MI289: Hacking Your Life, Money & Travel w/ Chris Hutchins

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25:06To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. People like Dave Ramsey, as an example, say that credit cards shouldn't be used at all, regardless of the points. And then other people say that credit card users spend more because they're using credit cards than they would if they had paid in cash, which basically negates or wipes away any benefit that you're receiving from those credit card points.

25:45I personally use credit cards for everything. Every single purchase, I use a credit card. I don't think I've ever even used the debit card I have. I very rarely ever use cash. And I've never spent a penny on interest. So I never carry a balance. So I feel like I keep it in control. But I could see it being true that I maybe spend more money because I'm using a credit card, not cash. Because the few times, it's rare, but the few times that I do have to use cash, it kind of hurts. It doesn't really hurt. It's just like, oh man, I don't know. It just feels different than when I'm using my card, either entering it online or even just entering the chip at a store.

26:18So I think I could be potentially spending more money just because I'm using a credit card. And maybe that's even offsetting the amount of points I get, even though I probably get thousands and thousands of dollars a year in points. So yeah, I'm curious how you balance these ideas. And I know you obviously think it's worthwhile, but why do you think it's worthwhile? Well, first off, if anyone has any high interest debt, and I don't know what the right threshold is now in this high interest rate environment, but let's say like over 8%. Normally, I'd say like over 5%, but now that mortgages are kind of tipping over 7%, say more than 8%.

26:52So if you're carrying a credit card balance, if you have a really high interest car loan or a title loan or anything like that, this is not for you. You are never going to earn credit card rewards that make it worth that debt. So step one, I'm sure there is another episode of this podcast that would be an incredible listen. And you can put a link in the show notes about how to think about debt, how to get on a payoff strategy and build your credit and all that. That's more important. Now, let's say you're past that. And so for Dave Ramsey, maybe his audience is entirely filled with people that given access to unlimited amounts of spending beyond their means, they will just do it.

27:25And if you're the kind of person that would spend more money with a credit card, yeah, it's not a good fit for you. That's just clear. But if you're the kind of person who isn't going to spend a lot more money, like if you're going out to dinner, whether you pay with cash or your credit card. If the fact that you have the credit card in your wallet means you're going to order three times as much for a nice bottle of wine, you should pay with cash. Because the points aren't going to make up for that. The point value is at max, maybe a 10 % return. And if you're not that optimized, maybe it's a 2 % return.

27:54So the window is 2 % to 10 % back. So if you're going to spend 20 % more, bad deal. If you're going to spend 1 % more, probably a good deal. And you could probably A, B test this. Why don't you take a month and just spend cash? You might find that there are a lot of things that are very hard to pay with cash. Maybe use your debit card. I don't know if that'll burn as much. But you could try to test this and be like, am I actually spending more when I have a credit card? For me, I don't think I am because I'm just making this decision of do I want the thing or not? Or do I need the thing or not?

28:24And then paying for it. And for me, I've never felt the burn of using cash. If anything, I feel the burn of using cash is actually that I like tracking my spending. So I do it all in Copilot. And with cash, it's just so hard. With a credit card, I can actually see where I'm spending money. So I could actually make a case that because it's so easy for me to track my spending using a lot of different apps, I personally use Copilot. By using a credit card, I'm able to track my spending and see where the money's going. And I can't remember the stat. So I just started working with Copilot because I reached out to them.

28:57I was like, I love your product. Can we work together? Can we come up with a deal for my audience? So if you go to allthehacks.com slash deals, by the time you hear that, hopefully we'll have a good deal for Copilot. And I love it. But I think they found that people save some meaningful amount, like more than 10 % of their spending. Their spending gets reduced by more than 10 % just by tracking it. And I can tell you that tracking your spending, if you're using cash, is so much harder that I imagine most people listening won't do it. For however much more you might spend by using a credit card, But I wonder if that's negated by the fact that if you track your spending, it's so much easier to do with a credit card because your transactions could get imported automatically versus you manually needing to type in how much money did I spend with cash?

29:38How much money did I spend here? I guess you could still do that with a debit card, but I don't know. Most of the studies I've seen comparing credit card to cash is actually like physical green dollar cash. So for me, I don't think that I'm spending more by using a credit card, but I am getting 2 % to 10 % back when I use that credit card. So it's a no-brainer. And the difference between 2 % and 10 % isn't just picking a card that aligns with your spending, which is part of it. If you spend all your money on dining and groceries, well, there's cards that earn 4 points per dollar on dining and groceries.

30:11So that is probably the card you should use. If you spend all of your money on travel, there are cards that earn 3 points per dollar on travel. Or if it's all on flights, 5 points per dollar on flights. You can pick a card that aligns best with where you spend your money. And that'll maximize your return. And then the second piece is using those points in a way that gets the most value. And so if you have a million points on Chase, and you decide to get gift cards with those points, you're probably going to get a fraction of the value as if you wanted to use those points for travel. And so you might get two, three times as much using them to get travel by booking in the travel portal on Chase's website.

30:51But you might get another two to three times more points if you take those points and transfer them to an airline or a hotel group like Hyatt or United and book directly with those airline and hotels. And then you might be getting... Gosh, I've had instances where each point's worth 10 cents. Let's take an example of you have a card that earns three points per dollar on dining and you're able to get 10 cents per point out of the value. That's like 30 % cash back every time you go out to eat, which is pretty cool. Now, those 10 % examples are few and far between. And I think you could make a case that had I not had those points, I wasn't going to stay at the hotel that would have otherwise cost $1 ,800 a night.

31:30Maybe they're not really worth that much if we're being totally honest. And I'll be totally honest. I'm not going to spend$1 ,800 a night. So are they worth that? No. But they're certainly worth more than I would have gotten buying a gift card with my points by a huge margin. There's a lot there that I want to talk about. but first, why Copilot? And I think it's funny you mentioned that because I didn't know that you used them. I downloaded their app, I don't know, a couple months ago, maybe even longer, maybe last year. It's been a while. I didn't love it. It was hard for me to get into it. So I'm curious, what am I missing?

32:02I use Mint right now. I really like Mint a lot. It's free, super easy to use, and I can do a lot of things that I need to do with it. So I'm curious. I'm always looking for something better though. So why Copilot? So there's a lot of options. And when I wanted to decide what to use, I used Rocket Money, Monarch Money, Mint, Tiller HQ, and Copilot. So I tried all of those. Are there other ones I should have tried? I'm sure someone listening has another... Oh, and YNAB. I tried YNAB. The tried and true thing. So for me, there's two styles of budgeting, if you will. And I hate the word budgeting, because I'm not budgeting as much as I am spending tracking.

32:38One is budgeting, right? I want to say this is how much I'm going to spend in a category and I want to really hold myself to it. My style is more, I want to understand where I'm spending money and I'm pretty good if I feel like I'm spending too much at course correcting next month. So I don't really need to set a budget per se to say, I only want to spend$300 this month on going out to eat. I want to say, how much am I spending going out to eat? Do I need to ratchet it back? So YNAB is really good if you're the kind of person that wants to set budgets and try to stick within them. That was not me.

33:11YNAB wasn't the right product. Amongst all the other ones, I put a high value in my world at products that just look beautiful. I like well-designed products. I have an iPhone. I enjoy Apple's design. And I think that Mint, for as much as it has many features is filled with like, go get this ad, go get this thing ad. There's just lots of ads. All the monetization of the product is ad supported. And it's just so overwhelming. And the ease at which you can customize things was not as simplistic. So like, hey, every time there's another transaction with this name, do this thing. And it just happens automagically.

33:54So Mint was just a little bit frustrating. And the UI of looking at how your spending was happening wasn't great for me. Monarch Rocket Money were similar in that I just felt like they were slightly less easy to use. And I'm a crazy person when it comes to this. So I actually went back and imported 18 months of transaction history to Mint, to all 6 of these apps and went through and recategorized every transaction in every single app. And so if you listen to my show on all the hacks, that's the kind of thing that I do. I'm like, I'm going to spend 40 hours testing out 8 budgeting apps to try to figure out which one I think makes the most sense for me.

34:33And if you're like me, you might like a certain one. And I'll tell you what I thought that Rocket Money was the best option if you don't want to pay a subscription. When it comes to something that's a combo of easy and has enough automation to do things quickly for you, but also had enough flexibility that you could create your own categories and design it in a little different way. So that was my favorite free one. But Copilot was a better budgeting, spending tracking app for me. And I love that I could just pull it up and look at categories, look at them over time, see all the recurring transactions I have going on, see where I'm spending the most, see where I'm on track on a month-by-month basis.

35:16Looks like this month, I'm way over... I'm trending to have July be a huge month because my wife and I just took a really big expensive vacation. And so I don't know. I've never been as excited to track my spending as I have the last like 6-7 months using Copilot. I'm opening up every day and it's really easy to categorize a transaction. I felt like Mint, to pull out your phone and see if I had any transactions in the last couple of days and categorize them in 2 seconds just felt like a lot of work. And the Copilot is just so easy. And they have a couple of cool things like They'll sync with Amazon and pull in your purchases so that when you're looking at your transaction on Amazon and you're like, God, what was this?

35:54How do I categorize this? Was this home? Was this kids? They'll just show you the purchases you made. And same thing with Venmo. There's a way to integrate Venmo such that you actually see what it was. It's not just a Venmo charge. So it's a little easier to categorize stuff. I don't know. That's a few of the reasons I like it. And everyone should know, like I said, full disclosure, I am now working with them. They're a partner of the podcast. But it all started the way almost every one of my sponsors in the podcast has, which is, I love this product. Right now, unintentionally, I'm wearing 2 articles of...

36:25My pants and my shirt are both Viore. So I was like, I love Viore. I already own them all. I wear them all the time. Can I partner with this brand? And so I'm regularly doing that for my partners. It's just like partnering with brands that I already use. But full disclosure. Yeah. Maybe I'll have to give a co-pilot another try. I literally just this morning was working on my Mint. Not really budgeting. I'm in the same spot as you. I don't really do the budgeting, but just tracking my spending, seeing where it's going. And I had a couple of Amazon charges and I didn't know what they were. I didn't remember.

36:55So I had to open Amazon and my other browser, not my other browser, my other screen and just had to enter it in because I didn't remember what it was. So that might be a cool feature of Pilot for me to try out. Quick thing though, for you and anyone that does any type of budgeting and expense tracking on Amazon. If you go to Amazon and you hover over the accounts thing and you click your account and you click account and you scroll down on the left, there's a link to something called your transactions. And instead of ordering everything by orders, it orders it by every charge that's hit your credit card.

37:28That's super annoying too, how they split it up. Yeah. So sometimes it's hard because you're like, ah, Amazon hit my card for$23. And you go in and you're like, I haven't ordered anything that's$23. It's like, Like, oh, well, I ordered this thing where half of it shipped. So they charge my card differently. When you go to the your transactions page, it just shows you like, charge for$5, charge for$34.72, charge for$31.93. And then you can link out to the order and find it. So I will say, whether you're using YNAB or just a spreadsheet or anything, if you are trying to figure out and categorize what you spent money on on Amazon, find the transactions page.

38:03It's so much easier than the orders page. Yeah, that's a good hack. I'm going to have to do that because that is always a problem for me. I'll buy four or five things and then two will be in one order and three will be in the other and one will be... It never adds up. So I'm definitely going to have to do that. I didn't know that that was there. Getting back to the credit card points. For someone who uses credit cards, they're interested in it. They've maybe always wanted to do more with their credit card points, but they've just never spent any time on it. Where do they get started? Give us the 101 version of getting started with optimizing credit card rewards.

38:34I'll give the two part. The 101 for earning and the 101 for redeeming. So 101 for earning is look at where you spend money. And it doesn't... I feel like some people think this has to be a science. You don't have to go use Mint or Copilot and be like, did I spend$3 ,008 on dining over the last three months? Or was it 3 ,010? No. Roughly. And most credit cards will give you an annual spending report where you can just download the spending report from Amex or Chase at the end of the year and be like, where did I spend money? Look at where you spend money. You probably already know this answer and think, okay, let's try to get a card that aligns with where I spend money.

39:10And that's my primary card. I will say I did an incredible amount of, I don't know, analysis is the right word. So I built this spreadsheet that had the top, I don't know, 20, 30 cards in it. And if you want it, you can go to allthehacks.com slash card value and you can get it for as little as a dollar. And you basically check a number of cards and put in how much money you spend in different categories. And it'll tell you how many on average points you're earning. So if you spend all your money on dining and you get a 1 % cashback card, you're going to get 1 % back. But if you get a card that has points on dining, you're going to get more.

39:43What I found, which is counter to what I do personally, is that you get a ton of value with your first and second card. And once you get a third credit card, you're not really adding that much extra value in terms of optimization and more earnings. So getting the right two card combo is really valuable. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. You're really diminishing returns. So it's finding the one or two cards that are going to most align with your spending. And the only exception I'll give there is like, if you have rent, the built card is just like, I would almost go as far as to say must have, because it's the only card out there that lets you earn points on rent.

40:23And you don't have to pay a fee to do that. So up to$100 ,000 of rent a year, you can earn 100 ,000 points. Highly, they're not a partner of mine. They don't pay me any money. But if you go to allthehacks.com slash built, it's my referral link. And I would love you to do that. But I think that's the one exception is like, there's a two card combo. And then if you have rent and you want to add a built card or make it your primary card, highly recommend. That's the earning side. Then on the redeeming side, I think you have two options. You say, I don't really want to go deep down this rabbit hole.

40:56And you redeem your points in the portal. Like go to the Chase Travel Portal, redeem points, and you're going to get somewhere between one and one and a half cents per point. And is it the best possible use of your points? No. Is it really easy to do? Yes. If you want to go a little bit further, you get a tremendous amount of value by having what I'll call flexible points, which is Chase points, Amex points, Capital One points, city points or built points. And they're flexible in that they're able to be used lots of places. You could transfer them to different airlines all over the world. So I've gotten tremendous value transferring points to Air France.

41:34And not because I'm necessarily going to France, but Air France is a partner with KLM. They're part of the same mileage program. So if you're going to Amsterdam, but you can also book flights using Air France points on any of the Sky Team airlines. So Delta and other things. British Airways. I've gotten some great deals booking flights within the US on American Airlines using British Airways points. I get a ton of value transferring points to other airlines. A really concrete example was I was trying to go down to San Diego, which is normally a cheap flight from San Francisco. But for whatever reason, it was like$250.

42:07And it was pretty last minute. But I transferred some points to Avianca, which is a Latin American airline. I think they're based in Colombia. And I got the flight for 6 ,000 points. If I were to book a flight in the portal, 6 ,000 points is going to get me like$60 to$90. But the flight was to almost$300. So finding the right way to do this point transferring stuff takes a little bit of effort and results in a tremendous amount of benefit. And so there are a lot of tools that help make it easier. There's a tool called point.me that makes it easy to search for award flights. and there's a tool called seats.arrow.

42:45I'm going to do an episode soon about all the tools and how they all work and what the pros and cons of each of them. But there are a bunch of these different tools. If you search award search tools is the industry term, you'll find them. Seat Spy is another one that focuses on one route at a time, but gives you a year of availability. But if you play around with these tools, you can find really, really great deals. And so I'd say that's the answer. And if you're on the higher end of the points earning spectrum, There are services where you could just pay someone. It usually costs about$150 per person to maybe$200.

43:19And they'll just do it all for you. And so I think sometimes you're like, why would I pay someone? That sounds crazy. And you're like, okay, well, how much is like six hours of my time worth? And if I'm otherwise not going to get this much value, is it worth it? And usually you only have to pay like$25 and then the rest only if they find something. If you're really excited to take your honeymoon and you want to fly in business class to Europe and those tickets are 10 grand for two people and someone can get them for you for the points equivalent of$1 ,000 and you got to pay them$300 to find those flights for you for two people.

43:50Yeah, it's actually like a lot better deal. I think sometimes we get caught up in like paying other people for time. But at some point, I think we all cross this threshold where we're like, oh, my time is valuable. And if this person can save me a lot of it or do it better than me and save me money in the process, it's worth it. So I think you have a lot of options. But I think learning how to get value out of transferring points to airlines and hotel groups is where you go from unlocking some value to unlocking a lot of value. But just using the right card is going to unlock a ton of value. Yeah, I think that's where I need the most work is learning how to transfer between things.

44:24And we're going to talk about a couple more situations. But also for anybody listening, I know Chris is mentioning a lot of really great resources from personal finance tools and resources, his own resources to a bunch he just mentioned in that response. So I'll make sure I put all those in the show notes for everybody listening. And also just to clarify, the seats.arrow is.aero, not A-R-R-O-W, which I spelled it wrong the first time. So again, I'll put all this in the show notes for everybody, but just wanted to clarify that. Now, is there anything better than Southwest Companion Pass? Is there anything better than that?

44:56And we can dive into more specifics of my situation if we need to, but I'm just curious, generally speaking, is there anything better than the Southwest Companion Pass? And for people who don't know what that is, maybe explain quickly what that is. Yeah. So Southwest, almost every airline has some type of elite status program. You fly enough on the airline and you get different tiers. And they're often like silver and gold and diamond and platinum. And Southwest is a little different in every possible way. The primary way that they're the most different is if you go to any search other than southwest.com, you can't find Southwest prices.

45:29So if you're new to the travel hacking game, or even just saving money on travel game, one, I think Google Flights is the best place to search for flight prices. But two, Southwest never shows up on Google Flights. The flights do, but the prices don't. Unfortunately, you probably always need to do two searches. It's like Google Flights and then Southwest. But Southwest has A-list, A-list preferred, which are their tiers of status. And then the third one, and I think now it's 135 ,000 points a year, you get what's called companion pass. And with companion pass, you can nominate one person and you can actually change it three times a year.

46:03And that person flies for free anytime you buy a ticket. And you don't even have to buy the ticket. If you use your points to buy a ticket, they can still fly free. You just pay taxes and fees, which on most domestic flights is like$5.60. If you have a partner and you guys want to travel a ton. Domestically, Mexico, Caribbean, Hawaii, Southwest Network isn't too international outside of North America, Caribbean. But every single flight you take, someone gets to come for free. It's incredible. And if you want to do that, and then on the summer, your spouse is tied up with work, you want to travel with a friend, you can nominate, switch it to the friend, travel with them for a few months and switch it back to your spouse.

46:45It's an incredible thing. But the extra incredible thing is that almost every single elite program makes it very difficult to earn their status without flying. Southwest is a rare exception where you can earn companion pass just from the points you get from a credit card, including the points you get from a sign up bonus on a credit card. So if you need$135 ,000, you might have to spend$135 ,000 on a credit card. But if you open up a credit card at a time where Southwest has a 60 ,000 point signup bonus... And by the way, if you open up two Southwest credit cards at that time, you're already off to the races.

47:23If you hit those two welcome bonuses, you're at 120 ,000 points. Chances are those credit cards had a thing that was like, spend$5 ,000 in the first 90 days and get this bonus. Between the points you're going to get from that spending and the welcome bonus, you might already be there. I think within the industry, the way to hack companion pass... And by the way, whatever you earn it, you get it for the rest of that year and the next year. So the real hack is get the card in December, spend some money on it, but make sure you don't spend enough to hit that welcome bonus until January. January statement closes, you get those welcome bonuses posted.

48:03Now you've got it for the rest of that year and the next year. So if you're thinking about this coming into 2024, make sure you could open a personal card and a business card. And all of a sudden, by January 2024, you spend the welcome bonuses, you get there, you've got 2 years of nominating someone to fly anywhere you fly for free. It's absolutely amazing. And so a lot of people will do that for 2 years. And then if they have a partner, they'll switch. That partner will open up 1 or 2 Southwest cards, get that welcome bonus, then they'll do it for two years. Now, four years later, maybe the first partners now downgraded or closed their Southwest card, they do it again.

48:41And I know people that for the better part of eight years have been cycling between their partner to have companion pass for eight years. So the short answer is, if you're in a relationship, you don't have kids where... If you want to do kids, you and your partner can do it at the same time, nominate your kids. But no, there's not much better than companion pass. I think I've done it twice. And so we've had it for probably four years. And it's great. I think that is an ultimate hack if you want to travel in North America. But if your goal is, I want to go to Europe or Asia, it's not going to help you much there.

49:17So this is my second time with the companion pass. The first time I earned it, it was totally by mistake. I didn't know anything about really critical performance. I knew I was earning some cash back, but I didn't really know. I wasn't optimizing like you're talking about here. I opened a credit card with the rewards bonus. So I got 80 ,000, I think, points maybe in May-ish. And then so I earned it later that year. And so I think I earned it in September or something. So I got it for that year and then the following year. And I realized, okay, well, now that I get it for a year and a half, next time I do this, I can do it well or properly.

49:48And so now I earned it in January or February of this year. And I have... So I have it until December of next year. And I fly about 50 times a year with my girlfriend. And we fly only in the US. So we fly companion pass. And so we fly almost 50, 52 weeks a year. And we do that, buy one, get one free. And so I didn't think there was going to be anything better than that. But I had to ask because like I said, I fly a lot, but I've never flown first class until like two weeks ago. I flew first class for the first time ever. The only reason I did it was because I had bought a normal general admission ticket or coach or whatever you want to call it.

50:24And they upgraded... When I was doing checkout, they're like, okay, upgrade to first class for$47. And I was like, yep, done. I will absolutely do that. So I did it. And the downside there though, is now I feel spoiled. And I'm like, oh my god, first class... Even though it was a pretty short flight, I was like, oh my god, first class is awesome. So much better than any seat on Southwest. And so I was hoping that there was a way that I could still use a non-Southwest rewards system to get something equivalent to the Southwest Companion Pass. But given that I get 50-ish flights a year, buy one, get one free, I figure there's probably nothing better than that.

50:59No, I think the best option for you is just make sure you're diversifying your points so you have some points in a program like Chase or Amex or Citi or Capital One or Built. And then save that business class for when it really matters. if you're going on we took a trip uh last december and we went to london and paris and it was me my wife and two kids and we have an au pair from spain and the five of us are going to europe and it was like let's drop all of our point not all but we dropped about 420 000 points and we all did business and it was like everyone got to sleep a little bit on the plane and one of the baby one of the kids was only like six months so we only needed four tickets but it was amazing.

51:40And it just made the whole travel experience so much better. Versus if I'm flying business class to LA, it's like, yeah, it feels nice. But it's like, save it for when it really matters. And by the way, I was looking right now on Southwest, the personal cards right now are at about 50 ,000 point welcome bonus. But the business cards are at 80. And then it's not a cheap card. The Rapid Rewards Premier Business Card right now is at 120 ,000 points. Now granted, you've got to spend$15 ,000 in nine months. But if you started using that this year and just hit that nine-month mark in January, hit that 15 ,000 mark in January, you'd get 120 ,000 points.

52:22Now, caveat, I stand corrected reading this. After you spend 3 ,000, you get the first 60. And then after you spend the next 12 ,000, you get another 60. So you want to make sure you don't get that first 60 in one year. So maybe hold off or wait until you can hit it. But that's a huge, huge way to get there quickly, right? 120 ,000 points from the card. You got to spend 15 ,000 to get it. You're already going to be at 135 by the time you're done. And a couple hacks here. If you're trying to earn a welcome bonus, whether it's Southwest or Chase or anything, I have too many hacks right here. Remind me to come back to business cards.

52:54But I'm not an advocate of, oh, I need to hit this bonus. Let's go spend money I don't need to spend. That is not what you want to do in this circumstance. But some things that you can do, if you're trying to hit the minimum spend to get a welcome bonus without spending more money, a favorite of mine is just buying gift cards for things you know you need, assuming you can support it with your cash flow. If you shop a lot at Whole Foods, you can go to Whole Foods and you can buy Whole Foods gift cards. So if you know you spend$500 a month on groceries, you could potentially buy four$500 gift cards.

53:25For the next four months, you buy all your groceries on Whole Foods gift cards, but you're able to front load$2 ,000 on your card now. If you spend a lot of money on Amazon, you could do the same thing. So I would say one way to front load your spending is to go prepay for things on gift cards that you know you're going to spend. Don't go buy a$1 ,000 Home Depot gift card if you don't have a$1 ,000 Home Depot purchase coming. Don't do that. But that's an option. I'm not ever a fan of paying fees to put anything on your credit card. If you got to pay 3 % fee to send your friend money on Venmo. I don't think it's ever worth getting those fees.

54:00But if you're towards the end of a welcome bonus and you're not going to hit it, it probably is. So if you're like... In this case, it's like if you spend$15 ,000, you get 60 ,000 points and you're at$14 ,500 and there's nothing you need, maybe send your partner$500. Pay the 3 % fee, which is only going to be like$15 and make sure you get your 60 ,000 points. Absent you're on the cusp of getting a bonus, not a fan of paying fees. So that's one. And then on the business card side, I think a lot of people think in order to get a business credit card, you need to be running a company with employees and all this stuff.

54:33And that's not true. You do need to have a business. But a business can also mean a sole proprietorship, which means you don't have a tax ID number for the business. It's not necessarily a legal entity. It could be I drive for Uber every now and then, or I sell stuff on Etsy, or I have a blog. And I don't monetize it yet. But one day, I want to monetize my blog or I want to monetize my social media account. Anything that could be a business that you're starting to work on now would qualify. If you tutor someone, if you consult on the side, if you do some freelance work, a lot of times business cards have tremendously larger welcome bonuses and could help accelerate points of earning very quickly.

55:18And you can sign up for them with your own social security number. You don't have to have a business tax ID. And so I would just say, look into that if there's anything you have in your life that could potentially fit the mold of business income or future business income. Because I'm looking, it's like Southwest card, the personal ones are all 50 ,000 points and the business ones go up to 120 ,000 points. There are a lot of Chase cards that are 50 ,000 point for personal and then you go to the business side and some of them are 100 ,000 point. So you can really, really accelerate points earning with welcome bonuses, and you can also accelerate it with business cards.

55:58So I have a list of all the cards and all their bonuses right now at allthehacks.com slash cards. If people are interested, the links on there are links that are partner links. So obviously, you'll be supporting the show, but just know in advance. But there are a lot of cards there and all the bonuses there as well. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle.

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59:33That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance. All right, back to the show. One other thing I love about the Southwest card is that it's with Chase. I have cards with Barclays, American Express, Capital One. And for me personally, I like Chase the best. They're just my personal favorite. So I love that the Southwest cards through them as well. I used to say that. I used to say that. Why'd it change? I got a Capital One card. I hate it. And it's so good. You know why I hate it? I can't pay ahead the balance. So if I charge 50 bucks on the credit card and I go to try to pay it on Capital, like it's pending as 50 bucks, I can't go to Capital One and pay 50 bucks.

1:00:15If I do that on Chase, I can pay anything that's pending because it recognizes that as a charge already. And that drives me nuts. The only place I've been able to do it is Chase. And that's why they're my favorite. So for me, I'm like, I don't want to pay the card off before the statement's due because it's like a free 30-day loan. But the few things that Capital One started doing that are really impressive. And so I have a VentureX card. When I did my analysis of the two cards that for the average American spending pattern, get you the highest return, it was the Amex Gold and the VentureX. Amex Gold's 4X dining and groceries.

1:00:51And VentureX is 2x on everything. Simple. There's no secret categories. Just everything is 2x. And I was playing around on the VentureX site. So one thing, they have a browser extension that anytime you're checking out, they will create a virtual card for you. And you could put that virtual card in and then head it to auto lock. So if you're buying something on some website that you're like, I don't really know about this website, you could buy it with a virtual card that's not your regular card number, set it to auto lock the next day and know that if someone ever were to get the credit card number that you paid for that transaction with, it would never work again.

1:01:25Or if you're signing up for like a seven-day trial, you could put a virtual card in there, lock it the next day and know that if you forget to cancel that trial, they're not going to be able to charge your credit card. So that feature is so easy to use on Capital One. I know a couple other banks and issuers have it, but it's just not as easy. The second one, my wife got this email and it was like, Hey, we've noticed you got two charges for the same thing. Is this correct? She clicked the link in the email and within 30 seconds, they disputed and refunded the charge. It didn't require her to go look at her statement.

1:01:59They noticed it, reached out to her and fixed it all automatically, which was awesome to see. There's a handful of things like that where I feel like Capital One is just really pushing the envelope on what you can do with software and technology when it comes to credit card. And I just really love it. I just hope everyone follows suit. Where I don't like Southwest is that they only let all these budgeting tools like Copilot and Mint import 90 days of history. So unlike Chase, everyone will pull in a year of history. If you're going to go try out Copilot or Mint or any of those apps, you're going to get a full year of transactions that can really just make it easy to go back and see how you were spending.

1:02:36And Southwest is only going to give I mean, or Capital One is only going to give you 90 days. So you can go into Capital One's website and export a year of history if you have a Capital One card, but you can only pull in automatically 90 days of history, which is frustrating. It's funny. We both have these small things that really neither of them are big. My thing being able to pay it right away is not really that big of a deal. I could just wait till the transaction posts. It's a couple of days and then I could pay it. It's not really a big deal. Your stuff's not really that big of a deal either, but we both have our preferences.

1:03:03So that's kind of funny. do you know on the Southwest cards, they have, if I remember correctly, three, I believe, Southwest personal cards. Do you know, can you only earn that intro bonus one time? So let's say, could you get all three cards and earn the bonuses three different times? Or can you only earn it one time? I mean, you definitely can't usually open up a card if you already have the card. Well, they have three different ones. So they have a priority card, a premier and a plus. If I already have priority, can I open the plus and still get the bonus? Yeah, you can definitely do that. A lot of people's strategy is to open two cards and get the companion pass.

1:03:41I would need to do some homework. I know you could definitely have multiple cards because that's what I did. But I don't know if you can do two personal. I know you could do a personal business. You could even do it maybe on the same day. I've done the personal and business. So I'm out now. So that's why I'm wondering if I could do a second business and a second personal or not. I know that Chase's rule is that you can't be a current card member of the card or have gotten a bonus in the last two years. Business card excluded. So I think you can only get a personal card. I think you can only get a bonus on a personal card every two years.

1:04:18But do they count as different cards though? That's the thing. They have the plus and the priority. I think you can't be a Southwest Rapid Rewards card holder and haven't got a bonus in the last 24 months. So you might have to, every 24 months, you might have to close the card. So one thing when it comes to card closing, a lot of people think, oh, you list this episode, you're like, why am I using this stupid Bank of America credit card? Don't necessarily go close every card. Your credit score is really impactful for a multitude of things from getting good interest rates on loans in the future to getting approved for credit cards.

1:04:50And one of the factors is how long have you had most of your lines of credit? If you have a card that you've had for 10 years and you realize it's not the best card, you might not want to get rid of it because it might be that anchor, you know, kind of bringing the average number of years you have on your credit report up. And so the thing that you'll want to do is you'll want to either, this is my sequence of events is one, if there's no annual fee, just keep it open, right? You don't have to close it. You could just keep it open. And I try every year, my trigger is the holidays. Like if I'm going out on the holidays and I'm buying like a stocking stuff or a small gift, I just cycle through the old cards to make sure I put a transaction on that card every year.

1:05:26And for some reason, the holidays is like my trigger. Oh, it's the holidays. I've got two or three cards that are old. I'm going to go put a couple bucks on these cards. Another option is put like a small recurring subscription on each one, like your Netflix bill or something. If it does have an annual fee, you can one, call up the card issuer and ask them, say, hey, I like this card. I'm not spending a lot of money on it. The annual fee is just a little too high for me right now. Some cards will say, oh, we'll waive the annual fee next year. Great. You can punt it down the line. Or, oh, if you could spend$3 ,000 on the card in the next three months, we'll give you 50 ,000 points or some crazy retention offer.

1:06:02So if you Google around for card name retention offer, you see a bunch of blog posts of people that are like, oh, here are the retention offers people have recently gotten for this card. Third option is you can downgrade the card. A lot of cards have a free version or a free card in the family. So the Chase Sapphire Preferred, you could downgrade to the Chase Freedom or the Freedom Flex or the Freedom Unlimited. That's true about United cards. There's a free version. You could downgrade them. So if you're like, gosh, I have this card. It has an annual fee. They're not going to give me any bonus.

1:06:29Instead of canceling it, you can just downgrade it to a no annual fee card. You can call up or even use the secure chat and just say, hey, can I downgrade this card to a version with no annual fee? If none of that works, and you have the card open for 12 months, you can cancel it. And the only hacks there are one, I try to wait over 12 months because there's some language in a few of the card terms of service that say, they basically say effectively, we can do things if it looks like you're the kind of person that opens up a card, gets a bonus and cancels it in the first 12 months. But most issuers have a rule that you can get the annual fee refunded if you cancel within 30 days of it hitting your account.

1:07:08So you can wait till the 13th month, even 366 days, and cancel it. And then you will never be on the list of person canceled within 12 months, which is a place to you don't want to be is like seen in the issuers as opens a card and cancels it right away after you get the bonus. They look down on that. So those are a bunch of options there on chase. If you ever cancel it, if you do get to a point, you have to cancel a card. And that card had a pretty high credit limit. You can actually move the credit between cards. So if you had a card with a$20 ,000 limit, and you're going to cancel it, and you have another card with a$10 ,000 limit, you could call chase and say, Hey, could you move$19 ,000 over the other card, which will now have a$39 ,000 limit, and then cancel the card after you've reduced the limit to$1 ,000.

1:07:52So if that limit is important to you, you can move it around. When I was commuting into an office for work, I listened to a ton of podcasts. But with me working from home these days, I don't really listen to many podcasts. That said, yours is one I tune into when the guests or the episode topics are interesting to me. Which is all the time, right? Yeah, everyone. Every single one. So I am very picky these days because I don't have a lot of time to listen. So I really read... Before, your show would be one I'd listen to every episode just because I like the show. So I'd listen to every episode.

1:08:23There's very few podcasts that I do that to these days. So I just look at the title of the guest and see if it's something that's really relevant to me right now. And yours is frequent, but not always. And one that was... It's kind of recent, kind of not. It's been a few months now, but it was with Bill Perkins. And it was the author of Die With Zero. And I want you to tell us a bit about his book and his philosophy. I think it's fascinating. And I think it's one that the audience will want to learn a lot more about. First off, thank you for listening. Second off, I've started doing something recently.

1:08:52I've realized that some people just don't have time for every episode. And so I write a newsletter where I try to summarize some of the conversation in a newsletter. So if you're listening to this and you're like, gosh, I just can't do another podcast, but I can do another newsletter. I try to write like 2-3 ,000 word newsletters to hit on a lot of the main points. It's never going to be as comprehensive as the podcast. It's never going to be as timely as the podcast, but backup alternative for someone who maybe has time for a newsletter and not another podcast. But Bill Perkins was such an interesting conversation, probably changed my perspective on money more than any conversation I've had since starting the podcast.

1:09:27And his philosophy is you shouldn't just aimlessly go down life trying to increase your net worth every month because you should really be trying to increase your net fulfillment in life. and there will be times where you might be better off doing something now than saving money and trying to do it later. So a lot of us, if we look at our parents, right? And we wonder, could my parents run a marathon? Definitely not. Could my parents climb Machu Picchu right now? Definitely not. So there are things that when you're older, you just don't have the time, energy, health physique to do. And so if one of your goals is one of those things, you really should be prioritizing it earlier.

1:10:08And a lot of the data he shares is super fascinating about the fact that a lot of people have more money in retirement than they think, and they spend less than they thought. And so his case is, make sure you're not waiting till you're old to spend money and then not able to use it the way you want. And when I left that conversation, I was talking to my wife and she was like, we have X dollars of net worth. And she's like, I think the goal for this year should be a little bit more. And I was like, I think the goal should not be a little bit more. I was like, what if our goal has nothing to do with increasing our net worth?

1:10:37What if our goal this year is to not increase our net worth? What if our goal this year is to not decrease it, but to spend the money that we otherwise could have saved and spend it on life? There's only so many years where our kids are going to be young enough. They're not in school. We can take them places. Maybe this is the time. Maybe it's not. But let's not just default into the assumption that all we should do with our money is just save, save, save, save, save. And right now, my wife and I are both working full-time on all the hacks. We're never going to have as much flexibility with where we live and work as we probably will.

1:11:11Maybe we'll do this forever and we'll continue to have this. But if this ever stops or if she ever decides she doesn't like working with me and wants to do something else, she'll have to go to work. She'll have to go to an office. For right now, we have a lot of flexibility. So maybe we should use that flexibility, go live abroad. Maybe we should do longer term travel. I don't know. But I don't want to assume that the best use of our savings is to just keep increasing our net worth. Now, I realize I say this from a place where I feel like we've saved enough to cover our retirement. Obviously, those priorities will be different for everyone.

1:11:44But I think a lot of people wait till they're 50, 60, 70 to start spending their savings. And then they leave a bunch of money to their kids because they couldn't spend it all. And even if that's going to be you, Bill argued, give the money to your kids earlier. If you're going to leave money to your kids, give it to them earlier because you actually get to see the joy they get from it. It's just so interesting. If you want to donate your money to charity, great. Donate it to charity when you're younger so you can see the impact it has. It just totally changed my whole perspective on how I want to think about money and what I want its purpose to be.

1:12:18And I was just aimlessly going down the maximize my net worth path. And now I'm like, do I want to increase my net worth right now? Maybe I do. Maybe we decide we want more of a cushion because we don't have the stability of full-time jobs with salaries. Maybe we do want to focus this year on building up more of a buffer in our checking account, if you will, or savings account because I want high interest. But maybe that's our goal. Everyone's goal could be different. But reframing the conversation on how do I get the most out of my money? How do I maximize life is I think the thing we should all be trying to achieve.

1:12:55And so that was episode 91. You can go to allthehacks.com slash 91. You can find it in the show notes. But I think that episode, I think it's like number one episode I've done in terms of downloads. And I think anyone would go listen to that and have an amazing new perspective. You don't have to adhere to all of it, but I would be shocked if people didn't listen and say, I want to do something different than I thought I did. I put the link in the show notes for everybody that's listening on our show currently. Just slide up in your podcast player or go to theinvestorspodcast.com. and look at the show notes.

1:13:26The link to the episodes there, like Chris said, I highly recommend you listen to it. I haven't read the book yet. I really want to, but I think Chris's episode did such a good job covering it that I almost feel like I don't even need to read the book. I feel like I got the gist of it, but I'll still read the book. But even just the episode itself has really changed my philosophy a lot. And I love to combine this concept from Bill with another concept from Alex Ramosi where he talks about seasons. He says, okay, well, if you have five different things you want to do, just do one for right now.

1:13:53You're in that season. And if you want to do a second thing, now you're in that season. And if you want to do something else, you're in another season. You don't have to say no to things. You can just do them in different seasons. So what Chris was saying is maybe right now, this year is a season where you're spending money rather than saving. And maybe next season is all about saving. And so I think it'd be really powerful for me, at least, to combine those two concepts. And it's made a big difference in my personal life and how I've been spending money, how I've and saving money. And I've been trying to enjoy it a little bit more recently than I had been.

1:14:23I had been very... I don't want to say I'm quite a penny pincher, but I was more on that side than I was in terms of spending a lot of money. So recently, I've been spending a bit more than I had been in the past. And it feels good. I definitely was in that side. You were a penny pincher? I was being irrational. So I had this conversation towards the end of the episode where I'm like, I want to take this trip. And I just feel like there's not a good deal on the points right now. And he's like, what are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for getting the best deal of your points? Are you optimizing for taking the trip?

1:14:52What is the thing you care about? If the thing you care about is taking the trip with your family, maybe there's not a good deal with points. So maybe you spend money on it. Maybe you just accept that you're not going to get the best value of your points, but you're going to go on the trip. And it was so funny because we were talking about what to do. It was the holidays. My wife had never been to London. She's from the mountains and she was like, we live in California. We're not going to experience something cold. And even though London is not like the quintessential, like snowy winter destination, you know, it has a very holiday charm.

1:15:22And so we were like, you know what, screw it. We ended up booking the flights. It turns out that we actually ended up also getting a good deal. But we committed to go before we knew whether there was a deal to be had. And that year, which is very rare for London, it snowed while we were there. It was like everything that we got that perfect experience that we were looking for. And my old version of me would have been like, well, if there's not a good deal, let's maybe we go next year. And it would just been the same thing happened, not quite as great on the deal side. A couple of weeks ago, my parents told us that in 2023, there was like one week where we were free and they were free to help watch our kids.

1:16:00And so if we were going to take a trip without our children, there was a week to do it. And we were like, great, what are we going to do? And we started looking and we couldn't find anything that was a great deal that week. And we just bit the bullet and we paid for a not great deal. We just paid the extra money, probably 50 % more than we wanted to. And granted, it didn't put us into debt. But it was like, I was looking for the deal. I didn't find the deal. And I thought back to the episode. Literally this moment with Bill Perkins where he's like, what are you optimizing for? Are you optimized for the deal or taking the trip?

1:16:29And I was like, we only have one week. If we don't go this week, and if we don't do something awesome, we're going to look back and say, we wasted the one week where my parents offered to watch our children. Like, what are we doing? So we just took the trip and we paid the extra money and I have no regrets. Like, it was amazing. And that's what I want to do more of. That's what I want to use my money. And maybe that means I'm going to spend less money on other things in the future, which is also okay. Like, I can also just say, you know what? I'm going to like ratchet back somewhere else. And, you know, based on my co-pilot spending for this month, maybe I should do that.

1:17:01Over budget. But maybe next month, you'll notice us cutting back a little bit somewhere to feel better about it. And I guarantee the satisfaction we got from that trip will be worth cutting back on going out to eat for a couple months. It's funny, July must be a spending month because I am way over budget this month as well. I had some home improvement stuff that I had to get done that I've been just putting off that I finally got done, had to fix my truck a little bit. So it's been a heavy expense month for me. But Chris, we've had a great episode. I've really enjoyed it. We could keep going for hours and hours.

1:17:32We'll have to have you back again soon. Before we wrap up, tell everyone listening where they should go to find you, listen to your podcast, everything you got going on. Everything's All The Hacks. So you can search that in the podcast player you're listening to right now. You can go to allthehacks.com. You could go to Google. You could go to whatever your favorite search engine is. Anywhere you look for All The Hacks, I'd be surprised if I wasn't the first result. And we got a lot of great content. It's not just about points and miles. We spent a lot of time talking about money. We spent a lot of time talking about life, everything from negotiating to family to...

1:18:03We did an episode on meditation. And then we do these cool travel guides. So about once every one to two months, we'll pick a destination and we'll go really deep on that destination and do a whole episode about it. So I don't want to make it just about one type of optimization because I think you can go too deep. I love the 80-20 rule. So I'm trying to break down that 80-20 stuff for you so that if If you're thinking about insurance, we got an episode that'll give you everything you need to know about optimizing your insurance policy. Links to all of Chris's resources will be in the show notes.

1:18:34Like I said, throughout the episode, I'll split the links to some of my favorite stuff as well below. So guys, if you're interested in checking it out, go there. Chris, thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Dude, thanks for having me. This is awesome. I agree. We could go on and on. So I'm glad you finally put a stop to it. Otherwise, we'd end up with a three-hour episode. All right, guys. That's all I had for this week's episode of Millennial Investing. I'll see you again next week.

1:19:23This show is copyrighted by the Investor's Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.