How Much Should You Spend on a Family Vacation? (By Income!)

Transcript:

How much should you spend on a family vacation? Buy income. What's

up everybody. And welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of master money. co and today on the personal finance podcast, we're going to be talking through how much you should spend. Spend on a family vacation by income. If you guys have any questions, make sure to hit us up at the master money newsletter by going to master money.

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Now, today, this episode, we are diving into how much should you spend on a family vacation? And the idea for this episode sparked because I saw a few statistics that the majority of families who go to Disney world. Go to Disney world by going into debt to pay for it. And I think this is one of the most heartbreaking things that could ever happen.

And so today, what I want to talk through is first, I'm going to talk through some of the considerations you should have on how much you should be spending on a family vacation or any vacation whatsoever. But in addition, I'm also going to be talking through the steps that you can take in order to have the funds to be able to pay for that vacation and cash and paying for vacations and cash is the Now, this is not up for debate whatsoever.

I don't think in any circle. The only way you should ever take a vacation is if you can pay for all of it in cash. You should never, ever, ever go into debt for a vacation. Now, I am only All four vacations. In fact, I want you to take as many trips as you possibly can. I want you to bring those memories to your family.

It is one of the most valuable things that you can do when you're lying on your deathbed. The number one thing you're going to regret is not spending more time with your family. If you spend so much time working or doing other things that are for yourself. You want to make sure that you separate time for your family.

Maybe you don't like traveling. Maybe you like staying home. It's staycations and doing things locally. Maybe it's traveling the world and you want to go do world travel with your family. I'm going to show you how to do that too. Maybe you just want to go to the fun family stuff around your specific country.

If you're in the US or if you're in Canada or if you're in Great Britain or wherever you are, maybe that's what you want to do. And so as we start to talk through some of this stuff, I want you to know that I think most people value travel. And if you don't, that's fine, but most people value travel and they value the time that they can take to go experience new things.

And experiences are part of the reason why I believe people should build wealth because you can experience so many more things. Things and use your dollars for those things that you value. It is absolutely amazing. The stuff that you can do just by learning some of these tips, tricks, and tactics. So I'm going to dive into a, where your financial health needs to be first before you start taking some of those vacations.

B, then we're going to talk through how you can actually start saving up for those vacations. Then. See, we're going to get into travel hacking a little bit again on this episode. Now, if you're not familiar with travel hacking, it's a way to rack up some points and miles so that you can take a large portion of these trips for free.

And free, if you don't know is my favorite number. So I am super excited about this episode and without further ado. Let's get into it. All right. So what most people do is they just willy nilly go on a vacation and they try to figure it out later. And some people will just put their vacation on their credit card without having any plan whatsoever to be able to pay that vacation off.

Now we all deserve a break. We all deserve rest. I think you should be taking rest every single week, in fact. And so for most people, you should be out there considering and planning out your rest. And what a really productive person does is they have days that they rest and they have days that they are really productive.

And so you kind of think through this as you go through this process. But in addition to just having those days off, we also want to be able to rest for longer periods of time. And depending on where you are in your financial situation, that's going to tell you how big of a trip you can take and, or if you need to save up a little longer for the trip that you are looking for.

And I want you to take your dream vacation. I am excited for you to take your dream vacation, and I'm going to show you how to do it. today. So first off, we're going to assess our financial health. So we want to know things like our monthly income. How much do we actually make? The crazy thing about this is most people don't know actually how much money they take home and how much money they make.

They may know what their salary is and that number, but they don't know how much they actually bring home every single month and or every single year at the net level. And so I want you to know what your net monthly income is. Secondly, most people definitely don't know this. Is there monthly expenses? I want you to know, especially those baseline bare bone expenses, how much you spend every single month on your regular month expenses, these are things like housing, utilities, groceries, insurance, debt payments, all of these are part of your monthly expenses.

And then lastly, your debt status, how much debt and outstanding debt do you have on hand? Now I am more worried. about debt. If you have debt based on things like personal loans or debt on credit cards, that's the kind of stuff that we're really talking about here. If you have a car note and it's a responsible car note that you can pay off and or if you have a mortgage and it's a responsible mortgage under 30 percent of your income, that's completely fine.

I'm not worried about that as much. You can have a mortgage and take as many vacations as you want as long as you're hitting some of these goals that we're gonna be talking about here. So I need you to know those three numbers before we dive into this. Then I want you to set up your financial priorities.

So we talk about this all the time, but the stairway to wealth goes through kind of the order of what you need to be doing with some of this stuff. And so your emergency fund, first of all, before you take a vacation, we need to have our emergency fund funded. Why do we need to do that first? Why is it so important to have emergency fund funded?

Because if you go on a vacation, you spend all of this money on a vacation and you don't have an emergency fund funded and something happens in your life and you don't have cash on hand to take care of the scenario that happens in your life. Maybe there's a medical emergency. Maybe your house has an issue.

Maybe your car breaks down. And if you don't have the funds on hand to be able to take care of that issue. All of a sudden your vacation took you into debt. And so we need to have an emergency fund in place before we start taking vacations. Now, my minimum requirement on emergency funds is six months.

Most people will say three to six months. I am a six month guy. If you're comfortable with three months or you have some sort of plan with three months, more power to you. But my. Personal preference and my personal belief is that you should have six months on hand. Secondly, retirement savings. You got to be hitting your retirement goals before you start taking those vacays, homies.

You just got to. You have to hit those retirement goals first. Why? Because you will never achieve that financial freedom where you could take All the vacations you want and spend all your free time doing things that you want. If you're not hitting your retirement goals, investing your dollars is the only way to retire.

And if you're not investing your dollars, you will never retire. I want you to hear me clearly on this. You have to invest your dollars. And so making sure you're hitting your retirement goals is incredibly important. If you don't know how to figure out if you're hitting your retirement goals, we have a bunch of episodes talking about this.

So make sure that you are tuning in and make sure you are following this podcast and we will get you through that. I promise you, we will teach you exactly how to make sure that you are hitting your retirement savings goals. And then also look at your short term goals. If you have short term goals that are really more of a priority than vacations to you, look at those as well.

Maybe you're trying to save up for a down payment on a house. And maybe that's more important than taking this vacation. And I would prioritize that. And maybe you are trying to think through, you know, how can I save for down payment on a car, or maybe you're saving for a wedding or all these different things, make sure you got your priorities right.

All right. And so that's another really important thing to have in place. Also, we need to look at our debt. If you have high interest debt, anything above a 6 percent interest rate on credit cards, personal loans, anything outside of your mortgage or the thing that takes you from point a to point B, then you most likely need to be paying that off before you take a vacation.

I don't want to see high interest debt with anybody out there. And then you go and take a vacation. It's just not worth it. You need to make sure that you're paying off that high interest at first. So all of these are super, super important, uh, to make sure that you were taking care of before you take this vacation.

Now I want you to go through and next we're going to calculate our disposable income. Now, if you've never heard of disposable income, this is the income that you have by subtracting your monthly expenses, debt payments, and savings contributions from your monthly income. So you're going to go through and you're going to subtract out your expenses.

Your debt payments, your retirement contributions, your savings contributions, all that stuff. And then you have your monthly income left. And then you're going to determine if there are any existing savings specifically at your March 4 vacation. So I want you to start to have a section in your budget or a section in your high interest savings and your budget.

I love Monarch money because Monarch money helps me like track that. Goals. So Monarch money actually has goals in that system, uh, where you can start to put in, Hey, here's my vacation goal. I want to hit this goal and you can put it in your budget and it will tell you if you're on track, how far you're on track.

It's a beautiful, beautiful dashboard that they have there. So, uh, really great stuff. By the way, if you want 30 days free, you can go to monarch money. com slash PFP, and that will get you 30 days free to test out Monarch money if you want to. But anyways, so as we go through this. We can look at our existing savings.

Make sure we have savings on track, but I want you to create some sort of savings bucket savings segment in your budget. However, you actually manage your money. And if you don't manage your money, you can have it on a cash envelope if you want. I don't care. Uh, but you want to have some sort of existing savings so that you can start to save up for those vacations.

Now, The optimal place to put that is in a high yield savings account because you're going to earn interest on that money. And so you can have more dollars to spend on vacation. And so using something like a high yield savings account is going to be the best for you. The high side. And so that is one of the better things to do as well.

Now we're going to look at in budgeting and allocation for vacation. So the way I like to look at things with money is with percentages because everybody's dollars are different and everybody can spend a different amount based on the percentage. So if you make a hundred grand a year, You may have a different dollar amount that you could spend because of percentages than someone who makes 25 grand a year and so we want to make sure that we are doing this as a Percentage and so one of the common recommendations is a lot of people will say five to ten percent of their discretionary income They can use towards vacations.

Now, here's the beautiful thing about discretionary income is I'm going to give you a baseline of around five, 10%. You can use as much as you want, because this is discretionary income. This is income after you've covered everything else you need to cover. You can take 90 percent of this and utilize it towards vacations instead of having hobbies or things like that.

You can use a hundred percent of this. It doesn't matter. But what does matter is having a goal in place and starting to Automate this process because money automation is the only way that you're going to actually make sure that this gets done. You can't rely on your willpower anymore to go into your account and log in and move the money over.

No, we're going to automate this process. And so we got to use a percentage in order to start. Automating it. Now, alternatively, you can use a fixed amount once you start to set up this percentage method. Um, but I would definitely start to automate this process. Now you're going to have the budget in place.

I want you to think through, Hey, how much money do I have left over? Let's say, for example, you have 500 bucks left over every single month. If I had 500 bucks left over every single month, I would 10 percent in order to move that over. I'd probably use more like 25%. 50 percent of that 500 bucks. If there's a bigger vacation, I want to do, cause I have a family of four going on five in October.

And so for me, I got to spend more on vacation. You boys got to spend more doll hairs on vacation. And so, because of that, we need to make sure that we are moving money over in a proper manner and then start saving in advance. So I want you to just start. Even if it's a small amount of money, if it's 10 bucks a month, but you are starting, you're going to be amazed that over time, when you just start saving money and start increasing those dollars over time, how much more you can save?

One of my favorite methods is to use the 1 percent method. So you start with, say, for example, you start saving up 5 percent towards your vacation budget, and you want to get to 10, 15%, okay? And so you start to save that 5 percent of your discretionary income, boom, every single month, then the next month you increase it to 6%.

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

I love that gold dashboard because of this because it shows you kind of how close you are to your progress and what percentage you have completed. If you remember like the thermometer charge back in the day where you would do like school fundraisers for example in the school would fill up that thermometer and everybody's looking at that thermometer like hey this is a really cool way to motivate me to try to give more to the community or whatever else it is the school whatever it is.

It's the same thing. I mean, using that psychology is really, really powerful stuff. And then I want you to evaluate and I want you to adjust over time. And so we're going to talk through what this kind of could look like by income based on what you can do. Now, that's what discretionary income. Now, if you want to take bigger vacations and you have enough disposable I am okay with you looking at adding a larger percentage of your income towards vacations because really, I want you trying to spend about 30 percent of your money.

As you start to build wealth, you need to increase your income. But as you are starting to really get that thing cranking, people over six figures, that type of stuff, uh, where you have lower costs of living, you can start to spend higher percentages of your income. On the things that you love. And if you can get from 20 to 30%, somewhere in that range, you're living life, baby.

I mean, you are out there doing the things that you want. If you're spending 20 percent of your income on stuff that you love. And so as you start to get closer to this, you can start to spend a percentage of your total income that comes in. So say your net income is a hundred grand. You start spending five, 10 grand on vacations.

This is where I really want you guys to get. So at the beginning, if you're at the beginning of your personal finance journey, we're going to look at a percentage of discretionary income. If you are hitting all your goals and you have extra money left over, we want to look at total income, baby. We want to look at that net income and start spending that five to 10 percent of net income.

That's really where I want you to be. And so that's where we're going to dive into in this next segment is I'm going to show you how much you can spend by income if you are covering Everything else, and you still want to be able to spend a big portion of your income on big vacations. So we're going to talk about that next.

After that, we're going to get into travel hacking. We'll be right back. Now, I'm going to talk through this by income because I want you to see kind of how much this matters based on certain incomes, because I think it matters a lot more doing this on a lower income. And by a lower income, I'm talking about, you know, folks starting off at 40, 000.

We're going to start at the 40, 000 level here and kind of go up. Buy 20 grand all the way up to 200 grand. And we're going to talk through, you know, by income, how the folks that are in the 40 grand category, these dollars are going to matter a lot more to them than folks who might be in the 200 grand category.

And what I want to talk through is listen, if you are in the 40, 60, 80 grand, if you're under six figures of income and you feel like you're struggling or trying to get by, this is probably not the best model for you to do five or 10 percent of total income. You got to do this. the discretionary income move.

And so until you get that money and system in place, then you can move to the total income move. And while you're trying to do that, what I want to encourage you to look into is travel hacking as long as you've never been in any sort of credit card debt because travel hacking is really going to help you through this process.

So we're going to go by income first. I'll get into travel hacking after this. So at 40, 000 worth of income, if you spent 5 percent of your income, now this is net. If you spent 5 percent of your net income, that'd be 2, 000 that you could spend on a vacation per year or multiple vacations. However, you want to break that up.

If you spent 10%, that's 4, 000. Now the problem with this is if you make 40, 000 per year, that means if you spend 10 percent of your income, that means you only have 36, 000 left for the entire year to cover all your expenses and bills and things like that. So that is someone who either is, you know, living on their own, uh, And they want to be able to prioritize travel.

I get it. You can definitely do that. I think it's very possible. And, or that is somebody who maybe it's a dual income, no kids, and they may be able to do that as well. It's tough to get, pull that off four grand a year with kids when you're only making 40, 000 net in the household. Now this is household income.

It's not individual income. I'm talking about the household income. So that's one thing I want you to consider. So folks. In that range, most likely you can start to travel hack. And if you spend a certain amount of money per year, you're going to be able to get some of those signup bonuses where you can get free hotels or free flights, and that's going to significantly reduce the cost of vacations where then you can get closer to maybe that 2, 000 range that you spend, or you can spend nothing.

My wife and I went to multiple, multiple trips and we spent 0 on these vacations. And these weren't like vacations in our backyard. These were, we went to Italy, we went to Greece, we went all over the place. So it's like one of those. things that you can really definitely do, but you got to make sure that you are thinking through and understanding some of this stuff now at 60 grand per year net, uh, at 5 percent of your income, that'd be 3, 000.

I mean, I know all you can do math, but, and then at 10 percent of your income, that'd be 6, 000 that you can spend per year on vacations. Now, as you can see, Somebody who is making 60 grand is in a much better position to even spend that 10 percent of income than somebody who's making 40. Why? Cause you have still have 54, 000 left over to spend on your lifestyle.

Just making 20 grand more is a huge difference to your life because. You can do so many more things. Now, one big thing at this level also is you can travel hack, but you can also like if travel is a huge, huge thing for you, you're like, I just don't have the income to do the trips that I want to do.

Another thing that you can do is a travel hack, but B is to work on some side hustles that might make you a couple hundred bucks a month and utilizing those side hustles and putting them towards travel as well, because that can help you just get over that hump to get to this trip you want to do. Also, maybe instead of taking yearly trips, you take them every 18 months or so.

Where you take the bigger trip, but it's every 18 months. So you have six more months to save. There's another great hack there for a lot of people. Now let's look at 80 grand per year. If you make 80 grand per year, you could spend 5 percent of your income is 4, 000 and 10 percent of your income is 8, 000.

8, 000 can get you some amazing trips. You can go to Europe. You can pretty much do whatever you want for two people for a family of four. It's going to be a little more costly, but at the same time, there's a lot of things that you can do. And at a grand, you still have 72, 000 to live on for the entire year.

And so if travel is a huge priority for you, this would still be somebody who has a huge priority to travel over other things. But if travel is a huge priority to you, that is a great option. Now, let me show you why 100 grand is a huge difference, because here is where you're going to see a significant difference in how much money you have left over.

If you spend 5 percent of your income or 10 percent of your income on this. At a hundred grand, obviously we can do quick math. 5, 000 is 5 percent of your income and 10 percent of your income is 10, 000. But what that means is you still have 90, 000 of income left to fund your lifestyle fund, your family's lifestyle.

So if your household income is at a hundred grand, maybe, you know, the wife makes 60, the husband makes 40, you have a hundred grand left net that I'm talking about net. You 100 grand left net and you guys want to go on a couple of vacations. You go on a few per year, or you go on some massive, huge vacation and use your two weeks PTO or however you want to do it.

That's another way to do that there. So it's really, really cool. As you start to earn more income, this is why increasing your income is so beneficial psychologically. It's so beneficial to your lifestyle. Because you can use these extra dollars and still be able to live a comfortable life in life. Now, it depends on where you live.

Like if you live in California, it's going to be tougher to live on 90 grand in San Francisco than it would be, you know, in the middle of Georgia. But at the same time, it depends on your personal situation and where you live. At 120 grand now we're cooking with gas here because at 120 grand, if you spent 5 percent of your income, you'd have 6, 000 and so you'd have still have 114, 000 left that you could spend on your life, which you can see how this is just a big, big difference and then 120 grand at 10 percent of your income, then you're coming down to you could spend 12, 000 on vacations.

You could take at least three awesome vacations at four grand each and or. You could break it up into a couple of really good vacations, or if you have kids and you have to fly down to Disney, your boy lives an hour and a half from Disney, so your boy gets to drive there, but if you live far away from Disney, you have to fly down and buy flights to the whole family.

You could do that Disney trip there too. A lot of people spend right around 12 grand when they go to Disney. So, um, if you have a family, so that's another thing. Now let's look at 140, 000. So 7, 000 at 140, 000 is 5%, and 14, 000 at 140, 000 is 10%. But as you can see, again, now you still have 126, 000 per year to fund your lifestyle if your household income is 140, 000.

Husband's 70, 000, wife's 70, 000. So you have 140, 000 left and so that's a big, big deal. 160 grand. 80 80 is $8,000 is 5% of your income and 10% of your income is one. Six is 16,000, and then $180,000 of income is 9,000 at 5% and 18,000 at 10%. I mean, those are some baller vacations, uh, at the 180 grand mark.

And then at 200,000, it is 10,000 at 5%. And you still have 190, 000 to fund your lifestyle in at 200, 000. 10 percent of your income is still 180, 000 per year. So if you prioritize travel, it's a big deal to you. You still have 180, 000 left. that you can be utilizing to fund your normal lifestyle. And then you have 20 grand to spend on vacations, which is amazing.

So I stopped at 200 grand because we're talking about net here. So if you get into higher incomes, you could spend even more than that. So that's another thought process to have. If you want to take more vacations, you're really, really serious about it. Increasing your income is gonna be an amazing way to do so.

Um, and you can, he doesn't have to be at your day job. I would start by negotiating your salary, trying to get that salary up. But But then looking at side hustles too, if you can make an extra five, 10, 15 grand, that's gonna make a big, big difference in your life, um, to be able to do that. And then also you can travel hack, which is what we're going to get into next.

All right. So travel hacking is the last piece here. Now, if you haven't heard our episodes talking about travel hacking, we have an entire episode with the complete guide to travel hacking that kind of shows you how uh, you can learn how to travel hack. In addition, we also have an episode with Chris Hutchins from all the hacks and it's a great episode.

He's a good friend of mine. And in that episode, we actually talk about travel hacking as well. And some of the ways that you can travel hack and book flights. And really it was kind of how to book your travel and some of his favorite cards as well. And so those are two great episodes to definitely tune into.

And then also we actually have. A step by step guide to travel hacking. It's like an email mini course. That's free. Uh, if you want to check that out, you can definitely do so. We'll link it up, uh, in the show notes so that you could check that out. Um, but that is going to be another really important one to definitely check out as well is making sure that.

We have that travel hacking course because that'll kind of take you step by step on what you need to do So that you can do this and then if you want to see my favorite credit cards for travel hacking Uh, we will also link that up in the show notes so that you can see all of my favorite cards Those are some of my favorites out there.

I like capital one like just a quick Quick references. I like Capital One Venture for starters. And then I also like the Chase Sapphire for people who are starting out as well. Uh, you can get some great sign on bonuses. And if you have a business, you can get a ton of points with an LLC or a business. It doesn't have to be some massive business.

It could be a regular business. So you just have an LLC. You can really rake up credit card points. If you have a business as you start to do this. Now, if you don't know what travel hacking is, I'm going to give a quick. Overviewed at the end of this episode. Just so you guys have, uh, just a way to think through this.

And then we will do some more master episodes on this stuff. Cause I know a lot of people talk about travel hacking to me and send me questions and it is something I love talking about, but if I talk about it too much, I'll get really, really deep in the weeds. And so I gotta be careful sometimes when I go through this, by the way, if you want an episode of me going in the weeds, send me an email and let me know.

And I'll do one. Um, but it gets pretty nerdy when you get, when you get into some of this stuff. Number one is with travel hacking, the way that this works. Is that you take your daily bills that you spend on daily stuff, your groceries, your dining out, the stuff that you pay for, for your kids clothes or your whatever else you can put on a credit card and you all your subscriptions and you throw them all on this one card.

And the goal is to try to get a sign up bonus. Meaning a lot of cards. If you spend, you know, 4, 000, they'll give you 75, 000 points or 50, 000 points, which is worth about 500 to 750 worth of travel. If you really know what you're doing, you can squeeze out, you know, 1200 bucks or so worth of travel through like the chase portal or the capital one portal and be able to really optimize those points.

So it's worth it because you're already going to be spending the money anyway. Instead of using something like a debit card, you're going to be Earning points and miles that you can then spend on travel and save yourself every couple of months. You know, 1, 000 worth of travel and what a lot of people do is if it's a husband and wife combo, they'll call it player one and player two.

And so the first person will open a card. They'll hit that spending limit, get that bonus. And the second person will open a card and they'll get that bonus. And now you have two big bonuses that you earned. And now you can utilize those points for traveling. You have a couple thousand dollars worth of free travel.

Again, people at the 40, 000 income all the way up to 100, 000 income. I want you to be doing this if you have no history of credit card debt. If you have history of credit card debt, turn this off right now. But if you don't have history of credit card debt, I want you to be trying to do this because this is how, when I didn't make a lot of money, how I was able to travel so much because I was able to earn these points and miles.

Now, people who make a lot of money, I also want you to do this because I'd rather you save these dollars and put them towards other things. Now you get these sign up bonuses and you get a lot of cool stuff. You also can join a hotel and airline loyalty programs and you can earn points on flights and stays and stuff as you start to do this.

And these points can be redeemed for future travel. So it's a double whammy here because now you're getting free travel. You go to the Marriott, for example, now you're staying at the Marriott with your free travel. You can also earn points and miles with that. And so you could really stack this stuff up.

Over time. Now you can also use it for, you know, rental cars. You can use it for cash back. So if you get in a pinch, you need an emergency fund and you have a bunch of credit card points, you can actually get that cash back and be able to save yourself 345 thousand dollars in pure cash. I have a friend, Rob Berger, who's been on this show.

Rob uses all of his points and invest it into his fidelity account. And so he's got something like 30, 000 worth of invested dollars just by using his credit card points. And so there's so many different ways to tackle this behemoth, and it really can get really, really nerdy. I just heard on another podcast.

I heard someone talking through how they actually use their credit card points for their emergency funds, or they have millions and millions of points, and they have like 60 grand worth of cash in credit card points because they optimize so much. Now that takes a lot of work to get to that level, but if you want to get to that level, you definitely can now.

I don't think it's a best use of time unless you really got time. But at the same time, you can definitely look at that. Now, what you want to do is you want to look for some of the best offers out there. So you can kind of start scanning through my page that I'm going to link below with all the credit cards.

We'll have the best offers out there. It'll show you what your signup bonus is, how much it costs every single year. A lot of times it's like 79 bucks. Some of the big, big cards cost, you know, three, four, 500. Uh, but if you're just starting out, start with either free or like the 79 to 100 range, um, per year, you don't want to be spending tons of money until you figure out exactly what you're doing and you make that money back off the point.

So it's a win win situation there. But as you start to progress through some of this stuff. Then you have things like limited time offers. So sometimes Chase or Capital One will have limited time offers where you can earn a lot more points. Southwest is doing that right now. For example, at the time of recording this, Southwest is offering like 125, 000 points on their business cards for people who sign up and hit the signup bonus.

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

If you're traveling domestically, which is a whole nother conversation, I'm going to do a whole section on money, Q and a on the companion pass, because I think a lot of people need to know about that in addition, though, we've got things like award travel. That you can utilize where you book flights through those portals.

So Chase has its own portal where you can book the flights and you can really actually maximize the points by booking through Chase's portal. Same thing for Capital One. Same thing for Amex. All of these different places. City. They all have different places where you can actually book your travel there.

And then one of the cool hacks is if you really want to travel, you can look for Off peak times where you can save a lot of money there. If you're going to go travel, you know, internationally, things like that. Um, but also you can use points for things like upgrades on travel. If you wanted to get free check bags, you can do use it for airport lounges.

You can use it for travel insurance. There's so much you can use, which is why I love the points in miles game. Now, There are people out there who will tell you, do not use points and miles because it leads to people going into debt. And again, that's why I say if you've been in credit card debt in the past and you cannot trust yourself, even though you might be saying, well, I'm not going to do it again.

I don't trust you. I don't. And so you got to make sure that you have been responsible to credit cards in the past because I don't want you utilizing them and then going into debt. It's really, really important not to do that. But there are a lot of different things that you can do to utilize this for.

So basically, in a nutshell, this saves you on flights, hotels, rental cars. It can save you on meals. It can save you on activities. There's so many different ways to do this and optimize this. Uh, and it really is for the true optimizer. If you love optimizing stuff, it's worth it to use points and miles so that you can start going on free trips.

Really, really important stuff to do because. You can save yourself thousands of dollars per year. And if you do that, you can take a lot more vacations and have a lot more experiences with your family. So that is a really quick guide on how to just get started. I would check out the email course. I get a little deeper into it there.

And if you have questions on travel hacking, please send me and I'll answer them all day long on money Q and a, and then if you want to get. Started just check out my link. I like, again, the chase sapphire, the capital one venture. Those are two great ones to look into to start off with. The city cards are fantastic and the Amex cards are also great.

So all of those have some great, great stuff going on, but you want to just try to start to maximize your points and miles, get into a little bit and we'll talk more about it on this podcast as well, because we get a lot of questions on it, uh, and I want to start answering more of those as time goes on here.

So we're going to optimize that, but check out my page with the credit cards there that also helps support the show. If you utilize our links. I'd be truly, truly grateful if you utilize our links, if you're looking for some of those cards, but I always want you to find the best deal. If you can find a better deal out there, make sure you go find that better deal.

Don't use my links. If you see a better deal, um, but it does help support the show. So thank you guys so much. I truly, truly appreciate it. So listen, that's the episode. If you guys have any feedback, please let me know. But I truly appreciate you guys listening today. Can I thank you guys enough? I truly value each and every single one of you so much and want to make sure that you were getting as much value as possible.

I Out of this show, happy vacationing this summer and into the fall. And I truly, truly cannot wait to see where you guys go, uh, this year based on free travel and or just budging it out and paying cash. Remember, always pay cash for your travel. That is the number one thing you want to be doing. I'll see you on the next episode.