tip taxes included if there is tax and there's no tipping so okay this is a thousand yen which was

48:18Ginger:six us dollars that was a delicious lunch and that was pretty much the norm so if you're looking to go to japan it's a pretty darn good time we did not really use rewards all that much for the other hotels because we wanted to make it i think this is part of your question also is like all right look, it's nice to optimize, but sometimes it's also about the experience. And we really wanted to stay in some traditional Japanese ryokans and have the tatami mats and the onsens and, you know, they're the hot springs or the baths, the public baths in the hotels. That really meant something to us. So I think we could have optimized more, but I don't think life is necessarily about optimizing all the time.

49:02So I think that led to a much better trip. And we stayed in like nine or 10 different places in the three weeks, which is kind of the antithesis of slow travel. But I think also by virtue of us moving around a lot for that Kumano Kodo, that was part of it. But yeah, we got a little bit of everything. We got these amazing Japanese inns. You're in the robe that they give you and you'd go to dinner with 15 other people or thereabouts, everybody who's staying, and you'd sit down and have this meal put in front of you where there are 20 different things and you have no idea what half of them are. And you just, you just, it's an adventure.

49:36And I think that's a little bit outside of my comfort zone, but part of the spice of life.

49:41Ginger:Was this the kind of trip that at the end you started trying to figure out when you could go back? Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. We were like, oh, how could we rent a furnished department in Tokyo for 90 days because I think that's the visa limit. If there's a future where my younger daughter Molly graduates from high school in four years, I think there's a future where we travel a decent bit. And I can see Japan being a mainstay in that rotation. Yeah. I want to ask you a hotel question. Let's transition to me and my questions. I've been yapping the whole time, which is not my ideal scenario.

50:18So I love it.

50:18Ginger:I think I know the answer to this. No, I don't know the answer fully to this, but I bet other people have this question, which is like, I've never been much of a hotel person in the last few years because of the like child thing we've talked about. I'm like, I need an Airbnb, but sometimes I just travel with a friend. And so I got the Marriott Bonvoy card a few months ago when they had this awesome deal that was like five free nights. Oh, yeah. I booked this luxury hotel in Bangkok. It's going to be so great. It's going to be so fun. But here's my question about that. I don't really want the card for anything else.

50:58And if I were to cancel my card, I think what you would tell me is it's fine because I already

51:05Ginger:booked my hotel. So that maybe is done. I can think of that as like that's not going to get revoked just because I don't have the card anymore. First of all, am I correct about that? That is certainly true in every scenario that I know. I think the most important thing when it comes to travel rewards is like, we're not trying to game the credit card companies here. They're providing these rewards as part of the deal. You sign up, you hit the requirements. I think some people do some weird stuff, like maybe in the battle days, like they close the card instantly. And there are some instances where the credit card company realizes you're gaming it and they like claw back the points.

51:43but that's not what you're talking about here. This is a card you've had. You might close it when the year is coming up because at that point you're making the decision, like, do I want to pay the annual fee again? Like that's a legitimate question.

51:55Ginger:Yeah. So that is what I'm wrestling with is like, I think, and I'll kind of have to look at the dates, but let's move it away from me to say if theoretically my card renewed in January and my trip is in February and I decide, you know what, this is not worth it to me. I'm not going to renew. We know we've established, Hey, your, your trip is probably fine. What if something happened though? And I had to cancel that trip. What would happen to those points? Yeah. Well, the way that this has always worked and there might be some edge case that I just don't know about, but the way that travel rewards has always worked when it comes to these, we call them like co-branded credit cards.

52:38In this case, the Marriott credit card or a Hyatt card or Southwest. How it works is those points go from your credit. When you earn them, your credit card company, whatever it is, Chase or Amex or whomever, those points then get sent to your rewards program at that hotel or airline. And at that point, they become those airline miles or hotel points. and they are not related to the credit card company anymore, as long as they're in your Marriott account or they're in your Southwest or Hyatt account. So those points, again, unless you did something crazy, which you deserve to be punished for, frankly, like going against terms and conditions of, or like trying to gain the system or close it immediate.

53:23Like if you do something stupid, that's clearly like delineated as against the terms and conditions. Yeah. The credit card company can take the points back because you're doing something untoward basically, but that's not what you're talking about here. Like those points are then in those accounts. They're then subject to whatever the expiration policies, a lot of the airlines and hotels, their expiration policies post COVID have gotten dramatically better. So a lot of airlines don't have expiration policies anymore, but some still do. So the only thing you have to worry about at that point, Ginger, is expiration of the points, or in your case, those are like free nights.

54:01And I think usually free nights, at least how I've seen it, like in my Hyatt, for instance. So I have the Hyatt credit card. I get one free category one through four hotel each year for having this card. So I pay the annual fee, which in my case is$95. I get this certificate, but that certificate has an expiration date. And I know if I don't use it, then it just expires. So I would say in your case, I would just keep an eye on the expiration policy of those free night certificates that almost undoubtedly they were in your Marriott account. And that's how you book this hotel for Bangkok. So if you did cancel them, those free nights would go back into your Marriott account.

54:41Then they would be subject to whatever the expiration is. Now, this differs from the bank cards, like let's say the Chase Sapphire Preferred or the Amex Platinum or whatever, you know, Citi has a whole bunch of thank you points and built and et cetera. Those points exist. Let's just talk about Chase. Those Chase Ultima Rewards points exist in your Chase credit card account. That's both a feature and a bug in this particular instance. It's 99 % feature in that, okay, I have so much flexibility with those points, which is why we love those transferable points because you could transfer those points to any number of their partners or redeem it a different way.

55:20You could redeem it through Chase Travel, which is not a terrible way to do it, but can be really useful in a lot of instances. But we usually want to transfer to these transferable partners. You could transfer some points to Hyatt, transfer some to Southwest and get a trip or transfer to United and fly to Bangkok if you want, whatever it may be. That's the cool part about having those points is they're so broadly useful. But if you close that card and you still had points, poof, they are gone. Like you just didn't transfer them. They're gone. Now that would be like a silly unforced error because you could have just transferred them to any of those partners.

55:56You would have had to have speculatively done it, but it's better than losing the points.

56:00Ginger:Yeah. For me, it's always, I keep the points in my chase account until I absolutely need to book because they always have more value as chase points. But if for some bizarro reason, like I've had my Sapphire preferred card open for forever, if for some bizarro reason I was ever going to close that, I would just send some of them to United. I'd send some of them to Southwest. I'd just have to basically make up a number of where I wanted to send them. But yeah, it's pretty hard to lose your points these days as long as you just have some wherewithal of understanding. Yeah. And thanks for clarifying the co-branded thing again, because that reminds me too, because I have points also with Marriott and I don't want to get stuck thinking, oh, there's an emergency.

56:45Ginger:I have to spend these points before my anniversary. That is probably not true. And to your point, I just need to check on what the expiration deal is with that particular account. Yeah, that's it, which is nice. And that's just the case at all, all of these accounts. I think I had to log into my British Airways account. I think that's one that still has a 36 month expiration policy last time I checked. So that was just something I put into my Todoist app that I always talk about. It's like my external brain. I think this is one of the things that's made my life better over the last 10 years than just about anything.

57:18I literally have that on a rolling basis. It's like, I think American Airlines miles might still expire. I think British Airways miles might still expire. So I just have it as a recurring task every X number of months, let's say 35 months in British Airways. And it's like, all right, just log in and check the expiration and whatever, book a flight or something like that. Any type of account activity will reset the expiration. So it's really hard. You have to really fall asleep or go out of your way to have miles and points expire at this point. but this isn't top of mind for everybody. So that's why I like to put it in that external brain of mine.

57:59Ginger:Yeah. All right, Brad. Well, we could chitter chatter another two hours, but maybe we should wrap it up. All right, cool. That sounds good. I know you're always plotting with travel rewards. Tell me about the points you're using coming up. Well, I mean, this is one of the things I'm, I am working on is understanding travel rewards a little bit better because I've been pretty, pretty lazy about it or pretty basic about it. And so that is something that I am working on. I think that that's going to be a to be continued. Yeah. All right. Well, nothing wrong with that. It's funny because Aaron and I were talking about this morning, we're going back to Ohio to visit some of her family and we're staying in a hotel a couple of nights on the way and on the way back.

58:46And we're like, even me who I've always He's been pretty good at this travel rewards stuff. Neither of us have like a real store of points other than Hyatt points. I know friends of mine, like Marla, who's been on the show a couple of times and Noah, who is actually, so we actually just did a couple episodes. 594 was this travel rewards deep dive with Noah, who's amazing. And Devin Gimbel from Point Me to First Class was on episode 601. So just in the last three months, I've had two different episodes on Travel Rewards. That was like a Travel Rewards refresher for 2026 with Devin. And that was another great episode.

59:26So I'm now at the point where I'm traveling more. And I'm going to definitely double down on Travel Rewards content. So Jonathan's helping me. I think he has a chooservite.com slash travel. He's building out a whole travel course with my help, some tools and such. So that is going to be really useful for a lot of people. Marla has always talked to me about these Wyndham rewards. Noah talked about that too. And I know a lot of people get great value from IHG also. So this is top of mind for me. And I know you're interested in it as well. So let's make it a thing over the next six months that we both go back to the drawing board, try to figure this out, bring Noah and Devin on and Marla hopefully and get a plan that we can each do this separately in our own lives.

1:00:13And then, yeah, everybody can listen and figure out, here's, I'm going on a road trip. Like, this is literally what we're doing tomorrow. We're leaving first thing in the morning. We don't have a hotel booked because we're just going to drive X number of hours. What do I do? I'm driving through West Virginia and Ohio, and I need just one night. There's no Hyatts along the way, unfortunately. I know I can book through Chase Travel. I could do that. But do I really want to use my super valuable Chase Points?

1:00:39Ginger:Yeah. What if I could buy Wyndham points for a discount or buy, I think there's some things like that, that maybe it's not the perfect optimized thing, but if I could buy a hotel room for$50 a night by using points in this smart way, that would be pretty cool. So, uh, let's, we're going to, we're going to make moves in that immediately and we'll do another one of these roundups in another month or two. Okay. Sounds good. Awesome. Okay. This is part of the journey. just talking through this. This wasn't an episode where Ginger and I had every answer, but that's the fun part about FIIs. We're all working through this together.

1:01:15It's a journey and it's part of life. It's uncertain. We're trying to figure it out. We're trying to come up with the best plans for ourselves. That is a feature, not a bug. It's part of the journey of life. And it's like I said, on my trip to Japan, it's you're just learning a little bit more about yourself and we're all just trying to live better lives. So I hope you enjoy this episode. As always, you can join the community. Choose a bit.com slash login. That's actually the place where you can log in. You can create an account for your local group. You get on my newsletter. You get on this amazing platform that Jonathan, my co-founder of choose a vi has built for us, including these travel rewards tools.

1:01:53It's that one-stop shop. And if you've already created an account, that's actually the easy way to just get back to it. So join in, join your local group, go to a meetup and really be part of this community. it will change your life like it's changed our lives. I really, I feel so strongly in this. That's why I've been doing this for 10 years. We're coming up on our 10th anniversary of Choose a Fi when the part of the fun of Fi and early retirement is I could have ridden off into the sunset, but this is really important. And I learn every single day. I love chatting with Ginger. I love chatting with all of you.

1:02:26So keep hitting reply to my newsletter and just keep being part of the community. This is a crowdsourced show. This is a crowdsourced journey. This is a community more than anything. So again, sincerely, thank you for being here.