Transcript:
On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast is Travel Hacking Dead. We're gonna ask Chris Hutchins.
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 gonna be talking to Chris Hutchins about travel hacking. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Master Money Newsletter by going to.
money.co/newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, apple Podcast, YouTube, or whatever podcast player you love, listening to this podcast on it. If you want to help out the show, consider leaving a five star rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. Now, today we're gonna be diving deep into a topic that's been heating up in the travel rewards world.
Is the game still worth playing right now? See, credit card, annual fees are skyrocketing and loyalty programs are devaluing points left and right, and a lot of people are asking a fair question, is this still worth it for the average person or has the golden era of travel hacking. Started to fade. Now to help us separate signal from noise, I brought in one of the smartest people I know when it comes to points, miles, and optimization.
The host of all the hacks, Chris Hutchins. Now Chris has traveled the world on points, built incredible strategies around loyalty programs, and is known for squeezing insane value out of rewards that most people don't even realize exists. And today we're gonna break down a bunch of different things from Chase v Amex.
Loyalty point devaluations and the rise of cashback strategies to how to build a smart travel rewards plan for that big trip you've been dreaming about. We'll also dig into advanced tactics, underrated transfer partners, and yes, some of the funniest and most ridiculous stories from the world to points and miles.
So without further ado, let's welcome Chris to the Personal Finance Podcast. So Chris, welcome back to the Personal Finance Podcast. Dude, I'm excited to be here. I am pumped to talk about this 'cause we are getting a ton of questions coming in. A lot of people are kind of setting up plans for where they wanna travel.
They're talking about points and miles and a lot of things have shifted in the Points and Miles game over the course of the last couple of years that I wanna talk through here today. So we have seen. Credit card, annual fees skyrocketing. We've seen it across, you know, things like the chase sapphire.
We've seen it across amex, and these fees are rising, but then the perks that are associated with them, a lot of people are saying, well, maybe these perks are worth it. Maybe they're not. But what is your honest take? And is this hobby worth it for most people in 2025? I think that for the right person, the hobby is definitely worth it.
Uh, if you're able to take advantage of big welcome bonuses, use your points to take vacations, I think you will come out ahead. That said, I think that. If your end result is you're often just like booking in the Amex and Chase travel portals, I'm not convinced that you would've been better off earning points over cashback.
The real value still comes from when you take your points and you transfer them to travel partners, hair lines, hotels, and book with them. However, the points and miles cards offer the most generous welcome bonuses. So I could argue that cashback could be more competitive, but a good cashback card might say, Hey, sign up for our card, and you get 200 bucks.
And a good points, a miles card might say, Hey, sign up for our card and we give you 200,000 points, which is like $2,000. So if you're always working on a welcome bonus points is gonna be your best friend. If you're never working on a welcome bonus, you just want one card, you never wanna open up another card ever again.
Well, it's gonna be tough to win. On the points side, if you are not taking those points and transferring them to airlines, which inherently requires you to have some flexibility. The other place I think that we kind of get caught up is saying, what are all these credits worth on these cards? And I would push people back and.
Say, ask yourself how much you would buy someone else's credits for, and they might not be worth as much as you think, right? Like if your Chase card gives you $250 every six months off of a booking of the edit through their like luxury hotel program, you can't call that $250 because I am sure you wouldn't buy it for $250.
Right? Like if you asked your friend, Hey, will you book a hotel for me? You know, like. You're gonna cash out their $250 credit, it should be worth a lot less. And so I think you can get value out of a lot of these credits that justify, quote, unquote, these really high annual fees. But you gotta be honest about what they're really worth.
And sometimes if you are booking a hotel, you've never, were gonna book in the first place to get $250 off. I, I wonder whether that's really worth $250. And there's two types of people that we kind of come across when it comes to this hobby that I've noticed as of late. And one is the optimizers. The optimizers are the ones that are gonna focus on trying to transfer those points to those transfer partners and really want to be able to go out there and, and get some of these free trips.
Then there's people who wanna simplify their finances. They want the simplest path possible. They're gonna stick with that one card. And so, like you're saying, maybe cash back is the better option for them because if they wanna stick to one or two cards, uh, that may be the way to go. But the signup bonuses are the real.
Way to, to actually acquire points. And that's the name of the game if you're looking to travel hack going forward. Now there's a big, big, uh, piece that's been in the news a lot as of late, and it's Chase versus Amex, and there's a lot of, you know, the new cards that are coming out where they have all these additional perks, but those, uh, yearly fees are really, really high.
So which one has better rewards right now in your opinion? And is it worth it? What's interesting, so Chase and Amex have been competing. So Chase came out and they're like, we're gonna bring the high annual fee from, you know, I think it was 5 6 50 or 5 95 up to 7 95 and Amex, without even saying what they were gonna do, said, no, no, no.
Our card's coming out. We're not gonna tell you why it's better, but it's gonna be a higher annual fee. It's like, who can have the highest annual fee? Seems to be the game they're competing on. I would say. There's a lot of ways to look at this. And by the way, capital One I think is just as compelling and they've said, you know what?
We're not gonna play this game. We're not gonna try to have the highest annual fee. And from that perspective, I would say maybe they're the ones that people should be thinking about. They've added a couple new transfer partners. Meanwhile, Amex has lost a couple, like Capital One's. I would put in the running up against Chase and Amex, but between the two really expensive cards, I think it's pretty clear that Amex added a lot more value for the increase in fee than I think Chase did.
So when you're just looking at whose card justifies the annual fee, I think it's probably Amex if you're looking at whose rewards are better. I think I give the edge to Chase, and it's primarily because Chase still has opportunities in their travel portal to book things at an elevated value. It used to be that if you had their premium cards, you guaranteed you could book any travel for one and a half cents.
They got rid of that. Now it's between one and 2 cents, depending on the flight, the hotel, and all this stuff. But I think it's easier to get more value out of your points in all scenarios with Chase than it is with Amex. But I think it's just so much easier to earn Amex points. Amex has so many more cards.
They're doing so many more promotions. The lucrative signup bonuses. So I think it's easier to earn Amex points. It's probably easier for the average person to get VA more value outta their chase points. And for those of you who haven't seen it, it's, you know, chase and Amex have come out with just all these additional perks that they've thrown out.
And Amex is the big one as of late, where they've added in things like a $200 LUIN credit and they've added resi credits and they've added in, you know what? AA ring credits and people are buying AA rings just to get those credits. And that's one of the, the traps I think people are falling into is they're spending more dollars on specific things just to get those credits, plus the yearly subscription and all those different things.
And so it really, overall you gotta figure out, hey, what brings the most value to what I am trying to do? And then kind of go from there. Now I agree with you. I think Chase has just so many different transfer partners, uh, but Amex does have a bunch of different ways to acquire points, and so that's kind of the trade off that you have there.
So. How have Loyalty Point Devaluations changed your personal strategy? How do you actually think about this within your personal strategy of how you look at cards and open cards? So on one hand you could look at it and say, wow, I can't remember. I went back and looked at one of my first international trips I ever booked.
You know, it was like 50,000 points round trip in business class. It was some like amazing thing. And now it would cost twice as much as it would, and I looked back at some old historical signup bonuses. There was a period of time where a card would offer 30,000 points, and that was amazing. And so yes, if you want to book flights with your points, it cost more, not just because the underlying dollar cost of the flights has gone up, but airlines that have kind of fixed prices, they're like, oh, you know, flights used to be.
50,000. Now they're 80,000. They're always going up in price, which means that your points are effectively getting devalued. But back in the day, a 50,000 point signup bonus was incredible. Back in the day, I had a card that earned like one and a half points on everything. It was incredible. Now you have cards earning 3, 4, 5 points per dollar.
You have signup bonuses that are all the way up to, I think the highest recently is 300,000 points for an Amex business Platinum. So. Do I hate that my points are worth less? Yes. Do I love that I can earn them at a faster clip? Yes. So I actually think we've come out ahead. I think that it feels worse because the points we have are worth less, but I think you can accumulate them faster than they are getting devalued.
Does that trend continue forever? I dunno. But the fact that there are credit cards offering a hundred, 200, 300,000 points to get started, like that is something we've never seen before. And it more than makes up for the fact that you might need. 20% more points for the trip you wanna take. Agreed. And I think that's the big thing is you can just earn them so much easier.
There's a bunch of different ways that you can earn points that just will accelerate your path to getting to that higher number. So overall there's a big, big difference for sure. And I think we kind of alluded to this early on, but you talked about, you know, cash back cards might be a better option for a lot of people and there's a number of different things that you can do with cash cards.
Can you kind of talk about why that might be an option for some people and what you can do with cashback cards specifically when it comes to even like taking those dollars and investing them or. Taking those points and turning 'em into investment dollars and, and kind of looking at it from a personal finance perspective too.
Yeah, I mean, there's no surprise that these points are getting devalued over time. And if you take cash and you put it in a high yield savings account, it increases in value over time. So that, like, that is an argument for cash back, is that the pool of, uh, dollars that you've earned versus points you've earned will grow.
That said, if you're getting two, three, 4 cents of value out of your points, like, you know, it's gonna beat whatever growth you'd get on your cash back. Another thing that I think is really underappreciated in this hobby, if you will, is that when you book a flight and you pay for your ticket with cash, you earn miles, right?
You don't just earn miles on your credit card for booking the flight, or you earn cash back for booking the flight on your credit card, but all the airline programs are gonna give you points that you usually don't earn on an award ticket. My math shows, and I did a ton of analysis recently on an episode about what are points actually worth a few weeks ago, and.
I think that you're getting about 10 to 20% of the value of a cash ticket back in terms of earning status, earning points, credit card points. So tickets are basically 10 to 20% cheaper with cash than with points because of all those benefits. So that's one thing that I think often gets lost in the numbers.
So. I think cash back can be really, really compelling. You could buy whatever ticket you want, you can go whenever you want. You earn points on those flights. You earn points on your cards. It's super simple and straightforward, and you don't need the baked in flexibility that you need to get maximum value outta your points.
So I'm a fan. Especially, as I said before, for people who don't want to open 5, 10, 15, 20 cards a year, right? Because that's where the real lucrative benefits are. And there are some cash back cards now that are 3% on everything, 4% on everything up to like $10,000 a month of spend. So I think for, for people who aren't spending, let's say more than a hundred thousand dollars a year on a credit card and don't want to open up lots of cards, there are a lot of lucrative cashback options.
I think that's a huge, huge perk overall is being able to kind of recognize that, especially if you want to have, you know, less cards, is to be able to just find, you know, the highest cash back that you can find. Now I have know people, for example, who have utilized their cash back for long periods of times, and for listeners who haven't heard of this strategy before, they have taken those cash back dollars and they have built six figure emergency funds with them and now are taking all the cash back and they're just kind of growing their, their wealth and investing their dollars in places like.
Fidelity, uh, I've heard you mentioned before the show Morgan Stanley can, you can transfer Amex points there. So there's a lot of different things that you can do, I think, that are really, really powerful. If your focus is, you know, financial independence or building wealth and that's the number one thing you wanna do, you don't care about traveling as much as being able to put those dollars towards things like wealth building, then that's, I think a really powerful place to start.
So. There's all these different cards out there. There's all these different premium cards that are coming out and a lot of people are trying to see, well, does this annual fee even make sense? Can I actually justify this annual fee or is it something I should just avoid and just go to a, a standard card with a, a normal annual fee every single year?
So how should someone look at this and evaluate whether premium card perks are actually worth it for them? So this is something that really drives me crazy. Someone emailed me and said, oh, the Amex annual fee is going up to 8 95. I'm canceling the card. And I was like, well, you had the card before the fee went up and you were okay with it, right?
So you were okay with 6 95. You're not okay with 8 95 on the personal Platinum card. It went up $200 and they increased the perks of the card from getting. $200 of hotel credit to $600 a year. They gave you a $300 Lululemon credit. They gave you a $200 Aura credit, like they added on a lot more value than that $200.
So. I could make a case that the 8 95 fee doesn't make sense for someone. It would be really hard to make the case that the $200 increase for someone who thought it was worth it before is now in a worse position. But I think at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself like, what's the real value you're getting out of these things If you like you said, don't want no a ring.
Now you have a $200 Aura credit. So you buy a $400 ring that you didn't even want in the first place, and now you're paying six bucks a month to keep this subscription active. Then it's hard for me to say that you got $200 of value out of that credit. In a way, you've got negative value outta that credit.
By having that credit, you're now spending money you didn't want to spend. That credit is worth negative to you. Now, if you bought a $400 ring, aura, got $200 back and went and sold it online for, you know, 300 bucks. Then you made a hundred dollars. So if you don't care about Lululemon clothes, but you buy $75 Lululemon gift cards that you sell for 60 bucks, you're getting real dollars back.
But if you go buy a bunch of Lululemon clothes that you never wanted or needed, and it doesn't replace any purchase you were gonna make anyways, you definitely didn't get $75 of value. Maybe you got $20. Like you can ask yourself how much value you got out of it. They have this $50 every six month sacks credit.
There's nothing at sacs I really want, so I end up buying like two pairs of underwear, right? Like I wouldn't spend $50 on two pairs of underwear normally. So I can't call it $50 of value. Maybe it saved me 20 bucks. You know, like plus how much time did it take me to spend searching on the Sacks website to try to find something I wanted?
Like if I value my time at really anything, it's probably worth zero. So again, I would back up and. The question I would ask yourself is run through all the perks of that card and ask yourself what you would buy those perks for. How much would you buy $300 of Lululemon credit for? If you spend a thousand dollars at Lulu every year, you'd probably buy it for, I don't know, $275.
You know, like that's real value. If you regularly book hotels, premium luxury hotels through Amex's Travel portal, getting $300 off every six months. Worth a lot. But if you never shop at Lulu and you never go to these hotels, those perks are only worth a lot less. Unless you're finding creative ways to, you know, book a hotel for your friend and have them reimburse you.
Like there are some creative ways to do it, but at the end of the day, I think you gotta be honest with yourself and just say, what would I buy this for? What would I buy a $300 travel credit for on Chase cards? That $300 travel credit is so easy to use. You book any travel on your card and they just reimburse you.
So like on the Chase Sapphire Reserve, that travel credit to me is worth pretty much $300. 'cause all I have to do to get value out of it is book travel. I'm gonna book $300 of travel a year. But some of these other things, like I personally value the chase, the edit, $250 credit at zero because I don't stay in hotels through that platform that cost that amount ever.
So I, I can't value that credit at anything. That's what I think you gotta be honest about yourself is how much value are you really getting? And I know that frequent miler, I can send you the link. They have this premium card worksheet where it lists all the perks out and it gives you the ability to say like, here's how much I value it.
And you can kind of do the math to see if it's really worth it. And I think for someone who's a real optimizer. I get a lot of value. I'm certain that I spend more than $10,000 a year in annual fees, and I've done the analysis like hyper competitively, like very thoroughly that I get enough value, but I spend a lot of time doing this.
I do it for a living. So I'm not saying that other people should adopt that strategy. And I do love that the, the way you're thinking about this too, because a lot of these perks, you can just think of even examples like you mentioned the example for Lululemon gift. Cards. Well, you can even think through all these different perks.
If you're not gonna use the Ora ring credit, for example. You can gift that. I mean, the holidays are coming around. You can gift those types of things and really get a reduction in even the cost that you're gonna be spending on gifts coming around the holidays. There's a lot of different ways to use this stuff, and like you said, I think having spreadsheets or having something in place that actually has a plan of how you're gonna use these perks and see if the value outweighs what you're actually spending each and every single year.
That's the only way to really look at this in a responsible way. If you're trying to really optimize and squeeze every single dime out of the. Cards. That's a real way to do it. 'cause you gotta a, you gotta understand what all the perks are. Some people go into these, they don't even understand or know some of the perks they have with these cards.
And then two, you have to have a plan in place in order to make sure that we are looking at that properly. So I think that's a great way to look at it overall. But if you're looking at a card like the Amex Platinum card and you're able to get 175,000 point signup bonus, right, which at the least should be worth $1,750, right?
For that first year. I'm less concerned about whether you'll get the full $895 out of the value of the card because you're getting $1,750 to open it, and, and if those points are used more strategically, maybe you're getting $3,000. So if those perks are only worth $400 to you, then your actual annual fee is $495.
Okay, that's fine. You're paying four $95 for almost 2000 or more dollars of value. I'm okay with that trade off. At the end of the year though, when it comes time to say, do I keep this card open? I would always encourage you to say, well, if the value's not there, talk Amex. Talk to Chase. Sometimes if you say, Hey, the value's not here.
I don't think I wanna renew this card. Sometimes they'll say, Hey, well, what if we give you. 50,000 points. What if we like, there are often retention conversations that can be had to get more out of a card before you'd close it if the value's not there. So have that conversation. You could downgrade cards to no or low annual fee cards and you can close 'em.
So there are a lot of options you have at the end of the year, but I would isolate the value the first year from the following years because sometimes those welcome bonuses are just so lucrative that the annual fee doesn't matter. Like, honestly, like there are cards where the welcome bonus is so big that if it had a $500 fee and no perks, none, not a single credit coupon, anything, it'd still be worth it.
That's a huge, huge point to remember is that these welcome bonuses are the first key to look at in terms of making sure you draft out your plan. And if those are in place and those are really outweighing everything else, I mean, that's a huge, huge difference maker for sure. And then downgrading those cards is the easiest way.
You just kind of keep your credit intact and everything else, and I think that's really, really important to look at. Now when someone's building out a strategy, let's say for example, let's look at travel for example, and they're building out a strategy for next year. So we have this community called Master Money Academy that we kind of go through and we've had a lot of questions over the course of even just the last week of people saying, Hey, I am trying to build out a card strategy for next year, for next summer.
I wanna start traveling with my family. And so we wanna build all of this out, and we've gotten all these questions coming in. How far in advance would you start to open up cards when you are trying to build out a strategy to start travel for free? I think that there are three things. So one, lemme just remind people.
None of it's ever actually free, right? Because you have this opportunity cost that if you opened up a bunch of cash back cards and you spent all your money on cash back, you would just have money, right? Right. And whatever opportunity cost there was of the money you could have earned otherwise is what that free travel with your points cost.
So keep that in mind. That said, as someone who's opened up a lot of cards, spent a lot, earn lots of points of miles, used it to travel around the world many times, I think there's a lot of outsized value. Here's how I think about. When to plan and how to plan. So depending on how much flexibility you have, really dictates how easy it is to book your trip.
So the two big factors are how flexible are you and how many people are traveling because there are a lot of airlines where if you're traveling by yourself and you're super flexible and you want to take a trip next summer, you could open up the card next spring and probably be totally fine if you are four people.
You want to travel in business class to Japan during cherry blossom season next year, like it's a little late to do it at kind of schedule open. So you're gonna have to be really going last minute and you know, hoping and praying that it's gonna work out. So I think the big question is how flexible are you and how many people.
So for next summer, I would say you wanna have the miles as soon as possible because you never know when availability's gonna open up. And flexibility wise, I would encourage people to think not about, oh, I live in Denver and I want to go to Paris. And you know, maybe there's a direct flight from Denver to Paris.
So you're thinking, let's see if that flight's available. That is a way to look at things. Another way to look at things is, is there a flight anywhere in the middle of the country or even the east coast that flies to somewhere in Europe, and can I find a seat on that flight? And worst case, if I have to buy a ticket with cash from Denver to Chicago, or maybe I find a flight from Denver to Frankfurt and I have to buy a flight.
Or take a train from Frankfurt to Paris. Oftentimes those little, what we'll call kind of positioning flights or even positioning trains will be a couple hundred bucks. So if you can save $3,000 on your flight across the ocean because you flew out of a city that you had to pay a hundred dollars to get to, or $200 to get to, it could still be a really good deal.
So when I say flexibility, it might be. What route you take. It might be what day you fly. It might be, you know how many layovers you have. It might be how soon you find out where you're going. I told my wife this, so we were planning on going to Japan for spring break and I was very diligent. I had the miles ready more than a year out because I knew that Japan Airlines releases business class seats at 361 days to a couple partners.
So I'm ready to go. 361 days out, but they only released two seats. So I couldn't even planning one year in advance. I couldn't even get all four of us on the same flight. So I got us on two seats flying from San Francisco to Tokyo nta, and then two to Tokyo Heida. 'cause they have two airports there. So we were on separate flights.
But I told my wife. I'm confident that between now and departure, almost a year later, something will happen. Whether that's two seats on one of those flights open and will change, whether that's American Airlines opens up four seats from Los Angeles. You know, like I didn't know what it was, but I knew something would happen and so I told her, I was like, we're gonna be together.
I just can't tell you whether we'll find out at the airport. We'll go to the airport, ready to leave three hours from now and four seats will open up on a united flight and we'll change everything. But I knew it would happen. Sure enough, it did happen because Capital One announced that they were adding Japan Airlines as a transfer partner.
A lot of airlines make availability open just to their program, and so yes, you can book Japan Airlines flights from any of their partners, American British Airways, but they make more seats available to their own program. So we were able to transfer a bunch of Capital One miles to Japan Airlines and book all the seats we wanted.
We're all on the same flight together over and back. My wife's so excited about that. The trip kind of all came together, but had I not had miles in Capital One. Literally there was no other option. You can't transfer to Japan Airlines from Amex or from Chase. So I would say if you have a trip and you're very specific about what you want, plan more than a year out.
If you're really flexible and you're willing to take layovers and your dates can be changed, and you'll pay a couple hundred bucks to fly out of a different city and change planes plan as soon as you can, but it's not as urgent. I think that's where it comes into a BA always be acquiring points if you're gonna be looking for, you know, doing some of these big trips and if you wanna do 'em annually.
It's always just trying to kind of grab those points whenever you can. And I think that's really important was the way that, how flexible you were, uh, based on those plans and how you're actually gonna get there, I think is really important. Now, when someone is thinking backwards on this. And they're looking at trying to have a card strategy and how they open up cards and they're gonna try to acquire points over the course of the next couple of years.
How do you think about that? If it's someone like, who just needs to get cash back points where they want one or two cards? It's someone who is willing to kind of optimize here. What is your strategy and how many cards do you think they should open at a time? I know it's based on your spend and all those types of things as well, but how should they actually think about this and what card should they actually target and look at?
So the prereqs I would ask yourself are you'll agree with this? The number one is. Can I afford to do the spending? Because we don't wanna carry a balance. Carrying a balance isn't worth any amount of points. So let's keep that as like rule one, can I pay off all the cards that I'm gonna open? So let's set that aside.
Then the question is, you know, how much am I spending? Because the last thing you want to do is get a little too excited, open up a bunch of cards, and then not be able to meet the requirements to get that bonus, right? A lot of times it's. Earn a hundred thousand points after spending $8,000. Well, if you don't have $8,000 of expenses that you could spend in the next 90 days or whatever that requirement is, it's not gonna be a better deal to get points if you have to buy things you don't need.
Now, there are always ways that you can kind of. Shift your spending, right? Some utility companies will let you prepay more than your balance due. Maybe you can buy gift cards your grocery store or to Amazon or something. Or maybe you wait and do it around the holidays when you have more spending than maybe in the summer.
So I think there are ways to, without spending more than you need, maybe kind of shift things around so that you are hitting that bonus without increasing your annual expenses. How do you think about how many? So ultimately, you're gonna be limited by your spend, so I would be thinking about that. You're also gonna be limited by the kind of application rules of lots of different banks.
Chase has a 5 24 rule. You can't open up, you know, a new card with Chase if you've opened up five cards in the last 24 months, and it's not an official rule that you'll read about on their website. But it's just about as official as it comes. And if you Google 5 24, there'll be a thousand blog posts that detail all the nuance of it and how some business cards don't count and all that.
So I would be prioritizing the banks that are probably more strict. Capital One's a little bit more strict. Chase has a 5 21 rule, whereas Amex is probably a little more willing to give out cards, maybe Bank of America, also Citi, somewhere in the middle. That's kind of a high level guiding principle, and I would say.
After that, I'd be focused on what's the highest bonus, right? Like I would much rather have a card that was gonna gimme a hundred thousand points than a card that would gimme 20,000 points for opening it. And I'm probably not the best example of this, because there are people who open 10, 20 cards a year, right?
And they're earning millions of points every year. I'm not quite as aggressive as that right now. Earlier in my life where I didn't have spend and I was traveling more, I probably was, and you'd be surprised at how opening more cards doesn't have the impact that I think a lot of people think it will have.
On their credit. There was a really cool post someone put on Twitter. Couple years ago where he and his partner mapped out their credit score over 18 months while they opened like 20 credit cards and both of their credit scores went up. And so the influence of how many accounts do you have, how much of your open credit are you spending?
If you have $20,000 a credit limit and you spend $5,000 a month, right? You're using 25%. If you open up a bunch of cards and now you have a hundred thousand dollars a limit, you're still only spending $5,000 a month. You're only using 5% of your limit. That feels to a bank safer to lend you money knowing that you're not maxed out on your current card.
So there's a lot of reasons why opening new cards can actually help your credit, especially in the long term, right? It will have an impact in the short term. You have a couple new inquiries that you get every time you open a card. Average length is gonna be shorter, so it will have an impact. I did a like a.
Hour deep dive on credit scores, and I went through all of this in a lot more detail, but it will have an impact. But in the long run, it seems that for most people the impact is positive. Exactly. I think the utilization side of it is just a huge, huge deal because overall they kind of did some studies looking at people with credit scores that were over 800 and their utilizations on average were about 7% and it's because they had probably more cards open and just more opportunity to be able to lower that utilization rate.
So over time I can definitely see that happening. 'cause it's a huge, huge impact on your credit score long-term. So for sure. And I think. As we start to look at your framework on how you open cards, are you looking at flexible points first? And then once you do that, are you looking at airlines and hotels, or what is your kind of order of operations when you're choosing those cards?
So I think one of the tricky things you can end up doing, which can work against you, is if you focus just on the best bonuses. You're like, okay, well I'm open this card up and I get 200,000 capital one points, then I'm gonna do this one and get 175,000 Amex points, and then I'm gonna do this one and get a hundred thousand chase points.
That's not the worst strategy right now. You have. A lot of points, but they're in three different programs. And if you look at transfer partners of all these airlines, you'll see that there's a lot of overlap, right? So if you go to all the hacks.com/tp, I have a spreadsheet you can pull up and it shows all the transfer partners of every airline and something like British Airways, Avios, or Air Canada.
Aeroplan or Air France, they're partners with most of the programs, if not all of them. And so if you're transferring your points to a program where all of the points transfer, so if you're like, Avios is a transfer part of everyone, air France is everyone except this new, um, homeownership card called Mesa.
So. If it turns out that the flight you want is on Air France, this was a great strategy because you got way more points. And by the way, when I say on Air France, I actually mean bookable. With Air France. It's very possible that flight is on Delta or KLM or some other partner of that airline. When I say.
Air Canada Aeroplan. That doesn't mean you have to fly Air Canada. You could fly United, you could fly Latza, you could fly Swiss Air, you could fly Eva Air. Like there are a lot of, there are these three big alliances with anywhere from probably 15 to 30 airlines and they allow partners to book flights.
Now, they don't allow partners to book all the flights. So like in the Japan Airlines example before, sometimes having points in a specific airline is more valuable than having points with their partners. But there are a lot of these programs where you can transfer from everywhere. However, let's say you want to go to Asia and you can only find good flights to Asia on EVA Air or Japan Air.
Well, they are not partners either of them, of Amex or Chase. And so if you earned a lot of points on Amex and Chase, but you earn no Capital One or City Points, and now the flight you want is only available on Capital One or City, by transferring to those two airlines, you're kind of outta luck. So. That's definitely probably an advanced strategy.
At the outset, I would probably focus on earning the most number of points in one program and then get to a point that you have enough points to book one trip. So if you're a solo traveler looking to fly and coach, maybe that's a hundred thousand points. If you're a family of four looking to fly internationally in business class, that might be 800,000 points.
You know, like it's a very different. Answer, depending on what class you wanna travel and how many people. And then once you have enough points in one program, then I start thinking, okay, let's get a second program. Let's get a third program. Now, there are also cases where your personal financial circumstance might make it worth getting other programs.
So if you're a homeowner, the Mesa card is super interesting because. You earn up to a hundred thousand points a year on your mortgage if you're a renter. The built card's interesting 'cause you can earn up to a hundred thousand points a year paying rent. And so there are programs that might be worth getting separately from like these big welcome bonuses just because there are some really lucrative opportunities to earn points based on paying rent or owning a home.
But for the most part, I try to accrue in one program until I have enough for a trip. Then I go to multiple programs, which just gives you more and more flexibility. And for those of you out there who haven't heard of the MESA program or the built program, both those cards are basically, you could pay your home costs.
So like your rent or your mortgage, you can pay on a credit card and and actually acquire points on those, which is a really, really powerful thing that we haven't had available to us in the past. You know, it's a huge thing that you can do 'cause you spend so much money on that stuff. And so those are just free points that you can go out and get.
Uh, for sure. So let's talk, so the MESA card, by the way, is even crazier because you don't even have to pay your mortgage, you just have to have a mortgage. So you say you upload your mortgage statement and say, Hey. We spend $4,000 a month on our mortgage, and as long as you spend a thousand dollars a month on their card, they just give you 4,000 points.
You don't even need to pay the mortgage because you know, a lot of people think, oh, how am I gonna pay my mortgage? I have to go on this portal and I have to set. They don't take credit card. How am I gonna make this work? Nope. You just tell them you have a mortgage. They. One month in, say, verify this.
Upload your mortgage statement. So don't tell them you have a $10,000 mortgage 'cause they're gonna ask if you do, great. But if you don't, that'll be a problem. But, so it's that easy. And with built, they'll mail a check to your landlord. Your landlord doesn't have to accept credit cards to do it. So those are kind of like free gimmes, like if you have a high enough rent or mortgage that it's kind of a meaningful number of points.
I would look at both of them. For sure. I think that's such a huge tip for anybody. Anybody can utilize those. 'cause somebody's, you're either paying rent or mortgage unless you, you know, are living with someone for free somehow. So for sure. That's a huge one. And now let's get into some tactics and optimization when it comes to some of this stuff.
What are some of your favorite transfer partners right now? Because I think some people out there who maybe aren't even aware that transfer partners exist. And I know we talked about Chase on our last episode and some of the transfer partners that are available there, but what are some of your favorite ones now that offer some of the best redemption value?
So this is an interesting one. So first off, I did this episode 1 66 and I would actually look forward on YouTube. You can go to all the hacks.com/ 1 6 6 and I went through all the best award tools and so I wanna explain this 'cause I think people get a really caught up here. They think, okay, so Chris is gonna tell me that Air France is the best place to transfer my points.
I don't have an Air France account. I don't even want to go to France. Like it seems a little crazy and. I'll point out that one. You don't have to learn all of this because there are a couple tools out there. If you don't wanna watch the episode, you can go to award tool.com or points yeah. Dot com are two I really like and they will search for availability using all these other programs.
And you can even tell them. I only want to search for flights. I can book with Chase points and they'll come back and say, oh, you want to go from the East Coast to Europe with chase points? Here's an option. Or they both have some way where you can say, just inspire me like I live in Chicago. I have chase points, where can I go?
And they'll show you the best deals you can get with your chase points outta Chicago. So I love these two award search tools. At the end of the day, I would say I'm agnostic to the transfer partners. There are some that I would never transfer to and I don't love. It doesn't matter to me. I go where the flights are.
And so I've gotten a lot of value recently out of Air France. Because they've just been one of the airlines that releases more than two or three seats, which with someone that has a family that's really, really advantageous. I really like United and American and Alaska. I'd put Delta in here kind of for the policy reasons, which is you can book flights on those airlines and cancel them with no fee.
So if you're booking a American flight or a United flight and you need to cancel it. You get a full refund. All your miles get redeposited, any taxes you paid get redeposited. So it's really great for the strategy. I'll call of like good enough first, which is we wanna go to Europe. We'd love to go in business, and we'd love to go direct, but that's not available right now.
I hope it becomes available in the future. But I can book a premium economy flight on United for more miles than I want to spend, but it'll work. So I book it on United knowing that we have something that will work. And then I set alerts using all these award search tools for better stuff like the direct flight in business, or maybe a flight from LA in business.
And if those things come up. Cancel the United Book, the other one, but I have something so I can start planning the trip, right? Because it sucks if you're like, I think we're gonna be able to get to Europe, it's like, well, where do you book your first night hotel? Like when are you going, when do you request vacation from work?
So I like to go and say, let's book something that'll work. And when you use those as US carriers, it's great because they're totally refundable. Air France, you can refund it, get all your points back, but you might have to pay a $75 fee. So it depends on the airline, what the program fees are for canceling.
Which one do I like? Honestly, whichever one has the flights. I think that I've found a ton of recent opportunities with Air France and Air Canada. They're probably the two that I think. If you told me I had to ditch them, they would be near the end of my list of which ones to ditch because Air France I think has a lot of availability and Air Canada has the most number of partners I do love Alaska, American, United, they just have fewer programs you can transfer from.
So only city transfers to American only built transfers to Alaska. Only Chase transfers to United So. Those are good programs, but they're harder to accumulate points that you can transfer to them from because they just don't work with every program. Whereas Air Canada, air France, and British Airways, avios, those three programs cover your three alliances and they all work with Chase Capital One, Amex built City, Wells Fargo, except for Air Canada.
They don't work with City and Wells Fargo, but like a lot of options. That's huge. And I think a lot of people, what they do is they don't understand these transfer partners. And so what they'll do is they'll just go into the travel portal and they'll book all of their travel there. Do you ever use the travel portal or are you only using transfer partners?
And how do you decide between those two when you're booking a trip? I don't think I've ever used the travel portal, and that's primarily because I think I've done this enough, and I'm not saying you shouldn't. Right. To be clear, I think there are a lot of people out there who would get tons of value outta using the travel portal, so I, I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from using it.
I think you play this game enough and you start to understand how it works, and I have a really flexible job. My dates are flexible. I can get more value not using the travel portal, so I don't. But that's not to say other people shouldn't. If you're not flexible, you might never get more value using your points By transferring them to airlines, it'll be really hard.
And so anything that lets you take a trip, I think is worth doing. And so if the travel portal is how you're able to take a vacation and see the world and travel and enjoy life, by all means go use the travel portal. But if you're really flexible and you wanna get a little bit more value, you might get that from transferring.
There's two particular reasons where I think the travel portal probably. Can be a better deal than other situations. And that's with Chase. They have this points boost program and there are times where you might get 2 cents a point out of your chase points booking United flights. If you see that points boost and you're seeing like, wow, this would cost you a hundred thousand points, but $2,000, that's a way to know you're getting two sense of value outta your points.
I dunno, if I saw those deals, I might use them like I'm okay with 2 cents a point. Like I like getting one and a half cents or more for my points, so I'm usually transferring. But the chase points Boost can be worth that. And if you have an Amex business platinum card, you can select one airline, which is the airline you get reimbursed for with your airline credit.
And anytime you book flights in the travel portal. They give you a 35% rebate if you use points. And so you're, you end up getting effectively about 1.54 cents per point. So if you're using your points in the travel portal, getting one and a half cents, you should feel fantastic. Right. Could you get 2 cents or 5 cents transferring?
Yes. Is it gonna be a lot of work and you gotta figure it out also? Yes. But I'd say if you're only getting 1 cent. Then I am okay with that if those points were earned via signup bonuses. But if you're spending on a card, not earning signup bonuses, cashing them out on the portal for 1 cent, I would encourage you to look at cashback.
I think that's a big difference maker there, because if you're not getting the true value outta that and you're just booking to the travel portal every single time, then cash back's probably a much, much better deal overall, and I think a lot of people need to look at that prior to doing some of their analysis on this.
Now, how are you personally dealing with the rising cost of award charts in terms of, I know there's less availability. I know it's fewer sweet spots than there used to be. How are you thinking about that? Or is it just a patience game? I think it's a combination of patience and flexibility and diversification.
So how am I thinking about it? Trying to earn more points in different places, trying to make sure that I am a little bit more flexible, so diversified gives me more programs I could transfer to. And so yes, the reason why I would say these transferable points, so for anyone not familiar, you could transfer your points to different airlines and hotels like we've been talking about.
The reason why those transferable points are so valuable to me is. If I have an Amex point or a Chase point and one of the airlines that they partner with is really expensive now, it like doubled the price. Great. Well, I still have a dozen others I can use, whereas if I were only earning points with Delta and Delta a long time ago, made a switch that really devalued their points, I would say it is almost impossible to get outsized value out of Delta miles to the point that I have no interest in accruing Delta miles.
But there was a window of time where I've used Delta miles. Decades ago for really, really great value, if you were only accumulating Delta and all of a sudden you went from being able to get 5 cents outta your delta miles to one and a half or 1.2, boy, would that be frustrating? But if you had Amex points, well, okay, so now you just don't transfer them to Delta.
That's fine. You're not worried about it. So that's why I like transferable points and the more you have, the more flexibility you have, the more you're able to be flexible with your dates, your travel, your style, like where you go, you're like, oh, you know what? There's 10 places I want to go next summer.
I'm not committed that I only want to go to Switzerland. Okay, well now you have a lot more flexibility. I think it's gonna be a lot easier to book that trip. So, exactly. Then the other is I'm just like making sure I earn more points, right? Like, yes, they've gone down, but 300,000 point signup bonus, like that's insane.
Like I've never seen that in my life. And you can do that right now with the Amex Business Platinum if you find the right browser. Or sometimes the offer isn't 300, but for a lot of people it is. And if you find a 300,000 point signup bonus, well you just don't worry about the fact that your award flight costs 20% more 'cause you're getting two x the number of points when you open the card.
Exactly, and I think just having those transferable points, that's always the first place I always focus on too, is just trying to find cards that have those transferable points because it's just one of the most flexible things that you can do. It's just pure flexibility is what you really want when it comes to this game.
So you mentioned recently that you've taken optimization too far. Can you tell us that story and what happened? There's not one particular moment where it was like, oh, that was it. I took it too far. But I just started thinking about. Am I valuing my time enough here? There have been little moments where my wife and I were joking about trying to sell stuff instead of kind of give it away.
And then we were like taking pictures, dealing with people on Facebook marketplace for an item that costs, you know, $15 and you're like, did we just spend two hours to try to sell something for $15? Like, what are we doing? Like, what are, how are we using our time? And I think the same goes for a lot of.
Points, games and deals. It's just like, where is your threshold for when you're going to try to get a deal? And if you're buying something that's $10, are you gonna go search all the cash back portals? Are you gonna look if you have Cardlink offers? Are you gonna, you know, try to find coupons or are you just gonna pay $10 and move on?
And so I think I've tried to scale back where I focus my optimization on and let things go, which is so hard as someone who likes money and doesn't like throwing it away. It's really hard to turn down a few dollars for free. Like if you're walking on the sidewalk and you saw $5, well yeah, you'd stop and pick it up.
But if you ordered groceries on Amazon and you ordered them to make dinner, and they showed up three hours late like they did last night at our house. So we had to figure some other plan out for dinner, and now we have some ingredients that we don't really need because we weren't able to get them in time for dinner.
I'm pretty sure that if I go and I message Amazon and I open up a live chat and I explain that this thing got delayed and now we weren't able to make the recipe we wanted, and so now the red curry paste that was $4 and 79 cents or something, you know, now we don't really need it. I'm pretty sure they'd refund the $4 and 79 cents.
Do I wanna spend 40 minutes like going back and forth and negotiating to get $4 and 79 cents back? I try to think well. When I have free time, I don't hop in the car and go drive for Uber or DoorDash, even though I could probably make 20, 30 bucks an hour. So why would I spend 30 minutes trying to get $4 back if I wouldn't spend 30 minutes driving for DoorDash?
You know, like that's helped me kind of change my mental model, which is if every minute that I'm not driving around for Uber, DoorDash, Lyft, Instacart, whatever your, you know, gig economy profession of choice is for every hour, I'm not doing that. I am paying $30 or whatever, $20, whatever the rate is in your city.
So I've gotta at least value my time for that. And it sucks feeling like you leave money on the table. Sometimes it's like, oh, I bought this thing and the price dropped by $3. Should I like return it and rebuy it? It's like, well, yeah, I'd save $3, but I'd have to drive to UPS and drop the thing off and then wait for it.
And so, I dunno, it's, it's more of a. I've noticed myself trying to maximize too many areas, and I've tried to just pause and say like, is this worth the time? And as someone who likes money, it's hard, but if you don't do it, you'll never have time. And it feels like time is the limited resource, and it's easy for us to all say that.
Of course it is. But to start acting on its behalf is really tough. And I think that's one thing that you and I, you know, we were in our twenties, both of us are kind of the same in terms of like, we were pursuing financial dependence and we were looking to, to become optimizers. You know, we were frugal, we were trying to find ways to save money.
It's hard to kind of hit that mindset shift as time goes on, but once time becomes a more and more finite resource, and you look at it in a way, especially when you start to having kids and stuff like that, you see how valuable time truly is because you have way less of it. And so when that happens, a lot of times these things can start to go by the wayside a little more.
I remember even like used a drive around to try to find the cheapest gas. Now that's like the dumbest thing I could do with my time is trying to find, you know, save 25 cents a gallon or whatever else it is. And so there's things like that for sure, that I think a lot of people probably just think through and they want to cut out some of the optimization.
Um, but I think that's just, it's part of life and it's part of growing and as time goes on when it comes to that timeframe. So what is the biggest win that you have ever had from playing the points game? Hmm. It feels. Ridiculous to say this, but there've just been so many memorable trips. They're like, it's hard to say one is the biggest one, and I hesitate from focusing on the biggest value because that's not really the point.
Like I could tell you about a trip where we got 10 cents per point. But the biggest thing is probably, and this is probably recency bias, but my wife and I went to the Paris Olympics. And we actually did it by accident because we just set alerts to go to Europe and we were like, we were gonna take a week off and we were gonna go to Europe and seats opened and I didn't even look at what the dates were, I just booked it.
'cause we were like really flexible. In the summer, my parents really graciously offered to watch our kids for a week, so two seats open from SF to Paris, nonstop in business. I saw the alert come in because a lot of these award search tools, you can set these alerts. I went into the Air France site, I transferred points from.
I dunno if it was Amex or Chase. And then I booked it and then I noticed, oh, it's the Olympics. Like we were going right in the middle of the Olympics and my wife is a huge fan of the Olympics, so I was like, Hey, guess what? I guess we're going to the Olympics. And she was like, over the moon. She thought it was so cool.
But I looked and like flights to Paris Direct from San Francisco during the Olympics we're so expensive. And in hindsight. I should have planned a trip to the Olympics anyways. Like my wife was so excited. I can't believe I'd never crossed my mind to just go to the Olympics in Paris, but we stumbled upon it, and if I had the foresight to do that, I probably still wouldn't have acted on it because flights were super expensive, but these tickets were 50,000 points each way, and so we actually got a really good deal and it allowed us to go do a thing we wouldn't have otherwise done.
That was like such a magical, memorable experience. And so. We used chase points to transfer to Hyatt to book a hotel room that would probably actually not, would probably, you know, one of the really cool things about the Olympics was they made all the cancellation policies so strict that people were kind of scared to book because they knew it was non-refundable.
But we kind of were like, you know what? We're going. And so there was actually a lot of availability, so you could get $1,200 hotel rooms for tens of thousands of points. It was amazing. And so we wouldn't have taken that trip if it weren't for points of miles. It wasn't necessarily the best value, but it unlocked the coolest experience.
Now there's probably other ones that are honeymoons and family adventures and other things that were also equally as great. But I think you mentioned earlier, if you're really pushing on the financial independence path, maybe cash back is a more valuable thing for you, for us. We realized that travel was really important to us.
Like we really wanted to go and meet people from other cultures experiencing other things, like have these experiences, and they were the most expensive line item in our budget. So the cheapest way for us to achieve financial independence was to try and mitigate the largest variable cost, and, and to do that was to play this game.
We are able to reduce our travel cost every year to a very nominal amount by playing this kind of points of Miles game and traveling maybe more flexibly, but you know, ultimately to place we want to go. And so in a way, earning points of miles has been one of the fastest things to accumulate financial independence for us.
For other people who don't travel, that probably wouldn't be the case, but for us, that's kind of maybe the most valuable thing was that it cut out this huge variable cost and let us accelerate our path to financial freedom. And that's the biggest difference for a lot of people out there is that when you try to figure out which way you want to go, if your goal is not to travel, it's not what brings you value.
If that's not part of your dream life, then really cashback could be the best option for you overall. Now you've been to dozens and dozens and dozens of different countries doing this. What is the most ridiculous thing you've ever done to hit a sign up bonus? I don't know if this is the most ridiculous thing, but there was a window where we just weren't spending a lot, but there was a really kind of lucrative bonus.
And so I think we just bought Whole Foods gift cards, and I think we prepaid our annual, like the entire year's worth of groceries because we weren't spending that much that we could hit the sign of bonus on our own. So we were like, well. We live down the street from Whole Foods. We buy our groceries at Whole Foods.
Let's just buy $4,000 of Whole Foods gift cards. And every time we went to Whole Foods for the next year, we were just spending Whole Foods gift cards. And it really messed up our budgeting because we used copilot to track all of our expenses. And so for like eight months, we had no groceries expenses, right?
Like we had no grocery expense because we were always paying with a gift card. And it's not like you sync your gift cards. So it was like one month we spent. $4,000 on groceries and then for the next five months we spent zero. So ridiculous because it seems ridiculous, but also ridiculous 'cause it really messed up all of our kind of financial tracking and systems.
And I think I basically, at the very end, the day we used up the last gift card, I think I went back and just said, well, we bought 4,000, it lasted eight months and I just made it 500 a month to try to even it out. But. Was it worth the effort? I don't know. At that stage in our life, it probably let us take a trip we wouldn't have taken, so I'd say absolutely.
But it felt a little ridiculous at the time. I feel like I'd be the type of person that would just overspend on the gift cards because it's like free money, you know, six months down the line. I'm just kind of utilizing 'em even way more than I would normally spend. That's hilarious though. I think that's one for sure that.
That's awesome. So where do you see people wasting their time when they are looking at redemptions? Or are they chasing bad redemptions? Do you see people kind of going after, you know, different platforms or things like that where they are just kind of wasting their time? I actually got an email from someone that was a really good example of this.
They'd learned that transferring points to airlines is a great option. They've been doing that for years, and they were trying to book a trip for their family somewhere internationally, somewhere in business class. And they emailed me and they're like, the best deal I found is like 3 million points. What do you think?
It was some astronomical number of points. And I was like, well, did you even look at the travel portal? And they were like, no. And they went back and they'd gotten so accustomed to booking points by transferring to airlines was such a good deal. That they didn't realize that sometimes it's a terrible deal, right?
Like there are times where you'll look at Delta and yeah, Delta can get you where you want to go, but it's like 2 million points for a flight that might only cost $3,000, right? Like, and in that case, you'd be way better off buying the flight. Earning, you know, a ton of miles in, in this case it was a business class flight, which usually pays like two times as many miles that you're gonna earn flying that flight.
So it was just funny that they'd gone so far down the optimization game that they forgot to just check how much would the flight cost or. They were looking at an isolated thing. So let's say you wanna go to Japan from the west coast, and you think, wow, I'm looking at Japan Air and the flight's $10,000, so I'm getting such a good deal spending my miles on it.
But they didn't consider that zip Air is another airline that flies actually a subsidiary, and it actually flies from San Francisco to Japan. Maybe that flight's $2,000 instead of 10,000. So it's like you, you're not comparing apples to apples. You're like, well, this feels like a good deal because the flight was 10 grand.
If I bought a different flight, it was only two grand. And you could do this at any scale. You could say the flight was a thousand, but if I took this Southwest flight, it's only like $300. So I think you've gotta do your comparisons, not just with the exact flight you're gonna be on, but with a reasonable alternative.
And so if you do your comparison and you say, well the points are totally worth it 'cause it's saving me this $5,000 ticket, but I could book another airline and it's $800. So like just book the other airline. And that's a case where maybe you just book that $800 flight in the travel portal. I'm not upset with that.
Like, I want you to travel, I want you to get out there. Um, but sometimes you can learn how the game works so much and forget that sometimes the game isn't the best thing to play or this is my own mistake. Sometimes I love how easy it is to cancel flights that I'll book a couple options, so I'm never, you know, my flight gets canceled.
I already have a backup. And I talked to someone the other day and I've done this before, where they did that and then they forgot to cancel the second flight. You know, like one time I booked this flight on American First class from New York back to San Francisco through British Airways, and I was in New York and it was an evening flight and all the meetings I had that day got canceled.
So I was like, I'd rather just go home. So I booked a flight on United and I went to cancel the British Airways flight, not realizing that you can't cancel British Airways awards within 24 hours. I didn't realize this till I was already at Newark and that flight was at JFK. So at this point I'm like, it's a lost cause.
I just canceled this flight and I lost all the points. So I think you can start to play this game at a level that you're optimizing so much, and then realizing the mental overhead to manage everything you're doing is so high. And so even, even though I know how this game works and I've been able to get really outsized value.
When I have friends who just play cash back and they just buy tickets, I'm jealous of the simplicity of it. There's no mental overhead for them. They're like, I have one credit card. I put everything on it. When there's a flight, I just buy the flight, and I'm just so jealous of how simple it is for them.
Then sometimes I'm like, oh, but you're a sucker. You paid so much and I got such a good deal. So it's like there's a balance there for sure. There is a balance and you could over optimize and have blinders onto everything else. But at the same time, like you said, there's definitely a balance where you can kind of have the best of both worlds, I think, for sure.
One last question. If you had to give people one mindset shift to make their point strategy actually work for them, what would it be? I can only have one. I would say I'm, I'm gonna have a run on sentence mindset strategy here. Maybe it's like, I guess it's be honest with yourself, and that's both about the time you spend, the flexibility you have, because sometimes it's easy to put on your rose colored glasses and think this game is gonna be awesome.
We're gonna travel around the world for free. But be honest, like, are you actually flexible with the way you travel? If you're not, the game might not work. Are you the kind of person that is gonna make this an obsession and a full-time job such that you're spending 20 hours a week playing this game to get an extra 20% of value that might not be worth it?
So I would say think about everything you're doing and what kind of travel you like. Be honest about who you are and what you want, and if you fit the mold of someone who's flexible and. Really wants to get outsize value, especially premium cabin, business class, first class kind of stuff. You're gonna have amazing experience if you don't care about that and you only fly domestically and you don't care about business class and you aren't very flexible.
Be honest that this game might not actually give you any outsource value. And so you gotta look at yourself and ask, what do I care about? Do I care about simplicity, or do I care about a deal? Do I care about long haul international travel in business class or not? And if the answer is I'm flexible, I enjoy this sport and I want to travel around the world, ideally.
In like fancy luxury ways, you're gonna get so much value. And I don't think it has to be luxury. I think international economy is also a really, really outsized way to get value. But I think domestic travel is harder. Like you can get value on really expensive flights that are really short using points.
But for the most part, I think if you're not traveling internationally or you don't want to stay in really nice hotels, it's gonna be harder. For sure. I completely agree. Well, this has been awesome, Chris. Thank you so much for coming on here. Where can people find out more about you, your show and everything else?
Yeah, I did. Two main things are every week I do a podcast called All the Hacks about optimizing your money, your points in your life, and sometimes it's interviews, sometimes it's deep dives where I'll go through. All of an issuer and all their cards and how to think about them and rank them. And then every Saturday I send a newsletter, you can go to all the hacks.com/email, and I just share all the top deals, points, everything that's happening this week.
The nature of a podcast is that it's like, it's not news. It's kind of, you know, a deeper dive. And so the newsletters where I share everything you need to know about now and then the podcast is where I share kind of the deep dives with guests, with myself doing solo stuff. You could find everything@allthehacks.com.
You could search all the hacks. If you're listening to a podcast now, you could just type all the hacks and you'll find it and enjoy and let me know what you think. And both are extremely valuable. I cannot recommend them enough. So thank you so much again for coming on, and uh, we'll have you back on here soon.
Sounds good. Thanks for having me.
